The word of God is in my hands and everything has changed. In many ways this idea is at the heart of the Protestant literary imagination. While Protestants may imagine their origins from Luther and his forerunners, the origins of their literary sensibilities lay closer in spirit to William Tyndale with both his vernacular translations and his theological vision expressed in works such as The Obedience of a Christian Man. Tyndale articulated two abiding sensibilities: first, that the word of God may be placed in the everyday language of the people and, second, that all our words and thoughts may be soaked in a scriptural imagination such that we need no ecclesiastical or political ruler to hear God's voice and know the divine dictums. Such sensibilities grew like a swelling tide that covered over countless women and men, drenching them in a biblical world the contours and extent of which many were never able to escape, even if they wanted to, even if they disavowed all claims to any real connection between human words and God's voice. The drenching was complete.

The Protestant literary imagination is a storied imagination, imbued with the compelling narratives of the Bible and a compellingly biblical way of narrating life. The Bible came to life – living, breathing, and moving – and this is what constituted the Protestant. Of course, there is a central element of theological protest against a lax Catholicism in the origination of Protestantism, but biblical literacy is the birth parent who taught Protestants the stories of their lives and which became the story of their life. Like so many others, the Bible was the book that introduced me to the book. It was the pedagogue that guided me in the joy of reading, writing, and discovery. Biblical literacy gave birth to literacy for me, but not only for me but also for much of the Protestant world. The Protestant story is the story of literacy in unanticipated hands, but with mixed consequences and mangled results. This chapter considers those mixed consequences and mangled results and their legacy in the literary vision of those who carry the imprint of its effects.