Two Ways to Read the Bible in the (Very) Long Reformation

Abstract

In the 1630s, William Chillingworth famously and misleadingly claimed that ‘the Bible only is the religion of Protestants’. This chapter asks: in what sense? Plainly the Bible was central to Protestantism, but in what way? Against the positions advanced by Alister McGrath and Brad Gregory, and taking its lead from categories suggested by Erasmus in his 1524 polemic against Luther, it argues that from the beginning of the Reformation, Protestants used their Bibles in two parallel ways. First, as a polemical tool, indeed a weapon, requiring prooftexting precision and used in close-quarters textual combat to thrash out disagreements over doctrinal issues. This is the pattern of usage that has attracted the most attention and which has generated by far the largest paper trail. But also, second, as a devotional tool. Luther’s well-known willingness to cherry-pick from the Bible represents, not a lapse into hypocrisy, but a distinct understanding of what the Bible is, what its inspiration means, and how Christians can come to depend upon it: an understanding which runs on through Calvin and the magisterial Reformed theologians before it unravelled at the edges of the Radical Reformation, and especially during the English Revolution. This article traces, in particular, the often-obscured but pervasive history of this ‘devotional-inspirational’ use of the Bible during the long Reformation, observing its impact down to the present, and arguing that it very often underpins and makes possible the more visible polemical-textual arguments. And it argues that although the two modes of reading often appear contradictory, they appear in practice to have been mutually dependent.