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God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism by David S. Katz Yale Univ. Press, 2004 397 pp., $38  Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages by Jaroslav Pelikan Viking, 2005 274 pp., $24.95 |
In a period of only a few years right before the Civil War, American authors published a raft of books on the amazing advance of Protestantism in the United States. From a disorganized starting point in the 1780s, they could trace an unprecedented advance to a scene of remarkable vigor as well as remarkable influence on the country's institutions and mores. Figures as diverse as the Presbyterian Robert Baird and the Methodist Nathan Bangs were of course aware of problems in the denominations they described, but their overarching tone was bewonderment.
Then came the Civil War. When the very Protestant denominations that had risen to such influence divided among themselves in bitter controversy over the acceptability of slavery and when they floundered in responding to the great social and intellectual challenges of the postbellum years, the domination of Protestant values was over. Historians, who thought they were providing a road map to the future, were transformed into eulogists.
It is much to be hoped that the recent publishing flurry on the history of the Bible is not replicating the irony of Protestant histories on the eve of the Civil War. The learned, accessible, but very different books by David Katz and Jaroslav Pelikan that are the subject of this essay are appearing hard on the heels of a publishing boom that includes several of the best books every published on the history of the Bible in America (by Paul Gutjahr and Peter Thuesen), several unusually perceptive accounts of the Bible as literature (including books by David Norton, David Lyle Jeffrey, and Leland Ryken), and several effective narratives retelling the story of the King James Version and later Bible translations (by Alister McGrath, Benson Bobrick, and Adam Nicolson).
Whether this slew of outstanding books on the Scriptures is heralding a new day of biblical vigor (as some of the authors of these volumes so clearly hope) or pronouncing a benediction on a rapidly fading cultural epoch (and so reprising the fate of the antebellum Protestant histories) might depend on which of the contrasting plots inscribed by Pelikan and Katz anticipates the future.
Pelikan's general account of where the Bible came from is keyed to the diverse contributions of Jews and Christians over a very long history. It is an introductory study in which Pelikan's prodigious learning is worn lightly, yet authoritatively, as he explains how Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and even Muslim sacred texts took shape and then how they have been transmitted, studied, debated, and translated. By contrast, Katz's interests are much more specific, concentrating on three centuries of British history (1600-1900) and the specific issue of how the pre-critical biblical beliefs of practicing Christians were challenged, modified, and often abandoned by leading intellectuals. What Katz writes about the chronological bookends of his title is either hopelessly mistaken (Luther and Calvin did not believe that the whole Bible simply interpreted itself to anyone who picked it up) or risibly abbreviated (there are all of four breathless pages on 20th-century fundamentalism). But in between, for the subjects Katz knows well, the book is illuminating and provocative.
The contrasting stances of the two books are conveyed with subtlety. When Pelikan discusses the rise and effects of biblical higher criticism, he accepts that modern scholarship has forced most readers of Scripture, believers and unbelievers alike, to modify earlier convictions about the literal historicity of many biblical stories. He confesses that earlier conflicts among the three great "people of the book" witnessed unpardonable evils arising from misplaced confidence in biblical interpretations. And he repudiates the once popular idea that the coming of Christ superseded God's eternal covenant with the Jews.
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