For many evangelicals, no object is more central to faith and practice than the Bible—preached, memorized, carried, gifted, and treated as the ultimate authority. But how did it come to occupy that place, and what happens when readers of the same text reach opposite conclusions?

In this episode, historians John Fea, Dan Hummel, and Maggie Capra trace the Bible across American evangelical history: from the founding of the American Bible Society in 1816 and its mission to put a Bible in every hand, through common-sense interpretation, study Bibles, and an enormous publishing and translation industry, to the political uses of Scripture, the slavery debates, and the 20th-century battles over biblical inerrancy.

IN THIS EPISODE

“The Bible is doing its work.” Two American Bible Society Record stories—a young Catholic convert named Mary and a college skeptic—frame the belief that Scripture, “without note or comment,” could convert readers on its own.
Sola scriptura and a people of the book. Why a commitment to Scripture as supreme (or sole) authority made evangelicals Protestants—and shaped a distinctly anti-Catholic, anti-traditional posture.
Common-sense reading and its tools. Concordances, cross-references, and the perspicuity of Scripture: “helps” that let lay readers interpret for themselves—while multiplying interpretations.
Helps to study the Bible. Scofield (1909), Ryrie, MacArthur, and the commercial engine of Bible publishing—plus journaling Bibles, translations, and digital tools like Logos and YouVersion.
Reverence for the object itself. The family altar, soldiers’ pocket Testaments, and the Museum of the Bible—the Bible as sacred artifact, not just text.
Scripture, slavery, and politics. How the Bible was marshaled on both sides of slavery, woven into civil religion and nationalism, and invoked in times of war.
The battle for the Bible. Higher criticism, neo-orthodoxy, Fuller Seminary, Harold Lindsell, the ICBI, and the inerrancy debates that reshaped evangelical identity—and the Southern Baptist Convention.

BOOKS MENTIONED

The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society, by John Fea (Oxford University Press, 2016)
America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911, by Mark Noll (Oxford University Press, 2022)
The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, by Mark Noll (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell (Zondervan, 1976)
Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism, by George Marsden (Eerdmans, 1987)
Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America, by Daniel Vaca (Harvard University Press, 2019)

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Cyrus Scofield — author of the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford), a landmark dispensationalist study Bible.
Mark Noll — leading historian of American religion, cited on the Bible, slavery, and the Civil War.
Harold Lindsell — editor of Christianity Today; his Battle for the Bible made inerrancy a litmus test.
Carl F. H. Henry — founding editor of Christianity Today; author of the five-volume God, Revelation and Authority.
Kenneth Kantzer — shaped Trinity Evangelical Divinity School as a counterweight to Fuller in the inerrancy debates.
John Woodbridge — historian who critiqued the Rogers–McKim thesis on biblical authority.
Donald Dayton — historian who challenged Lindsell’s framing of inerrancy.
Eugene Peterson — translator of The Message, a single-author paraphrase of the Bible.
Daniel Vaca — historian who argues evangelicalism is, in part, a commercial religion.
Elias Boudinot, Francis Scott Key, John Jay — politically influential founders/supporters of the American Bible Society.
Robert Lewis Dabney & James Henley Thornwell — Southern theologians who built biblical defenses of slavery.

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Hosts:

JOHN FEA - Visiting Fellow in History, Lumen Center; Distinguished Professor of History, Messiah University

MAGGIE CAPRA - Visiting Instructor in American History, Beloit College

DAN HUMMEL - Director of the Lumen Center; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This podcast is brought to you by the Lumen Center and STUDIO, both initiatives of the SL Brown Foundation.

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Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour

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