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The nearly simultaneous appearance of Peter Thuesen's In Discordance with the Scriptures (Oxford Univ. Press) and Paul Gutjahr's An American Bible (Stanford Univ. Press), which are probably the two best books ever published on the cultural meaning of the Scriptures in American history, marks an important coming of age for scholarship more generally. Throughout most of this century, the immense quantity and often surpassing quality of biblical commentaries, dictionaries, archaeologies, and theologies was not matched by equal interest in practical questions—that is, how Scripture entered into the daily lives of all sorts of people.
More recently, published work in a number of scholarly domains has dramatically altered this situation. Now many authors are writing persuasively about how Scripture has actually functioned as a complex, but fully active, force in artistic, social, cross-cultural, denominational, scientific, ethnic, and intellectual matters; in addition to those mentioned below they include—as a very partial list—Philip Barlow, Ruth Bottiger, Gerald Bray, Shalom Goldman, David Impastato, David Jeffrey, Thomas Olbricht. David Rosenberg, Leland Ryken, Lamin Sanneh, Theophus Smith, Laurence Wieder, Peter Wosh, and Davis Young. Brief sketches of four pairs of books, each treating distinctly separate domains, can illustrate the variety of works that has begun to appear.
• Two multi-authored reference works underscore the reality that those who interpret the Scriptures are fit subjects for interpretation themselves. For his Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (InterVarsity, 1998), Donald McKim recruited 92 authors to write 108 articles. The book includes six general essays alongside 11 biographies of interpreters from the early church (Athanasius and Augustine are the first), seven from the Middle Ages, 19 from the era of the Reformation (16 Protestants and Desiderius Erasmus), 28 from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (including Wesley, Edwards, and Kierkegaard), 24 for twentieth-century Europe, and 13 for twentieth-century North America. The wide ideological reach of the modern sections—taking in, for example, the dispensationalist C. I. Scofield, the Catholic Raymond Brown, the feminist Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza—is especially welcome. Each article contains something about its subject's life, an ample sketch of the person's intellectual contributions, and a full bibliography.
A collection edited by Walter Elwell and J. D. Weaver, Bible Interpreters of the Twentieth Century: A Selection of Evangelical Voices (Baker, 1999), is more restricted but is equally instructive for its 35 evangelical scholars. Especially interesting for insights on how personal circumstances shape biblical understanding are the two instances where the same scholar is treated by different authors in the two volumes. To note differences between Ward Gasque (IVP) and Murray Harris (Baker) on F. F. Bruce, and between Lee McDonald (IVP) and Donald Hagner (Baker) on G. E. Ladd, is to see that hermeneutical self-consciousness is important for interpreting the interpreters, as well as for interpreting the text.
• Two other books offer up-to-date treatment of questions about the facticity of Scripture. In their self-consciousness about the history of such questions, both Jeffrey Sheler and Mark Kidger also add a great deal to understanding the attitudes of past generations. In Is the Bible True? How Modern Debates and Discoveries Affirm the Essence of the Scriptures (HarperSanFrancisco/Zondervan, 1999), Sheler, the religion editor at U. S. News and World Report, carefully summarizes a great deal of recent archaeological and historical work. For classically minded Christians it is encouraging to see Sheler conclude that "despite all remaining uncertainties, … most scholars would agree that there is a historical core behind the biblical stories of Israel's emergence in Canaan," and that testimony for "the core historicity" of New Testament narratives is even stronger.
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