Puritans, Scripture, and Mental Pictures
In the latest edition of the Scottish Journal of Theology, Dr Susan Hardman Moore, Lecturer of Theology and History at The University of Edinburgh, has written a splendid article entitled "For the mind's eye only: puritans, images and 'the golden mines of Scripture,'" SJT 59 (3): 281-296.
With a penchant for historical development and detail and breadth of primary source material, Hardman Moore traces the complicated shift from the visual to the verbal in seventeenth-century Puritanism. Her assessment of the role of printed aids to Bible study (such as concordances) in codifying Puritan emphasis upon the Word as an 'image-maker on the mind' is a fascinating portrait of Protestant thought in an emergent print culture.
Here is a summary taken from the abstract of the article:
To understand the drive for verbal imaging in puritansim with more precision, this paper considers the experience of readers in a culture where print was new; aspects of Reformed theology that paved the way, in particular the stress on the unity of scripture that promoted interest in typology; the boost that new printed aids to Bible study - specifically, concordances - gave to drawing 'mental pictures' from scripture; and the relation of all this to making the Bible both easy to handle and memorable, which was a key element in the strategy to drive the Protestant message into the hearts and minds of the people.
