I appreciate the good discussion yesterday. Some seem to suspect that I have some plan for building off of what I presented yesterday. Sorry to disappoint… the questions I ask are serious requests for input. These are issues I’m working through, not issues for which I’ve discovered some secret solution.
I know that many of the ills that I see can be solved by an emphasis on context. I’ve never heard someone say, “His problem, he’s using that verse in context.” A basic grasp of context won’t cure everything, but it goes a long way toward a healthy understanding of the Bible.
One solution that occurs to me is to quit presenting the Bible as a book. Instead, present it as an arsenal of books. You go to a business seminar, and the speaker recommends multiple books. This one will help you with time management, this one with communications, this one with employee relations. The speaker may quote a thing or two from each book, but you come away understanding that you need to read the whole book to grasp what the author wants to communicate.
What if we taught the Bible in terms of books? (Or sets of books, in some cases… you can’t really separate Leviticus from Exodus, for example) When teaching a general Bible class at Abilene Christian (“Christianity in Culture”), I emphasized chapters. I made them learn what chapter in the Bible contained certain ideas. Now I’m thinking that may not be big enough. I understand that we can’t present a whole book of the Bible in one lesson, at least not books like Isaiah or Genesis. But maybe it would help to remember that neither chapters nor verses existed in the original; the ancients worked with books.
So you take a new Christian and you say, “Here’s sixty-six books that will teach you about the Christian faith. They’ve been conveniently bound into one volume.”
No, I haven’t thought of all of the practical ins and outs of this. Frankly, this idea was born after reading yesterday’s comments, so it’s fairly young and fragile. Be gentle with it, like you would a newborn. :-)
Is there any value in changing this perception of the Bible? Even if we don’t radically change our teaching, if we can get people to think in terms of books, maybe it would help them wean themselves off the “verse by verse” approach that distorts the Bible’s message.
Looking forward to the discussion.
Anything that will help break the habit of verse by verse consideration of the text of the Bible, with no regard for plot or context of the book or The Book, will be a help. Chapter and verse divisions are sometimes so unfortunate in their locations.
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This is one of my ‘mantra’s’ with our young people and in a series of lessons that I give in the neighborhood: ‘This is not a book (holding up a bible), it is a library.’ The word in Dutch for book and library are the same root (library = bibliotheek), so this is easy. I mention that there is a CD section, some history, letters, prophecy and the story of Jesus (and even some weird apocalyptic stuff). I am quite sure that this is not new to many (also of your readers here), but it does help to keep mentioning this point. We keep trying to read in context, understanding that we are dealing with a library and not a book.