"Back to the Bible"

Sixty percent of the world's Christians live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Books & Culture reviews The New Faces of Christianity by Philip Jenkins, and the review comments at length about how those Christians regard the Scriptures:

.... African and Asian Christians revere the Bible and identify with its cultural setting and worldview. They see it as sacred text, with words of power, to an extent that has been lost to much of northern Christianity.

To understand this approach to the Bible, Jenkins informs us of the ways in which the Scriptures, freshly translated, have been received into Asian and African societies. In many of these realms, people already were familiar with the idea of sacred texts, so the Bible was given special status from the start. In the hands of newly literate people, the power of biblical words has been explosive. Northerners need to recall the electrifying force in Reformation days of common-language Scriptures, made available to new readers. "It burns!" exclaimed one of the Puritan preachers about the Bible, and so it does today for Nigerians and Indians and Chinese.

The Bible is read communally in the global South, so that the nonliterate, too, can profit from hearing the Word. Northern churches retain this ancient practice, but in the South, it is more central to congregational life. Believers commit long passages to memory and together they become people of the Book. It is God's word to them and in them, and it is not to be gainsaid. They venerate the Bible as a holy book, even a talisman. One of the last vestiges northerners have of such uses for the Bible is for swearing in court witnesses and office holders. The Bible in the South is a powerful evangelistic weapon, commanding deference from curious hearers, impressing them with its literary and spiritual qualities, and speaking pointedly to their lives.

Southern people of faith affirm the Bible's teachings and stories to be true, and no historical criticism can sway them. .... [more]

Source: Back to the Bible - Books & Culture