Abstract
Angus Paddison and Neil Messer (eds), The Bible: Culture, Community, Society, T&T Clark: London, 2013; 272 pp.: 9780567049445, £60.00/$110.00 (hbk)
If there is a common thread running through this collection of essays, it is perhaps the idea that biblical scholarship has to come to terms with a new contextual reality: despite the major contribution the Bible has made in the past to the intellectual, political and cultural life of the English-speaking world, society as a whole has broadly lost interest. But this theme is developed by different authors in significantly different ways, and the result, to be honest, is a bit of a mixed bag.
This book brings together twelve papers from a conference held in 2011 to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, together with an introductory chapter by the editors. The collection is sub-divided into three sections: Part I has four essays loosely centred on the theme of ‘Reading the Bible in Modernity’; Part 2 offers three essays on ‘The Bible as a Formative Text’; and the final section presents five papers on the general theme of ‘Reading the Bible in Public’. This division of labour feels somewhat arbitrary at times, however, and many of the essays could have been placed anywhere in the book or read at almost any conference on the Bible and culture. There are also some missing friends: it is particularly disappointing, for example, that at a conference supposedly held to celebrate the King James Version there is relatively little reflection on that translation, particularly in relation to its history and reception.
There is a strong theological emphasis on the Reformed tradition throughout the book, with the notable exception of the Catholic perspective offered in the outstanding contribution by Gavin D’Costa. Focusing specifically on the Hindu scriptures, D’Costa draws on his current research to ask if Christians living in the contemporary pluralist environment can learn anything from the difficult history of competing Jewish-Christian readings of Scripture to engage more fruitfully with the sacred texts of other faiths. Equally outstanding are the essays by David Fergusson, who sets the scene for the book with a thoughtful and careful discussion of the nature of biblical authority in the secular world, and Ben Quash who writes about the lessons to be learnt from the way the Bible has been used, past and present, to inspire the public imagination. Also noteworthy are the only examples of exegetical engagement with biblical texts in the contributions by Ellen Davies on the Elijah story and Peter Admirand on the Marcan version of the story of the Syrophoenician woman. In subtly different ways, both these papers suggest some gently challenging ideas about the theological implications of their chosen readings.
But the final three essays on the use of the Bible in the public square perhaps capture the general sense of tentativeness running through much of the book. These three papers each attempt a penetrating analysis of the challenge facing the Church in the wake of growing public indifference to the Bible, but they seem to leave the reader more or less where they started. The question is: however much Christians feel called to speak confidently from Scripture to a pluralist world, is anyone outside the Church actually bothered?