Church goers are outraged, but the publisher, Canongate, is only making explicit what has long been acknowledged by all sides: the King James Bible belongs to literature, not religion. The Church of England admitted as much when it made the Revised Standard Version its translation of preference. And stalwart atheists of my parents' generation lament the fact that "no one reads the King James any more." Culture and religion have come apart; those who read the Bible for its prose and those who read it for its truth are two separate groups.
But for all its avowed secularism, Canongate's publication of 12 biblical books in 12 separate volumes, each one prefaced with a "personal interpretation" by a famous author, is the logical culmination of a tradition that is in origin religious. This, one might say, is the reductio ad absurdum of protestantism. It could never have occurred to a pre-Reformation catholic to treat the books of the Bible as separate works, let alone to provide a "personal interpretation" of them. For a medieval churchman the books of the Bible were but chapters in the continuous revelation of God to mankind, mediated through different channels, but uniform in viewpoint and authority. The bible formed one huge system of allegory; originally unconnected words and incidents were caught up in a riot of symbolic parallels, endlessly branching and criss-crossing from one end to the other. It was read as a romance, in which the garden lost through the disobedience of the first Adam is finally restored through the obedience of the second. It is as a magnificent unity that the Bible has entered the imagination of Europe.
But splendid as it was, this understanding of the Bible rested on an ahistorical conception of inspiration that could not survive into the modern era. A quiet but momentous change was accomplished by Luther when he gave preference to some books of the Bible over others, according to the extent that they "showed Christ." By this action he implied that the Bible is a human document, whose divinity lies in its content and not in its source. The locus of authority was shifted from text to reader. Luther gave this shift practical effect by translating the Bible into German, enabling the laity to interpret its proclamation for itself. Private judgement was born.
Luther's remark that certain Biblical books "show Christ" more than others could be interpreted in a historical sense; and in the 19th century a search was mounted for the historical Jesus. The result of this search was to establish that very little could be said with certainty about the historical Jesus. But Luther's remark was also interpreted in a poetical sense, as a statement about the imaginative presence of Christ in the Gospels. To the extent that scholarship undermined the Bible's historical claims, this literary approach became correspondingly attractive. The Bible came to be read by educated people as a compendium of moral wisdom, or simply as a storehouse of language and imagery. Its miraculous aspects were quietly passed over.
The historian Fritz Stern has contrasted the form secularisation has taken in protestant and catholic countries. In catholic countries secularisation has been the work of anti-clericism. The Church has retreated under the onslaught of its political and intellectual enemies, but has retained its doctrines intact. In protestant countries secularisation has been the work of the churches themselves. They have bought off opposition by progressively diluting the content of faith, until finally it is acceptable to any "right-minded" person. Protestantism has a tendency to decline into a Kulturreligion-an affirmation of respectability decked out in religious symbolism.
The most influential exponent of Kulturreligion in the Anglican tradition was Matthew Arnold. Arnold argued that Christianity could win back the masses only if it abandoned its "unverifiable" dogmas and redefined itself as "morality touched by emotion." Bible reading was the centrepiece of Arnold's Kulturreligion. The Bible should be read, he maintained, in a literary fashion, as an exhortation to righteousness clad in poetry rather than as a source of dogma. In blurring the line between the Bible and secular literature, Arnold succeeded in transforming not only religion into culture, but also culture into religion. Reading, whether of the Bible or of selected secular works, became seen as a discipline of moral edification. This conception of culture-a form of secularised protestantism-became famous this century through the work of FR Leavis.
Canongate is full square in the Arnoldian tradition of secular protestantism. The respectfully agnostic series title, "the words of the wise," printed in trendy lower case, indicates that we are in the presence of Kulturreligion. Perhaps only a couple of the preface writers would call themselves Christians, yet most of them fall within the broad arc of protestant civilisation. They feel able to write about the Bible's "power and passion," its "timeless truths." And even the two Christians, Nick Cave and Richard Holloway, attribute to their books-Mark and Luke respectively-an authority closer to art than dogma. But the analogy with art can be pressed too far. The greatness of Luke is not, as Holloway argues, confirmed by the fact that he sends shivers down the spine. This is vulgar sentimentalism. Wagner also gives me shivers, but that doesn't prevent me from regarding his music as bogus and manipulative. Nick Cave's spirited introduction to Mark also suffers from a tendency to aestheticise religion. His identification with the "divine inspiration" of Christ is in the best tradition of romanticism, but has nothing to do with orthodox Christianity.
The great vice of Kulturreligion is parochialism. The Bible, in its traditional interpretation, caught up its reader in a universal cosmic romance; all share in Adam's sin and in Christ's resurrection. But when Arnold tries to summarise the ethical content behind the Bible's cosmological imagery, the result is comically Victorian. The Bible, we are told, is concerned with "Conduct," which has something to do with repression of the sex drive. After 100 years, Arnold's Literature and Dogma looks dated; after 2,000 years the Bible does not. This is a warning against attempts to identify the Bible's teachings with the commonplaces of contemporary morality.
Fay Weldon, in her introduction to Corinthians, exhibits a similar parochialism. She does not identify Paul's gospel with contemporary morality; rather, she employs contemporary morality to condemn it. "It is hard to like Paul the Apostle," she says. He is a "pestilent fellow," condemning adulterers, fornicators and all who step out of line. You get the impression that Weldon has swallowed Arnold's identification of the Bible with Victorian morality, differing from him only in the judgement she places on both. The parochialism of one age attacks the parochialism of another.
Do we really care whether Fay Weldon likes Paul? Was Paul asking to be liked by Weldon? You understand nothing about Paul unless you understand that his life was consumed by a single passion, a passion for the Kingdom of God, and that he believed the arrival of this kingdom to be imminent. From his perspective adultery and fornication-the things Weldon gets so worked up about-appeared an irrelevant distraction. Of course Paul was wrong about the Kingdom of God, but unless you can somehow empathise with his eschatological fervour you can scarcely begin to write about him. But then eschatology is equally offensive to all forms of parochialism, Victorian, modern or otherwise. It is the permanent reminder that, in Butterfield's phrase, "all ages are equidistant from God."
The pocket canons
Claire Paterson ed.
Canongate Books 1998, box set ?14.99
