New Society and Conference on Bible Craftsmanship

Here’s a new development that looks really great. It’s a new organization called the Society of Bible Craftsmanship (SOBC) for the promotion of quality Bible production. From what I can tell, it’s being started by the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) and is maybe funded by it (it’s not clear). The announcement explains:

The Society of Bible Craftsmanship celebrates beauty, creativity, and innovation in the field of Bible publishing. The society’s mission is to nurture and highlight excellence in the industry and to help the general reader discover and appreciate all that goes into the finest examples of Bible craftsmanship—in all languages, in all media.

A central task of the society will be to periodically gather and exhibit new Bible publications from around the world. The society’s awards program will recognize the finest work in a broad range of categories, with winners exhibited at Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC.

The Bible is one of the most important books ever to be published and also one of the most challenging in terms of design and production. Today, the innovation displayed in meeting these challenges is at an all-time high. In partnership with publishers and industry professionals, the society will host events and virtual seminars though Museum of the Bible to explore every aspect of craftsmanship, illuminating the work of translators and editors, designers and typographers, printers and bookbinders, and many other contributors to the production process. The society’s e-newsletter will also showcase the best writing on Bible craftsmanship. 

Museum of the Bible hopes, through the Society of Bible Craftsmanship, to promote the flourishing of contemporary Bible publishing and reading.

One of the people behind this is J. Mark Bertrand who we’ve had occasion to blog about in the past. For a long time he reviewed Bible design at the Bible Design blog (which now redirects to his new site lectio.org). He’s on the steering committee along with Jeff Kloha, chief curatorial officer at MOTB and Klaus Krogh, the CEO of the creative firm 2K/DENMARK that does a lot of Bible design.

J. Mark Bertrand

The Society is hosting a conference on August 27 in D.C. and online to kick off the new society. There is also a new book out from 2K/DENMARK about seven new typefaces they’ve designed just for Bibles.

One of the pleasures of studying the earliest printed English Bibles the last year or so has been appreciating just how many design decisions these early printers had to make. Yes, they had some precedents they could follow from manuscripts as well as Bibles in other languages. But, in other ways, they were inventing the wheel, so to speak, making decisions that would set the course of Bible production for the next 500 years. Everything from the names of books to chapter titles, marginal notes, maps, introductions to the reader, indices, cross-references—you get the idea. And beyond this there are the myriad questions of format: typefaces, layout, columns, spacing, book size, and more. 

I like what the new president of the society says about good design having a “gentle authority.” Whether we know it or not, the design of anything written is always communicating something additional to the words on the page. That design will either serve or hinder the meaning; it’s never neutral. Nowhere is that more important than the Bible.

Three New Books on the Bible in American History

It is a good time to be a student of American religious history and especially American Evangelicalism. Historians like George Marsden, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch and others continue to write incisively on the subject even as a younger generation follows in their wake. Just recently, a number of fine historians of American religion have turned their attention to the story of the Bible in America. Not that there haven’t been others, but each of these stands out in one way or another from previous works.

1. Mark Noll, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783

The most notable of the recent bunch is Mark Noll’s first volume of a projected two volume history of the Bible in American public life. I can’t think of anyone better suited to write this story. Noll has been writing about American Evangelicalism for decades and along with George Marsden is considered the dean of American religious history. I have yet to be disappointed with anything Noll has written and I would venture that this new book will overshadow his acclaimed America’s God. Sadly my copy had to be shipped to the U.S. where it is eagerly awaiting my return.

Here is how Peter J. Thuesen concludes his review for Books & Culture:

In the end, it is precisely this capacity for self-criticism that distinguishes Noll’s In the Beginning Was the Word as the most profound treatment ever written of the Bible in American public life. All too often, histories of the Bible in America have uncritically glorified the American project, stopping just short of assuming that Moses and Jesus were Americans whose teachings were everywhere in harmony with the nation’s imperial ambitions. Noll exposes this delusion while also admitting the illusory nature of the sola scriptura that forms part of his own heritage as a Protestant. 

Yet Noll’s book is not all criticism. In its own nuanced way, it is a celebration of the richly fertile biblical world that colonial Americans inhabited. I have been unable to do justice in this review to the sheer volume of biblical allusions and citations that Noll uncovers in the legions of sources he examined. As he explains in the book’s introduction, his referencing of so many passages of Scripture was a conscious decision—an answer to his colleagues in the historical profession who have treated the Bible as mere “wallpaper, simply a backdrop for more important objects of attention.” To be sure, as Noll’s own account makes clear, the Bible has sometimes functioned as little more than rhetorical wallpaper, a fancy covering designed to sanctify the nation’s aims. But the Bible has also proven personally ennobling for countless citizens, even—and perhaps especially—after the republic threw off the system of inherited nobility and monarchy in the wake of the Revolution. Noll promises a second volume that will examine the “rise and gradual decline of a ‘Bible civilization’ in the United States in the long 19th century.” After the intellectual feast Noll has already given us over the course of his career, including in his earlier magnum opus, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002), we can only rejoice that the world does not yet “contain [all] the books that should be written” (John 21:25) by this uncommonly wise interpreter of the American religious experience.

2. John Fea, The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society 

Second up is John Fea’s new institutional history of the American Bible Society which should be of special interest to those of us who read the Bible in a UBS edition. As Scot McKnight puts it, “Every major translation of the Bible today translates the Hebrew and Greek texts produced in conjunction with ABS and UBS. This alone justifies the importance of knowing the story told by Fea.” Interestingly, Fea was commissioned by the Bible Society and agreed only on the condition that he would have full academic freedom. He says that “in the end, I am not sure some folks at the ABS understood the difference between a scholarly history and a promotional piece” (his book being the former rather than the latter).

Historian Thomas Kidd closes his review of the book with this:

As the ABS observes its 200th birthday, it has become more clearly aligned with a broadly defined evangelicalism than it has been for a century. That adjustment has been both self-conscious and controversial among the ABS leadership. ABS leaders have also become concerned that the agency has, for too long, focused simply on shipping as many Bibles as it can... Especially in America, the Bible remains pervasively owned, but little read, except among a devout minority. With the advent of the Internet and smartphones, access to the Scriptures in physical or electronic form is no longer an issue for much of the world’s population. The problem is focusing a prospective reader’s attention (or what the ABS calls “engagement”) on the Word of God.

Christians have no doubt that the Bible is “living and active,” as the Book of Hebrews puts it. But millions of dust-covered Bibles on American bookshelves don’t do much to enliven souls or even to preserve an American national culture. Addressing that neglect of the Bible may be the greatest challenge the American Bible Society has ever faced.

3. Douglas Sweeney, Edwards the Exegete: Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment

No study of the Bible’s influence in America would be complete without some consideration of “America’s theologian,” Jonathan Edwards. After a swell of interest in Edwards’s theology and philosophy over the last thirty plus years, Edwards is finally being studied at length for his contribution to Biblical interpretation. Other contributions have tackled his interpretation of specific portions of scripture (e.g., the Psalms or Revelation), but this book’s aim is much more comprehensive in setting the great Puritan’s exegesis firmly in its historical context.

From the publisher:

As Sweeney shows, throughout Edwards’ life the lion’s share of his time was spent wrestling with the words of holy writ. After reconstructing Edwards’ lost exegetical world and describing his place within it, Sweeney summarizes his four main approaches to the Bible—canonical, Christological, redemptive-historical, and pedagogical—and analyzes his work on selected biblical themes that illustrate these four approaches, focusing on material emblematic of Edwards’ larger interests as a scholar. Sweeney compares Edwards’ work to that of his most frequent interlocutors and places it in the context of the history of exegesis, challenging commonly held notions about the state of Christianity in the age of the Enlightenment.

The Bible vs the scriptures

I mentioned some time ago in my review of Misquoting Jesus that I thought Ehrman was using the word ‘Bible’ in multiple senses: to refer to individual copies of works given by divine inspiration, and to refer to the non-material entity, the Word of God, to which Christians often ascribe complete inspiration and truthfulness. The point of my distinction is that educated Christians down the ages (Jerome, Calvin) seem to have made a distinction between the copy in front of them (which might be in error) and the communication they held to come from God, which they did not see as in error.

It has been occurring to me that the confusion in Ehrman (and many others) arises from a disjunction between the language used in creeds and in popular Christian discourse.

I’ve been looking through Joel R. Beeke and Sinclair B. Ferguson, eds, Reformed Confessions Harmonized (Baker, 1999) which lays out synoptically various reformed confessions. The word that is completely absent in treatments of scripture is of course ‘Bible’. The same is true for the 39 Articles (see articles 6 and 7). The phrases that tend to be used are ‘the Word of God’, ‘the Scriptures’, ‘Holy Scripture’ (capitalization varies and I haven’t checked early mss or edns of these creeds).

I suspect that more recent creeds (e.g. UCCF, InterVarsity, Campus Crusade) tend to use the word ‘Bible’ more prominently, though the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy uses the word ‘Bible’ less than ‘Scripture(s)’. I’d be interested in knowing whether a shift has indeed taken place and, if so, when and why it took place.

I am tending to think that the word ‘Bible’, though advantageous in some settings, too readily focuses those considering doctrines of scripture on particular material manifestations of the word of God. Would anything significant be lost if we focused our discussions about doctrine and textual criticism on the terms ‘scripture(s)’ and ‘Word of God’ and reserved the term ‘Bible’ exclusively for material entities?