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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative
90.4  
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March, 2004
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Book Review


Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England. By Lisa M. Gordis. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xii, 309 pp. $39.00, ISBN 0-226-30412-4.)
Though the Puritans were the most avid Bible readers in early American history, few scholars have systematically studied the nature of Puritan scripturalism. Lisa M. Gordis's new book, in scope and sensitivity, is an unprecedented contribution to the literature on Puritan interpretive practices and their wider cultural implications for New England's Bible commonwealths. With elegance and clarity, Gordis traces the recurring tension in Puritan thought between the ideal of Scripture as self-interpreting and the reality of a Bible whose ambiguities demanded the authority of human interpreters. She argues that this tension, for all its destabilizing potential in the tradition, also accounted for the rich complexity of the Puritan relationship to Holy Writ. . . .
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