Chapter 17
Ritualizing Christian Iconic Texts
Popular verses, familiar stories, and parables from the Christian Bible are often ritualized in Christian worship through oral recitation, the singing of hymns, or the performance of skits and dramas. These rituals focus on the meaning of biblical words, engaging the semantic and performative dimensions of scripture (Watts 2006). Understandably, biblical studies, with its roots in ecclesiastical training, has traditionally focused on these dimensions in its quest to clarify and promote the contents of the Bible. But in recent years, as material cultural studies has been brought into studies of the Bible (Smith 2009; Beal 2011) more attention has been placed on the iconic dimension of Christian scripture, which focuses on the power and meaning generated by ritualizing the Bible as a material object (see Parmenter 2006).
Thus, ritualizing Christian iconic texts refers to those actions that manipulate a visually recognizable Christian “Bible” to convey power and meaning apart from the act of reading the words that are contained within that book. Whether the words comprise all 66 to 81 books of the Old and New Testaments (depending on the canon), the New Testament only, just the four Gospels, or biblical selections and/or prayers, the display and handling of a familiar image that signifies a Bible conveys and confers authority and legitimacy to individuals, social groups, or spaces. The rituals may be deliberate, or so taken for granted that they appear inadvertent; similarly, the meanings, effects, and affects generated by the actions may be intentional, or evident only through a careful analysis of a history of practices. Some examples of ritualizing Christian iconic texts include waving a floppy, black leather, gold-edged Bible in a demonstration (Figure 17.1), processing a jeweled Gospel-book from the back of a sanctuary to its resting place on an altar, and displaying a family Bible in a prominent place in one’s home.
Figure 17.1 A street preacher in San Francisco, CA, waves a red leather floppy Bible. Photograph by Dorina Miller Parmenter.
There are instances in Christian history where uses of biblical books in ritual not only fit the iconic dimension of scripture described by Watts (2006), but also where the Bible functions as an icon of Christ, following the rationale for the operation of Orthodox Christian icons. In these cases, displaying, touching, and/or processing with the Bible is perceived to make Christ present within the ritual space, overseeing and validating the other activities that occur there, or offering protection from harm.
The Theology of the Early Christian Book
In western religions, beliefs about the origins of the scriptures impact how the texts are used in ritual. Unlike the myths of the revelations of the Torah to Moses and the Qur’an to Muhammad, Christian scripture does not portray Christ as literally inscribing, dictating, or delivering the text of the New Testament. However, Christian views of the divine origins of the Bible do follow a common mythological pattern that can be seen in religions with their foundations in the ancient Near East. Throughout several variations in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian literature, the myths that depict this pattern explain that the gods obtain power and defeat chaos when they control the divine written record of the universe, most commonly called the Tablet of Destinies. While this heavenly book is generally fixed, sealed, and guarded, it can be altered through apotropaic rituals and penitential acts. In addition, the contents of this book are partially revealed to humans from time to time, with the intention of allowing human participation in the ordering of the world (see Dalley 1998; Parmenter 2009).
This ancient image of a fixed heavenly book that is revealed to humans is what lies behind the Qur’anic designation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as “Religions of the Book” (Qur’an 5:65, 29:46), where there is a book that remains in heaven that is the source of the written Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. While F. E. Peters (2007) claims that the New Testament is exempt from this heavenly book pattern because the work of the multiple Christian authors was “patently literary issue and not Words from On High” (36), this overlooks other ways that early Christians placed Christ, and the texts that represent him, into the tradition of heavenly books through their images related to incarnational theology, and the impact that those images have on rituals that employ Christian scripture.
The scriptural basis for Christian incarnational theology is the prologue of the Gospel of John (1:1–18): “In the beginning was the Word (logos). . . . All things came into being through him.…And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” This image of logos as the creative agent of God that resides in heaven yet is revealed to humans as a creative agent harkens back to Wisdom hymns of the Jewish tradition where Wisdom (ḥokmâ/sophia) is the book that dwells in the highest heavens but appears on earth (see Prv 8:22–36; Sir 24:3–12, 23; Bar 3:29–4:1; Boyarin 2004; Parmenter 2009). The aspect of the divine (“and the Word was God,” John 1:1) that becomes visible in the body of Christ (“whoever has seen me has seen the father,” John 14:9) is God’s heavenly book.
Following this theology of Christ as the Word, early Christian literary and visual images of the Book frequently are iconic substitutes for the body of Christ. For example, in the late first or early second century Ignatius of Antioch argues against Jews who do not believe aspects of the gospel that do not agree with the “original documents,” or the Torah. Ignatius writes that instead “it is Jesus Christ who is the original documents. The inviolable archives are his cross and death and his resurrection” (Phld. 8.2). The second-century author of The Gospel of Truth links the crucified Christ and the book of “the father’s thought and intellect” when he writes that the book was taken up by Jesus, who “wrapped himself in that document, was nailed to a piece of wood, and published the father’s edict upon the cross” (III.19.34–20.27, [Malinine et al. 1956], in Layton 1987, 255).
In visual images, an eleventh-century carved ivory book cover now in Berlin shows clearly how the body of Christ replaces the tablets from heaven received by Moses (Kessler 2006). In addition, Christ as the heavenly book is present in images of judgment, where the divine Word is also the Book of Life, the book of deeds that is opened at the resurrection and Last Judgment. In one of these Hetoimasia images, the Byzantine Last Judgment wall at the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, two figures, perhaps Adam and Eve, kneel before a jeweled codex on the judgment throne (Parmenter 2006, 2009). The image of the book as an iconic substitute for the image of Jesus becomes more frequent and explicit in some Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance images of Mary (see Acheimastou-Potamianou 2000; Smith 1996; Brown 2010), reflecting and reinforcing the idea that the Word that became visible through Mary remained visible through the Book (Figure 17.2).
Figure 17.2 Adam and Eve kneel in supplication before a throne occupied by an elaborate Gospel codex. Detail of Last Judgment wall at The Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, Italy. Credit: Mosaïstes byzantins—Louis Gabriel, Public.
The Technology of the Early Christian Book
Ritualizing an iconic text requires that the object employed be easily recognizable as the vessel for the scripture of the tradition. For Christianity, the ritual book was, and remains today, a codex. However, the first form of the written transmission of Christian Gospels and letters was papyrus or parchment scrolls, the commonly used technology for literature in the first and second centuries in the Roman Empire (Roberts and Skeat 1983), and the form used for Jewish scripture. But since what constituted scripture for early Christians was in flux until at least the fourth century, and because literacy was low, transmission of the gospel was primarily oral. During this same time, simple codices were used as informal note-taking devices, and it is likely that Christians took notes in these small books to help them in their evangelism (Roberts and Skeat 1983).
The fourth century was a turning point in Christian history because Christians may have exceeded 50 percent of the population of the Roman Empire (Stark [1996]1997) and because the codex became the dominant book form over the roll. While evidence shows that by this time Christians favored the codex for their books, there is no agreement among scholars as to why this was so (Roberts and Skeat 1983; Gamble 1995). In 332, two years after his dedication of a new, Christian, symbolic center of the empire in Constantinople, Constantine famously commissioned “fifty volumes with ornamental leather bindings, easily legible and convenient for portable use, to be copied by skilled calligraphists well trained in the art, copies that is of the Divine Scriptures, the provision and use of which you well know to be necessary for reading in church” (Eusebius, Life of Constantine, IV.36, trans. Cameron and Hall, 1999, 79). It is unknown exactly what books were included in Constantine’s volumes of scriptures: the four Gospels bound together would have been “convenient for portable use” and widely accepted as scripture, but pandect Bibles such as the fourth century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are also possibilities, as it would have required a great deal of skill and wealth, as might have been available in an imperially sponsored scriptorium, to produce the large volumes (Gamble 1995; see Turner 1977).
William Harris (1989) has noted that in the fourth century, precisely when Christianity and the use of Christian texts would have been growing, there was a decline in literacy in the Roman Empire. If this is the case, it is interesting that there was a concomitant rise in the status and function of writing in both religious and imperial matters. The low levels of literacy and the high regard for texts demonstrates that throughout this time, Roman and Christian culture was dominated by the oral dissemination of authoritative writings, whether from a public posting in the market-place or the reading of scripture in church gatherings (Gregory 1979). This hierarchy from the powerful inscription down to the passive aural recipient probably worked to the benefit of both church and state in maintaining authority. The paradox of authority based in/on texts but also valuing revelation over education allowed power to be channeled from two directions: the physical text gained status as an icon, or even a magical object (Gamble 1995; MacMullen 1997; Rapp 2007), while the disdain of classical education provided distance from the suspicions of “sophistry” (Cameron 1991; Lim 1995). This paradox can also be seen in the educational practices of Christians: scriptural and linguistic knowledge were necessary for access to and dissemination of the proper texts, but this education was limited to the elite. “There is no thought that the church should tell, or help, anyone to learn to read,” according to William Harris (1989, 316), but nevertheless the Bible or Gospel book, in a singular, codex form, was the focal point for Christian (and Christianized imperial) rituals.
Early Christian Book Rituals
Unlike in the Jewish traditions, where precedents and guidelines for the ritual production, handling, and use of Torah scrolls can be found in the Torah and Talmud, there are no scriptural models for ritualizing sacred texts in Christianity. It is likely that the earliest Christians modeled the proceedings of their house-churches (Phlm 2, Col 4:15, 1 Cor 16:19) after synagogue practices, so the focus was on reading “the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets,” religious instruction, prayer, singing, and the sharing of food and funds (Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 67, in ANF, vol. 1, 186). After Constantine, ritualizing the iconic Book through acts that heightened the visibility of the Bible or Gospels contributed to the public legitimation of Christian worship.
Starting in the late fourth century there is evidence of Gospels being processed through the congregation toward the altar for the purpose of the book being seen and touched (Egeria, Travels 24.8–24.11, trans. Wilkinson 1971; Dix 1945; Petrucci 1995; Mathews 1971). As the altar was associated with Christ’s death and resurrection (Bogdanović 2002; St. Clair 1979), as well as his throne (Mathews 1971), the procession and enthronement of the book ritually activates and authorizes the space for the reenactment of Christ’s death, resurrection, and rule in the next part of the liturgy that includes the Gospel reading and the Eucharist (see Parmenter 2006, 2010).
The ritual of enthroning the Gospel book to claim Christ as the ruler, judge, and legitimator also took place in the early Church’s ecumenical councils (Humfress 2007). The Canons of the Council of Ephesus recount that the council was convened in 431 “with the holy gospels lying on the throne in the middle and showing Christ himself present among us” ([Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum 4, 1237C], in Rapp 2007, 197; see also Besa 1983; Parmenter 2006). The Justinian Code of 530 also attests to the practice: a court case began when a copy of the Christian scriptures was placed upon the judicial seat, and the proceedings would only be valid while they remained there (Codex Justinianus 3.1.14.1). Individuals involved in the case were sworn in with their hands upon the Gospels, and the Book could stand in for an absent litigant (3.1.13.4). Caroline Humfress (2007) writes that “Justinian thus harnessed the power and identity of the quintessential Christian books, without the need to actually open those texts in order to consult their words during every legal process. . . . [T]he place of judgment and the legal participants were animated by the Holy Spirit, but the cases themselves were still judged according to the letter of ‘Roman’ law” (158).
Just as rituals of the book brought legitimacy to particular communal events such as worship services, councils, and legal hearings, early Christians’ private book rituals harnessed the same power for protection and healing from potentially destructive forces. Stories abound of Gospels putting out fires, being untouched by fire or water, and providing the antidote to snakebite or cures of other illnesses (Drogin 1989, Rapp 2007). Early Church Fathers attest to the laity using Gospels for apotropaic and therapeutic rituals, but frequently they lament or criticize the practices and instead direct people to incorporate the efficacy of the words of the text into their lives. Many of these references come from John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), Archbishop of Constantinople, who famously chided “women and little children” who garner attention because of the Gospels suspended “from their necks as a powerful amulet,” and carried “about in all places wherever they go.” Alternatively, suggests Chrysostom, “write the commands of the Gospel and its laws upon thy mind. Here there is no need of gold or property, or of buying a book; but of the will only, and the affections of the soul awakened, and the Gospel will be thy surer guardian, carrying it as thou wilt then do, not outside, but treasured up within; yea, in the soul’s secret chambers” (Homily on the Statues 19.14, in NPNF, ser. 1, vol., 9, 470). Similarly, Chrysostom writes “if the devil will not dare to approach a house where a Gospel is lying, much less will any evil spirit, or any sinful nature, ever touch or enter a soul which bears about with it such sentiments as it contains” (Homily on John 32.3, in NPNF, ser. 1, vol. 14, 114), and that hanging Gospels by one’s bed; in combination with placing alms in a bedside coffer “you have a defence against the devil . . . and the night will not be troubled with fantasies” (Homilies on First Cor. 43.7, in NPNF, ser. 1, vol. 12, 262). Augustine chimes in that placing a Gospel book at the head “is preferred to amulets” to relieve a headache; but even better, one should place it “at the heart to heal it from sin” (Tractates on John 7:12, in NPNF, ser. 1, vol. 7, 52).
Ritualizing the iconic book that is the manifestation of the divine Word legitimates the authorities and the institutions that publicly engage the ritual and control the interpretation and/or implementation of the text (Watts 2006). This was the case in early Christianity for church leaders, including the emperor, who made the Bible or Gospels a visibly prominent object in worship rituals and imperial rituals. Those without socially legitimated authority over the text ritually manipulated the Christian book in more private, personal, and subversive ways, attempting to tap into the same power denied to them in the public forums.
Bibles and Icons as Ritual Objects during the Iconoclastic Controversies
In the sixth century, the Syriac author Philoxenus of Mabbug instructed Eastern Christians to
[s]alute the cross, and take the gospel in your hands. Place it on your eyes and on your heart. Stand on your feet in front of the cross, without sitting down, and after every chapter you have read, place the Gospel on the cushion and prostrate yourself before it up to ten times. . . . Thanks to this external adoration which you give to God, you will conceive in your heart the internal adoration and the effect of divine grace which a human tongue cannot describe.
(in Rapp 2007, 198)
In the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries, rituals of veneration before the Gospels and the cross, such as the one described here, were not an issue. Instead, iconoclasts saw danger in pictorial icons as objects of ritual veneration, for they saw a risk of idolatry, or worshiping a material image rather than its spiritual referent. Iconophiles saw no distinction between these ritual objects, and argued that both the Book and the icon operated in the same way: the material object acts as a mediator to invoke and reveal the invisible world of Christ and the saints. John of Damascus wrote against the iconoclasts, “why do you worship the book and spit upon the picture?” (Against Constantius 3 [PG 95:316] in Pelikan 1974, 131) as did Nicephorus, who wrote that if icons were rejected, so too one should get rid of the Gospels (Refutation 1.37 [PG 100:292] in Pelikan 1974).
The anti-iconoclastic Decree of the Second Council of Nicaea of 787 affirmed this similarity between the Gospel book and icons. To pictorial icons, along with the cross, relics of the martyrs, and the book of the Gospels, “incense and lights may be offered according to ancient pious custom. For the honour which is paid to the image passes on to that which the image represents, and he who reveres the image reveres in it the subject represented” (NPNF ser. 2, vol. 14, 550). These controversies regarding icons are relevant to a discussion of Bible rituals because unlike icons, the Bibles or Gospel books consistently were taken for granted as acceptable ritual objects, effective in mediating the spiritual presence of God or Christ.
Ritualizing Relic Books in the British Isles in the Middle Ages
While frequently early Christian rituals operate with the Bible as a reproducible icon that invokes the presence and power of Christ (Parmenter 2006, 2009), in the Middle Ages, and particularly in the British Isles, there are many instances where the books produced by scribal saints in their devotional practices became irreproducible relics (Watts 2006; Rapp 2007; Brown 2010). Like other relics, these books harnessed the power of the saint’s intercessory power when ritually engaged through sight and touch. For example, elaborately and intricately illuminated books such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, created between 710 and 725, were never meant to be displayed and read by others, but were created as an act of prayer which opens a channel between the scribe and the divine, so that the Word becomes flesh on the page of the book (Brown 2010). Upon the scribal saint’s death, often the gospels were placed in a book-shrine, adorned with precious metals and jewels like other reliquaries, and only occasionally, if ever, removed for liturgical performance (Brown 2003). The preservation of texts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells was made possible because they were not intended to be used for reading; their power lay in the book as object, and that power could be harnessed through the shrine that enclosed it.
One of the most famous book-shrines is the Cathach reliquary, believed to contain a copy of the Psalms penned by Columba (or Colmcille, 521–597) without the owner’s permission, which led to a war (see Fowler 1894). Since Columba was victorious, in later generations the Cathach was carried “three times to the right” around the troops of the ruling O’Donnell family of Donegal so that “it was certain that they would return victorious” (Raftery 1941, 51). Other manuscripts of Columba, along with his clothing, were processed annually by the monks of Iona, where Columba was abbot from 563 to 597, to ensure a good harvest (Adamnan, Life of St. Columba II.VIII [Reeves 1874], cf. Fowler 1894, 63).
The Reformation and the Ritual Display of Christian Iconic Texts
The Protestant reformers’ uplifting of scripture and downplaying of the physical world turns a corner in the history of the Bible as an iconic book. Protestant epistemology converts all aspects of the visual and material world, including the Bible and the sacraments, into signs or symbols either pointing to or representing another unseen reality; that is, the material world is not perceived to be sacred in itself. Despite this overarching Protestant view of the material world as fallen and of no benefit to help in one’s salvation, the Bible remains a manipulable physical object—one of the few legitimate ritual objects in Protestant worship. Thus, while images and objects theoretically are diminished in favor of words and texts that signify, the Bible as essential object and image is at the center of the religion of the Protestants, so much so that the English churchman William Chillingworth ([1637]1854) wrote, “The BIBLE, I say, the BIBLE only, is the religion of Protestants!” (463).
This simple dictum of sola scriptura, the rallying cry of the Reformation, indicated the myriad of ways that Reformers attempted to wrestle soteriological mediation, and thereby institutional authority, away from the Roman Catholic Church. “Scripture alone” and the other “solas” that it encompassed—sola fides, sola gratia, sola Christus, and soli Deus Gloria—signified the anti-Catholic practices and ideas that it attempted to exclude: if the potential for salvation comes through scripture alone, its possibility through Church tradition, ritual, visible images, and other earthly “works” are denied. It was a call to iconoclasm and an attempt to focus on spiritual, rather than material, experiences and realities.
Stripped of priestly rituals and most liturgical objects and images, Protestant worship spaces, particularly in the traditions that followed Calvin and Zwingli, presented and reinforced their soteriology in the ritual display of the Bible and biblical texts. Altarpieces and other paintings were replaced with biblical inscriptions or images of the Bible itself, and eventually the altar was replaced with the pulpit, where the Word was presented and proclaimed. More modern Protestant spaces that employ stained glass windows or liturgical banners generally continue to present symbols of the church, such as crosses, doves, loaves of bread, and Bibles (Figure 17.3). David Morgan (2005) writes that “[b]y insisting on the dissolution of images,” iconoclastic reformers “created a media hierarchy in which the falseness of images underscored the truth of words and the iconicity of scripture” (13).
Figure 17.3 Bible stained glass window at Bay Ridge United Church, Brooklyn, NY. Photo by Robert Adamski via Wikimedia Commons (cropped from original).
Protestants also ritualized the display of their personal Christian books. Small prayer books or Bibles, ornamented with jewels or embroidery and carried by women or worn on the body, seamlessly took over where Books of Hours or Psalters had previously signified status, wealth, and piety (Walsham 2004). Similarly, in Puritan/evangelical communities, it was and still is a common ritual to process to church with a Bible tucked under one’s arm, even if that Bible is simple or worn out rather than elaborate or new (see Parmenter 2010). The practice of displaying a family Bible became ever more prominent until its apex in the nineteenth century in England and America, where Bibles were created to be, and marketed as the focal point of pious Victorian homes (Gutjahr 1999, McDannell 1995).
Christian Iconic Texts as American Political Images
The American colonies were populated by many Europeans seeking religious freedom with only the Bible as their guidebook. Puritans imagined the New World as their Promised Land, the fulfillment of their new covenant with God to create a Calvinist Christian society. Their journey paralleled that of God’s other chosen people, the Israelites, hence the use of Old Testament imagery to bolster their vision and purpose. Armed with their New World Bibles (the King James Authorized Version of 1611), the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay followed their governor John Winthrop in making themselves a Christian “City upon a Hill,” a model of a Bible-centered society and a light for all to follow (Stout 1982; Gutjahr 1999).
By the mid-eighteenth century many Protestants in New England felt that the light was dimming from the blandness of theological orthodoxy in the tradition of Calvin, which relied too much on educated elites to expound to the laity the doctrines of original sin, the trinity, and election, as well as to exert social control on the recalcitrant. The New Light or Great Awakening religious movement in the colonies saw the dawn of American evangelism, with a redoubled emphasis on the simplicity of scripture and egalitarianism in religion (Hatch 1982), and renewed stress placed on individual salvation rather than the corporate destiny of the chosen (Stout 1982). This shift from the doctrinal specificity of the different colonial denominations to a non-sectarian, individualistic Protestantism continued the settlers’ “unbroken allegiance to the Bible as the inspired Word of God and infallible rule for all issues of life” (Stout 1982, 33); however, it also began the transformation of the Bible into a unifying but generalized image of civil religion, more specifically, of Protestant-American nationalism (Morgan 2005).
During the American Revolution, Protestant colonists overcame some of the differences that divided them internally, uniting to preserve their bibliocracy from monarchy. In the inauguration of the first U.S. President, George Washington took his prescribed constitutional oath with a symbolic action that had great historical, legal, and religious precedents, but one not required by the Constitution: Washington spoke his oath with his hand on “a large and elegant” Bible and then stooped to kiss the Book (Gutjahr 1999). For most early Americans this ceremonial use of the Bible did not present a problem with regard to the boundaries of church and state as it does in its continued use in inaugurations today, because for the predominantly Protestant colonists, “the Bible was woven into the warp and woof of American culture” (Noll 1982).
The ritualized image of the Bible employed in an American context loses much of the christocentrism that characterized its use in earlier ages, where the Bible was an icon of Christ. Instead, a sentiment of national unity that subsumes many Protestants’ religious differences is invoked in Bible rituals. David Morgan (2005) has described American incarnations of icons, like Bibles and flags, as “sacred evocations of the divinely ordained republic, [that is,] the nation that is invested in these symbols to such a degree that the cherishing (or abuse) of them conveys the devotees’ veneration of the nation itself” (222). In the context of nation-building in early America, the referent of the Bible as an icon is a more generic concept of Providence, with all Americans as God’s chosen people—a less exclusive version of the Puritans’ Old Testament typological narrative. An illustration of this generic Christianity is that generally Jesus is not a part of national mottoes that are frequently linked to Bibles, like “God Bless America” or “In God We Trust.” Like the earlier uses of Bibles or Gospel-books in governmental rituals, such as in Roman courtrooms, invoking the image of the Bible legitimizes a particular vision of a nation guided by God.
At the same time that Protestant Christianity sprang to life and church attendance boomed with the evangelical revivals of the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, Protestants felt a threat from non-Protestant religions and retreated to their Bibles once again. According to David Morgan (2005),
Faced with the disestablishment of official or state-sponsored religion, the rise of mass democracy, and the arrival of increasing numbers of non-Protestant immigrants, Protestants in the Northeast during the early decades of the nineteenth century felt menaced. They responded by promoting the spread of literacy through the distribution of religious primers and instructional materials and encouraging the use of the Bible in public school rooms. The strategy was to assimilate newcomers and to socialize children into what most Protestants envisioned as a Protestant nation, a legacy of providence and millennial purpose as it came to be understood during the colonial period. (222)
This emphasis on the Bible as a generic moral educator was perpetuated by nondenominational or nonsectarian Protestant groups like the American Bible Society (est. 1816), the American Tract Society (est. 1825), and the American Sunday School Union (est. 1824). David Morgan has analyzed how these national organizations used mass media not only for the proliferation of biblical moral precepts in the form of texts, but also to provide images of a unified and homogenized Christianity. Nineteenth-century print media promoted a visual mythology for a distinctly American religiosity, and compensated for the First Amendment’s disestablishment of religion (see also Gutjahr 1999, Fea 2016).
Conservative Christians in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, faced with historical biblical criticism among liberal Christians and ever increasing religious diversity and secularism in American culture, attempt to hold fast to a vision of a Bible-centered nation in their ritual display of Christian iconic texts. This is nowhere more apparent than in disputes over the placement and/or removal of Ten Commandments monuments. The most notorious case is that of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who, shortly after his inauguration in 2001, erected a two-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama State Judicial Building. After much controversy and media coverage, the monument was removed by order of a federal court in 2003. As James Watts (2004) has pointed out in “Ten Commandments Monuments and the Rivalry of Iconic Texts,” “the Ten Commandments have become a common symbol for the claim that U.S. law and government developed from religious roots and that it should remain true to them” (§21). But more than a singular symbolic act, the Alabama monument controversy, and the entire Ten Commandments movement of the past ten years, involves a battle over which iconic text—the Bible or the Constitution—holds (or should hold) more power in America. Watts writes that, generally speaking, the thousands of conservatives who protested the removal of the monument
want the Constitution and the Federal courts that interpret it to acknowledge the higher authority of God and scripture. Some protestors in the Alabama monument incident wore t-shirts that juxtaposed a cross over the American flag and waved their bibles as they burned copies of the federal court order to remove the monument from the rotunda. This ritual concisely represented the conflict as one between iconic texts, elevating one [the Bible] while destroying the other [a federal court document]. It also illustrated the fact that the texts each side defended represent, and to some degree camouflage, other realities: Evangelicals use the Ten Commandments as a cipher for the entire Christian Bible, an iconic text considered in its entirety to be the literal utterance of God, and which represents for them the sum of Evangelical beliefs about religion and politics. The Federal Courts use the Constitution as a cipher for their own authority over American law, and over every aspect of government and society that law touches. This sets the two texts, as icons, on a collision course for symbolic supremacy. (§26)
Ritualizing Christian Iconic Texts in a Digital Age
With the proliferation of Bible apps for tablets and phones in the twenty-first century, the text of the Bible is more widely available to people than ever before. Having the Word close by at all times for easy reference and daily encouragement is promoted and implemented by many Christians today. But the use of electronic Bibles has also brought the importance of the iconic dimension of the Bible to the awareness of some Christian leaders, and they are now advocating that Christians return to ritualizing the physical book of the Bible.
One of the main reasons given for physical Bible use is that being seen with a Bible codex in public is a marker of Christian identity. Reading the Bible on a tablet is in a sense just like any other kind of reading, but reading from a recognizable Bible book is ritual display that conveys a message beyond the text itself. One blogger writes:
[W]hen the smartphone or iPad . . . replaces a hardcopy of Scripture, something is missing in our nonverbal communication to unbelieving onlookers. When you walk to church, sit down on a bus, or discipline one another at a coffee shop, a hard copy of the Bible sends a loud and bold message to the nearest passersby about your identity as a Christ follower. It says, “Yes, I am a Christian and I believe this book is the Word of God telling us who we are and how we should live”. (Barrett 2013)
It is precisely this ritualization of the iconic dimension of texts, or drawing special attention to what is otherwise an ordinary activity of reading, that turns a text into scripture and engenders its power for users (Watts 2006). That is, the shared and repeated activities with the Book mark it as sacred.
Do you take pride in your Glo Bible? Probably not. Does your family take pride in the wrinkled, stained, marked-up, decades-old Bible hauled out every night at the dinner table? More likely. . . . I know it’s just a collection of pages with ink on them, but I feel emotion about it. Partly the character of it, but mostly the physical presence of it. The history of it. This is something sacred. (Jackson 2014)
And if it is important for individuals and families to engage in Bible rituals, so much so for the legitimacy afforded to authoritative leaders (Watts 2006). One advocate for reviving iconic Bible use in church calls for pastors to leave their tablets at home and use “a hardcopy of the Bible, perhaps leather-bound and worn from constant use.” “[T]his large, even cumbersome book, reveals he is ready to bring to the people a message from God himself. In short, a print copy of the Scriptures in the pulpit represents something far more focused and narrow: a visible symbol of God speaking to his people, the master Shepherd feeding his flock” (Barrett 2013). This indicates that even in a digital age, the ritualization of the iconic dimension of the Bible is essential to maintain its status as the Word of God.