Abstract
This collection of papers from a conference at Duke University looks at the highly ambiguous place of the Bible in the life of, specifically, the United States of America. From the earliest post-Independence days there were tensions between the strongly Protestant ethos of the majority of the immigrant population and tendencies represented by the First Amendment, which prohibited any congressional law ‘respecting an establishment of religion’ or indeed ‘prohibiting the free exercise thereof’. If the Puritans who had exercised profound influence during the Founding Era were driven by visions of a New England, where Protestant experiments in European England had failed, there were others of a more rationalist temper who were suspicious of allowing religious bodies too great a say in the affairs of the nation. Moreover, in due course the influence of Puritans and Protestants would be diluted by the arrival, during the nineteenth century, of Jews, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. All these groups acknowledged the authority of the Bible but in different ways and, indeed, with very different forms of the biblical canon. And if that were not diversity enough, in the latter half of the twentieth century, the 1965 Immigration Act allowed the entry of a huge diversity of adherents of different religions, such that the United States can now lay claim to being the world’s most religiously diverse nation.
This is a volume full of fascinating vignettes demonstrating both the Bible’s ability to inspire people to action and extraordinary endeavour as well as showing the remarkable ability of believers to read their histories into the biblical narratives. It is organised into four sections: the first on the Bible and Politics; the second on the Bible, America’s Founding Era and America’s Identity; the third on the Bible and Popular Culture; the fourth on the Bible and Public Schools.
There is much of interest here. For those who find the current privatisation of Protestantism disturbing, and yet hard to overcome, this volume offers both some comfort and some caution. It makes it quite clear that Calvinism, and its later development in Puritanism, was a highly political project and that those who took flight to the New World did so in order to take up the task anew in a new land. It was a land they regarded as a desert, like the desert through which the Israelites made their way to Canaan (p. 83).
Rather like the editors of the present volume, who seem to imagine that ‘[m]ost Americans in the Founding Era were Protestants’ (p. 3), they seem to have reckoned without the indigenous population, who also make relatively little appearance in these pages. They do appear in David Morgan’s chapter on ‘The Image of the Protestant Bible in America’, first in a nineteenth-century engraving of a missionary preaching to a rather orderly and patient group of Native Americans, presented as being greatly in awe of the Bible which the missionary holds up to their gaze; and by inference, in another popular nineteenth-century painting by George Henry Broughton, Pilgrims Going to Church. This portrays a group of Bible-carrying Puritans on their way to church, guarded to the front and the rear by men, each carrying a musket in one hand and a Bible in the other. The painting appeared in 1867 shortly after the end of the Civil War and ‘may have appealed for its affirmation of the American theory of redemptive violence that kept an imperilled nation together and would continue to do so in the ritualized mythological memories of the nation’s origins’ (p. 104). It appeared at a time of major confrontation with the Native American Indian groups in the west and south-west. ‘What was implied was the intrepid march of Anglo civilization in the face of a deadly enemy.’ It’s a theme which has had many incarnations.
Several themes recur throughout the volume. One is that of the continuing fascination with Israel, whether in terms of an identification between the biblical narratives of the people of Israel and the early settlers or, more recently, in the various dispensationalist accounts of the history of the world and the place within them of the establishment of the State of Israel. It is remarkable that a set of beliefs, which from the time of William Miller in the 1840s, have experienced regular disconfirmation should nevertheless have gathered increasing support and made an identifiable impact on the foreign policy of the currently most powerful nation in the world.
Another important theme centres on the question of US American identity. To what extent is acceptance of the Bible’s authority, and its use in constructing a cosmology and an ethos, determinative of what it is to be a US American today? As already indicated, while it is clear that there were extremely powerful biblical influences in the overwhelmingly religious culture of the earliest settlers, such influences in due course became increasingly conflicted as different groups with very different forms and interpretations of the Bible entered North America. As John Fea’s excellent chapter, ‘Does America have a biblical heritage?’ makes clear, at crucial junctures in US history, biblical interpreters were ranged against each other as they faced critical questions about the direction which the people should take. Thus during the Revolutionary period there were many ingenious readings of the Bible in support of the Revolutionary position, drawing e.g. parallels between the situation of Ahaz and Micah (2 Chr. 28) and that of the colonies under George III. To Mark Noll, however, such readings ‘look more like comical propaganda than serious biblical exposition’ (quoted pp. 74-5). The literalists in this context are the Loyalists, mostly Anglican clergy who turned to Rom. 13 and I Peter 2:13-17 to bolster allegiance to the king. In the similarly fierce debates about the abolition of slavery, many of the strongest anti-abolitionist arguments were based on literal readings of the biblical texts, which clearly pointed to the acceptance of slavery by the biblical writings.
It is important to put these biblical debates in context. There was nothing exceptional about Puritan/Calvinist aspirations to build a ‘city on a hill’, to set up a Christian nation in the New World to which they had been led. The Spanish Conquistadores had had identical aspirations. What was distinctive about their attempts was Calvin’s innovative doctrine of the tertius usus legis, the third use of the law, which declared that the law was the best instrument for enabling believers ‘daily to learn with greater truth and certainty what the will of the Lord is’ (Instit. II, vii, 12). This endowed the legal/ethical teaching of the Bible with an overwhelming authority, such that no other ethical considerations, whencesoever derived, could trump it. It is this unique conferral of authority on the Bible beyond tradition and reason, beyond even the inspired teachings of the Spirit, which gives the debates described here their particular character. At least among Puritans, there was no higher standard to which appeal could be made than that of Scripture. And this in turn leads to the sometimes comical character of these controversies as people search desperately for Scriptural justification for courses of action they have espoused for quite other reasons. It took the Enlightenment critique of Lutheran and Calvinist Orthodoxy to reintroduce a more rational note into Christian ethics. And the Enlightenment, as Fea argues, also played an important role in laying the foundation of the new constitution. A Christian ethics which acknowledges no other authority than that of the Bible, and eschews all rational criticism, is a dangerous and unpredictable creature, doubly dangerous in the context of a project to establish a New World.
Tom Wright Invites the Church to Recover the Psalms
Tom Wright, Finding God in the Psalms: Sing, Pray, Live (London: SPCK, 2014. £9.99. pp. 200. ISBN: 978-0-281-06989-7).
This is a heartfelt ‘plea’ (p. 1) from a senior churchman to the church, especially worship leaders (p. 25), to recover the Psalms (pp. 4, 22–23). This adds Wright’s weight to similar pleas by Clint McCann, Bruce Waltke, Gordon Wenham and Ray Van Neste.
Chapters 1 & 2 make an extended case for the use of the Psalms. Chapters 3–5 guide the reader to see the Psalms as the intersection of God’s sphere and ours (pp. 7, 22, 35) in relation to time, space and matter.
These three paradigms are imported from his recent book on the gospels (p. 21) and may not be the best choices for the Psalter. Nonetheless, through them Wright brings a mouth-watering introduction to the Psalms. Christology is front-and-centre throughout. The circularity of taking a paradigm from the Gospels to arrive at Jesus is unfortunate. However, Wright constantly and masterfully orients us to God’s broader story concerning Adam, Abraham, Israel, Jesus and the church as God’s purpose for the whole of creation.
This leads to one weakness in his exposition: he appears unaware of the great value of three decades of analysis of the storyline within the Psalter. Wright does not deal with critical issues of redaction and collection (pp. 8-11), by contrast with such conservative readers as Augustine, Calvin and Delitzsch. Unfortunately, it is precisely through this arrangement of the Psalms into a Psalter that the story of Israel’s monarchy, exile and future hope is told, as argued by Gerald Wilson and others. Wright notices themes in adjacent psalms (pp. 42, 54), but never places a Psalm in this context of the Psalter’s narrative. Wright’s connections with God’s story are thus unnecessarily forced. E.g., his discussion of Ps. 90 (God’s space, p. 98) is not related to his excellent discussion of the loss of temple in Ps. 89 (God’s time, pp. 68-73), right across the seam of Books III–IV.
Wright envisages that corporate singing will drive private devotion (p. 26). He is silent about a third historic use, also in need of rediscovery: pastoral counselling. Wright’s opening chapters and (especially) his ‘afterword’ on his lifelong habitation in the Psalter, would have been greatly strengthened by some examples in this area.
Those who care about the reformation of the church should earnestly pray that this book will have a wide readership, so that the Psalter will return to its rightful place at the heart of corporate and private worship.
STEFFEN JENKINS
University of Bristol