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Icon of the month: Bible
This article was first published in Third Way in October 2005.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the poet Ampleforth is arrested because in producing a politically correct edition of Kipling’s verse, he kept in the word ‘God’, to rhyme with ‘rod’. One sympathises, not just because Room 101 awaits him, but because trying to expunge all trace of the Bible from our culture would be not so much like taking the raisins out of a fruitcake as taking the chocolate out of a chocolate cake.
You would have to ban half of our Christian names - just as the church has sometimes tried to ban the unbiblical ones - reshape the year, and the week, and take the red pen to the arts from Shakespeare to Lloyd-Webber, from Dylan to Damien Hirst. You would have to pick out all those everday phrases begotten by the AV: ‘a law unto himself’, ‘the powers that be’, ‘hope against hope’.
But that’s the easy bit. How do you extricate the biblical theme of redemption from A Christmas Carol? How do you put asunder the myth of Eden from adverts for Caribbean holidays?
The grip these roots still have in western soil is remarkable considering the stump of the Bible that is left above ground. 62% of UK families still have one, but this was 98% in 1954; and of course, as with Dickens and Stephen Hawking, to have is not to read. This applies even in church: the average Christian today knows less of the Bible than the average Victorian bank clerk.
It’s still our proverbial standard for truth; it’s just that when someone says, ‘I take it as gospel’, you can bet they’re not talking about the virgin birth. We still swear on it to tell the truth (though the Qu’ran is now an option), but generally without trusting the contents.
The Bible’s treatment by Christians has been extremely mixed. The vast bonfires of non-Latin Bibles in Italy were one of the more surreal aspects of the Catholic Reformation; while the many Protestant statements of faith that put the Bible first, before any mention of, for example, God, are transparent idolatry.
When Protestants made the Bible the centre of the faith, for the first time ever they put final authority in words on a page instead of living judges. Unfortunately it has to be interpreted. Applying the whole literary heritage of an ancient nation - from erotic verse to apocalyptic visions - to modern church life, invites somewhat different readings. When each has the final authority of God’s word, you can see why it came to pass that there are now 34,000 Protestant denominations.
Protestants removed seven books from the Old Testament, good going for the changeless word of God, though Luther’s attempt to demote James, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation proved less influential.
The grand irony is that while the authority of the Bible is Protestantism’s fundamental principle and distinction, it is Protestantism that deliberately demolished it with sceptical scholarship. In the words of G K Chesterton: ‘I grew up in a world where Protestants who had just proved that Catholics do not believe the Bible were excitedly discovering that they did not believe it themselves’.
And yet worldwide more Bibles are printed, and read, and believed, than ever before. Even in Britain, entering ‘bible’ at Amazon.co.uk today brought up 72,227 books, and tomorrow it will be more. Intriguingly, while the market for Bibles withers like grass, the number available multiplies and fills the world. There are editions for teens, newlyweds, addicts, executives; versions in cockney, Geordie and inclusive; in white leather and in metal; and in dozens of different standard-English tranlsations. We may not be great Bible readers, but we are certainly consumers.
As C S Lewis said, the less the Bible is read, the more it is translated. It’s as if publishers were saying, ‘What will it take to make you read this thing?’
it’s still our proverbial
standard for truth;
it’s just that when
someone says,
‘I take it as gospel’,
you can bet they’re
not talking about
the virgin birth