We Lutherans believe in the supernatural efficacy of \u201cWord and Sacrament.\u201d\u00a0 Other Christians believe in the power of God\u2019s Word, but deny that water, bread, and wine, when joined to God\u2019s Word,\u00a0can have any more than a symbolic significance.\u00a0 After all, how can the\u00a0physical convey what is spiritual?\u00a0 Part of my answer has always been that the Word too is a physical thing\u2013ink on paper, sound waves in the air\u2013that God uses sacramentally to bring us His grace.<\/p>\n
David Neff of Christianity Today<\/em> has written an interesting piece on the physical form of Bibles from the middle ages to our present-day \u201cBible apps.\u201d<\/p>\n The default meaning of Bible for Christians in my group was the King James Version. The default physical form was a black leather binding.<\/p>\n The physical form of the Bible matters because it influences the way Christians use their sacred book. In the countercultural 1960s, for example, publishers shucked the black leather uniform in favor of more contemporary dress. The aim was to reach those who might not otherwise pick up the Scriptures. The American Bible Society\u2019s Good News for Modern Man resembled a mass market paperback, and Tyndale House\u2019s Reach Out: The Living New Testament looked just plain \u201cgroovy.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1735, the Bible emerged in another physical form\u2014the family Bible. An English publisher named William Rayner produced The Compleat History of the Old and New Testament or a Family Bible. This was the first time that phrase was used, according to Liana Lupas, curator of the American Bible Society\u2019s collection of rare Bibles.<\/p>\n The purpose of these Bibles, says Lupas, who curated a current exhibition of family Bibles for the Bible Society\u2019s MOBIA gallery, was to provide study helps to answer questions that readers might have, and also to stimulate families to center their common devotions on the Bible.<\/p>\n People soon found other uses for these Bibles, pressing flowers, preserving locks of hair, and protecting other keepsakes. Families had already used the blank pages at the beginning or end of large Bibles to preserve genealogical information, recording births, marriages, and deaths. Dedicated family history pages were a natural development. And so in 1791, Isaiah Thomas published the first American Bible to contain pages dedicated to this purpose.<\/p>\n Placing the family Bible at the physical center of the ideal American home helped entrench the idea of the family as the main training ground in Christian living.Both Catholic families and Eastern Seaboard Protestants traditionally enshrined their family histories in parish registers and churchyard burial plots. But the American family became mobile, and American faith became more baptistic and individualized. Families who moved west left their family networks behind, and the family Bible became a portable shrine, recording the family as a sacred institution. . . .<\/p>\n Placing the family Bible at the physical center of the idealized American home also helped entrench the Puritan ideal of the family as the main training ground in Christian living. . . .<\/p>\n Today, many of us use Bibles with no physical properties of their own. They borrow their frame from computers, iPads, and smartphones\u2014also markers of middle class existence\u2014but created for individual use. Will this digital revolution cement the decline of family spirituality that was once fostered by the family Bible? God knows.<\/p>\n