For the Love of Dictionaries

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published three articles in the past week or so with a focus on dictionaries, particularly the Merriam-Webster 3rd Edition and its descendents. All three are by Allan Metcalf, professor of English at MacMurray College and stylish wearer of Tilley hats.

The first, "Redefining the Dictionary," meditates on the movement of dictionaries from print to online, and looks at some of the new features the digital medium might offer.

The second, "Unabridged," looks at the publication of Wesbter's Third New International Dictionary, a volume that brought consternation for its refusal to condemn colloquialisms like "ain't" and so forth.

The third, "Unabridged Online," continues the exploration of the legacy of Webster's Third, arguing that the new online Unabridged is the rightful heir to this storied volume.

Part of what got me interested in materialist issues in the first place was a fascination with the power and influence of dictionaries. Metcalf's reflections reminded me of these interests, and so I share them with you. Enjoy.

Stephen Prothero on America's Iconic Books

[Note: Cross-published on the Iconic Books blog]

A few weeks back Boston University's Stephen Prothero wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, "Memorial Day and the American Bible." For Prothero, the notion of the "American Bible" has less to do, ultimately, with the texts of Scripture, and much more to do with the texts of our identity.  The "American Bible" is comprised of those texts that help to answer the question, "What is (and is not) American?":

Americans [share] a collection of core texts that "we the people" regard as authoritative and a long-standing tradition of debating what these texts have to tell us about the meaning of "America"... This unofficial canon includes founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as well as songs such as "God Bless America" and speeches by Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan. It also includes novels from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Atlas Shrugged."

 For Prothero, it is the constant state of debate over this canon, and what it means, that is the most constant marker of what it means to be "American."  Not the adherence to a certain political position, so much as the commitment to the struggle of pluralism among political positions.  "Look Lincoln in the eye and tell him that liberty, not equality, is America's founding proposition. Tell King you have a different dream. But as you criticize these men, know what you are doing. You are not opting out of America; you are opting in," writes Prothero.

Prothero's hypothesis about the "American Bible" is much akin to what Jim Watts and Dori Parmenter have been saying for the past several years about the status of "Iconic Books" in national (not just American) consciousness.  Indeed, Prothero's observation that "What makes these texts American scripture is not so much that Americans call them sacred or treat them like sacred objects (though in many cases we do both). What makes them scripture is the fact that Americans use these texts like Christians use the Bible," resonates strongly with Parmenter's work and Watt's "The Three Dimensions of Scriptures."  

I find it especially interesting that this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal.  I think it is a wonderful forum in which to raise the questions Prothero is pursuing.  Unfortunately, from my glance at the comments section, the readers seem unwilling or ill-equipped to engage the issues Prothero has presented.  Instead, there seems to be a preoccupation with the "atheism" of Obama and the "socialism" of our current policies, with little in the way of evidence or grammar in support.

But, at the end of the day, I suppose this only strengthens Prothero's main point.  In abundant amounts, disagreement seems to be the quality we, as Americans, most universally share.

How a book is made

A beautiful little film by Glen Milner. Enjoy.

Article in Christianity Today about the physical forms of Bibles

David Neff, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, has penned a brief article about the effects the physical forms of Bibles have on readers:

The physical form of the Bible matters because it influences the way Christians use their sacred book. In the countercultural 1960s, for example, publishers shucked the black leather uniform in favor of more contemporary dress. The aim was to reach those who might not otherwise pick up the Scriptures. The American Bible Society's Good News for Modern Man resembled a mass market paperback, and Tyndale House's Reach Out: The Living New Testament looked just plain "groovy."

While it is an informative article about some of the little-known facts of the history of Bible publishing and use -- for example, you might not have known that it was in 1791 that Isaiah Thomas published the first American Bible to contain genealogical pages -- the piece actually has very little to say about what it promises in its title: the effects of physical Bible forms on reading.

What an article like this shows is exactly the importance of work like what is going on with the Iconic Books project and here at Material Scripture. We need a language and a means of analysis that actually can track these effects of physical form when we notice them. Hopefully this article at Christianity Today is not just a flash in the pan, and Neff and others will begin to take an ongoing interest in these questions (and their answers)!

(Thanks to Allyn Harris Dault for sending me the CT article)

Call for Papers - "From Text(s) to Book(s)" - International conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

An international and SHARP-sponsored conference
‘From Text(s) to Book(s)’
21-23 June 2012
Nancy-Université (Université de Lorraine from Jan. 2012), France

Deadline for proposals: 15 December 2011

I.D.E.A. (‘Théories et pratiques de l’Interdisciplinarité Dans les Etudes Anglophones’ / Interdisciplinarity in English Studies), the research group of the Nancy-Université English Department, will be hosting an international and SHARP-sponsored conference on the subject ‘From Text(s) to Book(s)’. This conference will provide a forum to discuss the ways in which texts are materialised for consumption by the reading public, both historically and in the contemporary context.

Full call for papers can be found here. Conference website is here.

March 2011 Conference Update

This month I presented papers pertaining to Material Scripture at two conferences. They were well received, and the conversations that followed were fruitful. So fruitful, in fact, that I'm looking into expanding at least one of them into a journal article. Here's hoping I find the time!

The first paper is "Hidden Among the Leaves: Protestant and Catholic Battles for Theological Identity Across the First Pages of Scripture," which I presented at the SECSOR conference in Louisville, KY. This paper describes some of my findings from last Summer's visits to the Pitts and Concordia rare book archives. Listen to audio of the presentation here.

The second paper is "A Hospitality of Suspicion: Scriptural Reasoning and Material Scripture in the Tent of Meeting," which I presented in a panel on Scriptural Reasoning at the Mid-Atlantic regional meeting of the AAR, held in New Brunswick, NJ. Audio from the presentation is available here.

At both conferences I got the chance to tell folks about SCRIPT, and made good new connections with people interested in asking material questions about Scripture.

In May, I'll be heading to Syracuse to present in a panel on Iconic Books.

Panel proposal on "Material Scripture" accepted by AAR

I am happy to report that the panel we have proposed to discuss the growing fields of "Material Scripture" and "Iconic Books" has been accepted. We will be presenting the panel during the Sunday "wildcard" sessions at the American Academy of Religion conference this fall in Atlanta (October 30 - November 2).

The one update of note at this point is that Brent Plate, with regret, has withdrawn his paper, as he has received a grant to study material religious culture in Japan that will take him out of the country during the dates of the conference. We have just confirmed that James S. Bielo, author of Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study, will take Brent's place on the panel.

I will post more updates as they are available. Meanwhile, if you plan to be at the conference, or in the area, please make plans to attend. It's going to be a great discussion!

The Magisterium, delivered right to your door

In the May 7, 2010 issue of Commonweal, Kenneth Woodward offers an extended reflection, "Church of the 'Times': A Dissent," in which he examines the weltanschauung of the editors and staff of the New York Times. I will leave it to my readers to judge for themselves the legitimacy of his overall claims about the newspaper's purported allergy to religions (particularly the Roman Catholic Church). I think that is a worthy conversation to have, though I am not sure this is the forum in which to have it.

However, this one paragraph caught my attention and I wanted to take a few minutes here to make a comment or two about the issue he raises (since I think this is the proper forum for such an issue):

...like the Church of Rome, the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board. There is no issue, local or global, on which these (usually anonymous) writers do not pronounce with a papal-like editorial “we.” Like the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the editorial board is there to defend received truth as well as advance the paper’s political, social, and cultural agendas. One can no more imagine a Times editorial opposing any form of abortion—to take just one of that magisterium’s articles of faith—than imagine a papal encyclical in favor.

In my doctoral dissertation, The Covert Magisterium: Theology, Textuality and the Question of Scripture, I make the suggestion that Bible publishers (and the larger corporations of which many of them are now a part) exercise a de facto magisterial authority over the shape and form of printed Bibles. That, in itself, is a relatively uncontroversial claim.

What interests me about Woodward's assertion above is the ideological power that is brought to bear when these magisterial effects are wedded with certain types of material objects. That editors and corporations control the content (and therefore, to an arguable extent, the possible readings) of books and newspapers is plain. But the Bible is not an ordinary book, just as the Times is no ordinary newspaper, in terms of the relative cultural power wielded by both.

By virtue (is this the proper word?) of their respective material presentations, the editorial decisions that go into the construction of an imprint of a Bible version or an issue of the Times are of an elevated ideological nature. Words in the New York Times are different, in their weight and influence, than similar words found in the Chattanooga Times, for example.

Similarly, though I bemoan the fact, I can cite numerous instances when my students (undergraduate and masters level, both) have pointed to a footnote, chapter heading, or editorial introduction in their various "study Bibles" and quoted it with the authority of Scripture itself. These aspects of printed Scripture that (arguably) are not Scripture perform as a sort of "blurred space" at the margins of scriptural authority. Gerard Genette calls these sorts of additionals the "paratext," and he (along with Phillipe Lejeune) argues that these paratextual elements shape and control how a given reader reads the text.

The "editorial shape" of a printed object is an artifact of larger ideological positionings within a set of cultural disputations. Ancillary to this claim, it is important to distinguish the claim that certain printed objects will have (within a given set of contexts) greater ideological forcefulness than others. This is why, while it might be appropriate to examine the ideologies involved in the editing and printing of an edition of The Joy of Cooking, I would be hesitant (at least in the current set of contexts) to interrogate that object as an example of a (covert) magisterial artifact.

Both the many (and multiplying) imprints of Holy Bibles and The New York Times, however, are currently situated within our culture such that the interrogation of their editorial and paratextual shaping can yield good critical fruit.

For example, Woodward later quotes Times editor Daniel Okrent, who says, “If you are among the groups the Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.”

I interpret this to mean that the editorial position of the Times does not exist in isolation, but rather as a part of a larger set of overlapping ideologies and communities within our cultural landscape. Certain "types" of readers identify with the editorial positions of the Times, and others will feel alienated by them. They are influenced by the Times. But these various groups are also influencing the Times through their economic power (whether or not they purchase the paper, for example, or whether or not they patronize the advertisers within), their reaction to the Times in the wider cultural discourse (articles like Woodward's, for example, as well as the blogosphere). Additionally (but not finally), the Times also exists as an abstracted totem, a crumb that is gnawed as a morsel or hurled as an insult within the over-simplified posturings that pass for political discourse currently (a totem of "Eastern elitism" or "informed journalism," alternately).

So the Times, so the Bible. Or, that is to say, so the many Bibles available as objects within the retail sphere (which, today, is the only sphere that matters). Just as certain readers will not feel at home reading the Times, we might easily be able to think of certain classes of readers made very uncomfortable the The Patriot's Bible, and other classes equally uncomfortable with The Green Bible. The editorial decisions that shape these objects are part of a much larger milieu of cultural and ideological disputes that are not one-way in their influences. The differentiation of Bibles creates hospitable (and inhospitable) ideological and theological space for differing classes of readers. These classes, moreover, are themselves complex and overlapping. In fact, it is the negotiation of publishers, wrestling with demographic data, with as many of these overlapping groups as possible that leads to the multiplicity of Bible imprints currently available.

All this is to say that I think Wooward's observation that the New York Times exists as a type of magisterial entity is right on the money (quite literally). Within the wider ideological landscape we are navigating with this analysis, it is an insight well worth exploring.

American Academy of Religion proposal for a panel to discuss Material Scripture

The following is the text of the proposal we turned in this week to the AAR. We are hopeful the committee will pick it up and let us do the panel. Keep fingers crossed.

From well before the advent of movable-type printing techniques, the Holy Bible has been a marketed object. This fact has only become more apparent in recent decades, with the rise of Bibles increasingly tailored to demographics and identity.

This panel will explore the physical forms that Scripture takes, as it is presented to readers in various iterations as a printed artifact. Thus the phrase, “Material Scripture,” describes a practice of inquiry that seeks to examine the culture of mass-market Bibles in North America by analyzing the Bibles themselves.

Raymond Williams’s argument, that “we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make them subject to quite special and distinct laws,” became the kernel for a method of literary criticism known as “cultural materialism.” This method, most visibly applied to the field of Shakespeare studies through the publication of Dollimore and Sinfeld’s Political Shakespeare (1985), has been adopted, and adapted, in recent years by a group of biblical scholars and theologians. Working under a variety of names, including “Iconic Books,” “Material Religion” and “Material Scripture,” these scholars are creating an international dialogue as to the various methodologies and practicalities of this “materialist” approach to biblical criticism.

This panel proposes to draw together several of the active scholars in this growing field of inquiry. We are at a point where it is appropriate that our discussions have a wider level of participation and become more public. Thus we are proposing this panel as a forum for a series of differing but complementary examples of “materialist” approaches to scripture.

A mass-produced Bible is both highly designed and, to an ever-increasing degree, a “designer” object. Published Bibles that reflect the demographics of certain aspects of American culture and lifestyle preferences are becoming prevalent in the marketplace, and this trend is not necessarily well addressed by the current methods of biblical criticism. In this panel, Brent Plate, Timothy Beal, and David Dault will offer varying perspectives on a more “materialist” approach to the printed Bible. These explorations of the physicality and genealogy of printed Bibles open up avenues of ideological and theological critique that stretch far back into the history of modern versions of Scripture and into the history of Western print culture itself. Dori Parmenter will respond, and James Watts will chair the proceedings.

The panelists, and their projects, are as follows:

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate (Hamilton College), “Looking at Words” – Typeface and page design matters. The matter (i.e., materiality and thus visuality) of words is as important as the semantics of them. “The Word” in Gothic font means one thing. “The Word” in Helvetica means something quite different. The presentation includes two key points. First, printed words are images, and the so-called Word-Image split ignores the visuality of script, typeface, and layout. Second, interpretation is emotional and affective. There can then be no clear-cut distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts and the iconic and performative dimensions. The rationality of semantics is not separable from the experiential appearance of words. They impact us emotionally, rationally, and, usually, subliminally.

Timothy K. Beal (Case Western Reserve University), “The Materiality of the Bible as Icon” – This multimedia presentation will incorporate a series of cultural representations of the Bible. The initial part of the presentation will involve a montage of images from film and video that demonstrate how the physical presence of the Bible in such representations can function in a totemic or iconic fashion. A brief theoretical reflection upon and discussion of the montage will follow. In this discussion, Beal will examine how the “cultural iconicity” of the Bible seems to be able to contain the plural materialities of Scripture — and how far that iconicity can be stretched to include new and radically different material forms.

David Dault (Christian Brothers University), “From Cultural Materialism to Material Scripture: Developing a Functional Methodology” – This paper will take a step back from the practices of material criticism represented by the first two papers, and offer an analysis of the developing process of material biblical criticism. “Material Scripture” will be presented as an ethically based ideological critique of the practice of"embedding" theologies and hermeneutic guidance into the visual and paratextual corpus of published Bibles, and some initial methodologies for its practice will be identified.

Response to the presentations will come from Dori Parmenter (Spalding University), and the session will be chaired by James Watts (Syracuse University), both of whom have worked in developing the “Iconic Scriptures” project, based at Syracuse University, which has approached a similar range of concerns with a different set of methodologies and assumptions. The inclusion of this alternative approach will, it is hoped, lead to a rich and generative discussion of the wider issues at stake in these disparate approaches to scripture.
Abstract

A mass-produced Bible is both highly designed and, to an ever-increasing degree, a “designer” object. Published Bibles that reflect the demographics of certain aspects of American culture and lifestyle preferences are becoming prevalent in the marketplace, and this trend is not necessarily well addressed by the current methods of biblical criticism. In this panel, Brent Plate, Timothy Beal, and David Dault will offer varying perspectives on a more “materialist” approach to the printed Bible. These explorations of the physicality and genealogy of printed Bibles open up avenues of ideological and theological critique that stretch far back into the history of modern versions of Scripture and into the history of Western print culture itself. Dori Parmenter will respond and James Watts will chair the session.

Jesus Built my Hot Rod, Redux

A couple of years ago, when I got started analyzing the material aspects of Scripture, it was as a fun continuation of my work in my doctoral dissertation. I wrote the dissertation, in part, as a meditation on The Golfer's Bible, from Holman Christian Bible Publishers. I was intrigued then, as I am today, with the blatant (crass?) melding of American consumer recreation and lifestyle activities with the physical objects we call Bibles.

Now this is not the place to launch into a tirade about these practices. Maybe, in fact, these actions by publishers to make the Bible "more accessible" are not so bad. I have my opinions, obviously, but I will also admit that those opinions have shifted back and forth as I continue this research. So I will let the reader, ultimately, be her own judge on these matters.

But sometimes it gets hard to restrain myself.

So in earlier posts I have also alluded to the Mossy Oak Personal Size Giant Print Bible from Thomas Nelson. I also quoted a little from its introduction in the previous post. I will have more to say, in the coming months, about this particular Bible (it forms part of a chapter in my forthcoming book). For now, I will simply gesture to it again, saying it was a stranger find for me, at first, than the Golfer's Bible. For a long time, it was my favorite example of this phenomenon of "designer Scripture." Moreover, when I tell people what I do, they often respond by asking me, "So what's the best Bible?" or some variant of that question. Because I think that might be the wrong question to ask, for several months the Mossy Oak has been the Bible I recommended [1].

Let us thrust all that to the side, however. Ladies and gentlemen, do not doubt for a moment we cannot push the envelope. We can. Do not doubt for a moment that a Bible can become weirder, more absurd. It can. We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better. Stronger. Faster.

Ladies and gentleman, start your engines. I give you... The NASCAR Stock Car Racing Edition of the Holy Bible, from Zondervan publishers.

I first saw this Bible in the Memphis BookStar a few weeks before Christmas, and was going to write about it then, but I got distracted by the holidays and then the birth of my daughter. Now Hugh Pyper has written a really good piece analyzing the NASCAR Bible for the SBL Forum.

Read the full text of his column here.

One of the things you notice about the Bible, when leafing through it, is that the "inspirational" portions (which highlight various celebrities on the stock car racing circuit, along with some bromides about the role of various Gospel passages in inspiring them to greatness) are sort of randomly spaced throughout the book, leading to some interesting ideological juxtapositions.

Pyper then points out how these sections, printed as they are on a different paper stock from the "rest" of the Bible, give the Bible a strange tactile feel. He surmises that the publishers did not give much thought to the overall effect of these juxtapositions:

In the end, however, what is most striking about the SCR version is how little interaction there is between the inserts and the text. The full-color glossy inserts contrast with the plain printed texts and tend to be the points at which the Bible falls open. The distribution of the articles appears to be random and mechanical, spaced equally throughout the Old and New Testaments. Although the inserts include some, but surprisingly few, biblical references, they seldom urge the reader to refer to wider passages in the Bible and certainly give no advice on how to tackle the more difficult texts that surround them.

This observation about the materiality of the product is exactly right, as far as I am concerned. When we examine these sorts of Bibles, we should be asking precisely these questions. How does the overall effect, visual, tactile, and ideological, influence the reader's possible reading sof the "bare text"?

At the end, Pyper offers a scathing conclusion: "What this version represents, almost in spite of itself, then, is the relevance of the Bible as symbol in the continuing debate over the nature of American identity, and the irrelevance of much of the Bible as text in that debate."

While I am quite certain, trends being what they are, that this will by no means be the weirdest Bible we shall ever see, it is the current reigning champion. In their race to reach all manner of audiences among the "unchurched," I am waiting for the publishers to come out with versions of Scripture targeted on other popular lifestyle demographics, like the readers of Soldier of Fortune and Penthouse. Though I am usually not one for slippery slopes, given what is on offer already on the bookshelves, I fear we will not have all that long to wait.


[1] I should, and probably will, devote a post in the near future to this phenomenon. I hang out a lot in the Bible sections of bookstores, and it makes sense that the people I run into might be looking for guidance from knowledgeable folks like me or the bookstore clearks to help them choose. But this question also comes up in some stranger settings (like my dissertation defense, for example). I'd like to explore the desire that lives at the heart of readers to have the "right" Bible or the "best" Bible. My short answer, then as now as always, comes back to where I consistently find authority and "rightness" to dwell: not in any Bible itself, but in the institutions and interpretations that surround a given Bible. So, kids, if you want to know the best Bible to read, go ask your priest.


Note: Material Scripture blog is an Amazon Marketplace Affiliate. If you choose to purchase an item through the links in this post, we will receive a modest commission.

Jesus Built my Hot Rod

Gunsights made by Michigan arms manufacturer Trijicon have come under fire in the past few days for their inclusion of Bible verses and references on items sold to the American Military.

There's an article and audio commentary giving an overview of this story here.

Some news sources are describing the inscriptions as "secret Bible codes," which is a little misleading. These inscriptions were certainly not hidden or obscured. For example, anyone with scant biblical knowledge might look at the "JN8:12" marking on the side of the Trijicon ACOG gunsight and at least suspect it to be a New Testament reference.

This issue has added fuel to the ongoing debates surrounding religious freedoms in the military, as well as concerns about the overtones of "holy war" between Christianity and Islam that haunt our current overseas campaigns.

The use of religious inscriptions to mark or "bless" material objects, from gunsights to money, certainly raises some even deeper questions than these, of course.

Then again, where is the bright line between a weapon that sports, say, a reference to 2 Corinthians 4:6 ("For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."), and something like the Mossy Oak Brand Camouflage Bible, which says in its introduction,

Life can be much like learning to hunt. God says in 2 Timothy 2:15, "Be diligent and present yourself approed to God..." Good hunters must become skillful, prepared and diligent. The greatest "hunt" in life is seeking a relationship with the greatest huntsmaster of all, Jesus Christ [p. iii].

Imprimaturs and prooftexts for all sorts of lifestyles of violence, here. Where's Stanley Hauerwas when we need him?

Iconic Books Blog

One of the highlights of the recent American Academy of Religion conference I attended was getting introduced to Jim Watts of Syracuse University. He, along with Dori Parmenter, are the motive forces behind the Iconic Books project:

Iconic books are texts revered as objects of power rather than just as words of instruction, information, or insight. In religious and secular rituals around the globe, people carry, show, wave, touch and kiss books and other texts, as well as read them. This blog chronicles such events and activities. For more about iconic books, see the link to the Iconic Books Project.

As soon as Jim and I started talking, it was clear we had been approaching the same field of study from differing but complementary trajectories. His project is an exploration of how the books we encounter become themselves objects of veneration and sites of worship. Hence the study of Iconic Books explores the sociological construction of these sites of veneration - that is to say, it looks at how the book exerts power and influence by its physical presence (as opposed to what is often thought to be the proper site of a book's power: "what it says" or "what it means"). I think this emphasis opens up fascinating possibilities for analysis, especially as we move into these questions of the "resurgence of the religious" in public life.

Material Scripture's complementary trajectory attempts to explore Althusser's claim that "ideology has a material existence." Where Watts's project looks at the physical object being transformed sociologially into an ideological signifier, Material Scripture looks closely at how theologies (as ideologies) are transformed into the layered materiality of "book-ness."

In both cases the question of materiality is paramount, but the methodologies are distinct enough to be generative of some deep conversations in the years to come. I am very thankful to my friends Tim Beal (who himself has a new book on the material study of the Bible coming out) and Wilson Dickinson for making sure Jim and I got the chance to meet.

Embedded Scriptures

"Materialist criticism refuses to privilege [Scripture] in the way that [biblical] criticism has done hitherto; as Raymond Williams argued in an important essay, we cannot separate [the Scriptures] from other kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make them subject to quite special and distinct laws. This approach necessitates a radical contextualising of [Scripture] which eliminates the old divisions between [Scripture] and its 'background', text and context... This attention to social processes has far-reaching consequences. To begin with it leads us beyond idealist [Scriptural] criticism--that is preoccupied with supposedly universal truths which find their counterpart in 'man's' essential nature; the criticism in which history, if acknowledged at all, is seen as inessential or a constraint transcended in the affirmation of a transhistorical human condition."

-- Jonathan Dollimore, adapted from his essay, "Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, Dollimore and Sinfield, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988)

(In the quotation above I have used the term "Scripture" to replace the phrase "arts and literature" that appears in the original.)

One of the key tenets of any cultural materialist approach to Scripture would be the suspension of the assumption that "Scripture" can be spoken of as a natural given, or an uncontested unity. Thus the task of any material theology of Scripture would involve the foregrounding of the embeddedness of Scriptures into communities and in a variety of physical forms.

Thus there is a difficulty in agreeing with certain general claims about the nature of Scripture. For example, John Webster's assertion that "the texts of the canon are human realities annexed by divine use" ("The Dogmatic Location of the Canon," Neue Zeitschrift fuer systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 43, no. 1, 2001, p. 32) will, following Kelsey, function properly as a claim within a confessional tradition, but will not and cannot function as a general claim.

In other words, the claim that the canon has a dogmatic location (and that it can be thus mislocated) is a claim that itself must necessarily occupy a dogmatic, not a natural or general, location. It is an argument made from within an ecclesial location--not from a universal vantage point.

The purpose here is not to single Webster out. Rather, it is to articulate that a materialist approach to Scripture does not necessarlity deny the "holiness" of Scripture--the divine "annexing" spoken of above. This holiness, however, must not be understood as a simple given or a universal quality (which is often the arguement made tacitly by theologians) but rather as a very complex interplay of an object (or, more properly, objects) embedded into one of several contentious communities in a given time and place.

This complex context is too-often streamlined in the classroom or in our discussions about Scripture. At the root, the Bible is a book, and thus functions like a book. That is to say, each copy of the Bible we might consider has a complex genealogy: a material history of its publication and distribution, as well as an ideological history of its assembly from fragments, previous translations and artifacts.

From a dogmatic vantage point, we can certainly make the confessional claim that this material genealogy has been "annexed." What we cannot claim, however, is that such annexing somehow renders the Bible as a special case above or untouched by material circumstances. That is to say, no matter how holy the book is, it can still be studied and examined simply and justifiably by theologians as a book.