One Book, Two Worlds

From The Living Church-

In The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies, Michael Legaspi tells a tale of two Bibles: the Bible of Christian Scripture and the Bible of the secular academy. The narrative that Legaspi presents is clear and compelling, although some might wish to qualify parts of it. According to Legaspi, the Protestant Reformation introduced a crisis of authority for Christian Scripture. As both Reformers and Counter-Reformers grasped after proof texts, Scripture failed the Church as a court of final approval. This “death of Scripture” left the Bible open for new appropriations.

The bulk of Legaspi’s monograph focuses on one such appropriation: the use and transformation of the Bible at the newly founded University of Göttingen, Georgia Augusta. At the center of his inquiry stands the celebrated orientalist Johann David Michaelis (1717-91), who, according to Legaspi, was central to the birth of the academic Bible. In turning the Bible, primarily his beloved Old Testament, into a historical document, Michaelis was able to salvage a text capable of transcending the intra-Protestant polemics that threatened to destroy many theological faculties. “Given the choice between the scriptural Bible and something else, university men, the fathers of modern criticism, chose something else” (p. viii).

More here-

http://livingchurch.org/one-book-two-worlds