Introduction: Encountering Biblicism

INTRO.qxd 5/12/09 10:46 AM Page 1 Introduction e n co u n t e r i n g b i b l i c i s m ja m e s s. b i e lo Northrup Frye, the eminent literary critic, once described the Bible as: a mosaic: a pattern of commandments, aphorisms, epigrams, proverbs, parables, riddles, pericopes, parallel couplets, formulaic phrases, folktales, oracles, epiphanies, Gattungen, Logia, bits of occasional verse, marginal glosses, legends, snippets from historical documents, laws, letters, sermons, hymns, ecstatic visions, rituals, fables, genealogical lists, and so on almost indefinitely. (: ) Frye’s description inspires because it begins to capture the complexity of the Christian scriptures. To borrow some language from Bahktin (): a more heteroglossic, polyphonic, or dialogical work is hard to imagine. When we consider the Bible’s global presence, we can add to Frye’s inventory translation difficulties, language change, manuscript transmission, literacy acquisition, and the sociohistorical dissonance between biblical writers and contemporary interlocutors. In fact, one could argue, the task of interacting with the Bible is quite overwhelming. Is it the height of futility (or maybe daring), reserved for those in love with the impossible? Perhaps. Yet, in the face of this (im)possibility, millions of people throughout the world read, interpret, apply, use, and otherwise engage with the Bible everyday. Men and women with and without formal training in biblical languages, hermeneutics, theology, and history approach the Bible with confidence, awe, bemusement, and suspicion. They find meaning, comfort, inspiration, council, strength, and conviction. They are surprised and encouraged, puzzled and troubled. All this begs an important question. How? How do people—as conflicted and complex individuals, as inheritors of institutional and cultural resources, as practitioners of distinct expressions of Christianity—interact with the Bible? In response to this question, this volume brings together twelve essays organized around the project of Biblicism. In this brief introductory chapter I hope to aid your reading of what follows by setting forth some priorities, goals, and questions that orient this collective endeavor. 1 INTRO.qxd 5/12/09 2 10:46 AM Page 2 ja m e s s. b i e lo 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 ). 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. INTRO.qxd 5/12/09 10:46 AM Page 3 Introduction 3 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 ; Engelke and Tomlinson, eds. ; Robbins ). 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 : ). 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 (a, , ) 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 ), clashes with modernity (Robbins ), tensions of identity formation (Coleman a; Shoaps ), and even the rejection of language ideologies entailed in this Calvinistic posture (Bielo n.d.). This abundance of attention paid to Christian semiotics is good news for the project of Biblicism. The comparative study of how the Christian scriptures INTRO.qxd 5/12/09 4 10:46 AM Page 4 ja m e s s. b i e lo 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 : , 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 ). 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 (), 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 ( 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 INTRO.qxd 5/12/09 10:46 AM Page 5 Introduction 5 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 ). However, even among Christians of similar theological stripes, similar ideologies can inform divergent hermeneutic procedures. As Bartkowski () 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 () 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 INTRO.qxd 5/12/09 6 10:46 AM Page 6 ja m e s s. b i e lo 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. ; Muse  and this volume; Wimbush, ed. ). Others have observed how Christians create well-defined interpretive communities for engaging their scripture (e.g., Bielo a,b; Malley ; Schieffelin ), and what happens in the wake of a strict adherence to limited interpretive imaginations (e.g., Ammerman ; Crapanzano ; Kellar ). 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 (). 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 ), dominant and resistant ethnic identities (Muse ), and material prosperity (Bielo ). 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 () INTRO.qxd 5/12/09 10:46 AM Page 7 Introduction 7 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 () and Webb Keane () 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 () 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. Reading The Social Life of Scriptures Liam Murphy opens our dialogue with his ongoing historical and ethnographic work in Northern Ireland. Murphy introduces us to two very different traditions of Protestantism, the Orange Order and mainline charismatics, and their divergent modes of employing biblical texts. Ultimately, Murphy forces us to consider the important question of what role the Bible plays in organizing logics of Christian subjectivity. The themes of cultural history and identity that Murphy explores in Europe are picked up by John Pulis’s uniquely crafted portrait of Rastafarians in Jamaica. Much like Murphy, Pulis foregrounds the central role afforded to the Bible by Christian actors when they are building narratives of INTRO.qxd 5/12/09 8 10:46 AM Page 8 ja m e s s. b i e lo selves, pasts, presents, and futures. Using an extended interaction with a locally respected Rastafarian exegete, Pulis illustrates the tight coupling between religious worldview and conceptions and practices of Bible reading. Chapters , , and  consider matters of Biblicism among three different groups of ethnic Mayans in Central America. Akesha Baron takes us to Chiapas, Mexico, where evangelicalism is actively changing the shape and tenor of local communities. She too emphasizes the importance of biblical texts in crafting identities. Unlike Murphy and Pulis, though, Baron focuses on gendered (primarily, masculine) identities and their changing contours among Tzotzil Mayans amidst the surrounding evangelical current. C. Matthews Samson shifts our attention to the Mam Maya of Guatemala, and their lengthy relationship with evangelicalism and Bible translation. Samson offers us a richly historicized account of Mam Biblicism alongside other Mayan groups of the region, and an intimate account of translation practices in the broader context of Latin America. Eric Hoenes del Pinal, also working in Guatemala, presents a highly nuanced analysis of the relationship between Biblicism and language ideologies among Q’eqchi’ Mayan Catholics. Hoenes insightfully takes up the question of how institutional processes work to authorize individuals’ relationships to the Bible. He explores this issue in a community parish that is split between mainstream and charismatic Catholics, and thereby identifies discrete models of legitimation, institutional order, and linguistic ideology. In chapter , Rosamond Rodman provides a transnational account of the ongoing struggles facing the global Anglican community. Traversing the happenings in Nigeria, Britain, and the United States, Rodman demonstrates clearly the theological and political tensions that impinge on models of Biblicism. The final four empirical chapters remain in the United States, offering portraits of Biblicism in several different Protestant expressions. Erika Muse draws from her extensive ethnographic work among Chinese American evangelicals in Boston. She takes up issues of ethnic identity, postcolonial hermeneutics, and gender ideologies in an effort to show the patterned and contested nature of Biblicism within Chinese Christian America. Shifting our geographic and theological attention, Jon Bialecki returns us to the world of charismatic Christianity in his ethnography of the Vineyard Fellowship. Bialecki creatively and convincingly highlights relationships of support and divergence that arise between biblical ideologies and beliefs surrounding charismatic gifts. He uses a framework of Biblicism to draw out the fundamental question of how imaginings of Godly presence and absence are organized. In my own chapter I focus on the practice of small-group Bible study, and its vital role in fostering models of Biblicism. I use a case study of a Lutheran men’s group to demonstrate how textual ideologies of scripture intersect with distinct forms of textual practice through acts of collective reading. Susan Harding concludes our empirical chapters, continuing the examination of born-again Biblicism she began in The Book of Jerry Falwell (). INTRO.qxd 5/12/09 10:46 AM Page 9 Introduction 9 She is among the first scholars to address the emergent genre of the “Biblezine” among American evangelicals—the textual properties and rituals of reception that surround this glossy iteration of the Logos. The final two chapters provide complementary reflections on these ten empirical essays. Brian Malley incorporates his extensive work among North American evangelicals to distinguish an anthropological analysis of Biblicism from alternative approaches, such as those found in theology, religious studies, and reception theory. Malley also explores the category of “God’s Word”—its potential boundaries and its function as a socially authoritative discourse. Simon Coleman, drawing from his substantial ethnographic work with charismatic Christianity and Christian pilgrimage, argues for the significance of Biblicism within the study of Christianity, as well as religion more broadly. In particular, he points to implications for the construction of meaning, religious action, and scriptural language. Both authors illuminate the theoretical and topical themes that unite these essays, the analytic tensions they reveal, and the questions they raise for other scholars to take up who are interested in the social life of the Bible. In pursuing the subject of Biblicism, these essays constitute a rich comparative field, and the contributors offer a series of disciplinary perspectives. Most are anthropologists, but many have received formal training in other disciplines, including linguistics (Baron), law (Bialecki), comparative religion (Malley), history (Pulis), theology (Rodman and Samson), and religious studies (Rodman). The type of “radical excavation”—critical, multidimensional analysis—called for by Vincent Wimbush in Theorizing Scriptures ()—the first volume to appear in the Signifying (On) Scriptures series—is answered in this collection. Wimbush makes clear that the goal of this book series is to reimagine the category of scripture by “excavating the work . . . that we make ‘scriptures’ do for us” (: ). The authors in this volume take up this concern with vigor, bringing a suite of theoretical tools to bear on a range of empirical questions. Through the course of these essays the reader will encounter analyses that employ frameworks from discourse analysis, cognitive anthropology, linguistic and semiotic ideology, cultural hermeneutics, personhood, and social praxis. These modes of investigation are directed toward topics such as everyday moral narratives, denominational struggles, sermonizing, prayer, Bible translation, and group study. Readers of this volume will encounter an array of social actors, social contexts, and interactions with the Bible. Throughout the balance of continuity and diversity in these essays, I trust that you will find an enduring social fact: there is no understanding of Christian culture to be had without an understanding of how the Bible is put to work, and the various contexts that frame that work. In the best of outcomes, these essays will spur the reader to extend the project of Biblicism to other cultural domains, and to view this phenomenon alongside other cases of signifying on scriptures.