Read an excerpt from Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels

PROFESSOR ELAINE PAGELS (reading from the Book of Revelation): “And another sign appeared in heaven; a great red dragon with ten horns and seven diadems on his head. His tail swept down a third of the stars in heaven and cast them to earth. And the dragon stood before….”

BOB FAW, correspondent: For almost two thousand years, that fantastic, sometimes nightmarish language of the Book of Revelation has confused and inspired, It was the inspiration for  paintings by William Blake, for the poetry of John Milton. Lyrics like “he hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword”: that too came from Revelation. Despite its profound impact, noted biblical scholar Elaine Pagels says Revelation remains “the strangest book in the Bible” and “the least understood.”

PAGELS: It’s the most controversial book in the Bible. It’s always been that. Some people thought it didn’t belong there at all. And other people wanted to throw it out. Others love it, and some hate it. Some Christians never talk about it; some people never stop talking about it. A lot of people throughout the country were using it as a predictor of current events and using it as part of their impetus to get into the Iraq war. People could apply this sort of war against good and evil to almost any situation you were involved with.

FAW: Pagels, author of the acclaimed book The Gnostic Gospels, was one of the first scholars to study ancient scrolls unearthed in Egypt in 1945. What the scholars found is that the Book of Revelation was not written by the author of the Gospel of John but by a different John living on the isle of Patmos off what is now Turkey.

PAGELS: He seems to be a Jewish prophet who is a refugee from a war in his own country, which was Judea, from Jerusalem, where a war had broken out in 66 to the year 70 when the Romans came in with 60,000 troops and totally destroyed Jerusalem.

FAW: It was, she writes, John’s “cry of anguish.”

PAGELS: This book picks up the language from the prophets and speaks about Rome and the leaders of Rome, the emperors, as a huge bright red dragon with seven heads, seven horns on its head. It was anti-Roman propaganda, because John was devastated by what had happened to his people, what had happened to the city of Jerusalem.

FAW: He writes it in language of dreams and nightmares.

PAGELS: Yes. It was probably dangerous in the Roman Empire to openly express hostility to Rome, so people would have done it in coded language.

FAW: John’s Book of Revelation targeted the Roman Empire as evil. But nearly 300 years later, when the Roman Empire became Christian, a wily and powerful bishop, Athanasius,  used the Book of Revelation to strengthen his hold on the Christian movement.

PAGELS: He says well it’s not just about the Roman Empire. This is about me fighting my opponents trying to create the orthodox Catholic Church in the fourth century. So he turns it into a story about Christians against other Christians, and that’s taken up later by Martin Luther against Catholics. It’s taken up by Catholics against Martin Luther.  It’s taken up by Catholics against Protestants and Protestants against Catholics, and it keeps on going that way.

FAW: And it was Bishop Athanasius who decreed that the revelation written by John of Patmos would be in the Bible even though most bishops would have left it out, says Pagels.

PAGELS: Most of the list we have of what’s supposed to be the New Testament completely leave this book out. It’s just gone. The one person who puts it in is Bishop Athanasius, and he realized that he could take this imagery of the war of good against evil and turn it against his religious enemies.

FAW: In that treasure trove of scrolls found in Egypt in 1945 there was not just one Book of Revelation. There were several, altogether different than the book that got in the Bible.

PAGELS: Most of them aren’t about the end of the world, and they’re not about judging the good and the evil. These other revelation texts have a different vision of the human race, that the same people could be both cruel and compassionate, that we are more complex than that.

FAW: They would not have been as useful for Bishop Athanasius to consolidate the church. That’s why he chose this particular one?

PAGELS: I think that Athanasius did choose this to consolidate the church and talk about you have to be, you know, orthodox to go up into heaven. Otherwise you fall into the lake of fire. I mean, this had been terrifying images for thousands of years.

FAW: Those images, the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the whore of Babylon—that is the version which resonates even now, largely, says Pagels, because those images can mean whatever a reader wants them to mean.

PAGELS: This book isn’t communicating much that’s cerebral. It’s really about what we hope and what we fear, and it’s as though you take all of your nightmares about plague or destruction or war or torture or natural catastrophe, and you just wrap it into a huge single nightmare, you get the Book of Revelation. But it comes out with hope at the end, so it’s very appealing to people who live in times of huge turmoil.

FAW: I wonder if a reader could come away thinking this book should not be taken as seriously as history has shown it has been taken.

PAGELS: I think you’re right that when you look at a book that’s in the Bible and you start to look at it in historical context, and you say, oh, this person wrote it in that situation, in war, you can say it doesn’t matter as much. It’s not necessarily something that came down from heaven. I’m a historian and that, to me, is an important way of looking at it. It’s not the only way. It’s not the way most religious people look at it. But it seems to me an important way of understanding our tradition.

FAW: Elaine Pagels’ new book, Revelations, may not become a best-seller like The Gnostic Gospels was, but it is already focusing attention on this Princeton professor, who says revelation might not give her comfort but that it does satisfy her curiosity.

PAGELS: I actually find this very compelling, and I am saying why? That’s a question I ask myself. What is it I love about this tradition, this Christian tradition? I wanted to think about how religion works, why people still are very deeply affected by religious language. I wanted to explore that, and this book is a perfect book for that because it’s not about the intellect. It goes straight to the emotions.

FAW: The Book of Revelation—always perplexing and provocative and now seen anew.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Princeton, New Jersey.

RABBI RAVID SHNEVER (Spiritual Leader, Kehila Chadasha and Am Kolel Jewish Renewal Center of Greater Washington): Simchat Torah means “rejoicing with the Torah.” The Torah refers to the scroll of the Torah, which contains the five books of Moses. The day of Simchat Torah is a day that was created by our sages and also by the people over time; it’s not mentioned in the Bible.

It culminates the whole season of holidays that began with Rosh Hashanah. We’re in the month of Tishrei. That’s the seventh month on the Jewish calendar.

Part of the joy of Simchat Torah is being playful with the service. We’ve been doing some pretty heavy stuff throughout the month of Tishrei, and so this is time to kind of really let go a little bit.

One of the major features of the service is the taking the scrolls out from the Aron Hakodesh, from the Ark, and we do what are called hakafot, encirclements. We circle around the room seven times. We often have flags. What we do and other congregations around the country, and also around the world, will often take their hakafot into the streets. It is celebrated in a very joyful way, and with much singing and dancing, and we’re out there in the street dancing for, oh, twenty, thirty minutes. It’s an expression of the love for our Torah, our teachings. It’s also a great way to begin the New Year.

A special feature of the holiday is that we conclude the reading of the Bible, the end of Deuteronomy, and we begin again by reading from Genesis. There’s this wonderful ceremony where we kind of link the two like a wedding, a marriage of the two, and it’s like the end of the scroll and the beginning of the scroll are being wedded, and the teaching is that learning and Torah is a continuous process. There really is no end.

(Male voice): In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…

(Female voice): The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…

(Female voice): For I know that my redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The familiar rhythms and cadences have echoed over four centuries, and believers and nonbelievers alike say it’s impossible to overstate the impact of the King James Version of the Bible.

JON SWEENEY (Author, Verily, Verily): It is the edition of the book, essentially. More than any other book in the world the Bible has influenced us, but this is the edition of the Bible that has influenced us the most.

LAWTON: Jon Sweeney is author of a new book, Verily,Verily, which examines that influence. He says the King James Version—the KJV—has been particularly important in American culture and history.

SWEENEY: It’s the Bible of the speeches of Lincoln. It’s the Bible of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. It’s the Bible of the speeches of Martin Luther King. It’s the basis of cultural identity in the United States more than any other book.

LAWTON: Sweeney’s book is one of many being released for the KJV’s 400th anniversary. All year long, groups around the world are organizing celebrations, from symposia and exhibitions to special projects online. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, Thomas Nelson Publishers is the leading commercial publisher of King James Bibles, and they’re still rolling off the presses. In this factory, workers add thumb indexes to help readers more easily find the various books of the Bible. For the 400th anniversary, Thomas Nelson has released a special limited edition King James Bible.

Today, more copies of contemporary translations may be sold, such as the New International Version or NIV. But the King James Version is still near the top of the list. In just the last 12 months, Thomas Nelson sold more than a million copies of the KJV.

The Bible is the best-selling book in history, and the King James Version of the Bible is the best-selling translation of all time. No one knows exactly how many King James Bibles have been published over the centuries, but experts say it’s likely in the billions.

RON WICK (Bible Collector): The King James is the most printed book in the history of man. It is an amazing thing.

LAWTON: The King James Bible emerged out of a tumultuous religious period in English history. For nearly a millennium, the Latin Vulgate Bible had been considered the only sacred text. As Latin became less used, ordinary people couldn’t understand what they heard when priests read the Bible in church. There were calls for an English vernacular Bible, but scholars who did the translations were branded heretics. In 1401, the English parliament made it a crime punishable by death. Enter William Tyndale, a renegade sixteenth-century scholar who made the first English translation from Hebrew and Greek texts. In 1536, even as King Henry VIII was separating from the Roman Catholic Church, he had Tyndale arrested and executed. But just a year later, it was Henry who authorized the first legal English translation.

LAWTON: Baylor University professor Scott Carroll directs the Green Collection, one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts and artifacts. He says 80 percent of Tyndale’s work ended up in the KJV.

PROFESSOR SCOTT CARROLL: I think he’s an unsung hero in the whole story.

LAWTON: After Henry VIII came a series of English Bibles, all intertwined in the often bloody battles between Catholics and Protestants. When King James I came to the throne, he wanted a version of the Bible that wasn’t tied to a particular movement. He formed a translation committee of scholars.

CARROLL: They were commissioned in 1604 to find the best translations out there and then match them up with the Greek and Hebrew, and if they matched up to take them. When you think about the King James, I think generally people think about—they think it’s a Protestant commodity. But in fact it really was a result, a culmination of Jewish, Catholic, even Greek Orthodox scholarship that led to this publication.

LAWTON: What has been called the “masterpiece by committee” was first published in 1611, and thanks to moveable-type printing, the King James Bible was widely distributed.

CARROLL: The success of the King James Bible is directly tied to the success of the introduction of the Gutenberg printing press and advancements made beyond that, absolutely.

LAWTON: It wasn’t always a smooth process.

CARROLL: 1631—the Wicked Bible, where a typesetter forgot to put the word “not” in and it says “thou shalt commit adultery,” and the poor printer was fined. He had to pull all the books off the market, so he lost his investment in that and he ended up dying in debtor’s prison.

LAWTON: The King James Bible caught on, and for the next three centuries it was virtually the only Bible used in the English-speaking world. Its literary beauty inspired writers and artists, who incorporated the language into their work, from the most beloved classics to the world of pop culture.

SWEENEY: The King James Bible is meant to be read a loud more than any other translation, and I believe that the translators themselves knew that. There were poets in those rooms in the Jerusalem Chamber in Westminster Abbey, and they wanted the Bible to sing. For instance, I Kings 19:12: “And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice….”

LAWTON: The KJV has had a significant impact on spoken English as well.

LAMAR VEST (American Bible Society): Many of those phrases that we hear today everyday, over 350 that have been identified that are used in modern English, came right out of the King James, and most people don’t have a clue that they’re quoting the King James Bible.

SWEENEY: The powers that be; a man after his own heart; signs of the times; eat, drink and be merry; the apple of his eye; can a leopard change his spots; am I my brother’s keeper; seek and ye shall find; the Lord is my shepherd; let my people go; and on and on and on.

LAWTON: The KJV’s poetic rhythms made it easy for people to remember.

Unidentified Man: “For I know the plans I have for you, saith the Lord.”

Unidentified Woman: “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against God.”

LAWTON: Almost every American president has been sworn in with his hand on a King James Bible. KJV language has been the source of some of the most important speeches in America’s history, including Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King Jr.’s most beloved remarks.

Martin Luther King Jr: I’ve seen the Promised Land…

LAWTON: Politicians to this day make King James references.

President Barack Obama: … that I am my brothers’ keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.

LAWTON: For a long time, many Christians considered the KJV the only version authorized by God himself. With the advent of more modern translations, the number of King James-only churches has decreased dramatically. But the KJV has never disappeared from regular use.

BOB SANFORD (Thomas Nelson Publishers): There used to be—maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago a single translation might be the preferred translation of choice for a church. I think those days are gone. Where a pastor, if he’s smart, will use multiple translations, the King James will likely be one of them.

LAWTON: Even congregations which may think they don’t use the King James might be surprised to learn the language of the Lord’s Prayer recited in most churches is indeed KJV.

People praying: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven….

LAWTON: Recognition of the KJV’s influence crosses theological lines. The Vatican Embassy in Washington hosted a reception in honor of the 400th anniversary. Guests got a first look at a traveling exhibition that will be on display in Rome later this year, and at the Christian Science headquarters in Boston, the Mary Baker Eddy Library also has a special KJV display. There, visitors can hand-copy verses from the King James Bible in the same way monks and scholars copied Scripture before the invention of the printing press.

LAWTON: Still, many modern Christians say they find the KJV frustrating for personal use. The sometimes arcane words can be difficult to understand, and many trip over all the thees and thous. Jon Sweeney believes this is unfortunate.

SWEENEY: Contemporary translations are good. They’re great. They make the Bible relevant, but at the same time I think it makes it kind of ordinary, so reading the Bible is kind of like reading a popular novel.

LAWTON: Sweeney says the KJV can bring a sense of wonder and majesty that is spiritually meaningful if people take the time to experience it.

SWEENEY: It’s interesting to read a Bible and have thees and thous—different ways that might actually change how you think about the God that you’re praying to, about the God that you’re reading about, about the activity of that God, because you’re using language that feels more reverential. I find that it puts my heart in the right place.

LAWTON: And 400 years later, millions around the world still agree.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

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RABBI GIL STEINLAUF (Adas Israel Congregation, Washington, DC): The Purim story is actually one of the books of the Bible. It’s called the Book of Esther or Megillaht Esther in Hebrew.

Jews today often think of it as a kind of fun, silly holiday. It’s kind of like Mardi Gras. It has costumes, and it has parties and festivals.

What really sets it apart as unique, in the Jewish tradition, is that it has specific mitzvot or commandments. We have to give gifts of food to each other. The most famous food that’s associated with Purim is what we call hamentoshen, and we have to give gifts to the poor, and we also have to sit down for a “seudah” or a festive meal together. We have to share the experience with community.

You have to hear the reading of the Book of Esther.

Reader: Moredechai told the servant that the Jews were to be killed by Haman and that Esther should go to the king to plead for her people.

STEINLAUF: When we talk about a terrible oppressor or enemy who has tried to destroy the Jewish people, there’s the expression “yemach shemo” which means “may his name be blotted out.”

Reader: Our enemy, replied Esther, is this wicked Haman.

STEINLAUF: So that’s taken literally. It’s not just a figure of speech. We give out noisemakers, which are called graggers. They swing them around and they make the noise. It’s as funny and as silly—as much as you can poke fun at the gravitas of life, the better. But, you know, it’s not just a child’s holiday. It’s actually a very sophisticated, very powerful spiritual message.

What’s most remarkable about the Book of Esther is God is not a character in the story. You never actually see God anywhere in the story. Esther is related to the Hebrew word “esther,” which means “hidden,” so that’s God’s hidden nature, and in a sense it reflects our ongoing sense of being mystified and curious about the fact why doesn’t God rescue us in the way that God rescued us from Egypt? And here in the story we see how, seemingly by chance, we managed to survive. What seems like chance is actually the surface of a much deeper reality, where God’s presence is working itself out in ways that we really can’t quite understand.

I think the deepest message of Purim is: You know what? It’s all ultimately okay. There really is a God even if we can’t find that God so directly. This world, like it says in the beginning of the Book of Genesis—it’s really “Tov M’od,” it’s really very good. We can even enjoy this world with all of its troubles and find reasons for joy.

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Watch more of producer Susan Goldstein’s interview about the psalms with poet and writer Pamela Greenberg, whose new book, The Complete Psalms: The Book of Prayer Songs in a New Translation (Bloomsbury, 2010), is being praised for its literary beauty.

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Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible by Robert Alter (Princeton University Press, 2010)

Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America edited by Roger Lundin (Baylor University Press, 2009)

These two very different but not unrelated books look at the changing influence of Christianity and the King James Version of the Bible on American literature.

Robert Alter’s “Pen of Iron” appears as the English-speaking world is about to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the 1611 translation of the Bible that is a landmark of Jacobean prose and, on a popular level, the most loved of the Bible’s many translations and paraphrases. Alter’s book is tightly focused and sweeping in the specificity of its claims. He takes a commonplace of conventional wisdom—the ubiquity the Bible once had in American elite culture—to argue that the King James translation created “the foundational language and symbolic imagery” of the whole of American culture, especially its prose fiction.

Alter is a literary critic and an important scholar of the Hebrew Bible, or what in the King James Version would be called the Old Testament. In “Pen of Iron” he combines both disciplines to show how stylistic techniques associated with the poetry of the Hebrew Bible—especially parallelism (using the same pattern of words and phrases) and parataxis (short sentences side by side)—were appropriated by the translators of the King James Bible and from there went on to shape the color and tone of American fiction.

“I should like to try to see how the language of the King James Version is worked into the texture of the writing, making possible a kind of strong prose that would not have existed otherwise, and I shall seek to understand how this prose serves as the vehicle for certain distinctively American constructions of reality,” he writes.

King James I

It is an intriguing notion, but ultimately Alter raises more questions than he answers. He rests his argument on a close and detailed reading of single works by two major American writers—Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom”—as well as a comprehensive examination of Saul Bellow’s “Seize the Day” and more glancing looks at Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” and Marilynne Robinson’s important novel “Gilead.” While they do not fit his category of prose fiction, he also discusses Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address.

Alter’s argument is at times reductive, while at other points he seems to conflate style and substance, employing a theological theme or deploying a biblical concept he finds prominent in the Hebrew Bible (“family,” “nationhood,” “land,” for example) to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the King James Version’s prose style.

But is there a unique “biblical style”? The Bible, even the Hebrew Bible, is the creation of many writers, many voices. It is a collection of genres, but even within genres, even within single books such as Genesis or the Psalms scholars identify differing writers, employing differing styles and languages, who may address similar concerns differently.

More importantly, Alter disregards the New Testament, its genres and styles, gospels and epistles, except to mistakenly read the Puritan colonists’ covenant theology as a rejection of the New Testament, thereby making them some kind of quasi-Israelites. But both the gospels and the epistles of the New Testament bring their own distinct linguistic techniques and methods to the Bible’s polyphony of voices. It is myopic to suggest that American prose writers, if they were as steeped in the King James Bible as Alter insists, closed the book at Malachi 4:6.

Alter does not seem to understand the colonization process or the religious diversity that was a part of the first hundred year or so of American settlement. The first New England settlers were Puritan Separatists, and the Bible they brought with them was the Geneva Bible, not the King James Version. Nor is it likely the first settlers in Pennsylvania, Quakers with strong separatist tendencies—and a vernacular that included “thee” and “thou” not grounded in the KJV—were as steeped in King James as Alter seems to assume for all colonists. Quakers certainly had Bibles, but the book was less important to their religious and spiritual life and expressiveness than making sure they were attuned to the working of God’s Spirit, the Inner Light. In Maryland, Catholic settlers would have carried the Douay-Rheims Bible, a revised version of which, as religious studies professor Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J. has pointed out, “was the standard English Bible in use among Catholics on the eve of the Revolution and during the nineteenth century.”

William Tyndale

Alter writes as if there was a direct, unmediated line from the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts to the KJV translators. But they did not work in such a vacuum. Rather, they relied on old, often flawed and error-prone manuscripts as well as a gaggle of previous translations, including the great Tyndale and Geneva versions and the Bishops’ Bible that the new version aimed to supplant. Indeed, much of what many today assume to be the catch phrases from the King James Version that have made their way into the common language made their way into the KJV first from Tyndale’s translations: “eat, drink and be merry,” “salt of the earth,” “give us this day our daily bread.” As Adam Nicolson notes in “God’s Secretaries,” his popular history of the making of the King James Bible, “Tyndale enthusiasts have calculated that 94 percent of the New Testament in the King James Bible is exactly as Tyndale left it.”

This is not to argue that the King James Bible had no influence on American prose style, but to suggest that Alter fails to engage the complexities and nuances of the Bible and its role in American culture. Symbolically, it might be noted, even that towering touchstone of American religious literature, John Winthrop’s famous 1630 “City on a Hill” sermon delivered aboard the Arbella before disembarking for the New World, drew its scriptural citations from both the Geneva and King James Bibles. But Alter appears to have adopted the conventional wisdom of conflating “the Bible” with the King James Version, and he seems to assert rather than demonstrate his thesis.

Alter is right about the widespread presence of the Bible in American culture, especially through the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its role in public schools through the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. But whether the KJV did the work he suggests in shaping the nation’s prose, and thus its ideological construction of reality, remains contestable. He might have strengthened his case if he could have showed how the “style” of the King James Bible influenced the culture of the second half of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century, the seedbed culture for Melville, for example. But Alter chooses generally to ignore the New England preaching tradition, the prose of Jonathan Edwards and the Founders, and the writing of Thomas Paine or Benjamin Franklin, where one would expect to find at least traces of the shaping influence of the KJV. Other than references to biblical place names and covenant theology tropes associated with “the New Israel,” he virtually ignores American writing until the mid-nineteenth century.

Abraham Lincoln

Alter does stop along the way to consider Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the certain stylistic influence the King James Bible had on that classic American speech. Here his analysis is concise and incisive, but he might have pointed out that the address was not really meant as a work of prose to be read, but rather a speech to be heard, and one reason it seems to reach so effortlessly to the KJV for its style is that the KJV was also meant to be read aloud, replacing the Bishops’ Bible in the liturgical life of the Jacobean church. In many respects it could be argued that the power of the King James Bible resides in its oral rather than written nature, and Alter might have done better to look at its influence on Puritan preaching, revival camp meetings, and the sermons of Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, not to mention Martin Luther King Jr.

Interestingly, Alter notes that while African-American culture is steeped in the Bible, the only African-American work he considered for inclusion was Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Unfortunately, he writes, “a renewed inspection of its prose revealed only oblique and episodic links with biblical style.” One wonders why he didn’t look at the work of James Baldwin or Toni Morrison or Richard Wright.

Alter’s case would also be strengthened if he could show the pervasiveness of the KJV’s influence—how the language of the Bible made a difference in the texture of American prose, its sound, syntax, and idiomatic usage—in more than one work by his chosen writers. Did the KJV influence not just “Moby-Dick,’’ published in 1851, but also “White Jacket” (1850) and “Pierre” (1852)? Was it part of the cultural air Melville breathed, or was it one voice among many, like the seaman’s jargon he also adopted in his prose? Was it all-permeating for other nineteenth fiction writers—for Nathaniel Hawthorne, for Harriet Beecher Stowe?

William Faulkner

Alter’s reading of “Moby-Dick” is his strongest at finding elements of the KJV style in a work of fiction. In contrast, the chapters on Faulkner and Bellow, in which he has many interesting things to say about each writer and the work he chooses to look at, are not very persuasive for his overall argument. To his credit, Alter picked in Faulkner a writer whose language is a near absolute antithesis to biblical style (unless one thinks of the intricate sentences of Paul) to argue there is “a set of biblical terms” in “Absalom, Absalom!” that “insistently recur” as a counterweight to the nonbiblical language and that are crucial to its meaning. “The King James Version enters into Faulkner’s otherwise anti-biblical prose not as a stylistic strategy but as a thematic lexicon,” writers Alter. He mentions birthright, curse, land or earth, name and lineage, sons or seed, but of course these words even as concepts are not unique to the King James Bible and certainly could be carried by other streams in the culture, including popular preaching, the Book of Common Prayer, or even the writing of pro-slavery southerners at the time of the Civil War. Even as “Absalom, Absalom!’’ reworks a biblical story, Alter’s claim seems a stretch.

Ultimately, what Alter shows in these close and interesting readings is that a handful of American fiction writers used a handful of techniques from a handful of Old Testament sources that also appear in parts of the King James Version to enhance their fiction. That this happened over a century in which the Bible was losing its religious significance for large parts of the elite culture is interesting, even provocative, and worthy of more attention. In fact, Alter begins to address the question in some of his comments on Melville. But his basic case, that the King James Bible determined “the foundational language and symbolic imagery” of the wider American culture, has not been made.

Herman Melville

In many ways, the collected essays in “Invisible Conversations” take up the paradox of the apparent waning of religious and biblical culture in American intellectual life even as the people as a whole continued to assert their religious identity and find meaning in the regular reading of the Bible. There is an academic intramural quality to some of the writing here. Edited by Wheaton College English professor Roger Lundin, the essays were developed out of presentations made in the American Literature and Religion Seminar, a project at the University of Notre Dame. (Another collection of essays by seminar participants, “There Before Us: Religion, Literature, and Culture from Emerson to Wendell Berry,” was published in 2007.) But overall they are a bracing companion to Alter’s book, charting and contesting the wider context of his reading. Alter’s chapter on Melville, for example, would have been a fitting contribution to “Invisible Conversations,” while many of these essays could have deepened his sense of the religious aspects of American culture.

Lundin’s book takes its title and underlying assumption from a belief that there has been in the United States a lack of interest in the religious aspects of American literature among scholars in the academy and a “stubborn refusal to engage religious questions on anything like their own terms.” Whether one agrees with that or not, the essays collected here with the aim of dispelling that ignorance and invisibility are fascinating, instructive and thought-provoking. They trace a wide arc, mostly concentrating on fiction and poetry, but also—as in Alan Wolfe’s essay on the role of religion in postwar nonfiction and Andrew Delbanco’s rejoinder—engaging mid-20th century social-science writing as well as—in Mark Noll’s essay on African Americans, the Bible, and slavery—memoirs, sermons, and other nonfiction genres in African-American literature.

The book structures itself as a dialogue between a chapter and a response—the conversation made visible, as it were. All of the selections have something to offer for further reflection and often pull readers deeper into their subject. As the responses make clear, many also invite argument. For example, is it really, as Stanley Hauerwas and Ralph Wood insist in their essay on theology and American literary tradition, the fault of “the churches” (whatever that might mean) that “a nation with the soul of a church” has “produced so few writers who are Christian in any substantive sense of the word,” and does one want to even argue that America has produced few “substantive” Christian writers?

Phillis Wheatley

The largest section of the book—three essays and a response—considers the oft-neglected area of literature, religion, and the African-American tradition, one of the main currents forming American culture and the area in which Alter said he could find no significant work exemplifying his notion of the stylistic influence of the King James Bible. There are many important insights in these chapters, and Katherine Clay Bassard’s study of the “sign of the cross” in African-American literature is a fascinating reading of the tradition, from eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley through Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel “Paradise.” But a comment by Princeton religion professor Albert J. Raboteau is especially worth pondering: “The astounding flexibility of our culture to include the stories of the invisible or the forgotten disguises the fact that their stories have been included but not fully incorporated.” It is a fitting and pointed reminder that despite the insistence by some that we live in a post-racial society, even in literary studies there is still more tokenism than canonization. Ellison’s invisible man remains as invisible as the religion the writers here seek to make visible.

The two opening essays, literary critic Denis Donoghue’s “Finding a Prose for God” and Harvard professor of American literature Lawrence Buell’s spirited rejoinder, “American Literature and/as Spiritual Inquiry,” lay out the key positions for two opposing views of how to read the American literary canon through a religious lens. But they also point to the larger debate in American culture, including its political culture, between religion and spirituality.

Donoghue takes his cue from a line by the poet Wallace Stevens, “We say God and the imagination are one” (from the poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”). He proposes that in the American canon from Emerson on, “modern American literature is a substitute for religion, but a substitute in which the original has been absorbed.”

Donoghue does not argue that literature is a “valid or effective substitute” for religion, but that for writers in the dominant tradition belief is reduced, replaced, and almost erased. He writes of Hawthorne, for example, that he “replaced God with nature and community.” Emily Dickinson’s poetry, he argues, “had to be eccentric and probably willful, because it did not issue from a living tradition of faith and observance.” It is the “living tradition” that is reduced over time in the American canon.

But to show that traditional, sacramental religion has not been wholly eclipsed, Donoghue examines Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story” and its narrator’s conversation with God. While earlier writers could not find a prose with which to converse with God, Dubus’s narrator can. What enables this, Donoghue writes, “is his membership in the Church, the sacraments, the rituals, the Mass, Confession and Communion.”

In his reply to Donoghue, Buell reads the literary history of the United States differently. He sees the canonical nineteenth-century writers—Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson—as less religiously attenuated. “American literature,” Buell argues, “is and has for centuries been imbued with spiritual striving, even though that striving mostly expresses itself in willfully idiosyncratic forms whose larger public office is to hold up a mirror to the dominant culture’s stolid complacencies.”

The effort by Donoghue—and by Hauerwas and Wood in their essay—to tie the category of the religious to particular institutionalized faiths needs to be challenged. “Why should not the religious be identified mainly, if not exclusively, with the arenas of moral or spiritual inquiry and practice rather than with theologic belief or church affiliation?” Buell asks.

The distinction between religion understood as institutionalized, even sacramentalized faith and religion as individualized spiritual seeking or striving lies at the heart of the American literary tradition as reflected throughout the essays in “Invisible Conversations.” It is also part of the wider debate over what constitutes authentic American culture and values. It is not too much to say that the American canonical tradition, including those streams of it such as African-American, feminist, or gay writing, is a two-way street. How you read the literature influences and is influenced by how you read the culture: religiously weak or spiritually robust? It is an argument central not only to academic literary studies but also to political life and the life of faith.

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service. He has written recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on nuclear disarmament, as well as on Marilynne Robinson,  John Updike, and Flannery O’Connor.