{"id":1124,"date":"2013-10-22T17:25:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T17:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/the-bible-paradox.html"},"modified":"2013-10-22T17:25:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-22T17:25:00","slug":"the-bible-paradox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/the-bible-paradox.html","title":{"rendered":"The Bible Paradox"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Nearly 80 percent of all Americans think the Bible is either literally true or is the inspired word of God. And yet, most Americans have no idea what is actually in the Bible, as Stephen Prothero\u00a0notably demonstrated in his book\u00a0Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know \u2013 and Doesn\u2019t<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
(To test your religious literacy, take Prothero\u2019s quiz\u00a0here<\/a>.)<\/span><\/div>\n
And so we have the paradoxical situation in which we as a culture \u201chave invested the words of this book with amazing authority even when we don\u2019t know what these words are and what they mean.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
So says\u00a0Joel Baden<\/a>, Associate Professor of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School. Baden gave a recent talk called \u201cWhat Use is the Bible?\u201d (see video below) at\u00a0The Nantucket Project<\/a>, a festival of ideas on Nantucket, MA.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cThe Bible has effectively ceased to become a text,\u201d Baden argues, but instead has become a symbol of power and authority \u201cthat is undergirded by the relatively uninformed faith commitments of the majority of the American public.\u00a0To speak in the name of the Bible is to claim a piece of that authority.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly 80 percent of all Americans think the Bible is either literally true or is the inspired word of God. And yet, most Americans have no idea what is actually in the Bible, as Stephen Prothero\u00a0notably demonstrated in his book\u00a0Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know \u2013 and Doesn\u2019t.\u00a0 (To test your religious literacy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Bible Paradox<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Nearly 80 percent of all Americans think the Bible is either literally true or is the inspired word of God. 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