Revolutionary Book: Did the vernacular Bible create individual liberty? - Wide as the Waters: The story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired - book review

Reason, Dec, 2001 by Mark Goldblatt

Wide as the Waters: The story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired, by Benson Bobrick, New york: Simon & Schuster, 379 pages, $26

IN A SENSE, to call the King James Bible a monumental achievement misses the mark. Monuments tend to stand apart from the things they celebrate. The King James Bible is, without question, a monument to the rhythmic power of the English language, but it also circumscribes the language itself, defining its linguistic and metaphoric possibilities--and thus the possibilities of how we think about ourselves and our place in the world. It is at once a cornerstone and a keystone, the prosaic base of our legal codes and the poetic altitude of our cultural aspirations. If its cadences were not by now ingrained in the mental breathing of every fluent speaker of English, you, the reader, would not sense the necessity of the period I am about to type.

Benson Bobrick's Wide as the Waters is, first and foremost, a highly readable account of how the English Bible came to be, from its genesis in the pre-Reformation intuitions of John Wycliffe in the late 1300s to its consummation during the reign of King James I in the early 1600s. More broadly, however, Bobrick argues that the appearance of the English Bible quickened "the development of the vernacular" and led, eventually, to "the origin of a culture belonging to the masses...that expressed the popular will." The ascendancy of democracy in the West, according to Bobrick, should be understood as an inevitable consequence of the historical movement to translate the Bible from the Churchsanctioned Latin of St. Jerome into the spoken languages of Europe. This isn't as original a thesis as Bobrick seems to think it is. Still, he brings considerable storytelling skills to the writing, and he has produced a history of substance and value.

It was the Englishman Wycliffe who, more than a century before the German Martin Luther, began churning out a series of polemical treatises raising the theological issues that would eventually coalesce into the Protestant Reformation. In these tracts, mostly written between 1378 and 1380, Wycliffe took up such volatile matters as the literal truth and sufficiency of the Scriptures, the nature of the eucharistic Presence, and the extent of papal power. Wycliffe was drawn especially to the Augustinian doctrine of predestination--the notion that people's souls were ticketed to heaven or hell regardless of their actions--and the corollary distinction between the visible Church, comprising all who proclaim themselves Christians, and the invisible Church, comprising an Elect who are actually predestined for salvation. Wycliffe's reasoning was straightforward enough: In the first place, God's omniscience implied that he foreknew the outcome of individual lives in advance of their being lived; in the second place, Jesus' sacrifice on the cross had been sufficient and complete and didn't need to be supplemented by human works. What was asked of the Christian was simply faith, itself an unmerited gift from God, and at the root of that faith was the Bible--which, like Jesus' sacrifice, was also sufficient and complete.

Rome, naturally, saw things quite differently--and declared Wycliffe's writings heretical. A 1,000-year tradition had established the Catholic Church's function as intermediary between the individual and God. The collective wisdom of Catholicism, embodied in the inspired judgments of its Church councils, was regarded as equal in authority to the Scriptures themselves. Of the seven Catholic sacraments, for example, only two--baptism and the Eucharist--could claim unambiguous scriptural precedent. The other five--confirmation, confession and penance, ordination, marriage, and anointing the sick--emerged through conciliar deliberations in the course of Church history.

What especially got under Wycliffe's skin, as it would Luther's, was the practice of selling "indulgences." The theory behind indulgences, as Bobrick explains, began with the premise that the saints canonized by the Church always accumulated more spiritual merits than were needed for their own salvations; their "excess credits" were thus "stored in a celestial deposit box" upon which the Pope was able to "draw and make transfers" to augment the merits of whoever happened to be lacking (and willing to pay, of course). Clearly, this practice had no unambiguous scriptural precedent; its sole justification seemed to be the authority of the Church.

For Wycliffe, that wasn't enough: "Were there a hundred popes...their opinions in matters of faith should not be accepted except in so far as they are founded on Scripture itself." The Bible was therefore the key; if the common man could get at it, could make sense of it himself, the intermediary function of the Church would be rendered moot. Thus, he and a group of his Oxford cohorts set about translating the Bible into English.

Wycliffe's efforts at Christian reform are a textbook case of having the right idea at the wrong time. The appearance of an English Bible seems, in retrospect, inevitable. It seemed less so in the late 1300s, if only for the simple reason that not many people knew how to read. (Gutenberg didn't develop his printing press until 1455, so there wasn't much to read even if you knew how.) Nor was the intermediary role of the Church viewed by the common folk of England as particularly objectionable. The Latin mass they attended must have seemed otherworldly indeed, the priest imbued with strange occult powers, striding across the sanctuary, uttering deep, sonorous syllables and eliciting unthinking responses, building toward a climax in which the Host was raised high and then mysteriously altered by the sacred words "Hoc est corpus" ("Here is His body"). It was that very phrase which, centuries later, in a more anti-Roman climate, would be garbled into "hocus pocus"--meaning a cheap bit of theatrical magic.