Opening the Text
The Bible as a Public Book

Full text of a presentation to the Christian Scholars Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, July 1996.

1 "Bible belt, Bible camp, Bible believer, Bible Sunday, Bible week, Bible school, Bible institute, Bible college, Bible battle, Bible bookstore, Bible puzzles and crosswords and quizzes, Gideon Bible in airplane and hospital and hotel room." [1] This list, compiled by Martin Marty, suggests that there is no shortage of Bibles in the United States. But despite this proliferation of Bibles, biblicistic Christians -- those who "claim to appeal to the Bible as the only standard for Christian faith and practice" [2] -- often complain that the Bible remains a "closed book" in American public discourse. They rarely perceive the content of the Bible to play a significant role in society at large. Undoubtedly, a number of factors contribute to the closure of the Bible in public discourse, including disestablishment, Enlightenment models of rationality, and other societal structures that affect religious discourse generally. I wish to focus here, however, on several ways in which biblicists' own biblically-oriented discourse is self-privatizing.

2 First, biblicists have, on the whole, not yet developed an effective approach to being biblicist in a religiously plural context. [3] Religious plurality has always been a fact of American life, but the old triptych "Catholic, Protestant, Jew" no longer does (indeed, really never did) justice to the range of religious commitments in the United States. And as Stanley Samartha has put it, " [i]n a religiously plural world, a plurality of scriptures is to be expected." [4] Samartha further writes,

Several questions arise in this connection. In a multireligious community there are different scriptures which are accepted as authoritative by their respective adherents. But can the authority of one scripture be extended to operate over other communities of faith who have their own scriptures? Who decides? [5]

3 Biblicists, it seems, often wish to answer that they should be allowed to extend the authority of the Bible throughout society. The Tennessee Senate, for example, has passed a resolution urging citizens to "observe the Ten Commandments, teach them to their children, and display them in their homes, businesses, schools, and places of worship." [6] The legislature justified the resolution by arguing for a return to "the basics of morality," apparently with little regard for the 10,000 Tennesseeans who find their basic morality encoded in the Five Pillars or the Noble Eightfold Path instead of the Ten Commandments. [7] Over a decade earlier, in 1983, a parents' group in Hawkins County, Tennessee objected to a series of public school textbooks whose stories, the parents (incorrectly) claimed, "promoted the Hindu faith." That the issue was neither Hinduism in particular nor religion in general, but rather the desire to promote biblicistic Christianity in the schools, is evident from two facts of the case. First, "Hinduism was an arbitrary choice, [one of the activist parents] recalls: 'I could have picked any religion in the world - Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Islam.'" [8] Second, Hawkins County public schools featured daily Bible readings and clergy-led Bible classes until 1986. [9] The Hawkins County case and the Commandments statute, inter alia, reflect a general biblicist unwillingness for the Bible to be admitted to public discourse as one of several bodies of scripture on a level discursive field. Rather, biblicists want the Bible to enjoy a special status not granted to other scriptures. Attempts to realize this desire for special biblical status often produce a backlash in which nonbiblicists dismiss the Bible and biblicism more readily than other scriptures and religious traditions.

4 Second, biblicists often attempt to enter into public discourse in a monologic fashion. Put another way, biblicists seem to want to speak with a public voice but listen with private ears. [10] "Biblical creationists," for example, dismiss out of hand scientists' claims that fail to find grounding in biblical data, but are quick to complain when scientists dismiss out of hand creationists' claims that fail to find grounding in scientific data. Similarly, the Southern Baptist Convention recently censured the Walt Disney Company for "extend[ing] health insurance to partners of homosexual employees, a move many Baptists regard as accommodating a lifestyle counter to biblical teaching." [11] While asking Disney to live by the SBC's biblically-referenced perspective on homosexuality, the SBC delegates also vowed never to obey any state or federal law legalizing same-sex marriages. [12] By asserting claims on society but denying that society has any claim on them, biblicists privatize their own discourse.

5 Third, some Christians have mounted what amounts to a "turf war" against the academy for control over biblical interpretation. Recent book titles such as The Bible as the Church's Book, Reclaiming the Bible for the Church, and, on the academic side, Whose Bible Is It Anyway? reflect this conflict. [13] Reacting against a putative "unilateral declaration on the part of a self-appointed professional elite that it possesses a monopoly on correct biblical interpretation," some Christians have unilaterally declared that the church possesses a monopoly on correct biblical interpretation. [14] Thus Alister McGrath decries the "Babylonian captivity of scripture" in, or the "hijacking" of the Bible by, the academy; Robert Jenson insists that "there can be no reading of the Bible that is not churchly"; and Karl Donfried proclaims that any non-ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible is inherently distorted. [15] But an ecclesiastical claim for exclusive rights to biblical interpretation is just as egregious as an academic claim to that end, and it certainly inhibits the Bible's entry into public discourse. As David Tracy has written,

To claim that only believers can interpret the religions, moreover, is a position that ultimately robs the religious classics of their claims to truth. At the limit, that position consigns the religious classics to the private reservation of a bureaucratic elite. The privatization of religion in the modern period ... is a battered script with a single plot: no classic manifestation will be granted any cognitive status, no interpretations of those classics will be accorded any public claim or allowed to disclose any possibilities other than those we already knew. For what we know now, whether modestly empirical or militantly positivist, is all that can be known. Any resistance to this knowledge must be made according to those rules, or it quite simply will not count. [16]

Tracy's analysis is equally cogent if one substitutes evangelical for empirical and fundamentalist for positivist.

6 Fourth, the "turf war" over biblical interpretation is waged not only between church and academy but also within the church, further privatizing biblically-oriented discourse. Donfried, for example, argues that only "an ecclesiological, trinitarian hermeneutic, in which Scripture is recognized as a unified and canonical whole" is acceptable; any other hermeneutic is, for Donfried, "alien." [17] Even McGrath, who recognizes that " [t]oo often, the professed liberators of Scripture proceed immediately to imprison it within their own worldview" insists that "all parts of the Bible" must be interpreted "in the light of ... the person and work of Jesus Christ." [18] Witness also the recent internecine hermeneutical battles within Churches of Christ. [19] If "to claim that only believers can interpret the religions ... consigns the religious classics to the private reservation of a bureaucratic elite," [20] to claim that only some believers can properly interpret the Bible privatizes biblically-oriented discourse even more.

7 In at least the four ways just discussed, biblicists' discourse tends to be self-privatizing. The common thread that runs through each of these is a desire for special discursive privileges. By seeking a special status for the Bible above other scriptures, asserting claims on society while denying society's claims, and by erecting ecclesiastical and hermeneutical walls around biblical interpretation, Christians privatize their own biblically-oriented discourse. Each of the moves discussed here constitutes a refusal to pay the price of admission to public discourse, which is, at root, the acceptance of contestability. Put simply, to introduce one's sacred text into public discourse is to give up the privilege of taking anything for granted. Everything -- from the lexical domain of a single word to the authority of one's text -- must be open to examination. Every attempt to fiat incontestability for some feature, attribute, or appropriation of a sacred text restricts that text's role in public discourse. In the final analysis, if the church wishes to open the Bible in public discourse, it must also open the Bible and itself to public discourse.

Notes

1. Martin Marty, "America's Iconic Book," in Humanizing America's Iconic Book (SBL Centennial Publications; ed. Gene M. Tucker and Douglas A. Knight; Chico: Scholars Press, 1982) 12. On the last item, Marty further notes that " [Gideon] Bibles are as ubiquitous in hotel rooms as wire coat hangers. Have any of us ever seen an old one, a used one, a spinecracked version? What happens to them? A Second City comic would have it that one does not know either where wire coat hangers come from. They are absent when one checks in but still mysteriously proliferating by the time one checks out. Could the Gideon Bible be a wire coat hanger in its larval or pupal stages?" Whatever the relationship between Gideon Bibles and wire coat hangers, a Gideon Bible was responsible for the spiritual revival of one of the late twentieth century's truly inspirational figures, Rocky Raccoon.

2. Russ Dudrey, "Restorationist Hermeneutics among the Churches of Christ: Why Are We at an Impasse?" Restoration Quarterly 30 (1988) 17 n. 1. Biblicism and biblicist are often used "pejoratively to the uncritical, literal interpretation of Scripture" (so Richard N. Soulen, Handbook of Biblical Criticism, 2nd ed. [Atlanta: John Knox, 1981] 33) and those who practice this kind of interpretation. No pejorative sense is intended here by the use of biblicist and biblicism; the descriptive value of the terms is compromised by their pejorative use, but no other word suffices either. It should also be noted that biblicist is increasingly used, especially by Jewish scholars, in a disciplinary sense as a one-word synonym for biblical critic.

3. So Martin Marty, "Christian Education in a Pluralistic Culture," in Rethinking Christian Education: Explorations in Theory and Practice (ed. David S. Schuller; St. Louise: Chalice, 1993) 20.

4. Stanley J. Samartha, "Scripture and Scriptures," in Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (new ed.; ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah; London: SPCK and Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995) 11. Samartha briefly identifies some of those scriptures (12-15), but his identifications must be taken with caution; for example, he misidentifies the Laozi (the Dao-De Jing) with the I Ching.

5. Samartha, 11.

6. Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, "First Amendment Legal Watch," <http://www.fac.org/legal/fawatch/lw22796.htm>, 19 February 1996. The vote on the resolution was 27-1; the lone dissenter was also Tennessee's only Jewish senator. Regional and national Jewish groups perceive the statute as an attempt at "establishing Christianity as the de facto religion of our government," according to "Why Separate?", Southern Shofar, <http://www.bham.net/shofar/1996/0396/separate.html>, March 1996.

7. Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Harmony, 1993) 88-93 report that 0.1% of Tennessee respondents to the 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification identified themselves as Muslim, and 0.1% as Buddhist. According to 1990 U.S. Census data available at <http://www.census.org> placed the population of Tennessee at 4,877,185. Combining the data suggests that approximately 4,877 Muslims and 4,877 Buddhists (9,754 combined) lived in Tennessee in 1990. This number has been rounded off to 10,000 in the text above. Unless there has been a mass exodus of Muslims and/or Buddhists from Tennessee since 1990, Census Bureau mathematical models for population projections suggest that 10,000 is probably a conservative estimate for 1996.

8. Stephen Bates, Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of Our Classrooms (New York: Poseidon [Simon and Schuster], 1993) 22-23.

9. Bates, 32, 321.

10. David Barton, a fundamentalist speaker and author with ties to the Christian Coalition, has explicitly used the language of a "one-directional wall of separation" between church and state, "protecting the church from the state but not the other way around" ("David Barton: The Religious Right's master of myth and misinformation," Freedom Writer, <http://www.berkshire.net/~ifas/fw/9606/barton.html>, June 1996).

11. Adelle M. Banks, "Southern Baptists likely to censure Disney over gay-partner policy," Religious News Service, 8 June 1996. The article cited was published in advance of the Baptists' vote on the measure, which they overwhelmingly approved in the event.

12. National & International Religion Report, <http://www.goshen.net/NIRR/1996/062496.html>, 24 June 1996.

13. Phyllis A. Bird, The Bible as the Church's Book (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982); Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds.), Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); Philip R. Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway? (JSOTSup 204; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1995).

14. The quotation is from Alister E. McGrath, "Reclaiming Our Roots and Vision: Scripture and the Stability of the Christian Church," in Braaten and Jenson (eds.), 63. To be sure, academics sometimes look down on nonacademic interpreters of the Bible, though there are signs of a marked shift in academic attitudes in this respect; for that shift, see (e.g.) Kathleen C. Boone, The Bible Tells Them So: The Discourse of Protestant Fundamentalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988); Daniel Patte, Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: A Reevaluation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995); and the contributions to Part 5 of Sugirtharajah (ed.), "People as Exegetes: Popular Readings." With regard to McGrath's charges, one wonders whether his diagnosis of the situation as a whole is not as poor as the hypothetical monologue he constructs for academicians contemptuous of ecclesiastical biblical interpreters: "You are amateurs. You know nothing about reader-orientated criticism. You are not fully acquainted with the oeuvre of Michel Foucault. You lack the cool and clinical detachment of the academy. You're biased. We're not." No truly informed academic would criticize someone for unfamiliarity with reader-oriented criticisms and the work of Michel Foucault, and simultaneously claim "cool and clinical detachment" or a lack of bias, as the latter claims are fundamentally antithetical to the guiding perspectives of the former works.

15. McGrath, 69, 88; Robert W. Jenson, "Hermeneutics and the Life of the Church," in Braaten and Jenson (eds.) 98; Karl P. Donfried, "Alien Hermeneutics and the Misappropriation of Scripture," in Braaten and Jenson (eds.) 20.

16. David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 110.

17. Donfried, 29. Jenson, 99 100, similarly insists that the entire Bible must be read as a single coherent narrative, and that " [t]o read the Bible whole, that is to read it as Bible, demands that the questions we bring to any text or set of texts or tradition or redaction - manifold and changeable as these questions will be - must be trinitarian questions. And to read the Bible whole, we must presume in advance that the doctrine of the Trinity is true, and that it must therefore also answer questions the Scripture raises for us" (99-100).

18. McGrath, 75, 68. It is extremely unlikely that Jews or nontheists will capitulate to reading "all parts of the Bible ... in the light of ... the person and work of Jesus Christ," and many Christians (especially those trained in historical-critical exegesis) will also object to such reading on methodological grounds.

19. For which see, conveniently, J. D. Thomas, Harmonizing Hermeneutics (Nashville: Gospel Advocate, 1991) and the works to which Thomas reacts in that volume.

20. Tracy, 110.