Introduction: Encountering Biblicism

The Social Life of the Christian Scriptures

Biblicism, as imagined in this collection, is a working analytical framework intended to facilitate comparative research on how Christians interact with their sacred texts. Conceptually, Biblicism is intended to theorize the dynamic relationship within Christian communities between two domains: how Christians conceptualize their scriptures, and what they do with them through various forms of individual and corporate practice. In short, Biblicism is about accounting for the social life of the Christian scriptures (Bowen 1992).

The contributors to this volume have all found, and demonstrate creatively in their essays, that Bible belief is rarely simple and often an object of struggle. However such belief appears in a given sociohistorical setting, the authors remind us that we should expect serious and wide-ranging consequences to ensue from how Christians are imagining the Bible. These essays illustrate, as well, that the uses and purposes Christians find for the Bible are tightly bound to their surrounding cultural milieu. What people do with their scriptures is informed by these circumstances; and, at the same time, what they do with their scriptures exerts a formative impact on those circumstances. Still, as a theoretical endeavor, Biblicism is not simply a matter of documenting the differences that exist across global Christendom vis-à-vis what believers do with the Bible. Our project is a more strenuous one. Biblicism is pressed to ask why particular belief formations, why specific forms of practice, and why certain tensions emerge at all. And, ultimately, are there identifiable principles and processes-social, cognitive, linguistic, or otherwise-that structure the interactions that occur between the Bible and its many and varied interlocutors? Biblicism is, then, both a descriptive and an explanatory effort. It is an effort that begins with empirical investigation, but always pushes further to demonstrate the cultural significance that infuses the social life of these scriptures.

Moreover, Biblicism is about prioritizing the relationship between biblical texts and communities of practice, not moving past it in pursuit of other questions. It is about scrutinizing (in the best, analytical sense of the term) this relationship, not treating it as an obvious, taken-for-granted phenomenon. In the best of outcomes, a comparative project of Biblicism will not be bound to a particular stream of the Christian world. In the best of outcomes, the approaches to Biblicism advocated here will encompass dominant and marginalized Christians, widespread and narrowly represented communities, historical and emerging expressions.

These twelve essays seek to develop systematic ways of thinking through the subject of Biblicism. It is our hope that The Social Life of Scriptures-along with the previous and subsequent titles in the Signifying (On) Scriptures series-will be the beginning of a productive, interdisciplinary conversation, not a word left lingering, and not a final word.

ja m e s s. b i e lo

Biblicism-Christianity-Scripture

Because it necessarily involves scripture's interlocutors, the study of Biblicism is implicated in the study of Christian culture more broadly. The global examination of Christianity has been the subject of much recent discussion among anthropologists of Christianity (Cannell 2006;Engelke and Tomlinson, eds. 2006;Robbins 2003). As a self-conscious project, the anthropology of Christianity is a relatively new enterprise. It is focused on understanding the cultural logics that operate among Christian communities, and the consequences that are evident in subjectivities, everyday actions, and social movements. An initial aim of this burgeoning field is to establish a "community of scholarship in which those who study Christian societies formulate common problems, read each other's works, and recognize themselves as contributors to a coherent body of research" (Robbins 2007: 5). In short, a sustainable anthropology of Christianity rests on being an analytic tradition in its own right, exploring comparative opportunities for theoretical and methodological development.

Thus far, the most developed subject area centers on Christian-namely, Protestant and charismatic-ideas about the nature of language and signification. The thrust of this paradigm has been articulated most clearly by Webb Keane (1997aKeane ( , 2002Keane ( , 2007 via his historical and ethnographic portrayal of mission encounters between Dutch Calvinists and Indonesian Sumbanese. As the argument goes, Western Christian semiosis experienced a fundamental shift during the sixteenth-century European Reformation. Keane traces this primarily to John Calvin's theological rejections of his Lutheran and Catholic contemporaries. Three crucial elements emerged from this reformed semiotics: first, a critique of sacramentality, iconography, and liturgical ritual that shifted the locus of meaning and divine action away from material things to immaterial words; second, an emphasis on words and their referents that defined the sphere of religion as one of subjective belief, and of accepting propositional statements of doctrine; and third, the ability of language to communicate inner states accurately, which made words windows onto the intentions of individual hearts and minds. This new semiotics carried multiple consequences for Protestant culture: a fetish with words, the elevation of the spoken sermon, the development of a creedal posture, the formation of an ideal sincerely spoken individual, and a new logic for experiencing God through worship. Keane's insights have been used to flesh out expectations of sincerity, spontaneity, and intimacy across multiple Christian communities, and carried further to address broader cultural forms, including the establishment of God's presence (Engelke 2007 This abundance of attention paid to Christian semiotics is good news for the project of Biblicism. The comparative study of how the Christian scriptures circulate in particular sociohistorical moments is well positioned to pick up on issues of text and textuality. The Bible is, after all, the transcendental logos for most Christians, a linguistic resource of habitual and strategic character, a semiotic object deployed by individuals and institutions, the subject of referential and performative discourse, and the recipient of all manner of hermeneutic imaginations. Several of the essays in this volume use an interest in Christian language as a lens to observe matters of Bible belief, practice, and Christian subjectivity. And if a semiotic focus has been an important means of advancing what we know about Christian culture, then a focused integration of Biblicism promises to carry this work further.

Alongside questions of language, text, and signification, the project of Biblicism holds promise for another central question within the anthropology of Christianity-what Christianities are we talking about? In a thorough review of how anthropologists have encountered Christianity, Fenella Cannell subtly (and powerfully) observes: "it is not impossible to speak meaningfully about Christianity, but it is important to be as specific as possible about what kind of Christianity one means" (Cannell 2006: 7, emphasis in original). The significant theoretical lesson here is that Christianity, wherever practiced, is always subject to processes of fracture, change, syncretism, dialogism, and mobility. The result is a global Christian culture that is extremely diverse, and in which innumerable ways are developed to satisfy some central tensions of the faith-say, for example, body/spirit, immanence/transcendence, materiality/immateriality, visibility/invisibility, presence/absence, this/other worldly, or institution/ charisma (Kirsch 2008). Biblicism appears especially helpful in this scenario, given that how scripture is imagined and used so often becomes both a distinguishing feature of local Christian life and the justification for division, separation, and exclusion. An in-depth, ethnographic view of the social life of scripture provides a way to understand, following Cannell, what kind of Christianity we mean. Thus, in this volume we encounter not just a variety of Bible beliefs and practices but also a variety of Christianities through their interaction with scripture.

While Biblicism is coupled tightly to these questions, it is the category of "scripture" that grounds this volume's emphasis on how Christian communities afford the Bible a position of veneration. In turn, the questions and problems that give shape to Biblicism are not restricted to Christianity (or anthropologists, for that matter), but are important for other social formations that count certain texts as central to their sense of being. Scholars of comparative religion, most famously Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1993), have called attention to the fact that scriptures rely on communities of practice to recognize them as such. For a text to be scriptural it must be endowed, and continue to be endowed, with the appropriate significance by a defined group of interlocutors. But, as Brian Malley (2004 and this volume) has argued, this line of inquiry has failed to follow up by empirically demonstrating how these processes of ratification unfold. An emphasis on the social life of scripture takes this charge seriously, posing questions about how actual people, in actual social encounters, amid actual institutional conditions interact with their sacred texts.

Places to Start

The real significance of this volume does not accrue from finding a voice where anthropologists of Christianity (alongside historians and sociologists) have been silent about the social life of the Bible. Indeed, scholars of various stripes have produced a number of influential works that deal centrally or peripherally with questions vital to the project of Biblicism. Despite this rather substantial historical and ethnographic record, however, there remains no sustained attempt to develop a systematic framework for how Christians interact with their scriptures. This does not mean that the existing work is a cacophony of scattered suggestions. At least four themes are evident in this previous work, all of which help set the terms for the analyses of Biblicism contained in these twelve essays.

Biblical Ideologies. A fundamental task is to explore the presuppositions that Christians nurture about the nature, organization, content, and purpose of the Bible as a text. This domain of convictions is hardly a matter of individual idiosyncrasy. They are very much culturally ordered-collectively held, historically grounded products that help structure the ways that Christians interact with the words, passages, chapters, narratives, books, genres, pages, and covers of Bibles. The dominant textual ideology that surrounds scripture in the European Reformation-infused tradition is the notion of absolute authority, legitimated by divine authorship (Bielo, this volume; Malley 2004). However, even among Christians of similar theological stripes, similar ideologies can inform divergent hermeneutic procedures. As Bartkowski (1996) demonstrated among North American evangelicals, the same commitment to authority can result in interpretive conducts as different as sin-punishment and love-forgiveness. And, because these ideas emerge from particular social and theological histories, we can expect potentially dramatic shifts across cultural contexts. Matthew Engelke (2007) clearly demonstrates this in his ethnography of Zimbabwean Apostolics. These Pentecostals revoke authority from the written text and invest it in the oral performance of scripture; they are, in fact, "the Christians who do not read the Bible" (cf. Pulis, this volume). Thus, a developed framework of Biblicism might ask: what are the dominant and marginalized ideologies assigned to the Bible in Christian communities? What are their historical, institutional, and theological roots? How do they act as a structuring mechanism for various forms of Bible use? What institutions encourage Christians to reproduce, reflect on, and contest these ideologies?

Biblical Hermeneutics. The most remarked-upon issue of Biblicism to date is the variety of strategies Christians harness when interpreting biblical texts. This scholarly focus undoubtedly stems from the Protestant inclination to imagine the Bible as a book that should be continually read, discussed, and expounded on. While this has the certain potential to mislead scholars interested in Christianity outside this stream of the faith, it remains an important domain of study. Scholars have explained interpretive styles as integral to national, regional, and ethnic identities (e.g., Hatch and Noll, eds. 1982;Muse 2005 and this volume;Wimbush, ed. 2000). Others have observed how Christians create well-defined interpretive communities for engaging their scripture (e.g., Bielo 2008a,b;Malley 2004;Schieffelin 2007), and what happens in the wake of a strict adherence to limited interpretive imaginations (e.g., Ammerman 1987;Crapanzano 2000;Kellar 2005). Thus, a developed framework of Biblicism might ask: what role, if any, does Bible reading and interpretation play in Christian communities? How are hermeneutic strategies grounded in biblical ideologies? What strategies are dominant and marginalized? Do struggles over Bible interpretation index more widespread conflicts in society and history? How do interpretive styles intersect with everyday and ritual practice? What institutions encourage Christians to reproduce, reflect on, and contest these interpretive postures?

Biblical Rhetorics. Biblical texts, narratives, characters, idioms, and images are deployed in both intersubjective and virtual contexts of identity performance. Individuals and collectivities appropriate the Bible as a resource-often because of its intense cultural capital-to support and persuade, impose and resist (see Baron, this volume; Murphy, this volume). It is in this aspect of Biblicism that social actors seem to exercise the most agency (textually, interpretively, and in practice) with the Christian scriptures. Among the most widely cited cases here is Susan Harding's work among North American fundamentalists (2000). Author and preacher Jerry Falwell used biblical tropes and storylines to offer his audiences a moral vision of himself and their communal experience. Other important observations of biblical rhetorics have been made regarding notions of charismatic subjectivity (Coleman 2000), dominant and resistant ethnic identities (Muse 2005), and material prosperity (Bielo 2007). Thus, a developed framework of Biblicism might ask: what biblical texts and narratives are prevalent and absent within Christian communities? Are the choices of biblical texts and narratives an index of schisms and struggles within Christian culture, and their broader local-regional-national contexts? What types of discourses-moral, emotional, theological, political, environmental, and so forth-are biblical rhetorics employed in? Is the Bible an organizing text for these discourses, or a supplementary one? What institutions encourage Christians to reproduce, reflect on, and contest these rhetorical practices?

The Bible as Artifact. The Bible is not only a textual object of discourse and interpretation; it is also a material object of use and signification (Malley, this volume). Bibles are incorporated into everyday activities and ritual events, and displayed in homes and public settings. The very presence of a Bible can provide a register for subjectivity, authority, and legitimacy. Colleen McDannell (1995) argues that this is part of a broader attempt to enact religious faith through material culture. In cases of missionization and conversion to Christianity, the Bible often enters into a relationship with existing spiritual-religious practices associated with tradition, indigeneity, and the like. Danilyn Rutherford (2006) and Webb Keane (2007) both observe such interactions and describe how the Bible does not completely replace traditional forms but comes to cohabitate with other materialities, dividing up the labor of signification. The artifactual properties of the Bible are further complicated by the practice of creating scenes that recontextualize scripture. Grey Gundaker (2000) provides a rich documentation of this in her account of yard displays in the southern United States, where biblical texts become instantiated as uniquely created forms of representation. Thus, a more developed framework of Biblicism might ask: where do we find Bibles physically present and absent in different Christian communities? How are Bibles situated in these places, and how do they work to signify? How do Christians recreate biblical texts in other material forms, and what are the semiotic connections between the two? How do the Bible's material significations coexist with its position as an interpretive and discursive text? What institutions encourage Christians to reproduce, reflect on, and contest these functions of materiality?

These four themes capture the kinds of questions scholars interested in the social life of the Bible have asked up to this point. They should not, however, be taken as exhaustive. An analytical framework of Biblicism should seek to develop more systematic ways of thinking about these domains, while also pursuing other types of relationships that Christians enter into with the Bible. Indeed, the collaborative project of Biblicism also needs to attend to the ways in which particular ideologies, hermeneutics, rhetorics, and material uses appear before us as well-defined cultural products. Several of our contributors do just this-paying explicit attention to the theological, political, historical, and otherwise social processes that underwrite and legitimate the social life of scripture (namely, the essays by Bialecki, Harding, Hoenes, Muse, and Samson). At this stage in its life, Biblicism is an open-ended inquiry; a reality that these twelve essays remain attentive to.