Originally published April 7, 2006

From the fourth century until today, Christians have created things to do together, rituals, in order to experience for themselves the great simplicity of redemption. These rituals are meant to recur, they are the stones of an archway which, once built, is there to use, to go in and out by prayer and so to find pasture. We do not want to be rebuilding a different-shaped arch, however entrancing, but to use what we have, what we are used to, in order to enter into the real business of prayer. So the ceremonies of Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday, are there to be used, and this is a physical matter, a use of the body, so that all of ourselves will know. Intellectual apprehension of truth is all very well, and indeed for some it is enough; but for most of us, we live in a half-light, neither awake nor asleep, wanting to understand but not quite able to think it through; we need to be there to act it out, to participate. This is in no way an alternative or lesser kind of theologizing; by both ways we come to the central theme of redemption, the flesh-taking of Christ in which he returns to the Father and takes us unto the dynamic life of the Trinity which is the ultimate procession, and it is by physical processions that we can learn to become part of that reality.

The last days of Holy Week provide a simple way of allowing the body, the flesh, to learn theological truth by doing and being in earthly processions. Palm Sunday’s procession is about how to do the basic human thing — to walk, to take one step, just to be able to do the next step, and to remain with that doing, not seeing a much quicker way to get there by a bus, a train, a ship, a plane, which are quicker than our feet; we are always dashing through in order to be somewhere else, and when we are there then we think we will begin. But the procession is a slow, corporate event, the pace set by the weakest and slowest. Like growing, a procession is something done for its own sake, and in doing it we are becoming what we are not, going by a way we do not understand, for a purpose that is God’s, not ours, in ways that are too simple for our sight. We will never of course be ready on earth for the full “procession” which is the dynamism of the life of love which is the Trinity, since we are broken human beings, with limited sight; but given our consent, God can lead us by the flesh he created, to understand and apprehend the image of God which he placed within us. All that is needed is to give a minute assent, however impatient and grudging, and then just to do it. A procession can be seen as a sacrament, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” In the same way that we read through the letter of the Scriptures to the inner truth, so we understand more by walking than we know; it is the work and gift of God.

Meditation upon the processions of Holy Week is rightly undertaken at its commencement. In the early church, for the first three days of Holy Week, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the custom was to have only plain readings from Scripture; later, what was read each day were the separate accounts of the Passion. Then as now, these were days of stillness and silence when all were to be prepared, emptied, turned towards the Saviour’s great work. After the signs we gave ourselves during Lent of being ready to become empty by giving things up and therefore more free, now that desire will be put to the test. There is nothing now to be done or thought. It is the end of Lent, the pause before the great mystery of Redemption. In this pause, it is possible to reflect on these three processions, on Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter night, as ways into the great procession which is the life of Trinity, and this is not just for ourselves here and now. First we walk with so many others from the past, joined with them by our present actions. We receive life from the hands of the dead to live it out ourselves and pass it on to others, and that is true tradition. We are walking with our friends. And second, we do not do this for ourselves only, but for the whole of creation; insofar as one small portion of humanity which is us assents to the love of God, so the whole of creation becomes part of redeeming work.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At a megachurch in Orlando, evangelical Christians gathered to pray for the nation. The meeting was organized by a group called The Response, which has been holding similar sessions in other early primary states. They say they’re praying because they are well aware of the importance of the upcoming election and of their own role in helping to choose the Republican nominee. According to exit polls, two-thirds of the GOP primary voters in South Carolina last week described themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. Forty-four percent of them voted for Newt Gingrich. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum each got 21 percent of the evangelical vote. Here in Florida, conservative Christians make up about 40 percent of likely Republican primary voters.

STEVE STRANG (CEO, Charisma Media): It is important just because there are so many of us. But we don’t all think alike. We don’t all support the same person.

LAWTON: And that division among evangelicals has been a major factor this primary season. Although one-time presumed frontrunner Romney does have some support within the evangelical community, so far many rank-and-file conservative Christians haven’t rallied around him. Some believe it’s at least in part because of Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—the Mormons.

WARREN COLE SMITH (Associate Publisher, World Magazine): Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is a concern of mine because I have a concern as an evangelical Christian that I should not promote what my faith teaches is a false religion.

LAWTON: Warren Cole Smith is associate publisher of the Christian news magazine World. He wrote a blog in which he said if Romney believes what the Mormon faith teaches, he is “unfit to serve” as president.

SMITH: You could start with the doctrine of the Trinity, what theologians would call their Christology, in other words their understanding of who Christ is. And you wouldn’t have to go any farther than that to identify very quickly some differences between orthodox Biblical Christianity and Mormon theology.

LAWTON: Mormons hold several views which set them apart from Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. Not accepting the doctrine of the Trinity, Mormons believe that Jesus and God were separate physical beings. Founder Joseph Smith taught that traditional Christianity had fallen away from the teachings of Jesus, so additional and continuing revelations, like the Book of Mormon, were needed to restore the true faith. The LDS church may hold different views from the mainstream, but Mormons are deeply offended by the suggestion that they are not “real” Christians. Joanna Brooks is senior correspondent for ReligionDispatches.org, an interfaith online magazine.

JOANNA BROOKS (Senior Correspondent, Religion Dispatches): The name of Jesus Christ is in the name of our church. So, you know, Mormons do tend to feel like we’re being profoundly misunderstood when we’re classified as not being Christian.

LAWTON: And does it matter in a presidential race?

SMITH: It is a position of such high visibility in the world that, yes, having a Mormon in that particular chair would have the effect of promoting Mormonism, of normalizing Mormonism culturally both here in the United States and around the world.

BROOKS: Mormons are actually pretty cautious about the scrutiny that might come to faith as Romney runs and if he were to win the presidency. At the same time, you know, perhaps over the course of a Romney presidency people would finally get used to the idea that Mormons are fairly normal members of American society.

LAWTON: The LDS church has not commented on Romney’s campaign because it doesn’t want to appear to be interfering in the election. However, the church has released a series of ads highlighting the variety of people who hold the Mormon faith. This primary season, Romney has avoided direct discussion of the faith issue. He has been doing a lot of outreach to evangelicals.

MITT ROMNEY: I am convinced that if we have a president who will tell the truth and live with integrity and who knows how to lead and rebuild an economy, who will then draw on the patriotism of the American people, we will be able to restore those values and keep America as it has always been, the hope of the earth.

LAWTON: In Florida, evangelical Republican Cathleen Kwas is supporting Romney largely because of his economic experience.

CATHLEEN KWAS (Evangelical Voter): I’m not electing him to be the pastor of my church or anything like that. I think he’s a moral man. I think he’s a strong husband, a good father, and I’m sure we share a lot of the same, you know, ethics and values. And you know, the Mormonism isn’t—I don’t even think about that.

LAWTON: Charisma Media CEO Steve Strong is among other evangelicals who say they are reluctant to support Romney because of his policies, not his faith.

STRANG: I have no criticism of Governor Romney personally other than the fact that you have to question how conservative he is by some of the things he did in Massachusetts. Thankfully his flip-flopping, in my opinion, was flip-flopping in the right direction. That is a factor, but for me that is more of a factor than what church he goes to.

LAWTON: If not Romney, who? In the South Carolina vote, many evangelicals appeared to accept Gingrich’s argument that he is the candidate with the best chance of winning.

NEWT GINGRICH: We must have somebody who knows what they believe, is prepared to defend what they believe, and will do what it takes to defeat Obama.

LAWTON: Evangelicals appear divided over whether Gingrich’s marital past will be a factor.

STRANG: I think Newt Gingrich’s past is a huge issue, and it isn’t so much that he could be forgiven. Forgiveness is the essence of Christianity, and we’ve all been forgiven. But it shows his character, and not once, but a couple times. I have no doubt he’s changed. No doubt. But it is troubling.

KWAS: I don’t hold Newt Gingrich’s past against him. I do believe he made mistakes in the past, and that’s not influencing me now. I think he has had a change of heart, but I just believe he’s not steady and calm, and I think he’s fairly progressive, and so the moral thing isn’t what’s going to sway my opinion.

LAWTON: Earlier this month, a group of conservative Christian leaders urged unified support for Santorum. Strang decided to join them.

STRANG: Because I want to make a statement that character is important and not think that we have to give it to somebody just because all the pundits say that they have the election wrapped up and they are the ones that can beat president Obama. I think that it is unknown.

LAWTON: But given his low standing in the polls, many evangelicals do wonder about Santorum’s electability. Susan Berdet says she wrestled a lot before finally casting her absentee ballot for Santorum.

SUSAN BERDET (Evangelical Voter): I do want someone to beat our present president. Badly. But I want it to be the right person. I just felt that Rick Santorum represented my beliefs.

LAWTON: Santorum has been urging other evangelicals to also vote their values.

RICK SANTORUM: It’s not about winning or not winning, it’s about how you want to win. Do you want to win by being just a little better, or do you want to win with a mandate?

LAWTON: Polls show that despite any misgivings in the primary, in a race between Romney and Obama the majority of evangelicals across the country would vote for Romney. But they may not be enthusiastic about it.

SMITH: The real question is will evangelicals both turn out in large numbers and be energized as volunteers and financial supporters of Mitt Romney? It doesn’t take a majority of evangelicals to stay home. It just takes a few million evangelicals to stay home or to choose to not get as actively involved in this race, to cost Mitt Romney the presidency, should he become the Republican nominee.

LAWTON: With all the decisions looming, many evangelicals say they will continue to pray for wisdom.

I’m Kim Lawton in Orlando.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: For millennia, people have being trying to imagine what happens after death. Is there a heaven? Who gets in? And what happens to those who don’t?

LISA MILLER: Everybody dies. And we want to hope that the people we love we’ll see again, and we want to hope that our own identities and our own consciousness and maybe even our own bodies exist in some other realm after we’re gone from this earth.

LAWTON: Books trying to provide answers to these age-old questions continue to be bestsellers. One of them—Love Wins by Michigan megachurch pastor Rob Bell—has ignited an intense new debate, particularly among evangelical Christians.

REV. ROB BELL: A lot of people, the conception they were handed of the Christian faith is that you go around making judgments: So-and-so we know for sure is burning forever in that place. You don’t know that. That’s speculation.

PROFESSOR MARY VANDEN BERG (Assistant Professor of Christian Theology, Calvin Theological Seminary): If you reject the kingdom of God, it doesn’t really look all that good for you.

LAWTON: According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in life after death. Seventy-four percent believe in heaven, and almost 60 percent believe in hell. A majority of Americans also believe that many religions can lead to eternal life. The exception: Evangelicals, who are more likely to say that theirs is the one true faith that leads to eternal life.

Journalist Lisa Miller is author of the book Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.

MILLER: It’s a mistake to think you can even talk about God in the Western tradition without talking about heaven, right? How you get to heaven, the question of salvation is central to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

LAWTON: Evangelicals have been especially certain about their answers, with many saying that people must accept Jesus as their personal savior.

REV. BILLY GRAHAM: Jesus said there are two roads in life. One is the broad road that leads to destruction and judgment and hell. The other is a narrow road that leads to heaven and paradise.

LAWTON: Mary Vanden Berg is assistant professor of systematic theology at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

VANDEN BERG: There is one sure way to know that you will spend eternal life with God, in the presence of God, and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.

BELL: Gandhi is in hell? He is? And somebody knows this for sure? Will only a few select people make it to heaven, and will billions and billions of people burn forever in hell?

LAWTON: Bell offers a more expansive view. He’s pastor of the nondenominational Mars Hill Bible Church just outside Grand Rapids, which has some 10,000 weekly attenders. He’s also a popular speaker whose videos have a huge international following among younger evangelicals.

BELL: For me, interacting with countless people over the years who literally are carrying around an image, God is not good and God is not good because my grandmother died and at the funeral the pastor wanted us all to know for sure that my grandma was burning in torment forever.

LAWTON: Bell points to Scriptures where Jesus says he is restoring all things and drawing all people to himself.

BELL: And Jesus tells stories in which the key character doesn’t give up on whatever is lost, and I think we should take that seriously. I don’t know what God has in mind, but I do know that this story that Jesus tells causes us to pause before we make any of those sorts of judgments. Be very careful, because God may be up to something way, way bigger than you’ve ever been able to comprehend.

LAWTON: Heaven, Bell says, is not a far-away place but a renewal of the earth that begins here and now. Bell believes the spectrum of people who will be part of it is “wide and expansive.” Hell, he says, is the consequence of choosing not to be part of God’s massive embrace.

BELL: God is throwing a party and everybody’s invited, but if you don’t want to come, you are given that option.

LAWTON: And in one of the most controversial parts of his book, Bell takes issue with the traditional Christian teaching that death ends any opportunity to make that choice.

BELL: So a seventeen-year-old atheist dies. God will punish this seventeen-year-old atheist forever? Yup. So 17 million years from now God will be tormenting and punishing this seventeen-year-old atheist? Yup. And this is okay with God? Yup, that’s how it is. And for me it just seems like, I don’t know, that doesn’t—it’s not compelling. That doesn’t seem to be what Jesus was talking about.

VANDEN BERG: Maybe we can think about those things, and maybe we can wonder about those things, but the Bible’s pretty clear that when the end comes that’s the end. You don’t have a second chance. Now might there be? Could God do that? I don’t know of any theologian that would say God couldn’t. God can do whatever God wants to do, but what does the Bible say? The biblical text doesn’t indicate this at all.

LAWTON: Vanden Berg says while she believes Bell raises some interesting questions, she is concerned that he is lifting out a few particular verses without taking the full biblical narrative into account.

VANDEN BERG: I’m uncomfortable with the way he frames things in the book that make it sound like sort of like don’t worry about it because it’s just going to be okay, and I’m not convinced that the Bible says that. I’m fairly convinced that the Bible says if you reject me, I’ll reject you.

LAWTON: Some evangelicals say Bell doesn’t give enough importance to the passages where biblical authors describe God’s judgment toward sin.

JUSTIN TAYLOR (The Gospel Coalition): When they talk about God’s great love, it’s always set against the backdrop of God’s righteousness, God’s wrath, God’s holiness.

BELL: I think what happens for many people is they heard about the judgment before the love. But if you start with the love and the judgment flows out of that, God’s love is for us to flourish in God’s good world. For us to flourish in God’s good world, judgments have to be made. Well, that then… now that puts judgment in its proper place.

LAWTON: Many evangelicals have been severe in their condemnation of Bell. Some even called him a heretic.

TAYLOR: We care about people, and people who have grown up in the church, who have sung these same songs, who are being won over by somebody who has produced great videos and is a good communicator but is ultimately teaching a false Gospel.

MILLER: What made people mad about Rob Bell was that he calls himself a conservative evangelical, and he believes in a much looser idea of heaven and salvation than conservative evangelicals traditionally believe in. So if he had called himself an Episcopalian, for example, nobody would have batted an eye.

LAWTON: Miller says the conversation itself isn’t new, but the fact that it’s taking place so openly within evangelicalism is.

MILLER: This is a radical upheaval of that entire worldview. Then what does that do to your doctrine, to your creeds, to your world view, to your, to your mission for evangelism? What do you need to teach people if they’re going to get in anyway? It’s a real theological struggle.

LAWTON: Miller says Bell has particular resonance among young evangelicals who increasingly have friends from different faith traditions, and that’s precisely what troubles conservatives.

REV. ALBERT MOHLER JR (President, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary): And I think that’s why we have to talk about this, because we’re very concerned about the loss of the Gospel. Not just getting a doctrine wrong, but the loss of the Gospel in this.

LAWTON: In June, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to reaffirm its belief in the reality of hell as an “eternal, conscious punishment” for those who don’t accept Jesus.

Bell says he wants people to see that Jesus’ ultimate message was about love, not just avoiding hell.

BELL: Jesus didn’t come along and say, “You don’t want to be a part of that thing, do you?” No, he came along and said, “Trust me. Something big is going down. Here, here’s a taste.” Ah. People thought it was amazing.

LAWTON: He says he’s not bothered by those who accuse him of inciting a dangerous conversation.

BELL: It seems to me like the church would be the place that would lead the way in having dangerous conversations. I mean, isn’t that what faith is?

LAWTON: And the conversation isn’t ending anytime soon. Several more books about heaven and hell are being released over the next few weeks.

I’m Kim Lawton in Grand Rapids.

At the end of the “almost entirely secular” funeral for singer Michael Jackson, Pastor Lucious Smith, in a concluding prayer, reminded mourners that “even now the King of Pop must bow his knee to the King of Kings. And we pray that you would remind us, Lord, that our lives are but dust.”

Renaissance studies professor Gordon Campbell writes that this incident is emblematic of the melding of contemporary popular culture with the words of a 400-year-old translation of the Bible. “The formality of the language acknowledges its origin in the KJV,’’ he observes in his book Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611-2011 (Oxford University Press).  While the modern idiom would be “bend his knee,” the use of “bow” recalls instead the repeated use of this idiom in the King James Version. Similarly, “our lives are but dust” echoes “he remembereth that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14), but it does so, Campbell says, in an archaic construction in which a negative is suppressed. The word “but” becomes adverbial and means “merely,” a construction common to the KJV.

Campbell’s book is one of a host of recently published and forthcoming books on the King James Bible’s 400th birthday, an occasion that is providing scholars and other commentators with an opportunity to praise and, if not bury, at least restore some measure of balance in assessing its importance, its influence, and its possible future significance.

It is fair to say the King James Bible is one of the most popular and, in many quarters, beloved books in the English language. At one time in the not too distant past it could be found in virtually every Protestant home in the United States. Along with Shakespeare, it is thought to have had an uncommonly large influence on the English language.

Campbell’s Bible is an excellent place to begin to sort through the history and influence of the King James Bible. Century by century, in England and America, Campbell guides the reader in accessible but thorough scholarship through the pre-King James beginnings of the Bible in English to the contemporary world where the KJV is available in a Kindle edition and MP3 formats.

Some of the history will be familiar, but other parts will be new and even startling or unsettling, especially to those who believe the 1611 text is the unalterable word of God. For example, Campbell notes the text of the KJV was not fixed in 1611, and there was no master first edition. “The absence of an agreed master text gave license to a long tradition of corrections, and there was not always a clear line drawn between corrections of printers’ errors and corrections of translators’ errors.”

Indeed, the stabilization of the text did not come until 1769, when English divine Benjamin Blayney’s Oxford folio was published. “The KJV that one can buy now,” Campbell observes, “is essentially this late-eighteenth century text, not the text of 1611.”

In succinct but informative chapters, Campbell moves through the pre-history of the King James Bible, beginning with the seminal figure of John Wycliffe. Although many think of Wycliffe as the first translator of the Bible into English, Campbell informs us while Wycliffe encouraged a number of translations by his followers, “there is no evidence that he undertook any translating himself.” Still, by the end of the fourteenth century “the English Bible was firmly associated with his name.”

Campbell also helpfully reminds us of the chief aim of Protestant Bible translators such as Wycliffe and, on the continent, reformers such as Luther and Erasmus: to put the Scriptures into the hands of the everyday laity. Henry Knighton, Wycliffe’s chronicler and contemporary, complained that the English church reformer “translated from the Latin into the language not of the angels but of Angles [the English], so that he made the Bible common and open to the laity, and to women who were able to read, which used to be reserved for literate and intelligent clergy.”

Wycliffe was the first but not the last Protestant associated with translation who would be martyred for his efforts. Since David Daniell’s definitive 1994 biography of Bible translator William Tyndale (1494?-1536), that English reformer with Lutheran sympathies has been getting increased attention for his major contribution to the King James Bible. Although he has often been overlooked by those who lavish extravagant praise on the KJB, especially for its literary merits, Campbell says Tyndale should be rightly known as “father of the English Bible,” and while he only completed translations of the New Testament, the Pentateuch, and the Book of Jonah, Tyndale was a looming presence in the 1611 version. Many of the phrases and cadences associated with the KJB, from “Let there be light and there was light” to “Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you,” came first from Tyndale. According to David Katz in his 2004 book God’s Last Words (Yale University Press), the portions of the King James Bible that Tyndale translated remain about 90 percent verbatim Tyndale. Yale critic Harold Bloom argues Tyndale should be ranked “one of the greatest writers in English, standing only after Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton,” and as New Testament scholar Gergely Juhász writes in his essay in the collection The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge University Press),  edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, “To put it somewhat bluntly: by modern standards of authorship, the KJB would be regarded as a form of plagiarism.”

After a synopsis of each of the major translations prior to the King James Bible, Campbell provides a useful overview of the commissioning of the King James Version, noting the king’s desire for an alternative to the popular but anti-monarchical Geneva Bible, as well as glimpses at individual translators and the organization of the translation companies. Readers seeking a fuller examination of the politics and personalities involved in the creation of the King James Bible might also turn to Adam Nicholson’s God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (HarperCollins).  Published in 2003, Nicholson’s highly readable, but sometimes excessively florid, account of the complex world of Jacobean England goes deeper into the intrigues and controversies swirling through England in the post-Elizabethan age, especially the Hampton Court conference of Puritans and bishops from the established English Church that aimed to reconcile the two increasingly cantankerous factions.

Nicholson provides fascinating sketches of the translators and others who played a role in bringing the King James Bible to life. He is especially good on the complex character of Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster Abbey, who, says Nicholson, is in many ways the flawed hero of the King James Bible’s story: “as broad as the great Bible itself, scholarly, political, passionate, agonized, in love with the English language …. Worldly, saintly, serene, sensuous, courageous, craven, if not corrupt then at least compromised, deeply engaged in pastoral care, generous, loving, in public bewitched by ceremony, in private troubled by persistent guilt and self-abasement—but in the grim realities of plague-stricken London in the summer of 1603, he appears in the worst possible light.” During the long months of the plague, Nicholson says, Andrewes never once visited his parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where more than a third of its 4,000 people died.

While the stricter Puritans were disappointed with the 1604 Hampton Court conference because no great change to the established church was enacted, “at court an air of optimism prevailed,” Nicholson writes. “The English Church would be unified, its Elizabethan squabbles forgotten. England and Scotland would become one country. Peace would be established in Europe. There would even be discussions with the pope about the reunification of the Roman and Protestant churches. … James’s Arcadian vision of untroubled togetherness would descend on the soul of England like a balm.”

“Much of that looks like a joke now,” Nicholson adds. “Almost the only remnant of that dream, a piece of flotsam after the tide has passed, is the King James Bible.”

Like Nicholson and others, Campbell pays special attention to the brief given to the translators. They were “not to make a new translation … but to make a good one better.” Indeed, the first rule the translators were to follow was begin with “the ordinary Bible read in the church, commonly called the Bishops’ Bible, to be followed and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.”

As he follows the changing text through the centuries, Campbell corrects some common ideas about the KJB. He says the notion that it was published on May 2 is a myth, for there was no such thing as a publication date in the seventeenth century. He also provides interesting details on other aspects of Bible publication, such as the first introduction of chronologies to accompany the text (in 1679), which dated Adam’s death at 130 anno mundi (“year of the earth”). A more famous chronology by Church of Ireland Archbishop James Ussher, which dated the creation precisely to the evening preceding Sunday, 23 October 4004, was added in 1701.

Campbell says the unhappy Puritans were broadly content with the translation, although a little uneasy about the inclusion of the Apocrypha. Others over the years were less accepting. Despite the near unanimity in praise for the KJB that exists today—a “cascade of delight,” English professor Stephen Prickett calls it in his essay on “the King James steamroller” in The King James Bible after 400 Years—it was not especially well-received when it was published or for some decades thereafter. After 1611, while the KJB was the Bible required to be read in English churches, “There was widespread grumbling, from all corners, about both its scholarship and its style,” editors Hamlin and Jones write. Critics found it a rushed job, the equivalent of scholarly fast-food, in which “the cook hasted you out a reasonable sudden meal,” in the words of Protestant clergyman and scholar Ambrose Ussher, brother of the famous archbishop. Others called it harsh, uncouth, and obsolete. Indeed, Prickett argues that acclaim for the KJB really dates only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then for literary rather than religious reasons.

As religious belief waned during the Victorian era, recognition grew for the King James Version’s importance to the English language and to British and American literary life. Prickett is explicit: praise for the KJB, when it comes, is presented as exclusively aesthetic.

Poet and historian Thomas B. Macaulay wrote in 1828 that the English Bible was “a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.” Literary historian and critic George Saintsbury, writing toward the end of the nineteenth century, called it, along with Shakespeare, “the perfection of English, the complete expression of the literary capacities of the language.” Even a religious skeptic like H.L. Mencken, writing in 1930, said it was “probably the most beautiful piece of writing in all the literature of the world.”

Harold Bloom, one of the most prominent and prolific, as well as controversial, contemporary literary critics, echoes Saintsbury in his book The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible (Yale University Press),  arguing the KJB stands at “the sublime summit of literature in English” alongside only Shakespeare. “Originally the culmination of one strand of Renaissance English culture,” Bloom writes, “the KJB became a basic source of American literature: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson are its children, and so are William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy. The KJB and Shakespeare fuse into a style of language that enabled the emergence of Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick, As I Lay Dying, Blood Meridian. Whitman’s verse and Hemingway’s prose alike stem from the KJB.”

While Bloom does not explore those large claims in his contribution to the cornucopia of books celebrating the KJB anniversary, eight of the essayists in the Hamlin-Jones collection do, examining the influence and impact of the King James version on figures from John Milton, John Bunyan, and the Romantic poets to John Ruskin, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and William Faulkner, as well as on African-American literature more generally and on lesser known—in the United States, at any rate—writers Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Smart.

Hannibal Hamlin, for example, in his essay on John Bunyan (1628-1688), best known for The Pilgrim’s Progress, observes that while writers had been making allusions to or paraphrasing and adapting the Bible long before the King James Bible, Bunyan “had the remarkable ability to transport himself into and live inside his favorite book … the Bible.”

“Pilgrim’s Progress is all Bible, all the time,” Hamlin writes. But the question is, which Bible? Bunyan, like many Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had access to more than one translation. Hamlin says there are some instances where the KJB and the Geneva Bible, the translation most popular with Puritans and other dissenters, diverge, and it seems Bunyan had Geneva in mind. But the Bible he clearly knew best was the KJB, and “the vast majority of identifiable biblical quotations and allusions in Grace Abounding and Pilgrim’s Progress are either decisively KJB or in language shared by KJB and Geneva.”

Hamlin goes on to observe: “One of the peculiarities of the history of the KJB is that the English Bible associated most strongly with a monarch and with the established church became the favored Bible of radicals and dissenters such as Bunyan. … The first major English writers who seem predominantly influenced by the language of the KJB are Milton and Bunyan.”

Similarly, it is worth noting—according to one of the essays in Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible,  edited by Helen Moore and Julian Reid and published by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford to mark its collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, on a major exhibition on the development of the King James Bible—that KJB texts were so prominent in the works of great Nonconformist hymn-writer Isaac Watts and early Methodist Charles Wesley that if the KJB were lost, as one Wesleyan minister said, you could “extract much of it” from their hymns.

Perhaps one of the writers contemporary readers would find most unlikely to be influenced by the Bible is Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Yet literary critic and New Yorker staff writer James Wood, in his essay on her novel To the Lighthouse (1927) in the Hamlin-Jones collection, finds it “stealthily biblical, and its visionary power all the stronger for the submersion and ghostliness of its biblical allusions.” One of the novel’s central questions, he argues, turns on what it means to continue to need or make use of religious language whose content is no longer believed in.

Wood looks in depth at the difficult “Time Passes” section of the novel to argue that what the passage seems to suggest “is that though an antique biblical language is needed to evoke the almost cosmic confusion of the First World War, that same biblical language will not suffice to disclose revelation, because the formal belief that sustained and enriched that language has disappeared; in this sense, when God died, the language of revelation died with him.”

“It is this post-Christian dimension that makes To the Lighthouse both the great elegy for the innocence destroyed by the First World War, and the great farewell, comparable to ‘Dover Beach,’ to the last, frail sureties of Victorian Christianity,” Wood writes.

Another fine essay in the Hamlin-Jones collection by Katherine Clay Bassard argues the African-American writer’s approach to the KJB “is based on a dual perception of the Bible as a book of signs and wonders” which represents in dialectical form the fascination with the language of the KJB “as the vehicle for social power and an acknowledgment of the spiritual authority bestowed on the Bible as a sacred text within African-American religious culture.”

Harold Bloom’s Shadow of a Great Rock takes a different and, of course, contentious approach to his consideration of the KJB. Instead of looking just at the influence the KJB has exerted on writers, he surveys many of the 66 books of the Bible itself, as well as the Apocrypha.

Like most literary critics who write about the importance of the KJB, Bloom devotes most of his space to the Hebrew Bible, where he applies the theory he developed in his The Book of J to write about aesthetic achievements of the writer he posits as responsible for the Bible’s first five books. He often takes issue with contemporary conventional biblical critical theory, not only in the case of the Pentateuch, but also in such cases as the authorship of Isaiah. “I am unimpressed,” Bloom writes in his comments on Isaiah, “by fashions in biblical scholarship, which currently dissolve the Yahwist (J) into a mosaic of fragments. Isaiah now is even more atomized.”

Bloom is even more provocative in his handling of the New Testament, or as he somewhat snarkily calls it “the Belated Testament.“ While he finds the Hebrew Bible’s compilation and canonization to be guided by an “implicit aestheticism,” there is no such overall literary merit or aesthetic motivation to the New Testament. “Usurpation is the stance of the Greek New Testament toward the Hebrew Bible,” and he finds that with the exception of Paul and James, the New Testament is “a viciously anti-Jewish work. Paul is anti-Judaic but not a hater of Jews.” The New Testament, Bloom says, “has hatred at its core despite its doctrine of love.”

His judgment of the Gospel of Mark is typical. “Like the J writer’s Yahweh, Mark’s Jesus is both a person and a personality. You cannot apprehend either J’s Yahweh or the Marcan Jesus by employing theology: it would not work. Both J and whoever wrote Mark are uncanny writers, but J is sublime and Mark is weird. I intend no deprecation of Mark by that distinction. J is a great writer, comparable to Homer and Tolstoy, while Mark reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe, a bad stylist who yet fascinates.”

For Paul, Bloom deploys his most famous critical insight, saying the apostle suffers “an anxiety of influence in regard to the Hebrew Bible. Seeking power and freedom, Paul tears to shreds the authority of Tanakh. … Usurpation is the central resource alike of the strong poet and the spiritual innovator. Not even Isaiah and Jeremiah were enough for Paul to overgo; Moses himself was to be surpassed.”

Along the way, however, Bloom engages in some useful comparative readings of Tyndale and the KJB, and he sets the two versions of 1 Corinthians 13 alongside each other to interesting effect. “Paul uses the Greek agape, caritas in Jerome’s Vulgate and so KJB’s ‘charity,’” he notes. “For me, Tyndale’s ‘love’ works better, and I also prefer his ‘I imagined as a child’ to the KJB ‘thought.’ Best of all is Tyndale’s ‘even in a dark speaking’ rather than the KJB ‘darkly.’ And yet again I must commend Tyndale over the apostle himself, strictly as a literary judgment.”

The King James Bible did not only exert a literary influence. History professor Naomi Tadmor, in her The Social Universe of the English Bible (Cambridge University Press),  the most academic and philologically penetrating of the books under consideration, looks at a very different reciprocal relationship—the one between the translators and the social world in which they lived, the world they sought to reflect in their translations. A key reason for its popularity, she writes, is that the translation was “Anglicized” or “Englished.”

“The biblical text was not simply translated into English but also transposed, slightly molded or otherwise rendered in terms that made sense at the time,” she argues.

There are key shifts in meanings from Hebrew words to English words that were “textually telling and historically significant. … As the Bible was rendered into the vernacular … subtle and overt ‘Englishing’ also took place, which in turn plays a role in the widespread propagation of the English Bible.”

Such changes, she contends went beyond word and semantic substitutions to include the construction of a social universe. In four heavily footnoted chapters, Tadmor explores four sets of social relations and how the biblical translation and social circumstances interacted. In the first, she looks at how the Hebrew semantic construction “love thy friend” or “thy fellow man” evolved to become the English “love thy neighbor,” a very different injunction. The second chapter examines notions of gender and the ways in which English conceptions of marriage crept into the vernacular biblical versions over time, while the third chapter focuses on labor relations and how the Hebrew word that would literally be translated as “slave” was transformed into the English “servant.” The fourth chapter surveys notions of office and rule and the ways in which biblical terms were “Englished” and manifested in such renderings as “prince,” “captain,” “duke,” “sheriff,” and even “chamberlain,” which, she notes, is the ”sanitized term employed in some contexts for designating the Hebrew saris, meaning eunuch.”

Tadmor argues, for example, that by “rendering the word re’a as neighbor in the biblical translations, the moral relationship of the biblical injunction was conceived of in the English text as taking place in a social world shaped by local communities.” Similarly, she writes that the understanding of service relationships in early modern England found its way into the translations of the English Bible. She finds that the original Hebrew wording of the Ten Commandments, for example, makes no reference at all to servants in any conventional English sense of the word. Rather, the text mentions male and female slaves. “In the Fourth Commandment, for example, masters are instructed to allow their male and female slaves (as well as domestic animals) to rest on the Sabbath day. The Tenth Commandment concludes by prohibiting individuals from coveting not only their fellow man’s house, but also his chattels, including male and female slaves.”

Linguist David Crystal, in his delightful book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language (Oxford University Press),  sets out to test the assertion made in his 2004 book The Stories of English that “the King James Bible—either directly, from its own translators, or indirectly, as a gloss through which we can see its predecessors—has contributed far more to English in the way of idiomatic or quasi-proverbial expressions than any other literary source” and to quantify just how many expressions such as “salt of the earth”’ or “whited sepulcher” currently used in English have their roots in the King James Bible. But as he says in Begat, it is not quite as simple as that.

The answer was both more difficult and complicated than he thought, and in 42 short, breezy, and often humorous chapters, Crystal looks at biblical expressions that have entered the common language. “The most interesting cases of the Bible shaping our language are when we find expressions in daily use, where people take a piece of biblical language and use it in a totally nonbiblical context, knowing that the allusion will be recognized.” Even better, he says, are cases where the biblical expression is linguistically manipulated to make people sit up and take notice. “The writers aren’t expecting us to know which bit of the Bible the allusion refers to, only that they’ve done something clever with the English language.”

Crystal cites as one example the phrase “let there be light,’’ noting that if one types the expression into a computer search engine there will be over a million hits but only a small minority directly related to the Genesis story. It has been put to use in all sorts of nonbiblical settings, including as a title for art exhibits and pop music. It even turned up as the name of an episode on the TV series “Sex and the City.”

“The best evidence that an expression has been fully assimilated into a language is when it generates creative, playful alternatives,” Crystal concludes. He notes blog reports on airline delays with titles such as “Let There Be Flight,” while boxing and wrestling Web sites go for “Let There Be Fight.” But “let there be light” is not unique to the KJB. It was in the earlier Tyndale and the Bishops Bible before it went into the KJB.

Another chapter looks at the phrase “fly in the ointment,” which Crystal notes has achieved a vogue in popular culture: it’s the title of two novels and a book on popular science, and in music it turns up as the name of a pop group as well as the title of a 1990s album by the US rock group AFI, as well as the name of at least two songs. But, he says, while all dictionaries cite the King James Bible as its source, the phrase doesn’t actually appear there with those words. The verse in Ecclesiastes (10:1) actually reads: “Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour; so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honor.”

Crystal finds Isaiah provides a number of expressions that have been turned into idioms, including the verse “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” He notes a headline in a Colombian newspaper about the decline of paramilitary activity and the rise of a local literature which read “beating swords into pens,’’ and the opening of a tea house on the site of a former battleground in Thailand leads to “beating swords into teacups.” A 2000 book on adapting military technology for civilian products was titled “Beating Swords into Market Shares.”

The conflation of Isaiah 22:13, “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die,’’ with Luke 12:19, about the rich man who tells his soul, “Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry,” winds up in all kinds of modern variations, such as “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet” or “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we devalue the pound” or “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may be in Utah,”’ a reference to the state’s strict alcohol laws.

Another Isaiah phrase, “Behold the nations are as a drop of a bucket” (Isaiah 40:15) has resulted in the modern idiom “drop of/in a bucket,” but, again, the phrase is not unique to the KJB and appears also in Wycliffe, Geneva, and the Roman Catholic Douai-Rheims.

So what does Crystal conclude at the end of his biblical combing and computer searching? He says the influence of biblical idioms is substantial, and they are found in all contexts in which language is used, “from ABC television to zoology, taking in on the way such varied domains as basketball, comic strips, dentistry, engineering, pornography and social networking. The people implicated cover all walks of life: Shakespeare and Sinatra, Byron and Beckham, Osama and Obama. The sources range from News of the World to Newsweek, from Henry IV to The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Even the recent banking crisis has made a contribution: “Am I my Lehman Brothers’ keeper?”

Still, says Crystal, this remarkable and stylistic diversity stems from a surprising small number of instances of English idioms from the KJB—only 257. “I say ‘only 257’ because this puts in perspective the sometimes wild claims made about the role of the Bible in the history of the English language,” he writes, yet no other source, including Shakespeare, has contributed as many.

What about in the King James Version? Crystal says in only 18 cases is a modern idiom to be found in its exact form. In 37 cases, such as “fly in the ointment,” there is no exact King James antecedent. In some 196 cases another translation, especially the Geneva Bible, has the same form as the King James Bible. Is it right, then, to insist that no book has had greater influence on the English language than the KLB? “If this claim is interpreted with reference to the number of innovative idiomatic expressions in a single canonical work of literature, I think we have to say yes,” Crystal concludes.

But do the current anniversary observances celebrate the enduring and continuing importance of the King James Bible, or are they an elegy for an influence that has passed and that will render the KJB of antiquarian rather than theological or literary interest?

“In 1986,’’ Indiana University English professor Paul C. Gutjahr notes in his essay “From Monarchy to Democracy” in the Hamlin-Jones collection, “the New International Version accomplished what dozens of other American translations had been unable to do: dethrone the King James Bible as the bestselling Bible version among American Protestants, a position it had held for nearly three hundred and fifty years.”

Gutjahr‘s piece explores the long tradition of Bible translation in America, pointing out that in the nineteenth century alone, American biblical scholars created some 30 new translations. While many of these received lukewarm receptions, new translations continued to appear with increasing frequency in the early decades of the twentieth century, including, in 1901, the American Standard Version, “a version which many American Protestants would revere throughout the century as the gold standard of translation accuracy.”

Gutjahr touches briefly on the controversy surrounding the publication of the Revised Standard Version in 1952, which brought into sharp relief the deepening divisions within American Protestantism between mainline and conservative evangelical denominations. In the wake of the RSV’s slow acceptance, new translations continued to appear, with nine in the 1950s alone. In the 1960s and early 1970s, however, two new versions of the Bible utilized a new understanding of translation—the American Bible Society’s Good News for Modern Man (1966) and The Living Bible (1971). Both used the controversial translation principle known as “functional equivalence,’’ which stressed translating the Bible “thought-for-thought,” rather than the “formal equivalence” method which translated “word-for-word.” Functional equivalence translations aimed to make the Bible more accessible and simpler to understand by flattening and limiting the interpretative possibilities of complex passages.

“While the quest to present Bible readers with a readily understandable vernacular translation reached all the way back to the KJB, the NIV became a shining example of the contemporary cost of such a mission as the NIV offered its readers ever narrower and more focused lines of interpretation,” Gutjahr writes. “As the voice of the KJB receded in American culture, not only did a multiplicity of scriptural voices become more prominent, but also these voices were increasingly inflected with distinct interpretative stances.”

The use of functional equivalence and the rise of what Gutjahr calls revolutionary changes in publishing have made the last 40 years an era dominated by the proliferation of highly interpretative niche Bibles—The Couples Bible, Policeman’s Bible, Extreme Teen Study Bible, and the Celebrate Recovery Bible, for example.

“Perhaps no biblical edition better captures the current spirit of the age when it comes to American Bible reading than The HCSB Light Speed Bible,” Gutjahr observes, a response to the fact that 40 percent of Bible owners say the book is too hard to read and 59 percent feel they don’t have the time to read their Bible. The Light Speed Bible fuses the Holman Christian Standard Bible with a reading system developed by author and lecturer William Proctor, which he promises will allow readers to read the entire Old and New Testaments in 12 to 24 hours with 70 percent comprehension. “Accessibility, efficiency, and ease of use have clearly become key values in the production and consumption of American Bibles,” says Gutjahr.

The consequences of the shift, both for the future of the King James Bible and for Americans’ biblical literacy, remain uncertain, but Gutjahr is pessimistic: “Not only is the popularity of the KJB dying in America, but with it is American biblical culture’s ability to benefit from the many-layered riches found in the Bible.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor for Religion News Service. He has written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on American prose and the King James Bible and on John Updike, Marilynne Robinson, and many other writers.

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Talk a bit about the service of Nine Lessons and Carols and what it means.

The Festival of Lessons and Carols, in a sense, is a vigil. How do you spend time waiting for something to happen that hasn’t quite happened yet? What do you do if you’re with friends waiting for something? Well, you tell stories, you pray, you sing songs, and that’s exactly what Lessons and Carols does. From a theological standpoint, and actually from a visual standpoint, it is getting that wide-angle lens and moving back and seeing the whole story, seeing the panorama of God’s plan for salvation for humankind and why that was even necessary, so we have to start at the beginning. We start with Genesis.

Tell us more. Why start with Genesis at Christmas?

Well, the story of Adam and Eve is evocative of profound truths about humanity and our relationship to God, and what you get from that story is this vision of Adam and Eve walking in the evening with God when the cooler breezes are blowing—from having a relationship with the divine, being able to walk with God in the Garden of Eden, which is Paradise, and then disobeying God, feeling shame about it, blaming each other, and then Eve blames the serpent. So they’re always blaming “other”—“‘it’s not my fault, it’s because so and so told me to; it’s not my fault it’s because…,” which immediately sets up a block into your relationship with the Holy One, so they can’t walk in the garden anymore. That’s the saddest thing about that story—that they have lost that ability to be present with the Holy in Paradise, and that story still speaks to us today. We understand that, and I think we long as human beings to get back to a place of Paradise, to get back to a place where things are right and just and beautiful, where there is not anger and fear and evil, and where we are at one with God.

In the service several Old Testament passages are read. Talk more generally about how that leads to Christmas.

In the readings in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah especially, we have some beautiful passages about the people of Israel being in exile and longing for Messiah to come, longing for a Savior, longing to return to the city of Jerusalem, longing for that reconnection that is proof that their relationship to God has been reconciled, and so we have promises of the Shoot of Jesse, promises of the House of David, promise that a Messiah will come, and Christianity has taken all of those beautiful promises, and we use them as showing that Jesus was foretold. Probably the most powerful place that that happened for us happened musically, and that’s when George Fredrick Handel decided to choose all those beautiful Isaiah passages and to set them to music in “Messiah,” and we hear that all the time now. Christians—actually everyone in the world is aware of those particularly wonderful passages because they have been set to music so wonderfully, and we do of course sing them a lot at this time of year.

Why is it important and meaningful to weave the scripture readings with the carols and the music?

The Scripture is the basis for our understanding how God operates. We are leaning on the experiences of souls of light before us who have felt connected to the divine, and those are the people that—we really stand on their shoulders. We look to them, the great prophets, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah—we ponder their stories, their struggles with God, and from that we glean how to have a relationship with God. So those stories are showing us more profound truths. In a sense, the hymns and carols—most of them are based on biblical sources, so they are interpreting for us, and it’s interesting with carols and hymns you have two different things happening at least: You have someone who wrote the text. You possibly have a translator—some of the texts were in Latin or other languages. And then you have a musician, a composer who either wrote the music for that carol or wrote it for something else, and it gets turned into a carol. So it’s very interesting how that process works and how people who sing actually make the decision what it going to end up in that song.

The Scripture and the music build on each other, interpret each other. How does that work?

The music really tells you how to feel about the text. It’s not a small thing. For example, “Joy to the World”: As soon as you start singing it it’s on a high note, you have to support your breath, you’re joyful even singing it. “Silent Night” is more of a lullaby, and it makes you think more of a little baby coming into the world at night time. It settles you into a different place. “O Come All Ye Faithful” is a procession. You can see people lining up and walking. That first verse—seven times the words “O come” are in there, “O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord”—so it’s inviting people to join this procession of faithful people across the ages. I think most churches will use it as the opening procession, because it’s a march tempo.

Let’s talk about the difference between Advent and Christmas.

Advent is the church’s preparation for the second coming and also for that first coming again, so we prepare for Christmas, but we also are preparing for the eschaton, for the final things, the second coming, the end of the world. Like Christians always say in Advent, “the end is near,” and we don’t like to talk about that, and the secular world pretty much jumps to Christmas. That’s a much safer place to be than talking about the final judgment and what will happen then. But for Christians it’s important to be thinking every year—it’s like cleaning house, it’s sweeping out, it’s preparing and trying to remember what it is that is really important in our lives and getting back to that, so it’s letting go of our need to try to be in control and remembering to let God be in control so that there is a place to invite God into our hearts.

And how is that reflected in the music?

The music of Advent—a lot of it has to do with John the Baptist, who was the prophet who came before Jesus just a little bit, enough for him to be baptizing people in the River Jordan when Jesus showed up and was calling people to repent and saying the kingdom of God is at hand, make yourself ready, and that’s the message of Advent. The message of Advent is this time is coming. I think the Advent hymns and carols tend to be more eschatological. They’re talking, again, about larger issues other than just a baby Jesus being born. They’re talking about opening our hearts to what heaven is really about. When we then move closer to Christmas and we talk about the Angel Gabriel coming to Mary, then it gets much more specific in preparing for Christmas. We tend to be more comfortable with that. A little baby Jesus is coming, and that’s great, and we know we are all loved by God. But when we get this bigger John the Baptist yelling in our ear from the desert “you should repent,” you should figure out what’s important and follow the truth, follow God, work toward authenticity—that’s a little harder to take.

Christians talk during this time of year about the Incarnation, and a lot of the music of Christmas speaks to that.

Yes. Incarnation means coming into the flesh, literally, so it’s becoming human. What’s wonderful about Incarnation is God actually lowering God’s self to become human and in doing so reminding us of how awesome it is to be human. That original sin with Adam and Eve and that break between divine and human which was so huge—the whole thing changes when God becomes Jesus as a little baby, and now we are reminded that our humanity is not something to be thrown away or discarded. That God would use the Virgin Mary, would use a human mother, that a mother could be the mother of God changes how we think about ourselves, and I would just say in our own lives that often God comes to us in the form of someone else always, and it’s always a human being, and if I go back in my own story about my own conversion as an adult, re-conversion, I can tell you the people who have touched me, where I saw God in them, I saw Christ in them, I saw a love beyond what I could understand and imagine. So, in a sense, God Incarnate is coming to know love in a very personal, very real, and very human way.

You have talked about the God who is far away and the God who is close. Can you talk about that concept and relate it to Christmas?

The transcendent God is God who is the skies, above us, so far away that we often don’t feel any connection whatsoever, or we’re so fearful of God that we can’t imagine approaching God in that form. “Imminent” means that God is right here with us, God’s presence is here now, and that’s the gift of Jesus coming into the world, of being born as a child. In the Christian world, one of the great, great gifts we have been given is the gift of Communion, of Eucharist, of being able to break bread with each other and drink wine, and in that simple act of sharing these very basic things, bread and wine, we believe that Christ is present again with us and becomes incarnate anew, so that every time that we join together in a service of Holy Communion we are reenacting this Incarnation, and God comes in us.

We also spoke about a tie between Christmas and Easter. How are they related, and how does the music show us this?

Well, the interesting thing about Christmas music is that we love best the ones that just tell the story clearly about Jesus being born, about shepherds coming, about angels singing, about wise men coming. We sort of like to leave it there. But there are some carols that hint at what is to come. Our Advent lessons and carols [service] today is going to end with a wonderful hymn “Lo! He Comes!” that really talks about Jesus now having to go and to suffer and die for our sins and then to be resurrected. Also, it’s interesting that Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio”—the very last chorus in it is beautiful and joyful and has a wonderful trumpet solo, but the music is the same music that we sing to the chorale “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” so Bach is speaking very theologically, knowing that, yes, this is joyous, this is the end of the Christmas festivities, but you know how the story ends.

The themes of hope and joy are really present, and the music highlights that.

“The hopes and dreams of all the years are met in thee tonight”: That’s part of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and in this particular carol Phillips Brooks had been in Bethlehem three years before, and he had stood on the hills where the shepherds might have been and looked down at the little, sleepy town of Bethlehem. So here he is at his job as a priest, a young man, and he’s asked to write a text, or a carol, for the Sunday school, and he thinks about looking down at this little town of Bethlehem, and then Lewis Redner, who was not only his organist but also the Sunday school supervisor, was in charge of composing a tune for it, and he couldn’t. Nothing came to him, it didn’t come, and then Christmas Eve he finally had a dream, and the tune was given to him, and it’s chromatic, it’s thorny, it’s beautiful. We know it so well as the American tune for “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” But what it does is it captures the darkness, the sadness, the fear and then also turns it to this hope and this joy in the baby Jesus being born in Bethlehem. The words have meaning, but the melody tells you what that meaning is and how to listen to it. We’re used to Redner’s version in America, but in England they’re used to a different tune, “Forest Green.” The two versions give you a very different sense of those texts. The Lewis Redner—“St. Louis” is the name of the tune—has a much more profound sense of the darkness of being in the city and hoping for something beyond ourselves and of longing that God will come to us. The “Forest Green” version sounds like it’s Christmas morning already. Everything has happened already, and we are safe in heaven with God.

Hope is deep in our communal soul. We want to be saved. We understand that we as human beings somehow let our pride, our egos, take over and when we do that it tends to alienate us from other people. We tend to cut ourselves off. The people who really are the happiest are not the people necessarily with the most things. It’s often people who have a community that they care about, a family where there is love that prevails even in the times of darkness. Almost anything that we face as human beings—if we can face it with other people of faith, other people who share love with us, they can be endured, and I’ve seen this again and again watching couples who have been so in love with each other, and one partner dies and being honored to be able to step into this holy place and to witness this extraordinary love that finally transcends the grave. It’s absolutely clear to me that there is something beyond, and there is a part of us that wants to be part of God, that wants God to dwell within us. I believe we’re happiest when we give. I think we are happiest when we are able to love. This season with the beautiful carols, many of them sentimental, many of them more lullabies, many of them helping us deal with the darkness—they are reminders to us that we are loved and that we are loveable, and in getting to that place it actually allows us not only to give gifts, but to receive love in a way we didn’t think was possible.

The amazing thing about Christmas is that it allows us to celebrate a really profound joy, the joy of being re-found by God, of opening our hearts to that love in a new way and of receiving this light that will transform us and reconcile us not only with God, but with each other.

And the themes of darkness and light?

Advent really is dealing with the fact that our days are getting shorter and that we are losing light, that we feel a sense of darkness encroaching and that the true light of the world now will come in the form of this baby, and if you think of a dark room and just one small, tiny candle, that will indeed make a difference. You will see that. So we’re reminded that even when things seem the darkest, seem the most impossible, seem absolutely like we have lost our way that we look to that light of Christ, and we invite that light within us.

Candles and the verses about darkness and light are important: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

Absolutely, and I believe those lights, the Christmas lights, the lights in the store, the shiny baubles that get reflected light—I think that’s our society’s way of trying to be mystical, and I think it works.

What about the meaning that “O Come, O Come Emanuel” transmits?

“O Come, O Come Emanuel” is one of the hymns that is based on Latin chant and is at least nine centuries old or more, and there were “O” antiphons that were written for every day before Christmas, for the eight days before Christmas, and each one had a different word for who was coming, a different word for God: O Come, O Come Emanuel; O Come O Wisdom; O Come O Root of Jesse. But it’s inviting God in, and that’s what Christmas is all about. It’s asking, pleading with God—this yearning, this desire to be reconciled, to get it right once more. Hymns such as “O Come, O Come Emanuel,” which has been chanted through the ages by monks and nuns in processions of faithful Christians—you have this sense of a timeless melody, and you join all these fellow souls of light and the communion of saints when you sing it.

“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is very typical in the lessons and carols service.

Charles Wesley, one of the great hymn writers of all time, wrote “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the story goes that he was very moved by the sound of the bells ringing on Christmas morning and that inspired him to write that song. The other interesting fact about it is that Felix Mendelssohn’s music was actually from another secular work that he had composed, and Mendelssohn didn’t think it was appropriate at all, but we have so taken over that tune, and we so accept that as wedded to that particular text that, for us, that is the angels at Christmastime.

What do people feel when they sing that?

This is where heaven and earth meet. In our society I don’t think we’re ever going to get rid of Halloween. We have horror movies at Halloween that remind us that evil is present in the world, and I don’t think in our secular society we’re ever going get rid of Christmas, because we need those angels. We need that image of something outside ourselves, and somehow we know that. Often I talk to people who say they’re atheists, they don’t believe in God, struggle with that, there’s nothing out there, but I have to say that when people who proclaim that to me are then in some grave difficulty, health problems or someone they love is dying, that my conversation is always very different to them, and I don’t need to talk anyone into believing in God. But I have to say in my own experience with life and death and with being with people who are dying and have died that there are mystical things that happen that I cannot explain in any rational way. I’m aware that if we live in a place of hope and faith that opens the door to beautiful things happening, wonderful coincidences that we can’t explain that change our mood from one of darkness and despair to one of joy. Christina Rossetti’s wonderful text “In the Bleak Midwinter” makes this point very well about this moment between heaven and earth coming together in the second verse: “Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him / Nor earth sustain; / Heaven and earth shall flee away / When He comes to reign: / In the bleak midwinter / A stable-place sufficed / The Lord God Incarnate / Jesus Christ.” So that brings together the sense of Advent, when we’re looking towards the end time, and then focusing it finally on this little baby who saves the world.

Is it the words, is it the melody? Is it both?

It is always a combination of the words and melody, as far as I’m concerned. When we sing “Gloria” in “Angels We Have Heard on High” we’re singing this long melisma, all of these notes on one word that allows us to get into a place where we’re actually going beyond the verbal. The music is going to tell you how to feel about it, and oftentimes it will flip you into a nonverbal place of ecstasy. Many, many notes to the same syllable is a way of trying to express the ineffable. We are trying to express what cannot be expressed. We are trying to get to a place of ecstasy that is beyond our normal experience.

How does sitting in a service of lessons and carols take us through all of this?

The gift of lessons and carols is that it takes time, and that you sit there and at the beginning you’re thinking about all those things you should be doing, and hopefully you just take out a piece of paper, write them down, and let them go. And then you let the music, the carols, the texts, the prayers wash over you, and if you do it well you will open your heart into a place of deeper and more profound meditation, and the light will break through. Some text, some image, some musical phrase will change you, and that’ll be the gift you get.

Many different kinds of churches and congregations have taken the traditional lessons and carols service but have changed it, adapted it. What does that say?

The idea of lessons and carols probably comes from the oldest service we have, which is the Easter vigil, and that was very early Christianity, so it’s the idea of waiting around for something to come. What are you going to do? Well, you’re going to sing, you’re going to read scriptures, etc. So for us to keep changing the order of what is read and what carol is sung is absolutely appropriate. It is good and right for us to keep recreating something so that it speaks to us now.

Some people coming to a lessons and carols service may expect that it’s going to be all the old carols that they know so well, but there may be some carols they are not as familiar with. How does that work into their experience of it?

Lessons and Carols is not a concert. It’s not where you’re going to applaud after everything. You’re going to allow yourself to meditate at a much deeper place. It can be very annoying if you’re expecting to sing carols that you know and are confronted with hymns you’ve never heard before, that go into different places. But my best suggestion is rather than being annoyed at it, talk to God about it, and say, okay, why are you telling this to me now? And then if you open your hearts you’ll find that all of the anthems, all of the carols are going to show you a different side of what you know in the familiar carols , but they’ll help you to attach it to your life now, in the present. Sometimes when we sing carols, we forget the text altogether, and we are at our grandmother’s knee, or whoever first taught that to us. But the gift of new carols is that God is working among us today, even now, inspiring us anew with the Holy Spirit breaking through in new ways, and often the Spirit is talking to you right now, and it could be that that most annoying new anthem or carol is just for you.

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