ABSTRACT
This chapter explores early evangelical understandings of the Bible, charting its many and varied uses, primarily devotionally, but also as an inspiration to activism of many kinds. The history of evangelicals and the Bible has also witnessed a number of new developments. The wide range of those developments underscores the depth of evangelical commitment to Scripture but also the complexity of that commitment. While the early generations of evangelicals were concerned with the uses of the Scriptures, the chapter argues that later generations have been more preoccupied with understanding its nature and defending the Bible against attack. From one angle, evangelical appropriations of Scripture have represented only a refinement of dogmas and practices extending back to the dawn of Christianity itself. From another angle, evangelicals since the eighteenth century have generated from the Bible an extraordinary range of wildly creative, confusingly diverse, and often internally contradictory attitudes, uses, convictions, images, and material objects.
