ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in understanding the roles scriptures play in the lives of individuals and institutions. This interest really is new, for, although there were repeated attempts by individual scholars in the twentieth century to develop a comparative theory of scriptures, only recently has there been a sustained effort to figure out what is going on, socially and psychologically, in scriptural traditions. Not surprisingly, empirical inquiry has shown that many common assumptions about the social use of scriptures are partial truths, systematically distorted by the ideological function they serve in scripturalist traditions (Levering 1989). In earlier work (Malley 2004), I have shown how, from the very definition of “the Bible” to the demarcation of scriptural authority, evangelical Christians in the United States recruit cognitive predispositions, institutionally distributed and framed by largely tacit conventions, to find in the Bible an inexhaustible fount of meaning. Eva Keller (2005) has described the epistemological function of Bible study and how it figures in the intellectual life of Malagasy Christians. James Bielo (2009b) has examined the social interactions involved in Bible study and shown why this form of social interaction is such an important dimension of scripturalist Christianity. Strikingly similar dynamics have shown up in a variety of contexts, suggesting that it makes sense to speak of a global Biblicist tradition (Bielo 2009a), within which differences can be especially revealing (Engelke 2007).
