Attitudes towards the Bible and Use of the Bible and its different media and cultural forms in Germany

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Alexander Deeg; Professor Dr. Gert Pickel
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439630984

The project examines the current relevance of the Bible in the German population, the attitudes towards the Bible and its use. The starting point for the project is the (supposed) centrality of the Bible for theory and theology of the protestant “church of the word”. On this background, the practical use of the Bible as a book and of its medial and cultural deductions (online, twitter, watchwords, calendar sheets) and the attitudes towards the Bible will be the aim of the empirical research. Central aim of the project is the detection of the ‘mental’ connections of people with the Bible and their consequences for their use of the Bible. One hypotheses, which has to be proved in the project, is that not many people ‘use’ the Bible by explicitly reading it, but many more ‘have’ a Bible in their households (also in households of people without church affiliation) and may be in contact with its manifold cultural deductions; at the same time there may be specific attitudes towards the Bible, which are important for the religiosity of the people. To get valid information on these questions, a method-mix, combining a representative survey and qualitative interviews with typological identified interviewed people will be conducted. The methods will be recombined by systematic triangulation. The results will be analyzed subsequently using the discourse and methods of practical-theological hermeneutics. The project has four concrete goals: (1) The empirical identification of the practical use of the Bible and its cultural and medial deductions. (2) The empirical identification of the existence of the Bible and their deductions in households. (3) The empirical identification of the attitudes towards the bible, their deductions and the ‘mental connections’ to the Bible. (4) The identification of the practical-theological consequences for Biblical hermeneutics in the context of the current society.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants