In his 2005 book, The Enlightenment Bible, Jonathan Sheehan describes changes in the Bible’s role in Germany and England between the late seventeenth and mid-nineteenth century. In Sheehan’s account, Enlightenment is not a philosophy or a secular mood, but a “new constellation of practices and institutions”—philology, text criticism, and new theories of translation, as well as coffee houses, scientific societies, and journals—one that dislodged the Bible from its central place in the Western imagination. No longer considered revelation from outside this world, the Bible was “reconstituted as a piece of the heritage of the West” and “transformed from a work of theology to a work of culture.”
What Sheehan describes is not so much a loss as a reconstruction of biblical authority. The Enlightenment Bible had authority, but its authority “had no essential center” since it was distributed among the disciplines that scrutinized it, each of which “offered its own answer to the question of biblical authority.”
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