A Conversation on the Bible and Culture
In the light of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible this year, Nigel Hopper (Lecturer in Contemporary Culture and Communications Manager, LICC) asked Antony Billington (Head of Theology, LICC) some questions about the Bible’s impact on culture and the implications for Christians and churches today. The following is is a transcript of their ‘electronic’ conversation.
Nigel: 400 years after the publication of the King James Bible, how would you describe the place of the Bible in contemporary British culture?
Antony: Well, there’s no doubt that the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible has given the Bible an increased public exposure, which means the issue of the impact of the Bible on British culture has been raised again and again in recent months.
And from some unlikely places too. In the first week of May, Stylist magazine carried a piece on the Bible. So, in amongst profiles of Karren Brady and Gwyneth Paltrow, beauty tips, fashion pages, and perfume adverts, was a three-page article on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible! That article also included examples of ways the Bible has inspired contemporary culture, taking in examples from songs (like Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’), art, novels (like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi), music, and film.
So, we’ve had lots of reminders of the impact of the Bible on English literature and language. In fact, even well-known atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins have been saying that our language and culture would be somehow incomplete without the King James translation of the Bible.
But others have been pointing out that its impact is more extensive even than that.
Melvyn Bragg, for instance, has published a volume called Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible (Hodder & Stoughton, 2011) in which he traces an emancipatory impulse in the Bible – showing how it has played a role in changing society. Of course, there’s already a revolutionary notion at work in the Bible being translated from Latin into English which moves Scripture from the elite to give access to all – the ploughboy as well as the priest. And then that impulse continues – in the movement to abolish slavery, for instance, and in the charitable work of the Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill. In others sorts of ways, Bragg argues that the King James Bible was a force for democracy.
Along similar lines, Nick Spencer, Research Director at Theos and formerly at LICC, also has a book out this year called Freedom and Order: History, Politics and the English Bible (Hodder & Stoughton, 2011). And Nick too argues that the Bible has been influential on British political history – whether on the rights and duties of kings, democracy, and tolerance – again highlighting the point that, on balance, the Bible has had a positive impact on British political life.
One more example worth mentioning, although it casts the net wider than the Bible’s influence on Britain, is Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization (Thomas Nelson, 2011). This is particularly interesting because it’s written by an Indian scholar and author. Mangalwadi is a Christian but grew up immersed in Eastern religions, and so he brings a perspective to this topic which allows him to explore the differences between what he sees as the biblical perspective on life compared with alternative worldviews found in (for instance) Islam and Hinduism. Not unlike some of the others mentioned here, Mangalwadi makes the case that the Bible provides the foundation upon which Indian democracy as well as western civilization rests. Pretty much anything seen as of ‘value’ in western civilization – and Mangalwadi covers rationality, technology, heroism, revolution, languages, literature, university, science, morality, family, compassion, true wealth, and liberty – he credits to the influence of the Bible.
In all these ways, then, the Bible has shaped various dimensions of our culture – often without us really being aware of the extent to which it has done so!
Nigel: It seems to me, looking around, that the Bible – and the gospels in particular – increasingly serve as a foil for contemporary re-tellings, or re-imaginings of its story (usually of a sensational nature), Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ being a recent example. Do you think this is helpful inasmuch as it puts the Bible in the limelight, and how can Christians ‘rescue’ the story of Scripture from contemporary interpretations?
Antony: Yes, it’s interesting to see how the figure of Jesus, however much he might be misunderstood, is deeply ingrained on our collective cultural consciousness. In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Canongate, 2010), Pullman uses the idea of Mary having twins, one named Jesus and one named Christ, as a literary device to explore what he sees as the difference between the ‘historical Jesus’ and the ‘churchly Christ’. In part this becomes a way of Pullman representing the leaders of the future church who make sure that the ‘truth’ recorded in the gospels is what they consider it should have been. But he’s clear that he’s writing a piece of fiction, even if he also seems to be wanting to make a point by doing so.
More recently and perhaps more controversially, we’ve had James Frey’s The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (John Murray, 2011). The promotional blurb asks what you would do ‘if you discovered the messiah was alive today, living in New York, sleeping with men, impregnating young women, euthanizing the dying, and healing the sick’. And the cover asks us to ‘be enraged’ as well as to ‘be enthralled’ – so Frey knows that his book will shock and upset people. And it’s received mixed reviews so far.
Interestingly, there are clips on YouTube of James Frey, and via his own website, where he talks about his goal being ‘to create a new mythology, one that is relevant in a world of nuclear weapons, fast physics, the internet, genetic testing and manipulation; a world in which we know homosexuality is not a decision and a world where women have the right to choose how they live’. So, he’s upfront about his social and political agendas; and, as some reviewers have said, the fundamental idea behind the book is that love conquers all and organised religion is the source of all evil.
Of course, that message of love found on the lips of Jesus himself in the gospels, but there is a danger of severing the message from the larger story of Jesus to which it belongs.
And that, fundamentally I think, is the big issue with re-tellings of the story of Jesus. What seems to happen is that the story of Jesus becomes about something else – an exploration of the human need for love, for instance, or a critique of ecclesiastical authority – and it’s this ‘something else’ that becomes all-important. And in the telling of that ‘something else’, the gospels get left behind and (somewhat ironically) Jesus gets left behind!
Even well-meaning Christian readers can sometimes be in danger of abstracting ethical truisms or theological ‘nuggets’ from the gospel accounts of Jesus, as if the accounts themselves are just a convenient vehicle for those things and can then be left behind once we’ve worked out what the gospels are really all about. Except, of course, that the gospels are about Jesus, and we can’t separate the abstracted truths (about justice or love, say) from the larger story of Jesus – indeed, the larger story of Israel which the gospels say Jesus has come to fulfil.
So, books like those by Pullman and Frey might be helpful in that they shed light on certain contemporary aspirations and fears, and hopefully they’ll drive Christians back to the gospels again to see what Jesus is really like – not what we’d like him to be like, but as he really is. But, as I’ve tried to suggest, who Jesus is emerges out of the story which shows and tells his proclamation of the kingdom, his words and works, his death and resurrection – and it’s through the gospel narratives that his identity is revealed.
Nigel: Although not a sensational volume, A.C. Grayling has recently published his The Good Book – an unashamedly secular Bible, if you like, that attempts to be a compendium of wisdom for living without reference to God. What do you see as the main flaws in such an attempt to cherry-pick ‘workable wisdom’ from the Bible (and other ancient texts) whilst keeping God out of the story?
Antony: Yes. This has been an interesting development too...
It's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but the book consciously mimics the design of Bibles with short chapters divided into verses. And it’s organised in fourteen sections, beginning with Genesis and taking in Wisdom, Parables, Lamentations, Songs, Histories, Proverbs, and Epistles along the way. But Grayling takes ‘secular’ texts from western and eastern traditions and weaves together their ideas and insights about how ‘the good life’ should be lived – without reference to any divine being.
What we get, then, is lots of material on the virtue of friendship, wisdom for life, the value of liberty, and so on. And, of course, all of that Christians can affirm – especially as we believe in the ‘common grace’ of a God who sends rain and makes the sun shine on all. All truth is God’s truth.
But, I’d want to say that so far as Christians are concerned, best sense is made of those things – like virtue and wisdom and liberty and hope – in the light of the bigger story the Bible tells. Indeed, it’s telling, I think, that while the longest sections in Grayling’s Good Book are Histories and Acts (drawing mostly on stories from ancient Greece and Rome), his Bible lacks a connecting narrative from beginning to end – which is what you might expect if there is no God.
And that dimension, I think, is a crucial distinctive of the Bible. For Christians, the Bible tells not a story about a god, but tells the story of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who will make good on his promise to Abraham to bless all nations, and brings that promise to fulfilment in Jesus – back to the concerns of the previous question.
Nigel: You mention ‘story’ in your response there, but the Bible is, of course, a collection of books and, according to Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘speaks with many different voices’. This being so, he says: ‘Even if you were the most devout fundamentalist, you wouldn’t make a coherent picture out of the Bible. Fundamentalists pick and choose. It‘s much more useful to see it as a witness to ancient conversations about things that still matter to people.’ Do you have any sympathy with this view of Scripture?
Antony: Well, I’d certainly want to agree with MacCulloch that the Bible is ‘a collection of books’, and even that it ‘speaks with many different voices’. But I‘d want to talk further about the entailment that we’re unable, because of those factors, to make ‘a coherent picture out of the Bible’.
So yes, of course it’s a collection of books, a library; and of course it’s made up of different literary types. But, the vast majority of Christian believers have always wanted to say that the Bible has a coherence and a unity to it, which means we can and must read the ‘parts’ in the light of the ‘whole’.
I suppose it partly depends on what sort of unity we’re expecting. It’s not a uniformity, where everything says exactly the same thing. And the unity of the Bible is not the sort of tight, logical unity we might expect from a philosophical system or a system of morals. As I’ve already indicated in responses to earlier questions, it’s much more helpful, I think, to see the Bible as unfolding the story of what God has said and done in Christ and through the Spirit – and begin to see its coherence in that.
And in fact, this story underpins everything else – all the ‘different voices’ that MacCulloch talks about. So, the law material in Exodus and Leviticus really only makes sense in the larger account of God delivering his people from slavery and establishing a covenant with them. The Psalms can’t be separated from the covenant God makes with king David which – from the perspective of the whole Bible – comes to its ultimate fulfilment in Jesus, David’s descendant. The wisdom material in Proverbs and elsewhere looks back to the God of creation and looks forward to Christ who is described in the New Testament as the wisdom of God. The prophetic books everywhere assume God as creator, deliverer of his people, upholder of the covenant promises, judge of the nations, and provider of hope for future restoration. Even the epistles in the New Testament presuppose the larger story of God working through Israel and Christ to bring about his purposes for the world.
So, even in books where the biblical story is not being explicitly told, there is what some have called a ‘narrative substructure’ – which helps us make sense of where we are in the unfolding plot and how to understand the significance of the different voices throughout Scripture.
So MacCulloch is right, I think, when he says that we ‘pick and choose’ to some extent. Just to start reading the Bible in a particular place is to make a choice about where to start. But, so far as is possible, we set our ‘picking’ and ‘choosing’ in the light of the story of the Bible as a whole. And Christian readers of Scripture, I would want to say, should in principle be ready to have our ‘picking’ and ‘choosing’ open to further light and correction as we read more of the Bible and become more attuned to its great themes which move through from beginning to end.
I’ve heard it said recently that our understanding of God and Christ and humanity and salvation that we get from the Bible is more like a sweater than a salad cart. We don’t walk up to the Bible buffet and load up on the teachings we like but skip the ones we don’t like. Instead, it’s much more like the intertwined strands of yarn in a cable-knit sweater. When we tug on one, the others tend to come loose too.
That’s partly why I'm not a fan of the idea that the Bible is ‘a witness to ancient conversations about things that still matter to people’, as MacCulloch says. It is that, to some extent, but it can’t be reduced to that. The Bible is not like Wikipedia – with several contributors, regularly updated, an incomplete project which now requires our input. Of course, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t require our engagement: you only have to read the extended reflection about God’s word in Psalm 119 to see that the appropriate responses are submission and obedience, confidence and delight – and all in the context of relationship with God through his word.
Nigel: Picking up on some of the themes you mention there, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently said this when asked about the place of the Bible in our society:
‘When writers use phrases and images from the King James Bible, it’s a way of saying: “This story, this poem, is part of a sort of conversation that is going on; it’s part of the family history and you ought to be able to recognise what it’s talking about.’ But it isn’t just about the treasures of musical and memorable language, or even a common culture. The stories told in the Bible mattered because they were seen and read as speaking honestly about human experiences, and about something more. They were – and are – about hope: the hope our failures are understood and forgiven, the hope there is a power beyond ourselves that can give us new beginnings, the hope there is a reality around us so overwhelming, exciting and unmanageable that we could never find words good enough for it, not even the words of the old Bible.’
Do you think he succeeds here in striking the right balance between recognising the Bible’s cultural impact as a classic of literature whilst also acknowledging it to be so much more than that?
Antony: Yes... I’d want to affirm all that’s said about family history and the significance of human experience and about hope and forgiveness. But I’m also glad to hear the key words ‘and about something more’...
As I said at the start of this conversation, the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible means that even mainstream atheists seem to have been falling over themselves to praise it. As Christians we might be intrigued by that, but I don’t think we should be flattered by it. What’s being commented on is the Bible as a cultural icon, if you like, which has been significant for its impact on art and literature and language and politics. But, of course, the Bible is more than a cultural artifact.
Even talking about the Bible as a ‘classic’ can be misleading. A classic is a text which expresses a truth which is so fundamental that it can be read and understood in totally different contexts by different readers. So, when some describe the Bible as a ‘classic’ what they mean is the Bible – like other great classic works of art or literature – has a lasting power which somehow draws us in and discloses compelling truths about our lives as human beings.
On this understanding, as we were saying when we reflecting on retellings of the story of Jesus, Christianity becomes a particular expression of a universal truth – like the significance of love or liberty or justice. We don’t need to deny the significance of those things, but they are truths that could have been got from other great classic works – like Shakespeare and Milton – not just the Bible.
And that’s why I think the Archbishop’s ‘something more’ is significant. Because most Christians want to say that the Scriptures are not simply a great work of literature, one classic among many, nor even a primary classic. They provide a way of seeing which is even more trustworthy and profound than even the greatest classics – because the Scriptures are God’s word through which God speaks, which tell the story of the salvation he brings to humanity centred on his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. And as such they’re essential for the identity of the Christian community – for how we think about ourselves and for how we live in the world.
Nigel: Finally, I started by asking you about the place of the Bible in contemporary British culture, let me finish by asking you for your view on the place of the Bible in the contemporary British church.
Antony: Survey after survey in recent years – carried out with people in churches, leaders and non-leaders, as well as non-church people – has confirmed what will probably not come as a huge surprise to many of us, that there is an increasing lack of biblical literacy in the church as well as in society more generally. The surveys reveal that the vast majority of people in churches feel positive about the Bible, and consider it to be revelation from God, but fewer and fewer, it seems – even leaders – are reading it for themselves. And when they manage to do so, they’re not always sure what to do with it. And then, on top of that, are the challenges from secularists we’ve already spoken about.
That’s why I'm delighted that LICC is part of ‘Biblefresh’ – a movement of churches, agencies, colleges and festivals seeking to encourage and inspire Christians and churches to a greater confidence in, and appetite for, the Word of God.
Biblefresh has been focusing on four areas this year – encouraging individuals and churches to take practical steps in reading the Bible, being trained in handling the Bible, supporting translation work, and experiencing the Bible in new and creative ways.
It would be great, I think, if we could all move forward a little bit this year. For some of us that might mean reading the Bible on our own more regularly than we have been. For others it might mean using some Bible reading notes when we read to take us further in our understanding, or going to a Bible study, or meeting someone once a week in a coffee shop to discuss a Bible passage. For church leaders and preachers it might mean being even more self-conscious about handling the Bible carefully or thinking through its significance for our people in their everyday contexts. For others it might be a commitment to give to the work of Bible translation so that others can read God’s word in their own language. Think how amazing it could be if we all took just one step forward!
We started with how the Bible has shaped British culture, but of course Christians formed by the Bible are themselves culture shapers. But we will best engage with culture and society today as people who are first shaped by the Bible, through hearing and then living according to the voice of God in the pages of Scripture.
Antony Billington
Nigel Hopper
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