As American Christians have prayed, worshiped with, and studied the Bible, they have often wrestled over how to interpret it Jason A. Hentschel Imagine a Bible—in fact, imagine your Bible. Maybe it’s an “old-fashioned” family Bible, black hardback with a faux-leather spine and gold gilt around the trim, a thin red ribbon marking a passage near the middle. Or perhaps you think of your church’s Bible as your Bible—a large Bible for worship, too large to pick up with one hand, lying open on a pulpit or lectern or displayed in a large gold stand on an altar. Maybe you think of a paperback with no verse numbers, presented in a modern paraphrase, aimed at reaching the unchurched. Maybe when you reach for your Bible you open an app launched from a phone, on the home screen right next to Facebook and Instagram, with 40 different downloaded translations. And, for the last two years at any rate, your Bible could be a PowerPoint shared in a Zoom church gathering. All of these Bibles have at least one thing in common—we all interpret them through our own particular lens. Just look at the land in which we live. It is peppered
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quiet time Worshipers—one studying a Bible—wait for
a service at a Nevada church in 1979.
not only with millions of different copies of the same book but also with hundreds of different denominations and innumerable independent churches totaling upward of 250 million different readers (see “Did you know?,” inside front cover). And then there are the dozens of different translations we have to choose from!
as though no one had read them
While interpreting the Bible for oneself is not uniquely American, it is particularly American. (For more on this, see our first issue in this series on the Bible in America, CH 138). Liberated by the new nation’s emphasis on the separation of church and state and empowered by a belief in the competency of the everyday citizen, the early nineteenth century saw a splintering of the religious landscape as Americans began to read and interpret
Christian History
William Smock, Prior to Evening Worship, 1979 —Paradise Valley Folklife Project collection, 1978 to 1982 (AFC 1991 / 021 ), American Folklife Center / Library of Congress
Whose Bible?
