Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States

Seth Perry provides an interesting and insightful treatment of how people sought to authorize their religious behavior by imbedding it in the imagined world of the biblical text. Scholars have long studied the prominence of the Bible in shaping religious America in the early national period. But they have tended to focus on the conceptual or theological authority that the Bible possessed as the supreme religious warrant for American Protestants, against the backdrop of anxiety over social disorder in the newly secular nation. Perry shifts our attention to consider how this theoretical authority functioned at the level of lived religion. In doing so he takes readers on a journey into the lesser-known realm of charismatic Protestantism. The authority of the Bible, Perry writes, cannot be thought of simply as a quality that inheres in a written text. Rather, it must be understood in terms of the relationships that it created among those who employed that text to comprehend their world and direct their actions in it. To characterize this nexus of relationships, Perry employs Vincent L. Wimbush's concept of scripturalization, meaning that that status, nature, and content of scriptural texts are in a continual, dynamic process of change as they are used by religious actors. But it also refers to the ways religious actors inscribe their lives with scriptural status as a way of securing a form of religious warrant. In a profound sense, American Protestants understood themselves as immersed in a world thoroughly suffused with biblical realities, such that it was almost impossible to distinguish between the two

Epistemology · History of religions · Meaning (existential · Political science · Protestantism · Realm · Religious experience · Sociology · Warrant · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy · Religious studies

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