In his book Knowing Christianity (Harold Shaw, 1995), J.I. Packer reminds us that “Calvin regularly referred to the Bible as ‘the oracles of God,’ a scriptural phrase in Romans 3:2, which the NIV renders as ‘the very words of God.’ Calvin took it and used it again and again to express the thought that what we have in Scripture is God’s own witness to his work of salvation.”
Later Packer quotes John Wesley:
I am a creature of a day hovering over the great gulf; till … I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing, the way to heaven. … God himself has … written it down in a great book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God!
We have the book—many of us have it in multiple versions, Bibles upstairs and downstairs—and the promise of the Spirit to guide our reading. And what then? Do we read with passion and discernment, as members of the body, the Church? Do we use the book as a weapon? Do we chew it and swallow it so that the words of the Word become part of our very being?
A “section” on the Bible is hardly sufficient, but it may be enough to prompt to such questions, and more.
In 1925, the Jewish philosopher-theologian Franz Rosenzweig, whose physical ability to write was severely limited by Lou Gehrig’s disease, published a memorable indictment of the debilities of written language and the limitations of the Bible as a printed text. In every Bible-reading culture, he believed, a point inevitably comes when the book becomes an end rather than a means: “The book no longer serves the word. It becomes the word’s ruler and hindrance; it becomes Holy Scripture.” In German society, that sacrosanct volume was the Luther Bible, a book whose glorification belied Luther’s own vision of continually updated translation. Neither Rosenzweig nor Luther would have lamented the human progress wrought by the printing revolution, but both feared that the words of Scripture tended to lose their creative force when written rather than spoken. Indeed, as Heiko Oberman has argued, Luther regarded the written text of the Bible as a “necessary evil.”1
In his fascinating new book, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880, Paul C. Gutjahr invokes neither Rosenzweig nor Luther but takes their insight one step further by showing how Scripture is constrained not only by written language but by the very materiality of Bibles: their typography, format, marginalia, illustrations, bindings, and distribution. The upshot of all this for Protestants, he argues, is that there is no such thing as Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone): God’s word never reaches readers in pure, unmediated form. In a “postmodern” context, this insight may seem prosaic, but Gutjahr actually draws profound implications for all those who cherish Holy Writ. The nineteenth-century publishing practices that made the Bible the most diversely presented book of all time may in reality have contributed to its downfall as the preeminent text of American print culture.
Gutjahr, who is assistant professor of English and American Studies at Indiana University, has produced an engagingly written, thoroughly re searched, and historiographically innovative contribution to the surprisingly small body of works on the Bible’s place in American culture. His book follows a handful of studies in the past decade, including Philip L. Barlow on the Bible in Mormonism, Colleen McDannell on the Bible in the Victorian home, Theophus H. Smith on the Bible in African American culture, Stephen J. Stein on biblical canons in American history, and Peter J. Wosh on the American Bible Society. Along with the older essay collection edited by Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (1982), and the six-volume series edited by Edwin S. Gaustad and Walter Harrelson (1982-85), these newer monographs and articles are beginning to bring critical perspective where a host of mostly uncritical nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century works once celebrated the English Bible as the crowning glory of American (Protestant) civilization.2
Gutjahr’s study appears at a time of increasing academic interest in the book generally, as evidenced by the founding of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) in 1991. The “history of the book” approach, as this growing field is known, encompasses a diverse range of work in the humanities, from more traditional bibliographic surveys of authors and imprints to quantitative analyses of the economics of publishing to highly theoretical studies of canon formation and reader response. A glance at recent programs of SHARP’s annual conferences reveals that the “history of the book” is yielding important work in all periods of American history, yet the Bible, long insulated by its status as Holy Scripture, is only beginning to be subjected to such inquiry. As Gutjahr puts it, “Scholars have paid stunningly little attention to ‘the book’ when considering ‘the Book.'”
Rectifying this neglect, Gutjahr tackles a wide swath of the Bible’s history in America, beginning with the first American edition of Scripture, the New Testament printed by Robert Aitken in Philadelphia in 1777, and ending just before the appearance of the much-touted Revised Version of 1881. No fewer than six appendices with statistics on Bible translation, production and distribution, along with 52 halftone illustrations, add to the encyclopedic feel of his volume, yet far from becoming lost in this mountain of statistical and visual data, Gutjahr adeptly discerns heretofore unappreciated aspects of Americans’ relationship to Scripture.
Gutjahr organizes his study under five headings: Production, Packaging, Purity, Pedagogy, and Popularity. In the first, he recounts how the American Bible Society, founded in 1816, came to dominate antebellum Bible production through its superior technological resources and distribution networks. He summarizes the development of nineteenth-century printing techniques and shows how early Bible printers, such as the Irish Catholic Matthew Carey, were gradually left behind as the new method of stereotyping replaced the use of standing type.
But the most interesting feature of this chapter is Gutjahr’s analysis of the unintended consequences of the American Bible Society’s successive attempts to supply every American household with the Scriptures. These periodic “general supply” campaigns grew out of the fears of founding president Elias Boudinot and his colleagues that biblical civilization was being eclipsed by the radical, deistic ideologies of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. The society sought to neutralize this threat by printing the Bible “without note or comment” so as not to obscure its allegedly self-evident truths. Yet the society’s very success in distributing the unadulterated Scriptures led competing publishers to seek a separate market niche in Bibles with note and comment, and these more elaborate editions soon took the field. By the 1870s, roughly 60 percent of all American Bibles included illustrations and some sort of extended commentary.
On Gutjahr’s reading, these various forms of “packaging”—pictures, an notations, bindings—had significant consequences for how Americans read Scripture. Illustrations, in particular, compete with text for the attention of the reader, and Gutjahr, taking a cue from J. Hillis Miller, argues that illustrations usually win out—often in ways that subvert the text itself. For Gutjahr, the inclusion of as many as sixteen hundred pictures in some nineteenth-century Scripture editions tended to deflect readers from the complexity of the biblical narrative and instead perpetuate cultural conventions in Bible-reading.
One such convention was an obsession with the Bible’s historical accuracy, fueled on the one hand by the higher-critical revolution in biblical studies and on the other hand by a surge of interest in the archaeology of the Holy Land. Throughout the nineteenth century, Bibles increasingly featured illustrations of Near Eastern archaeological sites, along with textual appendices outlining archaeological discoveries. Publishers offered all this to readers as a “topological apologetic” (to use Gutjahr’s apt term) that vindicated the Bible’s factual accuracy in the face of infidel critics. Advertisements for Harper and Brothers’ Illuminated Bible, an edition published in installments during the 1840s, emphasized the “historical” nature of the book’s engravings, noting that they were produced in “strict accordance” with recent archaeological discoveries. Gutjahr very rightly concludes that the “text” of the Holy Land, in the minds of many Protestants, was proving to be safer ground than the biblical text itself.
Even bindings, like illustrations, affect the reader in subtle but important ways. Gutjahr insists that a book is judged by its cover, and his careful tallying of nineteenth-century Bible bindings reveals that leather continued to be the material of choice long after cloth had come to dominate the covers of secular books. Leather, especially when elaborately tooled with gold, was suggestive of permanence and immutability. As Colleen McDannell has shown, large, richly decorated family Bibles were displayed on stands in the parlors of many nineteenth-century American houses, thus becoming the altars, or iconic focal points, of the home church. In the Victorian imagination, the guardians of this home church were women, who appear prominently as exemplars of moral purity in the many Bible illustrations surveyed by Gutjahr.
Bible translators could never reach a consensus on the specific consequences of textual purity, just as American Protestants could never reach a consensus on doctrinal standards of the primitive church.
The concern for purity extended beyond the moral realm to the text of Scripture itself. Though many nineteenth-century Americans regarded the King James Version as self-evidently pure, and therefore not in need of re vision, others spent whole careers at temp ting to restore what they believed to be the uncorrupted, original meaning of the biblical texts. Gutjahr surveys these apostles of purity, from onetime secretary of Congress Charles Thomson, to Universalist minister Abner Kneeland, to Disciples of Christ founder Alexander Campbell, to Baptist minister and Bible society organizer Spencer Cone. In all of these figures, Gutjahr finds a striking biblical primitivism—a desire to re capture the supposed doctrinal and semantic simplicity of the New Testament church—that parallels the more generalized primitivism identified by Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen as a ubiquitous feature of American culture.3
Like the American Bible Society’s quest for a Bible in every home, how ever, the quest for biblical purity had unintended consequences. Instead of gradually winnowing the number of available Bible translations to a single, highly accurate text, the nineteenth-century revision movement simply accelerated the proliferation of versions of every stripe. In the 40 years after the Revised Version (1881-85)—the most important nineteenth-century revision and itself a primitivist project—no fewer than 32 new translations appeared in an already crowded Bible marketplace. This host of translations arose because Bible translators could never reach a consensus on the specific consequences of textual purity, just as American Protestants could never reach a consensus on doctrinal standards of the primitive church.
The limits of consensus in “Christian America” were never more evident than in the centuries-old division between Protestants and Catholics, and to his great credit, Gutjahr examines the sometimes bloody conflicts over Bible-reading in nineteenth- century public schools. Save for its treatment by Catholic writers, this aspect of the Bible’s history in America was consistently avoided until fairly recently by Bible historians, who especially in the nineteenth century tended to base their works on the anti-Catholic premise that the Bible has no authority in the Church of Rome. Gutjahr recounts the battles in the 1840s in New York and Philadelphia, and in the early 1870s in Cincinnati, over the reading of the Protestant King James Version in public schools. Ever attuned to historical ironies, he shows how the violent nativist struggle to preserve the Protestant Bible’s preeminence in school curricula provoked a judicial counteraction that would eventuate in the much starker separationist view of church and state established by twentienth-century court cases. In other words, in crusading to keep the Bible in the schools, Protestants inadvertently helped push it out.
A final contributing factor to the Bible’s downfall was the meteoric rise in the American print marketplace of narrative supplements to, or even substitutes for, the actual biblical text. One such volume, Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon, was cast in archaic King James idiom, but most of these nineteenth-century works retold the life of Christ, or the lives of Christ-like figures, in more contemporary language devoid of the narrative impediments presented by the Bible’s collection of disparate books. Two novels, Joseph Holt Ingraham’s The Prince of the House of David (1855) and Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880), enjoyed phenomenal popularity, with the latter often appearing as a Sunday school text. Wallace combed the Library of Congress for books on the Roman Empire in order to make his story accurate down to the tiniest historical details. The result was a luxuriant epic that as late as 1922 was still enjoying million-copy press runs at the firm of Harper and Brothers.
Far from celebrating Ben-Hur as a stimulus to the scripturalism of Americans, Gutjahr sees in it little actual biblical content. Indeed, he contends that the book “helped pave the way for a kind of Christianity less interested in a reasoned argumentation and more interested in simple entertainment and emotional gratification.” Along with the various illustrative materials appended by publishers to Bibles themselves, novels such as Ben-Hur are, on Gutjahr’s reading, but one more way of “diluting” the biblical narrative.
Gutjahr’s analysis of Scripture’s “dilution” is not necessarily a value judgment, though there is an echo of jeremiad here. Rather, the purpose of his study is to explain how the tremendous diversification of America’s print marketplace had the paradoxical effect of drowning out the Bible’s voice, even as it made the Scriptures available in more editions than ever before. Gutjahr’s nineteenth-century subjects were not unaware of this development; he quotes one minister who in 1884 observed that the Bible occupied “a somewhat different place in the thoughts of well-instructed Christians from that which it held twenty-five or fifty years ago.” Indeed, by the twentieth century, this wistfulness about the erstwhile biblical literacy of Americans had become a familiar lament. The advent of radio, television, and computers further crowded the sensory field of Americans, for whom the once-preeminent Word now competed not only with other words but with the various forms of nonprint media. It is perhaps no surprise that by 1985, New York University professor Neil Postman was proclaiming the death of “typographic America” (as exemplified by the literary culture of the Puritans) and the triumph of the televised image.4
In a journal subtitled “A Christian Review,” it is therefore legitimate to ask what might be done to remedy the situation that Gutjahr has so skillfully described: How can the Bible’s place in the American imagination be rehabilitated? Surely the Bible will never reclaim the preeminence in print culture that it enjoyed in the Puritan era, but are there ways in which it might yet enjoy a new renaissance in the life of the American mind? No easy answers present themselves, but I shall hazard two possibilities.
The first is suggested indirectly by Gutjahr himself, when he speaks of the illusory nature of the Protestant Sola Scriptura. This founding premise of Protestantism has all too often amounted to a myopic view of religious knowledge—a pathological indifference to the ways in which the Bible, long before the nineteenth-century revolution in printing technology, was always mediated by the vicissitudes of texts and their transmission, the evolution of verbal and written language, the ever-changing nature of historical understanding, the sociological complexities of religious institutions, and the uniqueness of every society’s (and every individual’s) perception of reality. A realistic sense of the Bible’s similarities to any other book, besides being intellectually honest, is perhaps the best starting point for bringing Scripture to a skeptical generation.
Secondly, we may find resources for a new biblical renaissance in figures as disparate as Luther and Rosenzweig, who both possessed a vivid sense of God’s living Word as dramatically proclaimed in church and synagogue. Though we recognize that Scripture comes to us in a book, along with all the limitations this may entail, we also must have faith that God’s Word possesses a life apart from print when it is proclaimed in the believing community. To emphasize the oral and dramatic qualities of the Word is to avoid on the one hand the sort of inflexible biblicism that has sometimes elevated every jot and tittle of the King James Bible to de facto inerrancy among Protestants, and on the other hand the sort of postmodern nihilism that despairs of the possibility of any stable meaning in written texts.
To emphasize the orality of the word is also to elevate the agency of the church in maintaining scriptural literacy among Christians. The Puritans, who appear in most scholarship on the Bible in America as the archetypal Bible readers, refused to concede that any human institution could stand between the individual and Scripture. Paul Gutjahr has reminded us that the reality is never this simple.
Peter J. Thuesen is assistant editor of the Works of Jonathan Edwards and lecturer in American religious history at the Divinity School, Yale University. He is the author of In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (Oxford Univ. Press).
1. Franz Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Word: On the New Bible Translation,” in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation, translated by Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox (Indiana Univ. Press, 1994), p. 40; Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (Doubleday, 1992), p. 174.
2. Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (Yale Univ. Press, 1995), chapter 3; Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); Stephen J. Stein, “America’s Bibles: Canon, Commentary, and Community,” Church History, Vol. 64 (1995), pp. 169-84; Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell Univ. Press, 1994); Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds., The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (Ox ford Univ. Press, 1982); and Edwin S. Gaustad and Walter Harrelson, eds., The Bible in American Culture Series, 6 vols., (Fortress Press and Scholars Press, 1982-85). See also the volumes in the Society of Biblical Literature’s Confessional Perspectives Series: Mark A. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (Harper and Row, 1986); Gerald P. Fogarty, s.j., American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to Vatican II (Harper and Row, 1986); and David S. Sperling, Students of the Covenant: A History of Jewish Biblical Scholarship in America (Scholars Press, 1992).
3. Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988).
4. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Viking Penguin, 1985).
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