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EDITORIAL

‘Clergy Reading Habits and the Future of Biblical Studies’

Dr. Helen Bond, Associate Editor (UK)University of Edinburgh, UK

In early 2000, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (a thinking person’sbreakfast dose of news and comment) polled a number of practisingChristians, asking whether they believed the ‘literal truth’ of a numberof Bible stories – the creation, the virginal conception, Jesus’ resurrec-tion and so on. When the results were in and discussed, the presenterexpressed some amazement that even some church leaders had a ratherrelaxed attitude towards the historicity of these key elements of Chris-tian faith.

At the time, I thought the whole thing was rather amusing: howquaint of the BBC to dream up such a survey, and what blunt categoriesto employ. As the morning continued, however, I began to feel increas-ingly uneasy. The Today program’s presenters and editorial team arepeople of undoubted intellectual ability; their ‘intended hearer’ issomeone who understands the nuances of political debate and can evenbe trusted on matters of some scientific complexity. Why, then, aredebates on biblical studies reduced to kindergarten level? Why is theresuch mass ignorance, even amongst otherwise educated people, aboutmodern scholarly debate? And why do so many people (at least in theUK) still think you have to choose between science and religion?

Smugly cocooned in my university Divinity department, I concludedthat the problem lay with the clergy. If the good news that large sec-tions of the Bible were meant to be taken as myth rather than literalfact wasn’t getting out, it must be down to the churches. Ministers, Ithought, were too quick to shy away from difficult matters in sermons,too busy (or condescending) to treat them in Bible studies, and tooeager to embrace what might be called ‘social issues’ rather than hard matters of biblical interpretation. No wonder intelligent teenagersdesert the church in droves, unable with any kind of integrity to signup to Sunday school stories so much at variance with what they arebeginning to know of ‘real life’. And so every Christmas we have a

© 2005 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

poorly informed debate (often whipped up by the media) on poor oldMary’s sexual status, and every Easter the key question is what acamera trained on the empty tomb would have recorded. As is oftenthe case in modern life, crucial matters are lost in a mass of trivia until,in the end, we cannot tell the difference between the two.

A recent report from Duke University’s web site ‘Pulpit and Pew’has, however, caused me to rethink things.1 The report asked over onethousand American clergy from eight denominations how much timethey spend reading each week, excluding sermon preparation, andwhich three authors they read most often in their work as pastors. Asecond survey asked a number of Protestant clergy to list the last threebooks they read on any subject and which journals they read mostoften. The report, of course, could only hope to be impressionistic; it isas difficult to work out average lengths of time spent doing certainactivities as it is calculating working hours, especially in a job wherework spills over into the rest of life, and it is by no means impossiblethat some ministers exaggerated their reading activities. Nevertheless,the results are quite revealing. The average minister spends four hours a week reading; Episcopalians tend to read for five hours whileNazarenes spend only two, and a staggering ten per cent of clergyspend only one hour or less.

The list of useful authors is also instructive. The Catholic listincludes, as might be expected, John Paul II and Karl Rahner; biblicalscholars are represented by Raymond Brown and, somewhat lowerdown the list, William Barclay. ‘Mainline Protestants’ profess to readMarcus Borg on the New Testament (the only member of the JesusSeminar to make it onto any list) and Walter Brueggemann on the Old.‘Conservative Protestants’ read Matthew Henry and Charles Spurgeon,but no modern, mainstream biblical scholar appears on this particularlist. The only author to make it to the top twelve of all three lists wasC.S. Lewis, suggesting, as the report’s author Jackson W. Carroll putsit, that to a large extent ‘the three traditions live in distinct intellectualand cultural worlds’. What is more, these are male dominated worlds.The only woman to appear on any of the top twelve lists is BarbaraBrown Taylor (at number twelve for ‘mainline Protestants’), an Epis-copal priest and lecturer in Spirituality at Columbia Theological Sem-inary. Other women featured both lower down this particular list andon that of Catholics, but not a single ‘conservative Protestant’ put anyfemale author in his or her top three most useful writers.

More interesting still is a comparison of these lists of named authorswith the list of actual books that clergy are reading. Here we have lists

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1 The report is entitled ‘Pastors’ Picks: What Preachers are Reading’ by Jackson W.Carroll and can be found at www.pulpitandpew.duke.edu/pastorspicks.html.

only for ‘mainline’ and ‘conservative’ Protestants, but the discrepan-cies are again quite revealing. Only one author (Philip Yancey) makesit onto both lists for ‘mainline Protestants’ (many put his book What’sSo Amazing about Grace? published in 2002 amongst the last three books they read). There are a number of popular theological works inthis list: Bruce Wilkinson’s The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to theBlessed Life (2000), Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church (1995),Kathleen Norris’ blend of ‘history, theology, story-telling, etymology,and memoir’, Amazing Grace (1999); and general self-help in the shapeof Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Dealwith Change in Your Work and Your Life (1998). But, in general, this grouptends to read novels, particularly those with a biblical, theological, orspiritual angle. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is in top position, fol-lowed by Jan Karon’s Mitford series (cozy, light-hearted tales of FatherTim, a rector and lifelong bachelor), Barbara Kingsolver’s PoisonwoodBible (1998; the story of Nathan Price, ‘a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959’); TimLaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series (the story of life after the‘rapture of the saints’); John Grisham’s A Painted House (2001; there areno lawyers here, but rather the story of seven-year old Luke in 50s ruralBaptist Arkansas); P.D. James’ Death in Holy Orders (2003); and AnitaDiamant’s The Red Tent (1998). In contrast to the earlier list, the numberof female novelists in this collection is quite striking.

The list for ‘conservative Protestants’ is rather different. This time,three authors make it onto both lists (John C. Maxwell, Philip Yancey,and Rick Warren). Only one group of novels appears here (Tim LaHayeand Jerry Jenkins’ apocalyptically inspired Left Behind series), curiouslysitting alongside Steve Wohlberg’s anti-apocalyptic Exploding the Israel Deception (1996). All the rest are works on pastoral leadership and popular spirituality by evangelical authors: Bruce Wilkinson’s ThePrayer of Jabez; three works by Brooklyn pastor Jim Cymbala and DeanMerrill, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire: What Happens When God’s Spirit Invadesthe Hearts of His People? (2003), Fresh Faith (1991) and Fresh Power (2003);Charles W. Colson, Nancy Pearcey and Harold Fickett’s How Now ShallWe Live? (1999); Christian Schwartz’ Natural Church Development: AGuide to Eight Essential Qualities of Healthy Churches (1996); and TommyTenney’s The God Chasers (1999). [Journals read by the two groups ofProtestants also reveal similar trends. Some journals are common toboth lists, particularly those concerned with practical matters (Leader-ship, Christianity Today) or current affairs (Newsweek, Time); otherwisethe two groups favor journals reflecting their own theological outlooks.Disappointingly, Conversations in Religion and Theology does not seemto be read by either group!]

Of course, we should beware of reading too much into these lists.Clergy were asked to name the last three books they read on any subject

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– an instruction which automatically opens up more lightweightreading, the kind of book one might read before bed or on holiday. And pastors need to keep up to date with popular culture and currentaffairs. If asked the same question, I would have to list a P.D. Jamesand Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent amongst books I have read in the lastsix months (along with countless other novels). Yet, the fact remainsthat the list of ‘most useful authors’ does not generally coincide withthe list of actual authors read (though it is closer for conservatives than‘mainliners’), suggesting that the former list is more than a touch aspirational. Like many an undergraduate, certain clergy folk may wellhave listed authors they believed they should be consulting, or wouldhave consulted had time and other concerns permitted. Yet even thislist, as we saw earlier, contained very little in the way of modern bib-lical scholars; there is little that would indicate that clergy are keepingup with the recent surge of interest in the historical Jesus, the revolu-tion in our understanding of first century Judaism, or advances in thestudy of gender in ancient documents. In concluding the report, Carrollnotes:

Unfortunately, these preferences leave out works of serious theology, bib-lical interpretation, history and social analysis . . . the overall impressionis that clergy do not read very deeply. Although they may read regularly,what they read seems to be relatively light fare and pragmaticallyfocused.

I have not been able to locate any comparable analysis for British clergy,but it seems reasonable to suppose that their reading habits are similar.While the Church of Scotland, for example, organizes short courses for its ministers, often led by university scholars, the books reviewedin the denominational magazine Life and Work are all concerned withthe practicalities of ministry, youth work, or the future of the kirk. The Church of England’s excellent website includes the Church HouseBookshop which catalogues and reviews a wide range of books oneverything from biblical commentaries to church architecture,2 thoughit is difficult to know which books are being ordered (there doesn’tappear to be a sales ranking) and – more importantly – read.

Perhaps this should not be a surprise. We are all far too busy far toomuch of the time, clergy perhaps more than most. It is often hard to justifytaking an afternoon out to catch up with reading when there are morepressing things to be done. There may also be sometimes a sense thatthere are more important issues on the agenda than keeping up to datewith the ivory towers of biblical scholarship. Many books on biblical

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2 The website can be found at www.cofe.anglican.org.

studies are outrageously expensive (particularly in Britain where it isoften cheaper to buy from Amazon.com and pay shipping than to buy inthis country); you can buy half a shelf of popular books for the price ofone biblical study from Brill. And in the evening, when the phone hasfinally stopped ringing and the last visitor has been politely seen over thethreshold, a novel is infinitely more appealing than the latest SNTSmonograph (I speak as a contributor to that worthy series).

If, then, clergy themselves are not keeping up to date with new ideasand approaches in biblical studies, the problems with which we beganbecome all the more pressing. More worryingly still, at least in a Britishcontext, is the lack of schoolchildren taking advanced study in theBible. While Religious Studies is the fastest growing school exam atboth GCSE and A level (taken at ages 16 and 18 respectively), the areasof growth are ethics, philosophy and contemporary religions, while less than ten per cent of candidates take papers in biblical studies. Thechoice of paper is largely made by teachers rather than students, andprobably indicates a number of things: the interests and competencesof most teachers in Religious Education; the lack of good solid text-books; and the general disengagement of society in general with theBible. The rise of RE in schools is having a knock-on effect on univer-sity admissions in Religious Studies and Philosophy, but again anec-dotal evidence suggests that students are not opting to do biblicalstudies in large numbers but rather philosophy (suggesting that theproblem is not an aversion to critical thinking). The long term progno-sis of such a trend is not good: biblical studies departments will comeunder increasing pressure to ‘downsize’; the discipline will simplybecome a branch of ‘Christianity’; and discussion of biblical issues willbecome ever more banal.

It seems to me, then, that it is no use blaming clergy or schools forsociety’s lack of critical engagement with the Bible; in the end, it is upto biblical scholars to promote ideas and to foster debate. We can sitback and wait for films like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ to stirup debate – or hope for a blockbusting epic on Paul’s journeys (perhapsplayed by Brad Pitt?) to raise interest in the way that films like Gladi-ator or Troy have done for Classics departments and the study of Latin,but we might have a long wait. In any case, the discussion of The Passionin Britain seemed to bypass the gospels and historical questions relat-ing to the death of Jesus altogether, in favor of what different faith com-munities made of the film’s alleged anti-semitism; we heard more fromJewish and Moslem leaders than from biblical scholars. We need to takematters into our own hands, to write books to be read, avoiding jargonand needless complexity; to write textbooks both for schools and col-leges; to contribute to documentaries and TV/radio discussions whenasked; to offer to lead Bible studies; to write columns in newspapers;to promote journals like this one that disseminate the contributions of

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a range of major books; and to review the work of others in a fair and accessible manner, emphasizing what is new and important, ratherthan simply using a book review to mount our own particular hobbyhorses.

Naturally I realize that we, like clergy, have far too much to do –more meetings, more bureaucracy, more endless quality assurance. InBritain the government’s Research Assessment Exercise forces us toproduce a minimum of one monograph and three articles (all prefer-ably of international quality) every six or seven years. Finding time tocomplete the necessary research is hard, especially for those of us whowish to have some kind of life outside academia. Nevertheless, it isnecessary to keep the question of how to disseminate our research atleast in the back of our minds. There are examples of good practicehere: Tom Wright’s Everyone series; Bart Ehrman’s Truth and Fiction inthe Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What we Really Know about Jesus,Mary Magdalene, and Constantine (OUP, 2004) – an accessible rebuttal of the phenomenally successful novel by Dan Brown; and the JesusSeminar – whatever we may think of their results, their energy andenthusiasm for promoting discussion is surely a good thing. Findingavenues to disseminate ideas does not have to be time-consuming (andwho knows, we might even make a pound or two while we are at it).

All this is not an optional extra – it is a necessity. If we do not doanything to promote biblical discussion, theological literacy will con-tinue to descend at an alarming rate, the biblical texts will be treatedas ‘literal truths’ with all the inherent dangers in such an approach, andwe will only have ourselves to blame.

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