The Bible: A People of the Book (Episode 10)

For many evangelicals, no object is more central to faith and practice than the Bible—preached, memorized, carried, gifted, and treated as the ultimate authority. But how did it come to occupy that place, and what happens when readers of the same text reach opposite conclusions?

In this episode, historians John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra trace the Bible across American evangelical history: from the founding of the American Bible Society in 1816 and its mission to put a Bible in every hand, through common-sense interpretation, study Bibles, and an enormous publishing and translation industry, to the political uses of Scripture, the slavery debates, and the 20th-century battles over biblical inerrancy.

IN THIS EPISODE

• “The Bible is doing its work.” Two American Bible Society Record stories—a young Catholic convert named Mary and a college skeptic—frame the belief that Scripture, “without note or comment,” could convert readers on its own.
• Sola scriptura and a people of the book. Why a commitment to Scripture as supreme (or sole) authority made evangelicals Protestants—and shaped a distinctly anti-Catholic, anti-traditional posture.
• Common-sense reading and its tools. Concordances, cross-references, and the perspicuity of Scripture: “helps” that let lay readers interpret for themselves—while multiplying interpretations.
• Helps to study the Bible. Scofield (1909), Ryrie, MacArthur, and the commercial engine of Bible publishing—plus journaling Bibles, translations, and digital tools like Logos and YouVersion.
• Reverence for the object itself. The family altar, soldiers’ pocket Testaments, and the Museum of the Bible—the Bible as sacred artifact, not just text.
• Scripture, slavery, and politics. How the Bible was marshaled on both sides of slavery, woven into civil religion and nationalism, and invoked in times of war.
• The battle for the Bible. Higher criticism, neo-orthodoxy, Fuller Seminary, Harold Lindsell, the ICBI, and the inerrancy debates that reshaped evangelical identity—and the Southern Baptist Convention.

BOOKS MENTIONED

• The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society, by John Fea (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911, by Mark Noll (Oxford University Press, 2022)
• The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, by Mark Noll (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
• The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell (Zondervan, 1976)
• Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism, by George Marsden (Eerdmans, 1987)
• Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America, by Daniel Vaca (Harvard University Press, 2019)

PEOPLE MENTIONED

• Cyrus Scofield — author of the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford), a landmark dispensationalist study Bible.
• Mark Noll — leading historian of American religion, cited on the Bible, slavery, and the Civil War.
• Harold Lindsell — editor of Christianity Today; his Battle for the Bible made inerrancy a litmus test.
• Carl F. H. Henry — founding editor of Christianity Today; author of the five-volume God, Revelation and Authority.
• Kenneth Kantzer — shaped Trinity Evangelical Divinity School as a counterweight to Fuller in the inerrancy debates.
• John Woodbridge — historian who critiqued the Rogers–McKim thesis on biblical authority.
• Donald Dayton — historian who challenged Lindsell’s framing of inerrancy.
• Eugene Peterson — translator of The Message, a single-author paraphrase of the Bible.
• Daniel Vaca — historian who argues evangelicalism is, in part, a commercial religion.
• Elias Boudinot, Francis Scott Key, John Jay — politically influential founders/supporters of the American Bible Society.
•  Robert Lewis Dabney & James Henley Thornwell — Southern theologians who built biblical defenses of slavery.

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Hosts:

JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University

MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College

DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation. 

Find out more about our work:

• slbf.org/lumen-center
• slbf.org/studio

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour 

Transcript

Cold Open: "The Bible Doing Its Work"

SPEAKER_04 0:11

In 1829, an American Bible Society agent working in the Western United States met a young female Irish immigrant, let's call her Mary, who he claimed was, quote, rigidly educated in the Roman Catholic faith, unquote. Before arriving in America, Mary had planned to spend her life in an Irish convent, but when her father decided to emigrate, he brought her with him. Upon arrival, Mary continued to practice Catholicism under the watchful eye of her father, who the American Bible Society agent described as, quote, a very wicked man, but bigotedly attached to the forms and ceremonies of his church, unquote. Mary was trained to believe that there was, quote, salvation in no other. Mary's spiritual life took a drastic turn when a young neighbor boy who was playing in her house dropped an American Bible Society New Testament portion he had brought with him. Mary picked up the Testament and began to read, concealing the book from her father, who had taught her that it was a sin to read the scriptures without notes and commentary composed by the theologians and biblical scholars of the Catholic Church. During her reading, Mary became convinced that Catholicism, quote, would not answer in the last great day, unquote. She came to grips with the sinful state of her soul and became anxious about her salvation, all the while keeping her spiritual searching away from her father for fear of punishment. Without a teacher to explain what she was reading, Mary pressed on, guided only by the words of the small New Testament portion. As the anxiety-induced tears rolled down her face, she eventually came to grips, according to the story as told by the American Bible Society agent, with, quote, the pardoning love of God through a crucified Savior, unquote, and found that the pages of the Bible, those, quote, leaves from the tree of life, unquote, had healed her wounded spirit. An evangelical revival had commenced in Mary's town, another manifestation of the revivals known collectively as the Second Great Awakening, and she decided, unbeknownst to her family, to attend several of the meetings. As Mary watched, new converts paraded in front of the church to make public professions of faith, and she, quote, felt an ardent desire, unquote, to do the same. As the American Bible Society agent talked to Mary, he was surprised at just how much she knew about the Protestant way of salvation, despite the fact that she had no one to instruct her and no books to read beyond the testament that, quote, had fallen into her hands, unquote, and quote, the teachings of that spirit which had indicted the word, unquote. Eventually Mary did convert and joined the local Protestant church. The American Bible Society provided her with a full Bible, Old and New Testaments, to replace the portion she had been reading. She received it with, quote, tears of gratitude, unquote. Mary hid her newfound faith and her new Bible from her father and prayed that someday he too might come to saving faith in Christ. The American Bible Society, the most prominent evangelical benevolent society in antebellum, America, taught that the Bible had the spiritual power to send people like Mary on an entirely new life trajectory. It was no mere coincidence that Mary stumbled across this Bible on the floor of her house. It was, the agent believed, a providential act of God. Those working on behalf of the American Bible Society, they called their mission, quote, the Bible cause, unquote, were appointed to deliver the Word of God wherever it was needed. But they also believed that the Bible was a supernatural book that could lead people to salvation without the aid of a preacher or teacher. Mary's story was published in the monthly American Bible Society magazine to show that the Bible, without any commentary or notes, could bring people into the kingdom of God. It could also defeat a growing Catholic menace on the frontier and advance the cause of evangelical Protestantism in America. Though American Bible Society agents often took opportunities to preach and teach when they presented themselves, most of the time they merely dropped off a copy of a Bible at a house, on a train, on a ship, or to someone they met on the road and let the spirit do the rest. The organization was fond of using the phrase, quote, the Bible doing its work, unquote, to describe its effects on sinners and potential converts like Mary. In another case, the American Bible Society magazine published the story of a Christian father sending his son off to college. The father worried that the young scholar would lose his faith during the experience, so he purchased a quote, elegant copy, unquote, of the Bible, and without his son's knowledge, placed it at the bottom of his school trunk. Shortly after the son's arrival at college, the father's worst fears were realized. Quote, the restraints of a pious education were soon broken off, and the young man proceeded from speculation to doubts, and from doubts to denial of the reality of religion, unquote. One day, while quote, rummaging through his trunk, unquote, he found the sacred deposit his father had placed there. In a spirit of indignation, the young man decided he would use the pages of the Bible to clean his razor after his daily shave. Each day he used the blade to tear a leaf or two out of the quote-unquote holy book until half the volume was destroyed. But one morning, as he was, quote unquote, committing this outrage to the text, at least as the American Bible Society magazine story described it, several verses met the young man's eye and struck him, quote, like a barbed arrow to his heart, unquote. These verses, the American Bible Society article noted, were like a sermon to him, quote, awakening him to the wrath of God and leading him to the foot of the cross. College had made this young man a skeptic, but the Bible brought him back to faith. There was no need to provide rational answers to counter the young man's skepticism. The quote-unquote sacred volume had done its work.

Introduction: A People of the Book

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Welcome to American Evangelicals, a history podcast, where we explore the history, ideas, and movements that have shaped evangelical Christianity in America. For many evangelicals, no object is more central to faith and practice than the Bible. It's preached from, studied, memorized, carried, gifted, and often treated as the ultimate authority for understanding God and the world. But how did the Bible come to occupy such a prominent place in evangelical life? And what happens when different people read the same text and come to very different conclusions? In this episode, our historians take us from the founding of the American Bible Society in the early 19th century to some of the most significant debates in evangelical history. Along the way, they explore Bible distribution, common sense biblical interpretation, study Bibles, Bible publishing, slavery, politics, and the 20th century battles over biblical inerrancy. Let's join the conversation with historians Maggie Capra, Dan Hummel, and John Fia.

The American Bible Society & the Bible Cause

SPEAKER_02 8:42

So, John, tell us about why you picked this story. And we know the story is from uh a book you wrote, so it gives a sense of where the story comes from as well.

SPEAKER_04 8:50

Yeah, sure. I mean, this is this is a story from a magazine that the American Bible Society put out in the 19th century called the ABS or the American Bible Society Record was the name. It was a monthly magazine for, you know, I think for people who gave money to the American Bible Society. It was an early periodical. For those unfamiliar with the American Bible Society, I mentioned this briefly in the story, but the American Bible Society was founded in 1815 as one of the first major kind of benevolent societies, right? These voluntary societies, you know, you separate church and state, and you have, you know, these non-state sponsored uh, you know, today we might call them like parachurch organizations, but the the American Bible Society was the first. So others would be like the American Temperance uh Society or the American Tract Society and so forth. But this was a huge organization in an attempt. At one point, they actually wanted to give a Bible to every American citizen in one year. They failed. But in my book, The Bible Cause, I actually have a whole chapter on this initiative to try to get a Bible into the hands of every single person. The record is filled with these kinds of stories. And I think you have to look at these stories critically as historians. I mean, they obviously were publishing these stories. I don't know if they were embellished or not to like make it more dramatic. I'm sure they were. Um, you know, any good historian is going to read these documents in a kind of critical way, not critical of like the power of the Bible to change lives. I mean, more critical, like, you know, what are they actually doing with this story? Why are why are they putting this story in the magazine? Hundreds and hundreds of these stories, only a few of them actually made it into my book, The Bible Cause, The History of the American Bible Society. But these were two I thought that were really interesting. And since I'm always trying to pull us back further into the early 19th century, pre-Civil War era, I thought that I would start with these stories. I think the story sh really sheds light on several things, which I think we'll probably discuss here in the next coming minutes. One, of course, evangelicals are Protestants in the sense that they are one people of the book. Their primary way of thinking about God's revelation, God's moving in the world is through the scriptures, as opposed to, say, the scriptures and church tradition or the scriptures and the sacraments, right? There's this kind of very anti-sacramental dimension, and this plays into their commitment to the Bible. This makes evangelicals Protestants. The other thing that makes them Protestants and people of the book is that they're not Catholics. So I deliberately chose this story because it was about a woman converting from Catholicism, and 19th century evangelicals would have seen the Bible and the reading of the Bible, which they believe that Catholics did not do. They thought Catholics, we don't, they don't read the Bible, they just listen to their priests or they take the sacraments. They're not a biblical people. Again, this is how evangelicals would have understood Catholics at the time. So I think the fact that this woman, Mary, in the story, converts from Catholicism suggests not only a kind of born-again experience that we talked about in episode one of this podcast series, but I think it also reflects the fact that Catholicism were not people of the book, at least in the minds of 19th-century evangelicals. They didn't follow the Bible, they followed the Pope. And this would have been a sort of important reflection of kind of the anti-Catholicism that is inherent within evangelicalism, you know, not necessarily as much recently, but certainly in the 19th century. And then as I've already mentioned, I think, you know, I thought this was a nice story because it was the Bible without any notes, without any comments, without anyone to explain what the Bible meant. Many evangelicals believed, at least in the 19th century, that the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, could use the Bible to convict people's hearts without anyone even having it explained to them. So in some ways, there is this, the Bible becomes a kind of spirit-infused kind of, I don't know, talisman or the book itself, right? If you can just put the book in somebody's hands or just tuck it into the trunk of their chest or whatever, when they go to college, the Bible will do its work. It's the word of God, the Holy Spirit will illuminate it and it will do its work. That is all over the way in which the 19th century evangelicals thought about the Bible, especially those in the American Bible Society, which was largely an evangelical organization until the fundamentalist modernist controversy for the most part. So I thought it hit not only gave an example of the Bible and the way evangelicals understood the Bible as a tool of conversion, as an anti-Catholic way of thinking about Catholicism, but I think it also reflects the Protestant nature of evangelicalism.

Sola Scriptura, Common Sense & the Tools of Reading

SPEAKER_02 14:07

One of them is more philosophical, one of them is more about like Protestantism and the idea of the Bible and that, you know, the sola scriptura um type thing. So I'm not sure which one of those we want to tackle first, but maybe there's since I said sola scriptura right there, you know, one of the things that would separate the evangelicals of the American Bible Society from Catholics and even some Protestants, is this the centrality of the sola scriptura idea, which is comes out of the Reformation, this idea that the Bible is the only infallible authority on which to base your faith. There's different variations of that, and I think one confusion that can come about when we talk about sola scriptura is, at least in its the way that the people, the reformers, the reformation leaders talked about it, it didn't mean the Bible was the only authority. It wasn't solo scriptura or something like that, where you you didn't ever take account of history or tradition or anything like that, but it was the supreme authority, particularly in in more Presbyterian or Anglican uh traditions. That would be how you thought about it. But when we talk about American evangelicals, we're talking about a lot of evangelicals who really did see the Bible. Some of them really explicitly talked about it, that it really was the only authority that they were going to follow. And sometimes historians talk about sort of movements of primitivism or this idea that really the best model for a church and Christian community wasn't the New Testament. As close as you could model yourself to the book of Acts, to the early church, that was you getting closer and closer to the core of what it meant to be a Christian. Um I think that's something we come across a lot, but but a lot of that impetus comes from this Protestant ideal of solo scriptura and this idea that in some sense it doesn't really matter about it doesn't matter what happened in church history. It doesn't matter that there's this built-up tradition of interpretation or of thinking about religious law or whatever. It matters about your encounter with the Bible, maybe in community, maybe by yourself, and how you understand what the Bible is going to be saying. And that that really becomes the focal point of a lot of evangelical identity.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

So, real quick, Dan, you said infallible. Can you give a quick definition of that? Because I know that's going to be one that gets a little tricky when we get to the inerrancy debates.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

Right. So, yeah, that yeah, there's a few different ways Christians use that term. And yeah, it gets really technical in the 20th century when we talk about biblical inerrancy as a concept. When I said it was solo scriptura, this would be in a less technical sense than that around the words of the Bible, but saying that for Protestants, the Bible is the only authority you can appeal to that is entirely trustworthy, that has not erred in how it's guided people. And so it is above church authority. I mean, that that's the fundamental stakes in in the Reformation, is is you you can appeal to the Bible over against your church leaders. And so in that sense, it's infallible in relation to the church, which is seen as fallible and you know has has uh had failures. But yes, when we get to the 20th century, there's other ways infallibles invoked around the Bible.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

I think one of the really important things to keep in mind here is we're talking about the church and the relationship between Protestantism, as we are talking about the church like writ large, right? Um, and specifically for the Protestants, they're thinking about Catholic church tradition, right? And that's one of the criticisms that often can get levied against evangelicals even today. Theologians will talk about the fact that evangelicals don't like to take into consideration church tradition as a component of biblical interpretation, right? And so that's going to be one of those points of contrast between evangelicals and others when you're looking from a more theological lens.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

I think the Protestant turned Catholic, John Henry Newman from the 19th century, has sort of a famous quote that you know he he became Catholic and he said, you know, to be deep in the history of the church is cease to be Protestant or something. So this is a this is a common sentiment among non-evangelicals that, and non-Protestants, I guess, that one of these you know, sort of peculiar things about evangelicals is they tend not to care about what happened between 60 years, or whenever they think, you know, the year 90, whenever the Book of Revelation was written, until either the Reformation or until whatever they're living, right? And that that sort of what happened in between doesn't really matter that much. So yeah, i think of the broader Christian world, that's a sort of unique way that evangelicals act.

SPEAKER_04 18:38

This is goes back to this kind of no-no tour comment idea in the 19th century at least, because there were actually riots in cities. The Philadelphia, I'm thinking of the Philadelphia nativist riots of 1844, which was really over what kind of Bible kids would read in school. And the Catholics, they wanted, they did not want their Catholic students in Philadelphia schools to be reading the King James Bible because it was just the King James Bible without any notes or any comment, while their Catholic Bibles had all of this Catholic doctrine, Catholic history, notes, commentaries, and so forth. They wanted to use the Bible to help them understand Catholic faith. And this this actually turned into a physical fight, a physical riot in the streets of Philadelphia over which Bible is going to be used. The one, the King James Version with no notes or comments, you know, again, this hey, let the Holy Spirit guide students or the one with with commentary, which I think does create a very interesting situation for the 20th century when evangelicals are all about notes and commentary, right? That's a good illustration of what you're saying, Megan.

SPEAKER_02 19:54

So that's an interesting entryway, I think, into the another philosophical, if if we talked about the Reformation, a philosophical tradition, which is this common sense realism, as it's called. So coming out of the Enlightenment, particularly the Scottish version of the Enlightenment.

SPEAKER_04 20:08

Which has come up many times in our conversation. Yeah. You have to come back to this a lot.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

Right. And and the basics that we need to know now are people who are in that tradition think that every human is endowed with a common sense of being able to basically make sense of the world through their five senses. And you don't need to appeal to authority or to some other entity to really understand the world. And as it's applied for evangelicals, that's applied to the Bible, it's that you shouldn't need a biblical scholar or a commentary to understand the Bible. This is another Protestant idea of the perspicuity of scripture, that that scripture is not opaque, or at least you can glean the most important things as long as you can read it. And so this is something that's interesting because over the 19th century, evangelicals in both Europe and North America develop a lot of tools to help them read the Bible, but they're they don't see it as commentary. It's more like technologies or techniques to be able to make sense of the Bible. So two of the big ones in the 19th century are we get the first concordance that indexes every topic in the Bible. Imagine if you didn't have a concordance or an index or any other way, if you wanted to do a word study of the word Israel in the Bible, you would have to physically sort of you know read every page and make notes yourself. And it's it's so daunting that only a scholar uh you know could ever do something like that. The other technology that's a little older is the cross-referencing. So most Bibles, even today, if you say there's no notes, often they still have cross references, which is connecting a certain concept in one part of the Bible to a reference to it in you know a psalm or an or another part of the Bible. These are things that are seen as sort of things only scholars could really partake in until the nineteenth century, until these become things that many Lay Christians just have along with their Bible to help them read it, but it's still premised on this idea that I can do this myself. Yes, I might need some helps like this, but these helps aren't telling me what the Bible means. They're helping me understand what the Bible means. These become so common that I there's later descriptions of people who are like what were called Moody men. And these were people who were sort of evangelists or workers for Moody, uh Dwight Moody. And they would often be described as having a Bible in one hand and Baxter's polyglot Bible in the other hand, because this was sort of the popular cross-referencing Bible at the time. So this is all premised on this idea that I can do this myself. Um, I don't need my priest or my pastor or a scholar to tell me what the Bible means. But then of course it produces a lot of different interpretations because people use those cross-references and concordances to come up with all types of interesting word studies and theologies and all that type of stuff.

SPEAKER_04 22:53

Which is, you know, back to Protestantism, right? You put the Bible into people's hands, they're gonna come up with different interpretations, right? You take it, translate it into the vernacular. I remember being a first-year student freshman in Bible college in Philadelphia and buying in the school bookstore my first concordance. It was Strong's concordance. And I just thought I've I've become I'm now a Bible scholar. I am you know I have this huge book now that I can use to understand uh you know the scriptures. It was this is like a huge moment in my life that I now had a concordance. But then, Dan, so how do you explain? You know this more than anything else. You studied the Schofield Bible, and uh now today it's like you can't even, it's really hard to find a Bible without note or comment. And I don't mean just cross-referencing and a concordance in the back. You know, I came up on the Ryrie Study Bible, right? Where there was dispensationalists who taught a Dallas seminary basically included sort of dispensationalist notes in the Bible. Everyone now has their own Bible with their own commentaries. And what happened there? How did we move from, well, you can just read the Bible and interpret it yourself, to here are my favorite interpreters, let me buy their Bible or the John MacArthur Bible, or you know, something like that.

SPEAKER_02 24:17

Yeah. Yeah, well, one note on you buying a concordance. Um I mean, there's an interesting, so if you're at least in the evangelical world, if you're a pastor today, you probably have logos Bible software, which is created, I think this is right, created by two Dallas seminary professors back in the 80s or 70s, sort of early computer era. So there's even that impetus into the digital world for evangelicals to be at the forefront of helping technology help them read the Bible. Okay, so yeah, that it's an interesting question how

Study Bibles, Publishing & the Business of the Bible

SPEAKER_02 24:46

we get to like people-specific study Bibles. I mean, part of the the answer is that someone like Cyrus Schofield, who produces a study Bible in 1909 that's called the Schofield Bible, he claims he's not doing commentary. Yeah. He claims he's just giving helps, as he calls it, for the difficult passages. And so he he would, and and he has a whole preface that is basically him saying over and over again, I'm not doing anything novel here. And so that's one way that they think about it is we're not actually adding to the words of the Bible or anything like that. We're just helping explain it. I think that's also a sign of a more educated lay readership that is asking new questions, maybe more difficult questions based on closer readings of the text. If you think particularly of a dispensationalist approach to the Bible, there's a lot of, you know, a lot of the books of the Bible are prophecy. A lot of them are somewhat hard to understand on the on the surface level. And so if if you're coming at this as a dispensationalist who really thinks that these prophecies are laying out future events, you need help understanding what are the symbols about. One thing that is interesting is Schofield was was very into typology. So the idea that someone in the early part of the Bible is a type or a f sort of a uh foreshadowing of Jesus. And later dispensationalists got rid of all that, but he also pointed out in his notes, sort of, you know, note that Joseph in Genesis is a type of Jesus. And this was seen as a, you know, that there's a level of sophistication there of reading that I think you have to assume there's like an educated readership that would appreciate that type of stuff. So I think that was another thing he was responding to in the early 20th century was a more educated evangelical world that was interested in that stuff. And then finally, I mean, maybe less inspiring, but there's also a commercial aspect to this, which was certainly at the forefront of Oxford Press's interest in the Schofield Bible. It's probably still, we we don't know because Oxford doesn't publish these things, but it's probably still Oxford University Press's best-selling book of all time. And there's a really interesting reason why Schofield landed with Oxford. It was a surprise that really elevated the prestige of his study Bible, and it sold really well. And so that sort of produced a whole cottage industry of other publishers trying to sort of get in that market. And the Ryrie Bible or the MacArthur Bible and many others are sort of downstream of that. That also is a sort of indicative of just the American publishing culture. Every year in the US, Bibles are by far the best-selling, you know, if you just group them all together, best-selling book. If you go on to the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, sort of best-selling books of all time, you actually have to go down a bit to even find a book on there that's not a translation or a study Bible. So there's just an immense amount of public interest in this. And then it seems to be an insatiable market where in a very commercial way, you're needing to come up with innovative ways to represent the Bible so you can get people who already have, you know, 10 Bibles at home to buy that 11th one. Um, that's a really cynical way of thinking about it, but I think that's it's hard to not also know that that's part of why there's so many and have so many distinctive you could say each of these people, Ryrie, MacArthur, whoever, these are sort of a brand. Like you're you're buying into that person's way of reading the Bible. And so there's always a there's niche markets for for each of those. So I think that's also part of part of the motivation.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

And beyond just that, I mean, think about the popular culture of evangelicalism, um, particularly like post-war evangelical um college ministries, how the personal devotion is so central. And that is you and you have a very personal relationship to your Bible. I'm just thinking about like the flourishing of what do they call them, journaling Bibles, ones where you color alongside as you're going. Like there's so much more like artistic connection, personal emotional connection. And that goes into all sorts of other ways that American culture has changed in um the post-war world. But I think that that kind of correlating with this flourishing of um evangelical publishing houses and all of that. Um, Daniel Vaca, I pronounced the last name, has a book called Um Evangelicals Incorporated. And he basically argues that evangelicals are a commercial religion because of the way that they incorporate business practices. But there's no doubt that the way that Bibles are published impacts devotional strategy. And devotional strategy then in turn gets the publishing houses to publish new sorts of things, right? And so cultural trends like adult coloring books then impact the fact that you have Bibles where you can color alongside as you're meditating on scripture. And so there you get that kind of ebb and flow between American popular culture and evangelical culture in Bible culture, which is interesting. I don't know that it tells us a whole lot other than just evangelicals are human and we're part of the broader society that we live in. But I've always found that really interesting.

SPEAKER_04 29:42

The American Bible Society was very good at this. They would not market Bibles like you're talking about, Dan, with like new notes or new they would market them based on kind of pop culture trends. And this is more into the 20th century than the story I told at the beginning here. It would still be without note and comment, but they would mass produce, say, the good news for modern man with the stick drawings. Like they would get tons of letters. There would be these stick drawings of Jesus, and they would get tons of letters just like we love the stick drawings, more stick drawings. You know, this was in the 70s, you know. Some of you might be familiar with these good news. I have this story in the American Bible Society book that I wrote where where this youth pastor is talking about like ordering good news for modern man, these mass paperbacks, and getting boxes, little cardboard boxes in the mail and taking them and just throwing them out to people in the youth group. And or then they would have like a hippie. Oh, yeah. It would, it wasn't, it wasn't no new note, still, still straight text, but it would have like a psychedelic cover, a tie-dye cover, or they would have the military Bible. It was all the sort of marketing just on the actual paperback cover of the Bible. We could spend a whole episode on Bible publishing and the way consumerism ties into this, pop culture, and so forth. And I think the American Bible Society started this, but I think the results of that is what we see now in the marketplace, you know, the Green Bible or the whatever it is. I've seen so many of them.

Reverence for the Book Itself

SPEAKER_01 31:19

I think one thing to highlight, though, is that there is still a pretty strong reverence towards the Bible alongside all of that, right? Like I can joke about coloring book Bibles because I do think it's kind of funny. Yet I think I have one on a shelf somewhere. So I don't want to like put myself above people like that got into my home somehow. I don't remember buying it, but I probably did. There's also, though, especially if we look at like early 20th century evangelical culture, a reverence towards the family altar. And you'll hear that and kind of as the century proceeded, there is like a sadness over the loss of the family altar. And what did they mean by that? They meant a literal altar. There was a place in the home where the family Bible sat and the family would gather around it, right? This was a very Victorian American ideal for, I think, mostly white evangelical homes. And it could be that it existed elsewhere. I just haven't read the books on it, but that there was family worship, there was family devotionals, and that it was something that was to be treated differently than other books, right? And part of that has to do with the fact that books weren't as rampant or readily as available, but it was also because there was a true belief that that book is what dictated all your actions, your practices, et cetera.

SPEAKER_04 32:37

Did you ever run into uh anyone who either of you because I have, where the the the book itself, right, the physical object is so sacred, you know. So I've run into people, evangelicals, who say, you know, don't put that book on top of don't put that non-biblical, don't put that on top of the Bible, or don't drop the Bible, I've heard. You know, almost like an American flag kind of thing. The material object becomes so sacred in and of itself as if that is the word of God that you're holding. Have you ever run across any of stuff like that?

SPEAKER_02 33:11

Well, I'll just out myself. I don't think I've ever thrown away a Bible. I think I've heard of it in like that feels until some of this is tied up in other things too, but like we have a uh my dad's side of the family has a family bible that's been passed down. It's really about the physical, but what makes it special is that it's been held by multiple generations. I think there's a lot of that that type of yeah, reverence that that goes beyond just the words of or or the message of the Bible, and it's it's actually the Bible itself.

SPEAKER_04 33:41

I think I call it in the in the Bible clause book the sort of a kind of bibliolatry, or even civil war soldiers, right, who had a pocket testament in their pocket and a bullet. The American Bible site in their archives, which is now shuttered, but actually has Bibles with bullets in it. But the the book itself becomes a kind of physical manifestation of God's protection or God's presence or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

When I was a teenager, I trained for child evangelism fellowship, you know, the group that like sends teachers into backyards to teach backyard Bible clubs. I did that, I think, every single year that I was a teenager. And we were taught that we should not put the Bible on the ground in front of the kids, that there should be something special about teaching God's word, because we're mostly going and talking to kids that have no church access, right? And so somehow showing reverence to the Bible. And I don't think it was really to the extreme of you can't do it, like God will punish you, but instead just this is one way that we can show a kind of reverence and worship in a space that isn't set up for it because we're in someone's backyard. So I think that's the most prominent place that I've experienced that type of care or the Bible in its physical form.

SPEAKER_02 34:58

There's a museum of the Bible in Washington, DC that is largely funded, or it was, I don't know where it's funded now, but was funded by evangelical business leaders like the the Green family that owns Hobby Lobby. So they have a really extensive exhibit on the history of the American Bible, and they have a few collections in there, but you get a lot of sense of this reverence for the physical Bible through that exhibit as well. So, you know, one, it's interesting that there's a museum of the Bible that's largely a evangelical project. But even within that, seeing how they have sort of stories with some of the Bibles about how significant they were to their owners, or you know, they were Bibles of famous people, and it's like really interesting to be like, oh, who did you know, this famous preacher, you know, what type of Bible did they read, and things like that. So one other thing I I want to mention on as we're talking about this is it's not just the different types of Bibles, it's also the number of translations that have been produced, many of them, though certainly not all, but many by evangelicals. Um that's been a real big project of evangelical. And it comes back to some of the things we've been talking about. For a long time, the King James Bible was the O2 Bible. I would say up until turn of the 20th century. That was that was very common. The Schofield Bible in 1909 was originally in the King James version. You had some major initiatives to try to update the King James or the um revised um version was was sort of the one promoted by Protestant dominate. But by the 60s and 70s, you have just multiple projects on the evangelical side of creating new accessible versions of the Bible. The the national the new international version is sort of most dominant one today. But most of those are undertaken with this same desire that the Bible is very accessible to contemporary readers. There's this like a high ideal tends to be, and that there's a cell there's a commercial part of this, but that that will reach the broadest um audience. And you have some that are more um, I'm forgetting the technical terms, but one some that are more sort of grammatically close to the original, and then you have others that are more paraphrasing or even sort of very loosely inspired, like the message by Eugene Peterson, which is also unique because he was a single person who translated the whole Bible. Often these versions are by committee. You know, you get a bunch of scholars and and they oversee this. This is the English Standard Version or the New International Version. So anyway, that's just another part of the story that isn't it's not uniquely evangelical. There are, of course, many other Catholics and other Protestants also create versions of the Bible, but there are a lot that are specifically for the evangelical community. There's also, you know, I'm forgetting the name of the app now. What is the app that is the main Bible app? The UVersion app was also created by evangelicals and is sort of, I think they claim to be the most popular app for reading the Bible. You can go on there and they have you know dozens, if not hundreds, of translations on there that reflect this as well. So even in that, again, to go back to the digital, like logo software, u version is also one of these things where it's clear that there's something about evangelicals that make them want to push accessibility to the Bible into any new media that they can find.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

Which brings us back to the story, right? This idea that you do have part of the mission impulse of the American Bible Society. And it's been a while since I've done anything with the antebellum period. If memory serves, the American Bible Society was a little bit more focused on first putting Bibles in Americans' hands and then maybe a little bit further in, right? In the like the 30s or so.

SPEAKER_04 38:31

They really invested they were global by this time of the Civil War. Right.

SPEAKER_01 38:35

Yeah. And there's lots of theories as to why that existed, etc., and having to do with immigration and all sorts of things. But that is also a reason that there are so many Bible translations. I mean, they were really some movers and shakers there as well.

A Gift for Listeners (Free Button 3-Pack)

SPEAKER_00 38:53

Before we get back to it, we'd like to say a quick thank you to everyone who's been listening along with us this season. We've got a little gift for you. We're offering a free three-pack of American Evangelicals buttons. No cost, no catch. Just our way of saying thank you for being part of these conversations. If you'd like a set, the link is right there in the show notes. Click through and we'll get them shipped out to you. We're able to ship anywhere in the continental United States free of charge. That's a free three-pack of buttons, shipping included. Links in the show notes. Grab a set while they last. Now back to the episode.

Scripture, Slavery & Politics

SPEAKER_04 39:31

It's interesting when we think about like more modern sort of Bible controversy. I thought about this, Dan, when you were talking about translations. I'm assuming at some point here we're going to talk about the fundamentalist modernist Bible controversy. A battle over the Bible. Oh. And then later in the 70s, you have the battle for the Bible, like inerrancy debates, and so forth. But when I think about translations, there's also a battle for the Bible in the 1950s when um mostly mainline, more liberal Protestants come out with the revised standard version, RSV, and evangelicals are very, very upset about this because of the liberties that are taken. And the most interesting verse that they debate is uh I think it's Isaiah 7.14, where it talks about Jesus being born of a virgin in the old King James, and the RSV translates that more consistently, actually, with the Hebrew to mean young woman. And then you have many evangelicals in them who are in the 1950s who have the virgin, you know, defenders of the virgin birth who take their theology and try to force that on the Hebrew word, which literally does mean young woman. It's actually a better translation of that word. I can't remember the Hebrew word off the top of my head. Again, that's not to suggest I'm not making a theological argument here about the virgin birth, but this becomes a major, major, you know, we've talked about Carl McIntyre a few times. He devotes years of the Christian beacon to challenging the heretical revised standard version. So that one's often overlooked because we tend to look at the fundamentalist modernist controversy, and then we we fast forward to the uh battle for the Bible and those kinds of things. But I it just hit me again when you were talking about these translation issues.

SPEAKER_01 41:25

Now, John, the founders of the American Bible Society were also very politically motivated men, right? They were looking at the Bible as a way of, in many ways, forming a more perfect union. Um so can you tell us a little bit more about that mindset?

SPEAKER_04 41:39

Almost from the beginning of the Republic, the Bible is used to promote kind of a form of American patriotism, American nationalism. They're always connected. Whether we can we could debate whether they're connected in healthy or unhealthy ways, right? That's a theological kind of discussion. But certainly the Bible is always involved. So many of the American Bible Society founders, people like Elias Boudinot, for example, who was the president of the Continental Congress in 1783 when they met at Princeton, is the founder of the American Bible Society. Francis Scott Key, who we know from the Star Spangled Banner, was one of the founders. John Jay, in his later years, was one of the founders of the American Bible Society. They saw the dissemination of the Bible as connected to or speaking to questions of politics, questions of nationalism. They would often invoke the Bible against their political enemies, the Jeffersonian Republicans. Many of them were Federalists, these founders of the American Bible Society. So the Bible, you know, we should probably spend some time talking about this, right? How the Bible has been used in American history by evangelicals to promote, defend, advance all kinds of causes, not just kind of the idea that America is a Christian nation or something like that. One perfect example, of course, is uh the way the Bible was used in the slavery debates in the 19th century. The uh Southerners, pro-slavery, especially in the 1850s, when there actually becomes a more, you know, I hope don't take this word the wrong way, but a sophisticated kind of argument for the Bible teaching the institution of slavery. I mean, they were talking about common sense. These were biblical literalists in some ways. And if you read the Bible in a common sense way at face value, these Southern theologians, like, you know, Louis Henry Dabney or James Henley Thornwell, they would have believed that the Bible teaches that slavery is not only permissible, but it's it's a good, it's a positive, it's biblical. If you don't defend the institution of slavery, you're being unbiblical, right? All those abolitionists, they're more appealing to their moral conscience, not to the word of God. So that's just one example of the way in which the Bible can be used to. Promote some kind of social cultural institution or agenda or goal in that sense.

SPEAKER_02 44:06

Yeah, and that one of the you know key books that historians reference on this is book by Mark Knoll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. And in that, as the title conveys, um, he's really looking at this seemingly unbridgeable divide in biblical interpretation and how that leads to it's not the only thing, or even maybe the primary thing leading to the Civil War. There's obviously a lot going on in economics and politics and everything, but it creates uh a further sort of division. And he has a line in there which I'm not able to quote at the moment, but he has a line where he talks about ultimately the decision over interpretation had to be settled by the generals. Uh it was it was who won the war, got to decide which was a very difficult time. So about military power, yeah. And what just one interesting side note is is um in that book, Knoll is pretty he's not willing to say that the North had a better reading of the Bible or something like that. That it was really sort of if you were there in 1865 or 1860, it'd be very hard to sort of in some objective way say this is the better reading of the Bible between the Northern and the Southern reading. Interestingly enough, a lot many years later, more recently, he wrote Knowles wrote in two written two big books recently on the Bible in American culture, and one of them is called America's Book. And this one covers that same area, and he actually has a section in there where he says he's rethought that ambiguity from the Civil War as a theological crisis, which was written about 20 years ago, and he now thinks that objectively the North had a better reading of the Bible. And it's an interesting, it's almost moving into theology, John. Like sort of a it is a theological, not a historical one. But but he he at least felt the need to sort of express that. So that does a little encouraging to me as someone who prefers the northern uh reading of that. But it's also just an interesting way of uh thinking about this line between what historians do with the evidence and then where they're inserting, at least if you're someone like Mark Knoll, you can insert yourself and say what you think.

SPEAKER_04 46:04

Yeah, I mean, I wrote about this in my Christian America book. I mean, some of these Southerners literally believed that God was on the side of the Confederacy because they were being more true to the scriptures. This was an overt argument that they made. The other thing I wanted to say about that Knoll book, The Civil War is a theological craze. My favorite part of that book, and this might be helpful for our discussion here, is he has, I don't know if it's a full chapter or not, but he has a chapter about how English Catholics, I think it is, or or Catholics generally, looked at this debate over how to understand the Bible. And the argument they made was, see, Protestantism, right? You put the Bible in people's hands, they read it for themselves, next thing you know, they're killing each other. One group saying slavery's okay, the other one saying it's not. If everyone was Catholic, we wouldn't have these problems, right? So it's it's a wonderful kind of, and and these are literal critiques that I think it's English Catholics or maybe Catholics in America, I can't remember, are actually making about the real problem here is the Protestant view. And in the 19th century, we were really talking right about the evangelical view of uh biblical interpretation, right?

SPEAKER_02 47:16

The one funny note on that is is one of the or not, I don't know, it's funny, but Abraham Historically funny. Yeah, historically funny. Abraham Joseph Ryan, he was known as the poet priest of the South, was a Catholic priest who was as forward uh with his embrace of slavery as as anyone. And of course, there were many Catholics in the North who were the opposite. So you you saw that you saw differences of opinion even even among the American Catholics.

SPEAKER_04 47:40

I don't I don't remember what the I don't even remember what the kind of was there like some kind of papal position, magisterium on on slavery? I don't I don't know. I'd have to go back and look at that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:50

Yeah. Some of that came out many centuries before with Spanish colonies and things like that. So there'd been a whole sort of religious legal development of that. But yeah, you you definitely had in the American context, which I think you're right. I think they I think Noel was looking at non-American sort of observers of the US. In the American context, you definitely had Catholics very adamant on both sides of the conflict.

SPEAKER_01 48:13

It's interesting that you bring up that point from Catholic criticism of evangelical positions, because I've come across that in my research on divorce, right? Which is something that's a very specific doctrine within evangelicalism. And there's a lot of disagreement over the proof texts. Like, what does the Bible say specifically? And there's this one book in uh 1925 by guy's last name is Badger. I don't think anyone ever read this book when I got it from Interlibrary Loan, like the pages hadn't even been cut apart since 1925. This book, The Great Forgery or something, Great Forgery of Divorce, is really cautious in the first couple pages because he's hinting that the Catholics got it right in their consistency, but he can't outright say it because he's not Catholic. But this idea that because Protestants are able to, and evangelicals in particular, have this individual opinion on what the Bible actually says, it leads to so much chaos and and discord regarding divorce because that is such a personal sort of thing.

SPEAKER_04 49:10

It's not just a reason why there are like tens of thousands, I don't know how many, Protestant denominations, right? And only one Catholic Church, and it all comes down to the Bible, how you would think about biblical interpretation.

SPEAKER_02 49:23

I think if we go ahead from the Civil War, another thing to note about where we find the Bible in politics and society, this happens a lot with not just the Bible, with religion more generally, but in times of war is when you really see references to the Bible, reverence for the Bible, hymns that invoke the Bible really tick up. So if you think of the world wars in the or even the Spanish-American War, there there is some of this happening too. And up until very recent wars, that's one of the ways that we see new not necessarily translations of Bibles or commentaries of Bibles being produced in response to wars, but an embrace of biblical language and piety around reading Bibles. One example uh of a version of a Bible being produced right after a war or during a war, in 1967, the Schofield Bible that we've talked about had a revised edition come out, which had been taking many years and it was sort of trying to correct some of the obvious errors in Schofield's earlier notes. But it came out right around basically in the same summer season of the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, which was interpreted by people who like Schofield, like dispensationalists, as a prophetically significant war. There was a lot of hubbub around that, that sort of this Bible, this reference Bible that seems to endorse reading the war this way, came out right when the war happened. So that that was sort of a luck of timing for that that Bible. But anyway, that was just to say times of war tend to be when we see more Bible references in our culture.

SPEAKER_04 51:00

And would it be fair to say, Dan, the times of war? I'm just thinking even of more recent, like Middle East. Would it be fair to say that not only does the Bible more prevalent at times or people talking about the Bible, it becomes more prominent in times of war, but but certain prophetic passages, right? As people try to think about like what does this war mean in some kind of larger biblical, eschatological kind of scheme?

SPEAKER_02 51:22

Yeah, certainly the last, certainly in the last few decades with Middle East wars. I would say though that, yeah, and I I totally agree, there's a particular theological reading there. There's also a lot of what we call civil religion happening as well. So this is not just evangelicals, presidents tend to do this during war, is appeal to the common sacred text as a way of rallying people to often comparing the US to Israel in the Old Testament and sort of trying to draw lessons from that or or encouragement. So there's also that sort of really broad civil religion way that the Bible is used in our culture. Same with sort of like non-sectarian prayers that are often at the front of inaugurations for presidents and so forth. There's a there's a sort of whole way that a very generalized Christianity is at the heart of our political culture as well.

SPEAKER_04 52:13

Yeah, and this goes this goes all the way back to Leviticus 25, 10. Proclaim liberty throughout the all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. That's the liberty bell. That's engraved on the liberty bell, right? So, you know, you see scriptures as a form of civil. I get into this debate a lot with people because they want to appeal to these scriptures as meaning something perhaps more than they did in context. But yeah, it's this kind of civil religion where the Bible is always being invoked in one way or another for national feelings of patriotism.

SPEAKER_02 52:45

And we have examples of, I mean, the one of the more famous photos of President Trump uh sort of holding a Bible in front of a church as sort of like saying nothing, just sort of by that image trying to convey his relationship to the Bible.

SPEAKER_04 52:58

Second Chronicles 7.14, right, is you go look it up. I won't quote it because it's probably because I can't, but but you know, you know, about about you know, nations kind of uh being blessed by God if they remain obedient, these kinds of things. I mean they're they're everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 53:15

Well, and that's key, right? So so that in context, that's a verse referring to ancient Israel. It's not all nations who do this, it's about my people, God speaking. But Americans read themselves as if you're taking that reading that this is actually something that can be applied to the US, then you're you're applying it in a way that is not uh in the original text. It that's uh you know, Chronicles was not thinking about the United States of America. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_04 53:39

If my people who are called by my name sh will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, and I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and will heal heal their land. You hear you hear that a lot, especially among a certain Christian right kind of nationalist. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 53:55

Well that that was a very uh Billy Graham would invoke that uh constantly, and it was really in an early Cold War setting. This was this was the rally to the anti-communism, to to fighting atheistic materialism around the world.

SPEAKER_04 54:09

So I guess the point is evangelicals have I don't know if repurposed the Bible is the best way to describe it. To promote all kinds of political agendas, social institutions, and so has everyone.

SPEAKER_01 54:20

I mean, just think about the city upon a hill. I mean, that has its own rhetorical history in political speech making, to my knowledge, from mostly non-evangelicals giving those speeches as well.

The Battle for the Bible: Inerrancy Wars

SPEAKER_01 54:37

I think maybe another thing to highlight if we're going to talk about evangelicals and the Bible, are the big fights within evangelicalism over the Bible, right? Um, I'm thinking most famously of the battle.

SPEAKER_02 54:50

The battle.

SPEAKER_01 54:51

The battle for the Bible. One of the things that I use in my research is the International Council on Biblical inerrancy, right? Which is in response to fears that evangelicals have that uh neo-orthodoxy have kind of hijacked a certain understanding of what it meant to interpret the Bible well. And their big catchphrase is inerrancy, right? Like it's all rotating around. We need to recapture and re-proclaim what it means to have an inerrant scripture. And they did mean something a little bit different than infallibility. So I think talking about that, what was going on, because it is a part of this sort of neo-evangelical movement, but also it split in some ways the neo-evangelical movement as well.

SPEAKER_04 55:36

So to nuance this a little bit more, it's not only are they challenging kind of Karl Bart neo-orthodoxy, right? That the Bible is not not the word of God, but it sort of becomes the word of God when it's illuminated by the Spirit or something. But by the 60s and 70s, they're also challenging, you know, I I don't think anyone would would uh most people in the 60s and 70s would keep the neo-orthodox group outside the bounds of evangelical Christianity, right? But in the 60s and 70s, right, you're beginning to get these arguments made. Fuller Seminary becomes kind of the hotbed for this argument that the Bible is inspired, maybe even infallible on matters of faith and practice, but has errors in it when it comes to science or things other than faith and practice. And I think that's where the debate really revs up. When I think of inerrancy, right, I think of that, right? The Bible has answers for everything, right? You know, the the and this gets into other things we've talked about, like with Ted Davis too, about like seven-day creation, literal seven days. You know, I remember when I was a student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, we used to read this big book by an Old Testament scholar named Gleason Archer. It was called like a thousand Bible difficulties solved. The whole point of it was that here are all the things that liberals are saying that the Bible's not inerrant, and here's how it could be solved. The skeptic and cynic in me, you know, uh would say, you know, if they have to write a book about a thousand problems with the Bible, that seems a lot. What does that say about inerrancy? You know, you have to have have such a huge book that you have to answer all these questions, but that's just cynical me. But this was part of it. This was the inerrancy, and you had sort of places like Fuller that were wanting to embrace the full authority of scripture, the inspiration of scripture in matters of faith and practice. And then when I was at Trinity in the late 80s, early 90s, I mean, Trinity always positioned itself against the Fuller model and said, No, we are defenders of inerrancy. And one of my mentors, actually, as a historian, John Woodbridge, wrote an entire book critiquing what was then known as the Rogers and McKim thesis, which was the argument. The Rogers and McKim thesis was the thesis that again, the Bible's inspired, but it's not a book of science or you know, it doesn't explain the natural world and things. You have to understand the Bible in context and it's uh it's uh understand it in its ancient historical framework. And I know there are other manifestations of this battle for the Bible, too.

SPEAKER_01 58:15

I mean, Harold Lindzel's battle for the Bible.

SPEAKER_04 58:18

I was hoping to tip I was hoping that was my ramp on to Howard Linzel for someone to take it.

SPEAKER_01 58:23

Yeah, yeah. I mean, his book uh I think was definitely a pretty central component to the fight, and I think uh linking also to the ICBI.

SPEAKER_02 58:30

Yeah, it coined the term the battle. Yeah, and so yeah, just to reiterate one thing John was saying, this is, you know, historically downstream from the modernist fundamentalist debates, which a lot of it was over biblical criticism and this sort of more historical critical approach to the Bible, questioning whether the flood really happened, all those types of questions. So we're downstream from that, and the battle for the Bible as it was coined was not between those two camps. Those people had separated and they didn't like each other by the 70s. It was within the evangelical world. And for someone like Harold Linzel, who who was an inerrantist and was the editor of Christianity Today at the time he wrote that book, this was for him, he called it the watershed issue in evangelical identity. Basically, for him, he he interpreted the history predictive of American Christianity as those who held to inerrancy stayed true to the Christian faith, and those who gave up even an inch of that eventually became for him liberal or non-Christian. So he would start with Harvard and Yale, which way back in the day professed some version of inerrancy or high biblical authority. And even in the night, you know, look where they are today. They're they're barely Christian, if Christian at all. And he would go through and then he'd start in that book at least. He had he was at Fuller Seminary when, and you know, this gets at the sense of how high the stakes were for the camps on this, but in 1962, at a faculty meeting is when they sort of stopped enforcing the requirement that faculty had to reaffirm the inerrancy statement that had founded the school. And for people like Harold Lindzel and Carl F. H. Henry, this was Black Saturday, I think, or Black Friday, because it was this sort of dereliction of the mission. And so Linzel had lived through that. He had a lot of scores to settle with Fuller, and so that was a big part of the battle for the Bible book, was a whole couple chapters sort of documenting how all these different professors at Fuller don't affirm inerrancy. But he had other people he was calling out from across the sort of evangelical spectrum. And then one interesting one is at least in that 1976 book, he had another one later called The Bible in the Balance, I think, which was like updating it. But in that 1976 book, he talked a lot about the Southern Baptist Convention and how they were drifting, in his view, from inerrancy. And Lindzel was not a Southerner, but he ended up being through this book and his role at Christianity Today, being very influential in the Southern Baptist politics that were happening right at that time that ended up making the what was called the you know fundamentalist takeover, the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention just a few years later. And that whole politics within the Southern Baptist world was around inerrancy, or at least a lot of it was adjudicated around that topic. And so that book was seen to have, and that the whole concept of the battle for the Bible was seen to have huge sway in sort of how the internal politics of evangelicalism developed in the 70s. And he got to take some credit for the Southern Baptist Convention, the biggest denomination, Protestant denomination in the U.S.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:32

Moving from historically a pretty there was a wide range of views in the Southern Baptist Convention on this, particularly by the 70s, to one where in the 80s and up until today, even, very much all the seminaries, most of the leadership in the Southern Baptist Convention has to affirm biblical inerrancy.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:49

I was just reading a short collection of the Chicago statements that came out of the ICBI, and this is what it said about that exact same thing at the uh Southern Baptist Convention. And this was published in, I think, the early 2000s. It says that these statements are so important because they've been used as a guide and understanding inerrancy, and its views were adopted by, and this is the quote, the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the largest Protestant denominations of the world, in a landmark turnaround which saved them from drifting into liberalism. So that's kind of that key moment that they see this inerrancy battle as having won, right? And then you hear other people who particularly in arguments around um evangelical feminism, they see this as a great turning away from a moment where actually women's ordination had the opportunity to potentially gain ground. And then with this turn towards conservatism, that door shut within that denomination.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:44

So that statement's interesting to me too, because it's a historical argument. It's making this claim that had they not done this. And one little thing about Linzel was he was a historian. He got a PhD in history from NYU. There's another world where the person fighting this is a theologian, and you have a way different way of talking about this. But for Linzel, it was really important to document the turn to liberalism that he saw sort of as like a historical law, like in history. And so in an interesting way, that actually put a lot of people on the hot seat because he was calling out specific institutions and saying, hey, you're drifting. And that's just a different way of adjudicating this than a philosophical debate or a theological debate. It was really for him about proving that this was happening in real time.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:28

The book here, of course, maybe not of course, but one we should get on the list for recommended reading is George Marsden's book, Reforming Fundamentalism, which tells the fuller story in the larger context of this debate over inerrancy. I don't think it gets into Lindzel as much, although he probably talks about it. Well, there's a lot about Lindzel in the world. Is there? Okay. Okay. But many of the sort of we use this term neo-evangelicals, those who rose out of fundamentalism in the 40s and 50s, you know, Billy Graham, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today, a lot of them ended up siding with the inerrancy position. Christianity Today, not only Lindzel, but Carl Henry was the founder. He wrote a five-volume theology, which is probably, I would say, is probably driven by this defense of inerrancy. It was called God Revelation and Authority, one that doesn't get as much publicity because he was much more of an organizational player, was Ken Kanzer, who really brought Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and made it the kind of counter to Fuller. But you know, Conser claimed that he was the only person he knew who, in these debates, who had read every word of Karl Bart's church dogmatics. And so his inerrancy defense came from a kind of conversation with a neo-orthodox. And I mean, I think it's fair to say that a lot of the evangelicals who would still identify as evangelicals but were not inerrantists would have been influenced by Bart. So, uh, you know, by neo-orthodoxy, at least uh some of the folks at Fuller were. So you do see Christianity today. I mean, there's this famous statement, too, by Billy Graham, you know, they asked him about his position on inerrancy, and he always tried to avoid the topic, right? Because he was kind of wanted to be as broad as possible. But, you know, he tells this story. I can't correct me if I'm wrong. He's in the woods hiking or something, and he just is really praying about this. And he sits down on a, I think it was a stump of a tree and just says, you know, I'm going to believe that the word of God is your word, God, and without error, he's praying. And that's pretty much all he would say about it. But that immediately led people like Carl Henry and and others to claim him for the for the inerrancy side of the debate. But yeah, this is uh a huge debate. It's really interesting coming from the Christian college world. You really, with the exception of really more conservative schools, there's a lot of debate about what inerrancy means. So, you know, uh, you know, wheat and cotton. College, for example, requires their faculty to be inerrant. But there's now been, you know, I'm not a theologian, I can't explain this very well, but there's now such a kind of compared to the Lindzel model, a kind of watered down kind of way of still calling yourself an inerrantist and believing in the authority and signing the doctoral statement or whatever at we and you know, where I came out of Messiah, like you, the Bible department would never, Messiah College, University would never hire an inerantist, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:31

There's an interesting way where the inerrancy issue maps a bit onto the reformed world to bring up a category that we haven't used in a while, but but the sort of more Calvinistic streams are more concerned about this than the Wesleyan streams or the Anabaptist streams. And there's another important part of this. So, you know, someone like Carl Henry, who wrote those five volumes, he had a certain way of thinking about theology that actually came out of his reformed convictions, but that really the Bible is made up of propositions, like claims about the world, and that those are the truth that that's what's inerrant, are those propositions. One of the things that other traditions push back on is that it's not all propositional knowledge in the Bible. It actually sort of is reductionistic to put everything in the Bible just in propositional form. So that's one of the you have to be in a certain sort of intellectual milieu to really get at what this debate was really about. And there were plenty of people, I we've mentioned his name before, but Donald Dayton was a historian at the time who was one of these people that Linzel was calling out in his book for not holding to inerrancy. And Dayton was just so he saw it as not this debate over inerrancy, but he saw it as Linzel imposing a certain way of reading the Bible. Yeah. And then calling that inerrancy and saying that's the best way to do it. He was just one of many people who didn't think Lindzel was being was being fair to them. But that that that's part of the assumed background of people like Lindzel and Henry was that their theology and their was sort of the norm, but it wasn't. That's part of the interesting thing about the term evangelicalism at that time and still the days, it includes a really wide variety of theological.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:11

Yeah, the traditional the people who came who were part of, you're right. I mean, this those who were debating inerrancy were really not in those traditions, you know, those holiness traditions. You know, there was a line of argument that the inerrantists would make that traced kind of the view of inerrancy through the pr old Princeton theology, these old school Calvinists who taught it, like Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield and Jay Gresham Machin. And while they were all debating about this, you had, you know, the Asusa Street Revival going on and these kinds of things. And no one was no one was debating inerrancy. I guess if you like push them and say there are some people saying that the Bible doesn't is not authoritative in science, they would say, what? That's crazy. Of course it is. But they weren't, but they weren't debating these points. It really was a kind of high, you know, intellectual conversation. And I think Lindzel popularized that conversation and made churches and future seminarians who are going to become pastors very much aware of it. And it suddenly became a litmus test by the 70s.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:18

It's a very technical argument.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:20

That actually is a reflection to me of how modern a lot of evangelicalism is. So this is this has high stakes when you're doing really technical ways of reading the Bible. And it's also important just to point out that what was really at stake here was not the Bible. I want to be careful how I say this, but it wasn't the Bible that we have now. It was always the original autographs. So what you were assenting to that the original writer, when he wrote the original version of the Gospel of John, so when John wrote John, that that was inerrant. And you were not claiming anything more than that necessarily. And so you could allow for there to be errors. Transcribal that's to be transcribed errors. But that's how some of the I'm guessing I haven't read the thousand solutions to the problems, but I'm guessing some of them would be this is actually like a translation error, not an error in the original. So when Corey, a few episodes ago, mentioned that the evangelical theological society, they only have two things you have to agree to to be a member, the Trinity and inerrancy. But if you read what they mean by inerrancy, it's about the original autographs. You assent to those being inerrant. And so that's just a very, that's a philosophical plan. You know, you're you're assenting, but like we can't actually prove that because we don't have the original autographs anymore. So in that sense, too, it's just a very abstract argument

Closing: 'Red China' and a Segue to Global Evangelicalism" marker around

SPEAKER_02 1:10:42

as well. It's not about the Bibles we have, it's about sort of your belief about how God transmitted his words to humans. To me, it it feels like this is a there's a lot of modern stakes, modernism 20th century stakes around authority and reason and that type of stuff. But in other parts of the church, uh the even the evangelical world, that there just wasn't the same urgency uh around that question.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:04

And it is clear that the champions of inerrancy today, in 2026, is the Southern Baptist Convention. I mean, talk about the Evangelical Theological Society. If you look at the roster of people who are presenting there, it's almost 70% or something Southern Baptist. You know, like every PhD student at Southeastern, Southern, Southwestern, Midwestern, they're presenting something on their scholarship. And so I do think Southern Baptists now are the defending anercy in the way that say northern evangelicals defended it in the 80s, 70s, and 80s.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:43

I just I and this is partially just my own curiosity. Um, but in talking about the American Bible Society and the importance of the Bible and evangelicals, I just have to ask, as a camp kid who grew up in the evangelical camp world, did anyone play or hear of the game Red China?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:58

No. No.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:59

Okay, so I'm not kidding. This happened. I didn't make it up. I've talked about it at a couple conferences, just like in conversation with people, and they're like, this isn't real. But what we would do is the counselors would pretend to be communist Chinese agents in the woods, and their entire goal was to prevent you from getting the Bible to people who needed it. And you had toothpicks as campers, and those were your Bibles, and you were supposed to sneak through the woods and not get caught. And if they caught you, you would share the gospel with them. And if the counselors, I'm I'm not kidding, if the counselors thought you did a good enough job, you might not get your toothpicks snapped. But if you didn't, then they would snap your toothpicks and you'd get sent to prison. And sometimes there were rescues, sometimes there there weren't. And this was just something I unquestioned, like there's no questions. I just did this as a camper, I did this as a counselor. And I think about it sometimes when we talk about evangelicalism and the Bible in particular, and knowing that our next um episode, we're going to talk about the global impact of evangelicalism. And so I'm just putting it out there as my one opportunity. Did anyone else do this? Or was this just my very specific central Wisconsin experience? And if that's the case, I need to know who came up with it.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:21

Whether or not we've done it or not, I think that is a beautiful segue from our set our episode today on the Bible to our next episode on global evangelicalism.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:50

Thanks for listening to American Evangelicals, a history podcast. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's next. And if this episode sparked your curiosity, consider sharing it with someone who wants a deeper, more nuanced understanding of evangelical history. Until next time, thanks for listening.