Review: The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies By Michael C. Legaspi

by on September 25, 2025 | Comment

Is the church’s Bible also the academy’s Bible? Although we might even ask what this question means, Michael Legaspi argues that the Bible as Scripture is different than the Bible of the academy. In this respect, he indicates a gap between uses and reception of the Bible. On the one hand, the Bible was for centuries Scripture. It built the worldview for the church and even Western society. It had an encompassing role in how it addressed the here and now with relevant material as God’s living Word. On the other hand, the academy turned the Bible into a text for dissection. Rather than God’s instrument to shape life around us, the academy saw the Bible as lifeless on the table before them, meant for analysis.

Legaspi presents his case largely by analyzing the life and work of Johann David Michaelis (1717–91). As what was then called a specialist in Oriental studies, Michaelis taught primarily biblical Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible. He spent a lot of scholarly energy dealing with philology and doing comparative studies with other Near Eastern languages to find the original meaning in the Hebrew language. In this capacity, Michaelis was an early professor at Georg-August University, which became Göttingen. This school was meant to be an innovative place of study to break new ground in German academia.

We can start to reflect upon Legaspi’s case by noting some background. He teaches at an Eastern Orthodox seminary, and in that respect, sees the Reformation as planting the seeds that led to the separation of the Bible as Scripture and the Bible of biblical studies. He is right that the Reformation had an accompanying renewal of interest in rigorous exegesis, including philological and contextual study. He is wrong in slating this development as tied into the phenomena of separating the Bible for the church and the Bible for the academy.

Legaspi respects Michaelis and his scholarship so much that he misses the aspects of Michaelis’ approach that further the very problem that Legaspi wants us to see. Michaelis came at the study of Scripture in a university context that had no aim at training pastors. He wanted to recover the ancient context and meaning of Scripture so that we would understand the original meaning as those ancient authors understood their own writing. Michaelis, as Legaspi notes, came at the study of Scripture detached from any sort of confessional commitments. This dynamic is an exact component in taming the Scripture from being the Word of God that enlivens the church’s life. Michaelis grew up in German Pietism and brought a lot of that mindset to his study. He wanted to be free from dogmatic strictures in his scholarship, even if he affirmed many of them personally.

Interestingly, this non-confessional approach had a specific aim within the scope of the German university system. The preoccupation of the day was with the classical societies of Greece and Rome with a view to reappropriate its grandeur for today. Michaelis strove to repristinate Hebrew culture with the same classical prestige so that people would see it as valuable to developing a flourishing society.

The problem here is that he wanted Scripture to build a nice society apart from the proclamation of Scripture in the church. In other words, Michaelis himself was part of a desacralizing, pragmatic approach to Scripture that left it bereft of that fundamentally theological place that it had held for the numerous preceding centuries. Michaelis, and other scholars of his ilk, wanted Scripture to be of worldly good without coming through the church to be of spiritual good to God’s people first.

We might notice the connection to modern sentiments about Christian America. Here, I am not even thinking about so-called Christian Nationalism as a movement. I am rather thinking about the desire for a supposedly biblical culture without a desire to hear Scripture taught for spiritual edification in church. It is a longing for an outwardly comfortable Christendom that is its own sort of dead orthodoxy.

The payoff is also about hermeneutics. This reduction to ancient societal insights that might then profit culture today highlights the shortcomings of the exclusively grammatical-historical approach to exegesis. Now, grammatical-historical methods are important in ascertaining meaning in the text. When, however, we limit Scripture’s significance to only what the original author would have understood apart from the Spirit’s inspiration fusing divine meaning into human words, we cut ourselves off from the full doctrinal payoff that comes from a full, canonical reading of Scripture.

Scripture is a theological book. We need to read it in connection to God’s purpose for it to build his church. We also need to be mindful of how various scholarly trends seem conservative but may well be rooted in premises that were originally antagonistic or at least dismissive of traditional Christianity. Legaspi’s book is a thought-provoking snapshot into the shift of mindset concerning why God gave us the Scripture and how to study it.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2010).

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