The Bible in a Disenchanted Age, R. W. L. Moberly. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018.

Summary: Explores how one can privilege the Bible over other texts, ultimately as a way of encountering and believing God in Christ.

R. W. L. Moberly asks a basic question in this book: why may we trust the Bible and privilege it over other books in disclosing what it means to believe and know God? He sets himself a challenging task, turning aside from the apologetic approaches that appeal to evidence for the trustworthiness of scripture. He sees this as a modernist project in a post-modern age where the question of why particularly study the Bible over other books is a live issue. He takes as a point of departure Benjamin Jowett’s advice that we read the Bible as we would other books.

He contends that there are three ways to read the Bible: as history, as a classic, and as scripture, looking for it to disclose God to us. He models an exercise in such reading in a comparison of the Aeneid and Daniel 7. The real question then is what warrants the move from the second to the third type of reading. He explores why few of us read the Aeneid as scripture leading us to faith in Jupiter.

He draws on the work of Peter Berger, Leslie Newbigin, and others to observe the importance of plausibility structures and that the ones we heed and are shaped by will determine whether or not we privilege scripture. In reading scripture with the church, we read within an interpretive tradition, we approach a canon of scripture, of books whose authority has been recognized by the church. This implies an openness to what we will find and a willingness to act wholeheartedly to the truth.

What is attractive in what Moberly says is that I think he describes how many people come to faith. It is not through evidentialist proofs but a personal journey of reading, often with other Christ-followers, and finding the “ring of truth” in what they read that brings them to a moment of decision, a step of trusting not only what they are reading but that these are God’s words for them. There is a kind of “faith seeking understanding” that one exercises.

While a persuasive case may be made vis a vis the Aeneid, the harder test case is the Qur’an. There is equally an interpretive community and plausibility structures that may guide one “open” to affirm belief in Islam. One could equally follow the process of reading the Qur’an as history, as a classic, and as scripture leading to belief. I don’t think Moberly has answered the question for me of why privilege one religious text over the other where there are active plausibility structures supporting each? What he does do is explain why such structures have so much influence on the belief of individuals embedded in those structures.

This aside, Moberly concludes the work with a well-stated plea for biblical literacy, citing the lapses scholars and commentators who ought to know better have made. The approach Moberly advocates certainly encourages that literacy. He offers an alternative to evidentialist approaches that fail to resonate that may appeal to some. But I think Moberly needs more to truly contend for the privileging of the Bible over other extant religious texts.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Speakeasy.