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Jenkins uses the Anglican controversy over sexual morality to enter into the Bible as read by southern Christians. Their biblicism has been called traditional, literalistic, conservative, and fundamentalist, but Jenkins concludes that none of these labels really fits. Rather, the southern Christians' Bible is more immediate in its address to their realities. African and Asian Christians revere the Bible and identify with its cultural setting and worldview. They see it as sacred text, with words of power, to an extent that has been lost to much of northern Christianity.

To understand this approach to the Bible, Jenkins informs us of the ways in which the Scriptures, freshly translated, have been received into Asian and African societies. In many of these realms, people already were familiar with the idea of sacred texts, so the Bible was given special status from the start. In the hands of newly literate people, the power of biblical words has been explosive. Northerners need to recall the electrifying force in Reformation days of common-language Scriptures, made available to new readers. "It burns!" exclaimed one of the Puritan preachers about the Bible, and so it does today for Nigerians and Indians and Chinese.

The Bible is read communally in the global South, so that the nonliterate, too, can profit from hearing the Word. Northern churches retain this ancient practice, but in the South, it is more central to congregational life. Believers commit long passages to memory and together they become people of the Book. It is God's word to them and in them, and it is not to be gainsaid. They venerate the Bible as a holy book, even a talisman. One of the last vestiges northerners have of such uses for the Bible is for swearing in court witnesses and office holders. The Bible in the South is a powerful evangelistic weapon, commanding deference from curious hearers, impressing them with its literary and spiritual qualities, and speaking pointedly to their lives.

Southern people of faith affirm the Bible's teachings and stories to be true, and no historical criticism can sway them. Liberal critics say that these views come from a lack of education, or from fundamentalist missionaries, but these claims patronize Africans and Asians. They do think for themselves about such matters. Scholars in the southern churches choose to accept more direct readings because this Bible fits their reality and speaks, bang on, to life as they know it. A few years ago, while talking with a distinguished Ghanaian Bible translator, I learned that he had taken his advanced degree at Union Theological Seminary, in New York. And what did he make of the views of Scripture there, I asked. He smiled: "I lost them overboard on the way home."

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