The earliest Bible people in America were the Puritans. To be sure, portions of Scripture were being published by Roman Catholic friars in Florida for Native Americans a generation before the serious English Protestants arrived in New England. But as "people of the Book," the Puritans were unrivaled in determination to order their entire lives by Scripture and nothing but Scripture. They had fled England when stubborn monarchs and prelates stymied their efforts at purifying the Anglican church according to the Bible. As the centrality of long exegetical sermons in their twice-Sunday worship, the singing only of psalms put to verse, the habit of naming children after biblical figures, and their often vigorous godliness all demonstrated, the American Puritans were in fact remarkably successful in shaping their lives by Scripture alone.

But even the Puritans found it difficult to be completely consistent. Puritans attacked all practices of worship and church government that were not explicitly mandated in Scripture. Thus were banished statues, stained glass, organs, pictures, Communion tables, kneeling benches, candles, and much else that had been customary in Anglican worship. Yet the Puritans made one exception, an exception that, not surprisingly, concerned the Bible. From the earliest days in New England one colorful ornament not mandated in Scripture did in fact become a fixture in the Puritan meetinghouse. It was a cushion for the Bible.

In a book whose loving attention to detail has still not been superseded, Ola Winslow's Meetinghouse Hill (1952) describes what the Puritan Bible cushion was like:

Custom had early decreed that this cushion should be of green velvet or plush, with long tassels hanging from the corners. It sometimes took as much as four yards of velvet, ten yards of silk, and much [congregational] voting time to achieve this mark of prideful elegance, but eventually it was always achieved. Even the length and color of the tassels (should they or should they not match the velvet) were important enough to be mentioned in the minutes of the precinct meeting which finally took action toward such improvement.

The experience of the Puritans-a determinedly Bible-only people who nonetheless provided their Bibles a physical setting not mandated by the Bible-hints at the complicated nature of Western engagement with the Scriptures. Thankfully, that engagement has recently begun to be studied seriously. Books putting the Bible to use for countless purposes have, of course, poured forth like a flood since the introduction of the printing press into fifteenth-century Europe. But studies of how the Bible has actually functioned within cultures have, until recently, been far less common. A leader in rectifying that neglect is Yale University Press, which, within the last year alone, has published three significant books featuring the history of the use of the Bible in Western societies. Jaroslav Pelikan's The Reformation of the Bible/The Bible of the Reformation is a splendidly illustrated catalogue of an exhibition on Scripture in sixteenth-century Europe that was prepared for the Bridwell Library of Southern Methodist University. Also nicely illustrated is an essay on interpretations of Noah and the flood by Norman Cohn, the British historian best known for his landmark book The Pursuit of the Millennium. The third and most comprehensive is Ruth Bottigheimer's thorough study of the Bibles for children that since 1500 have been published in all major Western societies.

A very long essay would be needed to take the measure of these books, not to speak of a welcome number of other volumes that also take seriously the Bible's rooted history in Western cultures.1 Yet even brief treatment is sufficient to highlight two very important realities. The first is particularly pertinent for the sterner sorts of Protestants (but also many Roman Catholics, Jews, and, for their sacred books, Mormons and Muslims as well), who profess to see in Scripture a definitive, unvarying, absolute norm for all matters of faith and practice. This is a reality that, when stated simply, can still seem disconcerting, but that has in fact become a cliche of modern academic discourse. It is the awareness that even those who claim the most for the unvarying truth of the Bible constantly treat the Bible as a malleable book by projecting varying local norms, standards, or cultural conventions onto its pages.

The second reality, which once was such a commonplace as hardly to be noticed, now is so overlooked as needing to be restated. It is the fact that the Bible has been the book of Western civilization. Period.

The nature of what Bottigheimer and Cohn attempt leads them more naturally to demonstrate the extreme plasticity of the Bible. But that conventional postmodern note is also present in Pelikan's volume. When discussing the immense boost that Martin Luther gave to study of Scripture, Pelikan cites the trenchant remark of Gerald L. Bruns on the textbooks Luther secured from a local Wittenberg printer for the use of his students in 1513-14: Luther "instructed Johann Grunenberg, the printer for the university, to produce an edition of the Psalter with wide margins and lots of white space between the lines. . . . In a stroke Luther wiped the Sacred Page clean as if to begin the history of interpretation over again, this time to get it right." Liberated from the constraining hand of the history of interpretation, first Luther, then his students, then anyone who could read would (Bruns suggests) be free to interpret the Bible pretty much as he, she, or they pleased.

More obvious in demonstrating the flexible use of Scripture are the major arguments developed by Cohn and Bottigheimer. Cohn's short book is particularly compelling, with two examples on shifting interpretations concerning Noah's flood. The first is his discussion of the long domination of allegorical or typological understanding of this story. In a reading that was long influential, for example, Augustine held that "Undoubtedly, the ark is a symbol of the City of God on its pilgrimage in history, a figure of the Church which was saved by the wood on which there hung the 'Mediator between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus.' "

The second is Cohn's sketch of the many efforts since the seventeenth century, when scientific ideals rose to cultural prominence, to harmonize a literal reading of Genesis with whatever happened to be the most highly regarded science of the day. That survey takes Cohn from seventeenth-century harmonizers Nicolaus Steno and Thomas Burnet, through a great flourishing of scriptural cosmologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to modern "flood geologists." The common link in this historical succession is determinedly literal interpretation of the Genesis flood. The variable is the means of harmonization-now the effect of comets, now an antediluvian smooth earth, now a sun-induced deluge, now the alteration of dry land and oceans throughout the world, and so on. It comes as no surprise that, rather than Scripture, it is contemporary fashion-whether scientific or more generally intellectual-that in every case determines what that variable is. (Cohn's helpful essay would have been even better if he had put to use the most scientifically sophisticated study of his subject, Davis A. Young, The Biblical Flood: A Case Study of the Church's Response to Extrabiblical Evidence [Eerdmans, 1995].)

Ruth Bottigheimer's The Bible for Children is cultural history of the best kind, for while it uses contemporary interests to frame questions, it rests on painstaking examination of hundreds of texts (mostly from Germany, France, England, and the United States) that introduced the Bible to children. Bottigheimer could actually have been a little bit more adventuresome in her own interpretations, but no one should fault the quantity or quality of her research.

Not surprisingly, she finds that "the Bible" presented to children differed substantially, sometimes dramatically, depending upon factors like when and where it was published, what confessional community it was meant to serve, and whether it was an expensive book for elites or a cheap volume for the masses. One of Bottigheimer's most interesting general conclusions is the discovery that children's Bibles began to change markedly at the start of the eighteenth century. The general drift was from depicting a God of righteousness, who was fully capable of responding with anger to the sins of the smallest human creatures, to a God of benevolence, who was nearly desperate to show his love to all. As evidence of this change, characteristic adjectives for God (sometimes in successive editions of the same volume) began to change from words like "omniscient" to words like "wise," depictions of the crucifixion lost the terrible vividness that was once standard in the baroque era, and themes of resurrection received more prominence than atonement.

Bottigheimer's careful attention to provenance also leads to several counterintuitive, but securely documented, conclusions. The most important of these is that children's Bibles produced by Protestants, who constantly prided themselves as defenders of sola Scriptura against the depredations of Bible-dishonoring Roman Catholics, turn out to have played faster and looser with what was originally written than their benighted papist contemporaries. Thus children's Bibles for Lutherans, who became great champions of social order secured by the dignity of fathers, early on abridged the story of David and Absalom to cut out Absalom's reasons for being so offended with his father. By contrast, Bible stories for Roman Catholic children only began censoring at a much later date the sordid tale of Amnon's rape of Absalom's sister Tamar and Absalom's wrath at David for not taking action against Amnon. Even more remarkably, Protestant Bible stories quite early began to imply, and then almost to state directly, that the adultery between David and Bathsheba was, in flat contradiction to the text of 2 Samuel 11, Bathsheba's fault! Similarly, Bibles produced under Protestant auspices (for working-class audiences) were the first in the early eighteenth century to find injunctions for earnest labor in scriptural stories from which to that time there had been no clue.

Such human ironies and inconsistencies are important, especially for people who claim to live by the supreme authority of Scripture alone. They amount to a plea for a far higher degree of self-scrutiny and interpretive humility than earnest Bible-believers often exhibit. This kind of plea, however, especially in our own day, comes close to being jejune, for it lays far too much stress on the foreground of the big picture.

The big picture that is in danger of being obscured from postmodern preoccupation with self-serving competition for cultural hegemony, and even from proper Christian humility toward our own scriptural interpretations, is that the Bible has exerted an immense influence on virtually every aspect of Western civilization. This reality comes through most clearly in Pelikan's catalogue. What he shows especially is how thoroughly the explosion of print in early modern Europe was a biblical explosion, and then how much that biblical explosion shaped study of classical languages, affected every facet of European religious life, established a wide range of popular pastimes for ordinary people, and inspired major efforts in all of the arts. Pelikan's introduction, as well as the carefully chosen illustrations representing the Bibles and Bible-related books of Protestants, but also Catholics and Jews, and in many European languages (plus Arabic), makes a profound, if implicit, point: Remove Scripture from the sixteenth century and there is almost no Western culture in the sixteenth century. (It is only fair to note that our distance from that century will be underscored by the difficulty most of us will have in reading the many bits from classical and European languages that Pelikan leaves untranslated.)

The same conclusion lies in the background of Cohn's and Bottigheimer's books. While they feature the variability over time of biblical interpretation and biblical editing, the implicit background reality is the constancy of the Bible's presence. For more than 1,500 years, some of the West's most learned and sensitive intellects expended tremendous effort in bringing together what they thought the story of Noah meant and what they thought they knew from their own contemporary experience. Likewise, generations of editors along with countless parents and teachers have felt compelled to prepare thousands of Bible-story books (albeit in an immense variety of competing ways).

What, in the end, is the most important story about the Bible? The plasticity of biblical use, or the common drive that has so powerfully carried intellectuals, editors, parents, teachers, and kids to the Bible? Even the Puritans, who almost never laughed, especially over important questions like how much silk to use in a Bible cushion, would have laughed at us moderns if we could not get that question right.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. His inaugural Kuyper Lecture, given at Calvin College in 1995, has just been published as Adding Cross to Crown: The Political Significance of Christ's Passion (Baker Book House), with responses by James Bratt, Max Stackhouse, and James Skillen, and an introduction by Luis Lugo.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.

Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 21

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