Juggling with Jelly

Reading the Bible

I consider myself an evangelical (though after reading blogs by ardent evangelicals I'm not sure that I am or even want to be—but that's for another blog). My cry is that of the Reformers Sola Scriptura. But it seems that this puts me in a minority even in the supposed evangelical part of the church. Yesterday over at Better Bibles I blogged about a news report from Sweden; click on the title here to go read my blog and then the news report in full. It appears that there 6 out of 10 church-goers don't even think about reading the Bible. This sadly parallels the situation in other countries. Gallup conducted a survey, one of a regular series, into the Bible reading habits of Americans. They report a steady decline in Bible reading. (Unfortunately the summary of that survey was aged off their web site several years ago.)

What can be done to turn this situation around?

I want people to read the Bible text. Notice I didn't say I want people to study the text. Sometimes I think some of those ardent evangelicals spending too much time studying and not enough time reading. T C Hammond (author of In Understanding Be Men, which is still in print from IVP books in the UK despite first appearing in 1936 it still provides a good introduction to evangelical doctrines) is quoted as saying "read the scriptures in great dollops". Without reading it great dollops we lose the context of what we then study.

I try to read the entire text regularly. Some years I don't manage it all but in other years I manage to go through it many times. My shelves are groaning under the weight of many different translations. Seeing a passage in a new way helps to give a better view of the context. At the moment I'm using the God's Word translation produced by God's Word to the Nations.

Occasionally I have gone through the entire text without ever opening a single page. For several years I drove daily to a customer site in Cambridge—a commute of about 90 minutes each way. While driving I was reading the text of the NIV! Okay so I listened to the NIV read to me on cassette. I'd put a tape in each morning. Usually it was finished by the time of my arrival in the car park. On the few occasions when it had not finished the remainder would play starting off home again in the evening. This would go on for 60 days (there being 60 tapes in the set). Then pause couple of weeks maybe. And begin the whole process again. So during the three and half years of working there I probably "read" the entire text a dozen times. Despite having read it all before, even so there were still moments when verses jumped out at me and my response had to be "didn't know that".

In other years I have followed reading schemes that took me through the entire text in one year. Some of my own devising; divide the number of pages in the translation by 365 and then read that many pages a day. Some produced free by Bible societies; sadly can't find the reading scheme produced by the Bible Society (originally known as BFBS) that coincided with publication of the complete Good News Bible (Today's English Version). Some from commercial organisation; because I can't find the Bible Society plan I now make use of the Cover to Cover schemes produced by Campaign for World Revival.

Notice one common feature of these reading schemes? There are no "blessed thoughts" from some preacher to accompany the daily readings. Just the text and nothing but the text. I don't like those style of "Bible study" notes where you have a single verse to read and then a page of homily from some preacher. Though I note with regret that in their newest scheme CWR has succumbed to including these blessed thoughts. To my mind those notes are neither Bible study nor Bible reading they are a quick-fix good feeling excuse for not engaging with the text itself.

I'm already planning how to use the reading schemes next year. Indeed deliberately thinking beyond next year so that I can use them with Bibles produced using different philosophies of translation. Is anyone prepared to do something similar? Comment if you decide to do it or if you've done it in the past or are doing it now. Comment too if you find your particular Bible difficult to use with such a scheme.

posted by Trevor Jenkins @ 12:28 pm