I’ve been sharing some thoughts and musings about the format of the Bible, the fact that we have it as one volume when it is in fact many books put together. Some of my thinking on this came from a conversation I had in Cuba.

A man who was visiting Cuba from another Latin American country shared with me some thoughts on sin. As he laid out his arguments, he pulled together passages from several different New Testament books. No regard for context. No regard for differing authorship. Sentences and phrases cut and pasted together to make an unusual point.

As you can probably tell, I was quite dismayed at this man’s approach. (He was there to do training) Later I got to thinking that people might be less inclined to build unbiblical arguments using biblical texts if the different biblical books were bound separately. Maybe we would have a better grasp of context, literary style, authorial intent, etc. if each book were a separate volume on our shelf.

Maybe, maybe not. As we ponder such things, we also have to think about the nature of inspiration… but that’s a discussion for another post.

Anyway, I’m back to the question I raised a few posts ago:

We talk about “Scripture,” viewing the writings as a singular work. One book. The Bible talks about scriptures, the holy writings, a group of books.

Doesn’t it seem like that affects how we view the contents?