In the summer of 1941, in the midst of the Second World War, Oxford University Press published The Bible for Today, a new edition of the Bible that sought to make its meaning relevant in a rapidly changing modern context.
“A new approach is needed in these days”, its editors ...
(Show more)In the summer of 1941, in the midst of the Second World War, Oxford University Press published The Bible for Today, a new edition of the Bible that sought to make its meaning relevant in a rapidly changing modern context.
“A new approach is needed in these days”, its editors suggested: “Men cannot now read the Bible as their fathers did, with simple and unquestioning faith.” Both modern critical scholarship and the conditions of modern industrial and technologised culture and society, it was argued, were conspiring to distance mid-twentieth-century British society from the “common and universal” messages in Christianity’s most sacred text.
The strategy employed in this edition to connect the Bible to modern life lay not in any alterations of the main text, which was the standard “Authorized Version” (“King James Bible”) used widely in the Anglican Communion. Instead, what is interesting here is the way the biblical contents were framed: first, through short introductory texts that often drew connections to modern contexts and, second, through striking illustrations provided by a team supervised by prominent British artist Rowland Hilder (who also worked extensively with the Ministry of Information on wartime propaganda).
The book generated a substantial and largely positive response in the Christian press.
In my paper, I show how these framing strategies sought to make Christian messages relevant to what were at the time seen as the changed conditions of mid-twentieth-century modernity. I also demonstrate how this particular book emerged within a wider discussion among British Christians across the 1930s about how “modern” conditions in culture and society – particularly technology and growing state power – meant that sacred certainties had to be made newly relevant in order to regain their power. Such efforts were, of course, not unprecedented: while “sacred” texts are typically presumed to be timeless, they have always been framed and understood within particular historical contexts. Through my examination of The Bible for Today, I hope to add to the historiography of how British Christians responded to the challenges of totalitarianism, social change and global war in the 1930s and 1940s. More broadly, I hope to contribute to the growing interest in how early 20th century Christianity sought to adapt to – and to contribute to shaping – what was seen at the time as a fundamental transformation of European (and, more broadly, Western) ways of life.
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