Bible, Inc.

Scoot over "Big Tobacco," "Big Pharmacy," and "Big Oil" and make room for "Big Bible." While your business may be languishing during the present economic recession–cha-ching!–Bible publishing continues to flourish. A 2003 survey conducted by Zondervan found that the average American household contains 3.9 Bibles, (1) sustaining a juggernaut industry with more than 20 million "units" sold annually in the United States. (2) The trend has not slowed. The "Good Book" has turned a good profit every year since 1952 when Thomas Nelson and Sons launched the (then) controversial Revised Standard Version and hit pay dirt. It seems that fat cats prowl not only in Manhattan but in Grand Rapids, Wheaton, and Nashville.

The Problem

It is not simply the proliferation of Scripture tomes that troubles the church catholic. That God's Word is nearly ubiquitously available in hard or paperback (if not digital) should be something to celebrate. Instead, it is (1) the problem of marketing the change of the inherited interpretation of Scripture preserved within the specified spectrum of Christian orthodoxy, (2) the problem of niche translations and, especially, the manifestation of (1) and (2) in (3) the problem of self-study Bibles that undermine its proper use, as well as the interpretative community it creates and sustains, a problem we will address in conclusion. In a word, there is an industry agenda causing ecclesiastical fragmentation while promoting radical individualism and autonomous discipleship–notions antithetical to the being of the church and hard to reconcile with the principles of the product peddled. The motive may be fat cats with bottom-line agendas, but the results–at least from a Reformation perspective–sorely impoverish the church.

Reason.com analyst Greg Beato disagrees. He argues that positives outweigh negatives since commercialized renditions of the Bible ultimately benefit those with an interest in the Bible.

Every time a new permutation of the Good Book is added to the marketplace, the competition among publishers intensifies, which in turn inspires these publishers to find new niches to target and new ways to serve their customers. For every gender-inclusive translation, there's a translation that specifically markets itself as the historically accurate alternative to culturally biased revisionism. For every hipster coffee table Bible that preaches the gospel of the United Nations, there's an American Patriot's Bible that identifies its ideal customer as "the ordinary man or woman who loves this nation and believes it springs from godly roots." At this point, the only way to diminish the Bible's power would be if fundamentalists somehow ended all its questionable commercial permutations, comic book versions, audio interpretations, niche devotionals–everything but the King James [sic] Version in plain black covers. In this light, the Conservative Bible Project is anything but conservative. Like all other versions of the Good Book, the narrow new interpretation broadens the Bible's overall appeal. (3)

Notice that Beato's rationale emerges neither from ecclesiological nor soteriological points of view, but rather from the marriage of financial pragmatics and consumer felt needs. Viewed through the lenses of consumer choice and capitalism, Bible publishing is nothing more than a service provided for "customers," not necessarily Christians, let alone the corporate body of believers. For publishers contracting the marketing prowess of Madison Avenue, the Bible's "power" lies in its appeal to niche markets, not in being the sword of the Spirit. Consequently, the purpose of such a production is not so much to expose people to the frequently uncomfortable domain of law and gospel that engenders conformity to God's will and ways (that is, what people need), as it is to conform the explanation of the text to the comfortable domain of the reader's subculture or demographic (that is, what people want): hence the glutted "insert-your-race-sex-status-subculture-here-Life-Application-Study-Bible" shelves in contradistinction to the barren and moldering theology shelf. Here, again, post-Kantian subjectivity triumphs over pre-modern objectivity.

When fiduciary purposes displace theological onus, it does not take long for "Bible, Inc." to clamber into bed with niche marketing firms and transform the Word of God into a work of goods (and services). No segment of society is immune to the trend to commodify the Scriptures and handle them as a commonplace consumer item. The spectrum ranges from parody products like Da Jesus Book (translated into Hawaiian Pidgin) to the ultra-contrived The Green Bible (please!). Be it The Latino Bible, The Teen Bible, or The Surfers' Bible, the fact is that these products set forth exegetical paradigms that deliberately obfuscate or abandon theological commitments for the purpose of pandering to purchasers.

Now while the origin of annotating the Scriptures with "apparatus" reaches as far back as the distinctly Calvinist 1560 Geneva Bible, the modern phenomenon has as its immediate antecedent the revolutionary 1909 Scofield Reference Bible. For the first time, commentary was purposely built around the biblical text and did not emerge from a separate and clearly subordinate volume. In other words, the publishers of Scofield were consciously doing exegesis outside the domain of the church, outside codified confessional Christianity, outside the interpretative community, and therefore outside churchly responsibility and accountability–on the very same pages as Holy Writ. If nothing else, proximity to the inspired Word intimated that Scofield's explanations were quasi-inspired. How much more so when the text itself is altered to accommodate gender-inclusive ideology and such? A new day had dawned: the exegetical work of the Holy Spirit through the church's rostered ministerium was stymied because he had been voiced over by the programmed study notes of focus group writers. Corporate accountability was lost too when "self-study" rendered the individual a self-feeder and an arbiter of truth.

But what Beato and others do not seem to get is that, although the Bible is the best-selling book being consumed, it is being consumed differently from how it was fifty or a hundred years ago. It is not just the marketing that has changed but the marketplace. Consumers get Bibles for a different purpose: they expect to get something different from it than earlier generations did, namely, autobiography, not metanarrative. So, whereas at one time Bibles were commonly purchased to translate the individual into the interpretative community, now the Bible is all too frequently interpreted by focus-group commentators to translate individuals into their self-referential market sectors. Such an approach has moved beyond missiological contextual accommodation to shameless capitulation to our narcissistic culture. Consumer surveys are taken. Consumers would like the Bible to say "x" and "y" and the marketplace gives them what they want–techniques for personal enhancement and self-affirmation in an isolating context–in other words, law instead of gospel. The reason they do so emerges from the fact that publishing corporations define readers as "consumers," not "Christians."

In an altogether different way, God expands the person by incorporating him into the church, where exegetical Word ministry binds the baptized together so that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, rich nor poor, male nor female, black nor white. The Bible is to have that unifying effect–just like the Eucharist. Such sex, race, age, and wealth differences are nonessential in the body of Christ. Niche translations and demographic self-study Bibles, however, work in the opposite direction where discriminatory elements are identity making.

The Solution

The Bible is to be read like a roadmap. No one instinctively knows how to read a map until he is taught and oriented to its legend or key. And no one can quite teach you about a map like a guide who is native to that land. When it comes to reading the Bible, that guide is the church and the legend is biblical hermeneutics, not a publishing company or niche commentators. Some time ago, Michael Horton stated the solution to isogetical reading (i.e., reading the Bible in isolation, with only your demographic) of Scripture: "Read with the Church." (4)

There is a necessity to reading in and with the church. "No one is neutral," explains David Ford, "everyone stands somewhere–where do you stand in relation to issues that might affect your interpretation of the text? What about your own context and its special concerns and biases? What is your 'interest' in this text? Why are you engaged with it?" (5) Likewise, Colin Gunton says, "Scripture is never approached without some presuppositions or expectations, even though they may be undermined or revised when the text is studied." (6) Acknowledging the limitations of our own market- or culture-driven presuppositions, experiences, and desires is the first step in the prevention of falling susceptible to wrongful interpretations and manufactured exegesis and, instead, allowing the church to guide our understanding of the text.

Horton, Ford, and Gunton ask us to be conscious of our need for the church to which the Christian, by definition, belongs. By participating in the wider and historic church community of theological interpreters possessing established parameters, we prevent ourselves from engaging in self-serving or individualistic interpretations that are fruitless to the wider community of believers (1 Cor. 12:7) and dishonest to the text. We must keep in mind that God's revelation is a public revelation (Matt. 28:19; Acts 26:26) and his theology a public theology (Gal. 1, 2). In other words, the Christian gospel is a public gospel with an inescapably public message–he's not so much your Lord as the Lord. Nothing should militate against an egocentric approach to the Bible like being part of a crowd of readers that spans hundreds and thousands of years. Thus, Scripture interpretation should be public and social, accountable and responsible, not demographically tailored to generate particulate consumer groups alienated from one another in their hearing and reading of the Bible. In short, honest interpretation resonates with the larger orthodox tradition of the church and fosters requisite ecclesial unity in what we–as the church catholic–believe, teach, and confess.

The church's curacy of the Bible's built hermeneutical guidelines is aimed to keep interpretations and understandings within the text because, uniquely and dynamically, biblical interpretation begins within the Bible itself. A good definition of biblical hermeneutics, then, may be the church's established or traditional ruling principles of biblical interpretation that recognize the Bible's self-presenting, self-interpreting nature.

Biblical hermeneutics is important because the meaning of Scripture pertains to matters of life and death. Moreover, good hermeneutics is essential because there are many bad and false interpretations. These are the unfortunate results of the reader, translator, or commentator failing to acknowledge that the Bible is already self-interpreted as the history of the divine work of redemption. Consequently, dishonesty in interpretation (call it "contrived exegesis") results when the same text–say, the NIV–is "applied" (actually exegeted) in countless, even contradictory, ways. To avoid bad interpretations, readers must engage the biblical text not with particular doctrines, much less ideological or cultural urgencies, but within the interpretive community that yields to the overarching biblical theology that self-governs the self-interpretation of the text as a whole, as well as in all its parts.

Another important reason for doing biblical hermeneutics within the interpretive community is that the biblical text does not belong to us: It's not our word but God's Word (Matt. 24:35; Mark 7:13; Eph. 6:17; 2 Tim. 3:16). The church must yield to the fact that God has crafted his own roadmap along with the clues for reading it. This has been the traditional hermeneutical approach of the orthodox Christian church and it demands integrity on our part: We cannot take liberty with the Word of God in either translation or explanation if we intend to be responsible interpreters of the self-presenting, self-interpreting sacred text. Above all, this means doing sound exegesis–explaining the text according to its story and the interpretive parameters in continuity with the apostolic tradition.

Due to the self-interpreting character and nature of the Bible, the foremost criterion for a theological reading of Scripture is to let the Scripture present itself, which it does in a unified historic manner by presenting Jesus Christ as both its central focus and chief interpreter of theology. When we allow Scripture to present itself, then we lend ourselves to a Christ-centered, theological interpretation. In short, Scripture instructs the reader to read obedient to its own internal hermeneutic among the body of believers. "Big Bible" routinely gets this wrong by telling the story of "us," not "him." The call to all readers, then, is to read obediently, to endeavor to read the Bible in a Christocentric fashion, and thereby to learn firstly about God in whose light we begin to understand ourselves within the body of Christ. This in turn informs us as to how we are to live and to serve God's kingdom in every situation and circumstance. The call to "Bible, Inc." is to let the Scriptures speak for themselves and have readers learn to read, not in isolation with predetermined placement ("This is your group and therefore this is how you are to read and to consume"), but with the church.

We cannot read obediently as an isolated individual segregated in the church. That idea is antithetical to what it means to be Christian. There need to be check-and-balance systems in place to protect us from ourselves, our culture, our times. Christian orthodoxy does just that through the place of Scripture in the Divine Service or Mass, lectionary readings (promoting a reading of the text that connects with Old and New Testaments), exegesis and exposition of the text by duly called and ordained ministerium, and with confessional accountability. Perhaps if this were more the case, "Big Bible" might not overshadow the church in her curacy.