Category Archives: Bible

The Bible as books

3 Replies

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.

photo by Jane M Sawyer

Piety isn’t always pithy

6 Replies

People like quotes. Short little sayings that quickly convey an idea. We like to be able to refer to something Tolstoy said without actually having to read Tolstoy’s works!

In the business world, the idea of the “elevator speech” is popular, where you can explain some project in 30 seconds or less.

We like our religion the same way. We like short take-away expressions, like “Love your neighbor as yourself” or “I can do all things through Christ.” It’s easier to deal with the Bible at that level than to actually have to work through concepts like genre, context, linguistics, etc.

In my opinion, it’s why many people like the book of James. “It’s so practical,” they say. What they mean is that they can read a verse and seek to apply it, without working through the things I mentioned above. (That leads to lots of mistakes, of course, but it is definitely quick and easy)

Piety isn’t always pithy. Biblical concepts can’t always be explained in 30-seconds or less. Not every principle can be explained during an elevator ride. Not every problem can be solved by throwing a proof text at it.

Some things are as quick and easy as they seem. When Jesus tells us what the two greatest commandments are, that’s fairly straightforward… even though it would take us a lifetime to work out all the implications. But many other concepts only get distorted when reduced to a verse or two out of context.

We have to be willing to take the time to work at understanding the Bible. Yes, it does make it harder to explain to outsiders and beginners. That doesn’t change the facts of the matter. Quoting “I think, therefore I am” doesn’t explain Descartes. It doesn’t even describe the existential crisis and healing process around that phrase. The same happens with the Bible.

If it weren’t that way, God would have given us a religious quote book and left it at that.

 

 

 

photo from www.creationswap.com

Stopping to see the beauty of the text

1 Reply

Photo by Ove Tøpfer; from Stock Xchange

Had thought to write a bit more about context today, but technical issues slowed me up this morning.

Instead, let me share a quote from the introduction to The New Testament in Modern English by J.B. Phillips. I love to read the Phillips New Testament, and the introduction is fascinating. Here’s the quote I wanted to share:

Paul, for instance, writing in haste and urgency to some of his wayward and difficult Christians, was not tremendously concerned about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of his message. I doubt very much whether he was even concerned about being completely consistent with what he had already written. Consequently, it seems to me quite beside the point to study his writings microscopically, as it were, and deduce hidden meanings of which almost certainly he was unaware. His letters are alive, and they are moving—in both senses of that word—and their meaning can no more be appreciated by cold minute examination than can the beauty of a bird’s flight be appreciated by dissection after its death.

I love the imagery of that last sentence. I confess that I can sometimes be the astronomer who can’t see the beauty of the stars or the topologist who only sees mountains as something to be mapped. Sometimes we need to sit back and appreciate the beauty of the Bible.

Thoughts, comments, complaints, suggestions?

Putting Bible books in order

26 Replies

Is there a Bible out there that attempts to group the books in the order they were written? There would be some guesswork involved, of course, but surely such decisions could be worked out. It seems to me that it could help our understanding to see the books, especially those of the New Testament, presented in chronological order by their time of writing.

This occurred to me when discussing the frequency of the Lord’s Supper with someone in a Yahoo! group. This person was referring to the Corinthian church and mentioned “the prior teaching they had as to the when of the Supper,” referring to Acts 20. I pointed out that it’s hard to know what prior teaching they had, but we know for certain they didn’t have the book of Acts, for it hadn’t been written at that time. 1 Corinthians 16 seems to indicate that the teaching about having a collection on Sunday was new, so it’s hard to know what they had been taught and hadn’t been taught. (And yes, I’m convinced that 1 Corinthians 16 is talking about a special collection, but that’s another topic)

As I’ve pointed out before, many get confused when discussing the gospels because they don’t place them in their proper timeframe. It used to be a standard Church of Christ lesson to claim that they title page that says “New Testament” shouldn’t be placed before Matthew, but should be found in Acts 2. People have actually taught that the gospels don’t belong in the New Testament! If we realize that these books weren’t written at the time that the action took place, we come to realize that the gospels were written for the church. They are Christian books.

I remember F. Lagard’s Smith’s Narrated Bible presented the Bible in chronological order, but that was according to the order in which things took place, not the order of writing. Has anyone seen a Bible laid out in the order the books were written? Could be a helpful study tool.

The difference between understanding and doing

6 Replies

I’ve come to enjoy reading thoughts from Søren Kierkegaard. I’ll confess to never having read an entire book of his. But I’ve read a number of thought-provoking quotes. Here’s one that I find intriguing:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?

Kierkegaard, Søren. Provocations spiritual writings. Farmington, PA: Plough House, 1999, p. 201

It’s a little like the old Mark Twain quote: “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” That’s how I feel much of the time.