Curiously enough, the Renaissance carried on the same debate over authority with the later medieval Roman Catholic Church. The figures in the Renaissance, like the Reformers, turned away from lodging authority in the ecclesiastical structure. Unlike the Reformation, however, the Renaissance promoted looking within at the human mind or looking without to nature. Eventually, born of those seeds, rationalism and science would flower as the bases for knowledge, as the authority. The Reformers, however, looked past themselves and past nature to the one who created both. They not only looked to the Creator, they also listened to the Creator. They listened to his revelation as the authority.

This can be seen in John Calvin’s magisterial Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin scholar Edward Dowey has made a good case that Calvin’s thought can be understood against this Renaissance quest for knowledge in light of the meltdown of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Consequently, Calvin begins his theology with a discussion of God as Creator who has revealed himself. Revelation is the starting point. It’s not just a convenient starting point. According to Calvin, it’s the only viable one.³ Since Calvin, theologians on the side of orthodoxy have realized just how right he was and is.

This high view of Scripture, stemming from the idea of inspiration and divine origin of the text, was not without challenge. The early church fathers contended with those who promoted false books of the Bible, books termed pseudepigrapha. These include books like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas, books that are falsely (pseudo) written (grapha) in that they are written by later groups who claim to be written by apostles like Thomas. These books are not only faulty because of their authorship but also because of their content. The Reformers, as mentioned above, had to contend with those who tried to hem in the word of God, circumscribing it with tradition. This gets to the heart of Luther’s efforts at reform. He saw the word bound to the church and not the other way around.

The Reformers also battled the loss of the word. Widespread illiteracy, not to mention the powers of superstition, had captivated much of the laity. Copies of the Bible were extremely scarce, and then only in Latin, the language of a privileged few. William Tyndale expressed the Reformation opposition best in his herculean efforts to bring the Bible into print in the language of the people.

Changing Attitudes

Neglect, abuse, distortion—these were the culprits over the centuries that weakened the level of authority that people both inside and outside the church ascribed to the Bible. The modern age, however, introduced a new culprit, one that might just be a bit more pernicious: the judgment of the Bible’s irrelevance. The Bible in the modern world is sort of like a long-term employee who is about to get sacked. The employee is called into the manager’s office to be told what wonderful contributions he’s made to the company in the past. He’s told what great qualities he has, what a fine person he is. Then he’s told that his department is being restructured, that he is redundant. All of which is interpreted as saying, you are no longer needed or wanted. The Bible was good at one time but is outmoded and can’t keep up with the times. Or so goes the judgment of the modern age.

Mark Noll once wrote, “On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a nation more thoroughly biblical than the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War.”⁴ His opening phrase, “On the face of it,” is instructive. The reigning attitude toward the Bible in American culture was not that it was the Truth, but that it was the Story that provided the backbone for the American story. Nevertheless, Noll makes the case that the Bible had a presumed prominence up to America’s War Between the States. Post-Civil War America is another story. This is the story of how the Bible, like that longtime employee, got sacked.