Reading the Bible outside the Church

A Case Study

Ford

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532636820
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In many places in the Western world, churchgoing is in decline and it cannot be assumed that people have a good grasp of the Bible's content. In this evolving situation, how would "the person on the street" read the Bible? Reading the Bible Outside the Church begins to answer this question. David Ford spent ten months at a chemical industrial plant providing non-churchgoing men with the opportunity to read and respond to five different biblical texts. Using an in-depth qualitative methodology, he charts how their prior experiences of religion, sense of (non)religious identity, attitudes towards the Bible, and beliefs about the Bible all shaped the readings that occurred.

Part One

Chapter 1

An Unheard Voice

This chapter explores the prompts which led to the formation of my research question. I argue that within Britain, study into how the Bible is read has typically concentrated on regular Bible readers, such as the clergy, laity, or biblical scholars. Non-regular Bible readers, those outside the church, are missing from this field of inquiry, raising the question: How would a British person who does not regularly read the Bible (or go to church), read the Bible?

In order to situate present-day Bible reading research within a wider context, I begin by briefly noting the shift from the author to the reader in literary theory and the related emphasis seen in the philosophy and hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.37 However, this “turn to the reader” is not just seen in literary and hermeneutical theory but also in biblical studies and theology. Accordingly, I consider three subfields within these disciplines that demonstrate this new focus on the role of the Bible reader. What these subfields illustrate is that within Britain this research has typically concentrated on regular Bible readers. However, with national surveys indicating that most people in Britain do not regularly read the Bible, or go to church, I conclude that the majority of the population has been excluded from this research.

In bringing together the current focus on the role of the Bible reader and the lack of research into how the majority of the population may read the Bible, I provide the theoretical foundation for my study. The chapter concludes by highlighting three recent works that involved non-regular Bible readers. However, these works do not directly address my research question, reaffirming the need of my enquiry.

The “Turn to the Reader” in Literary Theory

Reader-response criticism is a term given to describe a collection of literary theories that are united in their emphasis on the role of the reader. The rise of reader-response criticism is usually described as a two-step process. First, literary scholars shifted their attention from the author of the text to the text itself, and then they turned their attention from the text to the reader of the text. This two-step recounting of recent literary history is a simplified one, ignoring counter movements and alternative trajectories.38 For instance, in Validity in Interpretation, the literary critic E. D. Hirsch Jr. responded to the shift from author to text, by arguing for the centrality of the author and their intent. However, for my purposes a brief overview of these two steps is sufficient to locate reader-response criticism within its wider context.

In the mid-twentieth century scholars moved away from focusing on the author’s motivation and purpose for writing, to concentrate on the text and its structure, this became known as new criticism. New critics, such as William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, claimed that “the design and intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of art.”39 This rejection of the author was neatly condensed into the phrase “the intentional fallacy” which Wimsatt and Beardsley coined in 1946. New critics took up this phrase as they argued against the idea that the reader was able to understand the mind or purpose of the author. In so doing, these scholars moved away from considering the author’s intention behind the text, to focus instead on the text as an entity in itself. They argued for the autonomy of the text, describing it “as an object of specifically critical judgment.”40 However, what new criticism also emphasized was that a text (such as a poem) and its results (its impact upon a reader) were in danger of being confused. Accordingly, they also rejected “the affective fallacy” which valued the reader’s response to a text, arguing that it would result in “impressionism and relativism.”41 Thus, “what readers brought to each text–including thoughts and feelings–was deemed extraneous to meaning-making.”42

Nevertheless, the new critics’ “affective fallacy” was found wanting, as is seen in the first essay in Jane Tompkins’s anthology Reader-Response Criticism. This essay, by Walker Gibson, is entitled “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers” and is situated within new criticism because it principally concerns textual analysis. However, it focuses on the role of the “mock reader” in this analysis, by which Gibson is referring to the way a reader identifies with and responds to a text. Thus, Tompkins describes it as,

The first step in a series that gradually breaks through the boundaries that separate the text from its producers and consumers and reconstitutes it as a web whose threads have no beginning and no end.43

It was not long before scholars had turned their attention from the text to the reader, theorizing the role of the reader and the reader/text relationship in the reading process. The reader-response critic Norman Holland argues for such a focus:

Let us open up the text by assuming the person brings to it something extrinsic. It could be information from literary history, biography, or an archaic ritual like the flyting between primitive bards. [ . . . ] It seems to me not only possible but likely that whenever we read, we are associating such extratextual, extraliterary facts to the supposedly fixed text. Now rather than strip those associations away, what will happen if we accept these things outside the text and try to unders...