Re-Enchanting the Text - Print

Re-Enchanting the Text: Discovering the Bible as Sacred, Dangerous, and Mysterious.

By Cheryl Bridges Johns.

Soft cover 178pp.
ISBN 9781540965134
Baker Academic (2023)
[Allow 4 weeks]

In an age when the Bible has been stripped of its sacredness and functional biblical illiteracy reigns, this book makes the case that we must work to re-enchant the text in order to return the Bible to its rightful place in the lives of Christians.

Cheryl Bridges Johns explains how the Enlightenment’s turn to the rational human subject made it possible to objectify the Bible and has distorted our interpretations of Scripture. This move generated a belief that studying the Bible was primarily a means of supporting facts and providing evidence of competing visions of reality. This “modern” version of the Bible does not trouble our nights with apocalyptic images. It has been stripped of its power. She also shows that both “liberal” and “fundamentalist” interpretation are failed forms of disenchanted readings.

Johns argues that we must rediscover the Bible as a sacred, dangerous, mysterious, and presence-filled wonderland to counteract biblical illiteracy in an increasingly post-Christian landscape.

“One can only voice a vigorous ‘yes’ to this wise and welcome book. Johns’s work is at once breath-taking and breath-giving in its expansive hopefulness.” Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary