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Article: Reclaiming the Bible: the church's book. (Column)
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- August 24, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Jaroslav Pelikan once observed that the best lives of Christ written in the 19th century were often "written in hate." Unsettling as these works were for traditional believers, the angle of vision adopted by their authors frequently brought to light features of the New Testament's account of Jesus that had been overlooked in the interest of doctrinal orthodoxy.
At the same time these works signaled a fateful shift in the study of the Bible: biblical studies had left the control of the church and moved to the secular academy. An enormous gap, especially serious for Protestants with their "scriptural principle," had opened up between the church and the main centers ...