CARNEGIE: “It’s not a f**ng book! It’s a weapon! A weapon aimed right at the hearts and minds of the weak and the desperate. It will give us control of them. If we wanna rule more than one f**ng town then we gotta have it. People will come from all over - they’ll do exactly what I tell ‘em if the words are from the book. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. All we need is that book.”
With this climactic scene from
Book of Eli, we discover for the first time the full extent of Carnegie’s plot: to find a Bible and expand his personal empire with the power it wields. We also cut to the core of one of the main themes in the movie: for better or for worse, the Bible is an effective weapon used by many visionaries to promote their agendas, whether good or bad. Carnegie is the antagonist in a film that seeks to elevate the importance and worth of the Bible, and to draw a clear line of distinction between the Book and those who would abuse its power for their own ends.
But why does the Bible possess this type of power in Western Culture? (I mention Western culture because the Bible certainly does not have the same type of sway in Muslim nations for example. The equivalent question in those places would be “Why does the Quran possess this type of power?”)
Of course, the whole question of ‘power’ itself – “What is power?” “Can a book even possess power?” “Or is it really the people
using the book who possess the power?” – is worth a bit of attention but I’ll leave that for another time. (See N.T. Wright’s article
How Can the Bible be Authoritative? for a discussion of these questions within the Christian context)
An Evangelical might simply say that the Bible is powerful because it is the “Word of God” and then proceed to quote Hebrews 4:12 “For the
Word of God is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating to the division of soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intents of the heart.” And at first glance, if “Word of God” does refer to the Bible (see below), then this does seem to attribute some sort of power to the Bible itself. The argument continues, the Bible claims this sort of power for itself because it was written by God himself as the means of communicating his instructions to humankind.
Thus, “The Word of God,” a biblical phrase that has been popularized by Evangelicalism to refer to the Bible, often carries with it certain connotations including the ideas of Biblical Authority, Inerrancy, and Inspiration (Inspiration in a supernatural- God wrote it – sense). The understanding, roughly, is that God communicated his universal, unchanging truth through the writings of Scripture; and therefore the completed Bible is carrying out the authoritative voice of God in the world today. The members of God’s chosen body of people - the church - are then responsible to read-and-understand, and then apply the directives given by God in the Bible. There is no debate necessary; “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” (Insert any number of witty rallying cries created by the defenders of fundamentalism to inspire the team on to victory)
As a related tangent, the rah-rah-you-can-do-it mentality starts with young, fundamentalist-to-be, training camp (a.k.a. ‘Sunday School’ or Vacation Bible School). “The B-I-B-L-E, Yes that’s the book for me, I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E. Bible!” Raise your hand if you had that ditty drilled into your head at two years old along with the image of the pudgy Christian Crusader thrusting his sword into the air (and toting his bible in the other hand)….and now you go to rehab.
Even the most popularized children’s song of all, “Jesus loves me,” carries out the same message: “Jesus loves me, this I know;
for the Bible tells me so, little ones to him belong, they are weak but he is strong. Yes Jesus loves me…..
the Bible tells me so.” Never mind the Yoda type grammar, or the tune (which belongs in a
Korean supermart advert); the significant observation here is that Jesus’ love is not known in an experiential way, or even a historical way (Jesus died for me so I know he loves me); it is known through a propositional instruction manual that teaches me about this mind-blowing concept as though it were one of the properties of an isosceles triangle you learn about in a math textbook.
So where did these ideas come from?
Well Evangelicals will obviously tell you they come from the Bible (See Part 2). Historically speaking
however, it seems that this is the result of reformation theology, at least in part. As Luther and the reformers sought to free the church (and the European world) from the tyranny of Rome, they introduced some paradigm-shifting ideas, perhaps none larger than sola-scriptura “by Scripture alone.” No longer was the Pope the ‘final authority’ on church polity, now the Bible was. The Guttenberg Press allowed this shift to take root as mass copies of the Bible became available for distribution for the first time ever, allowing any individual who could read a personal stake in the discussion (and actualization) of appropriate responses to God’s authoritative Word.
(It’s worth mentioning that perhaps the reformers did not go far enough - to the point of deconstructing the very notions of authority/obedience under which the entire church had operated for centuries)
A second historical movement that seems to me to be significant to the Evangelical bibliology is the Fundamentalist Movement of the early 1900’s. As philosophical rationalism progressed in the universities and Darwinian evolution began to reshape science, the Protestant community (and Catholic/Orthodox for that matter) was faced with questions it had never seen before. During the Reformation, an authoritative Bible was the instrument of freedom from Roman rule. No one questioned the legitimacy of the instrument itself – it was merely a question of appropriation. Now the instrument itself was being challenged.
Understandably so, the reaction among many in the Evangelical world was to defend that instrument at all cost. The opposition were seen as the agents of Satan using the tools of reasoning and science to attack the Bible – God’s true authoritative Word. At least one generation of the conservative Protestant church was spent formulating, articulating, and defending the core fundamentalist creeds, which centered on bibliology. There were certainly other tenets to the fundamental agenda such as the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, a literal resurrection, etc. But as in the reformation, the authoritative Bible became the focal point from which all spokes on the fundamentalist wheel found their origin. And truly it has become the hub for
all theology and practice in the Evangelical church today.
Evangelicalism has significantly shaped Western culture, most noticeably American culture and politics, and this may explain why the Bible was portrayed as a weapon in the
Book of Eli. It truly has been a weapon used by many different hands to further many different agendas and it continues to be elevated by many as a book worthy of devotion and as a power to be feared.
The question becomes: Is God one of those sword bearers? Does he use this weapon to accomplish his own purposes? Is this type of
power vested onto the book by God or is this rather a distortion of his book?
[Part 2 will attempt to examine some of the claims in the Bible about the Word of God]
