Biblical Literalism in the Academy, 1650–2005: Coming (Almost) Full Circle

An unbridgeable gap appears to exist between the learned biblical scholarship of Martin Luther and John Calvin and their seventeenth-century academic followers, on the one hand, and the Bible readings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century self-described “fundamentalists” and “evangelicals,” on the other.  Yet both have claimed to search the Scriptures for its literal sense. This paper will attempt to explain how that gap developed. First, it will examine two early modern university professors—the German Lutheran Abraham Calov (1612-86) and the Dutch Calvinist Johannes Cocceius (1606-69)—and their conceptions of the literal sense of the Bible. It will then contrast the millennium of learned tradition on the Bible and its senses that Cocceius, Calov, and their colleagues inherited and continued with the vastly different, more popular, literal readings that resulted from the Bible’s changing role in the university beginning in the eighteenth century. While almost all university professors, including theologians, came to distrust traditional defenses of the authority and authorship of the Bible and to accept some version of the documentary hypothesis, those outside the academy, led by popular preachers and charismatic laypeople, took over the mantle of defending Scriptures. Against their more learned counterparts’ claims of the Bible’s similarity to other ancient texts, they insisted that the biblical text was the inspired Word of God and therefore literally true. But the search for legitimacy for the literal sense has since moved back to the university.  Beginning in the late-twentieth century, some evangelicals established Christian universities and research institutes developed to lend academic credence to their literal readings of Scripture.