Too Many Bibles?

In their book “God is Back,” Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge describe the plethora of Bible versions now available:

“Thomas Nelson, the Nashville-based Bible firm, publishes sixty editions of the Bible every year. The Good Book now comes in every color of the rainbow, including the colors of your college. There are Bibles for every category of humanity, from “seekers” to cowboys, from brides to barmen. The African American Jubilee Bible contains over three hundred pages on the black religious experience. There is an outdoor Bible with laminated paper and a camouflage Bible for use in war zones. There are Bibles for family prayers, Bibles for personal devotion, Bibles for the theologically minded, with historical details, Bibles with commentaries by celebrated Evangelicals. The “hundred-minute Bible” summarizes the Good Book for the time starved.”

Annual Bible sales are worth in the region of $500 million. Over a hundred million Bibles are sold or given away every year and there are more than 500 English translations of the Bible. Yet despite the existence of all these Bibles the extent of Bible knowledge is shockingly low. A Gallup survey found that in the US fewer than half the population (who have an average of four Bibles sitting on their bookshelves) can name the first book of the Bible and 12 percent think that Noah was married to Joan of Arc!

It as if Bible publishers have carpet bombed the world with the Word of God, but with as little helpful impact as was achieved by the use of napalm in Vietnam.

Bible publishing is big business, and owning the ‘right’ Bible has often become just one more segment of our consumerist culture. It amuses and saddens me when leading conservative evangelical bloggers post excitedly about the latest edition of the ESV or the ESV Study Bible to hit the shelves – as if it contained anything new! What difference does the color of your cover make to the state of your soul? What does it matter if it is leather or card? How do we end up being both so fashion-conscious about our Bibles and so religious about them?

The translation of the Bible into many languages and its ready availability throughout most of the world has been one of the great triumphs of the post-Reformation period. But making the Bible just another aspect of our individualistic, sentimentalized, consumerist culture has been a great tragedy. The Bible only really makes sense when it is read and applied in Christian community. It is inspired by the community of the Trinity, written by men who were part of the community of the faithful and is intended to instruct and guide the Church. It should not be used as a kind of fortune cookie – a religious lucky dip for the individual believer to extract out of context ‘promises’ which serve only to reinforce the individualistic, materialistic dream of Western culture.

Never mind the cover. Eat the content.

Herding Cats

I like this advert a lot: 

I guess life feels like this for lots of us lots of the time. If you are reading this blog (nice to have you!) you are almost certainly a cat herder. Tech is great, but I could spend my whole life reading blogs, twittering and surfing YouTube. On my more distracted days trying to get some thoughts straight and meaningful work accomplished feels like herding cats – a twitch here, a mouse there and suddenly I’m off task and wasting time again.

Technology is conditioning us to have the attention span of a kitten.

“More than 140 characters? Not interested. LOL”

This ad is pretty cool as well: 

Life is like that – it’s the little things that will drag you down. Just another SMS, just one more email…

“Hey, where’s Jesus gone?!”

All this technology can give me a spiritual headache. I need to get out into the clean cool air, and walk with Jesus.

For me this is literally as well as metaphorically true. And its one of several reasons why I like this time of year – longer days mean I need less sleep and can get up earlier, and that means more time out in the cool clean air when no-one else much is around and I can walk and talk with my Lord.

I don’t know why I don’t do it every single day, even in the winter. When I don’t, that cat herding just gets all the worse and the squirrels tear at my ankles all the more. 

But then I’ve got two dogs, and they’re not so keen on cats and squirrels. Dogs make it easier to get up and walk – they make you do it. And if people hear you talking while you’re walking they think you’re talking to the dogs, which is ok, because if they knew you were praying they’d think you were mad.

Get a dog and go for a walk.

You’d be mad not to.

(Hey, even you Americans can walk you know. You weren’t born with wheels!)

iPod, iPhone, iTunes, iDol, iDon’tKnow

Turn it off.

Walk.

Talk.

Pray.

Loving Leviticus

Don’t you wish some parts of the Bible weren’t there?

Many of us are practical Marcionites. Marcion was the second century heretic who ditched most of the Bible, as he didn’t like the God it portrayed. Marcion was denounced then, and since, by the Church, but the reality is that many of us act like him in our reading of the Bible.

I have a confession to make – whenever my Bible reading plan gets round to Leviticus I feel a sense of inner dread. I know that it is going to be hard work, that it is going to frustrate me, and that it is going to make me angry. I also know that at some point I am going to have to preach through it, if for no other reason than to get clear in my own mind what it is all about.
Recently someone on our Alpha course came in all steamed up because she couldn’t make sense of the instructions for dealing with rape given in Deuteronomy. “How did she get hold of that?” I asked. My colleague who runs Alpha responded, “Someone did something stupid – they gave her a Bible!”

Compare this response with William Tyndale’s declaration about Deuteronomy that, “This is a book worthy to be read in day and night and never to be out of hands. It is easy also and light and a very pure gospel whose message is a preaching of faith and love.” Tyndale’s attitude always amazes me. He made this comment having lost all his translation work in a shipwreck and then having to spend months more redoing all that work. Months and months in the Pentateuch, while living under the constant threat of betrayal and martyrdom, and finding it “light.”

Perhaps our struggle with Leviticus, and Numbers, and Deuteronomy is that we just don’t give them enough time and attention. In skimming through these books as fast as possible to keep up with our Bible reading plans (or in ignoring them completely) we fail to see the gospel in them.

The key to understanding these books has got to be understanding the story of God’s dealings with the earth.

A key scene in this years Oscar winner, Slum Dog Millionaire, is the deliberate maiming of children who are sent out into the streets to beg. It is an ugly and horrific scene. I have four children. I found this scene hard to watch. But the movie needs that scene – without it the story wouldn’t hold together.

When we get to Leviticus we see something similar. In Leviticus we are confronted with the ugliness of sin and the gulf of separation there is between ourselves and a holy God. All those laws and commands – all of them point to the problem of sin, and the way to resolve it. There is no way that sinful humans should be able to worship YHWH, but he makes a way for this to be possible. And in those rules and commands we see something prophetic, a pointing towards Christ who by his own sacrifice will finally and fully defeat death and make real worship possible – make it possible for a sinner like me to become part of the people of God.

Leviticus is an important part of the story. We can’t cover our eyes or fast–forward through it. We need to learn to love it.

Singing The Bible

I was talking with someone yesterday who was expressing the all-too-common sentiment that he finds it hard to read the Bible. I don’t know how many people I’ve spoken to over the years about the importance of Bible reading, and had this response.

In contrast, its not often though that I find someone who finds it hard to listen to music.

Just today I have loaded Spotify on to my computer. This application enables me to listen to music online – for free, and legally! I have gone through my Amazon wish list of all the CD’s I want but can’t afford and now have them set-up as playlists on my Spotify account. Sweet.

We love music.

Perhaps the reason we so often miss the power of Scripture is because we are reading in our heads rather than singing it out loud. It is only in the last 500 years that people have started reading silently in their heads. Before that, when people read, they read out loud.

And sang.

We see this most clearly with the Psalms. We all know that very often music has the ability to connect with us far more powerfully than words we read silently in our heads, or even words that we speak out loud. That’s why when we teach children things they need to remember we often do it by song – A,B,C,D… – and why we find it easier to remember worship songs than memory verses. And this is why the Psalms have been so powerful for worship – they are crying out to be sung.

Struggling with the Bible? Try singing the Psalms.

One way of looking at the Psalms is to compare them with the letters page of a newspaper or magazine. In a letters page there is some similarity about all the letters – they all have a beginning and an end, they all try to make a point, they are all recognisably letters. But different letters have different purposes – some letters will be letters of complaint, others will be letters of praise or thanks, some will be making a humorous observation, others will be asking for help or advice.

The Psalms are somewhat similar. They are all recognisably Psalms, but there are many different kinds of Psalm. Some are Psalms of complaint – “why is this happening to me God? Why don’t you do something about this situation God?” Others are Psalms of thanks – “God you are so good, so worthy of praise, you have treated me so well…” Some are Psalms of praise – “God is king, let’s all worship him.” Some Psalms are full of confidence while others are full of doubt; some are angry, others are happy. Many are petitions – “God won’t you please do this for me” – while others describe loss and heartache. Some of them are instructional or devotional – they are meant to teach us about God and his character. Some Psalms are very personal, very individual, describing one persons desires and longings. Others are very communal, expressing the hopes and dreams of all the people of God. And there are other types of Psalm besides.

To my friend who was struggling with Bible reading I suggested getting an MP3 audio Bible download. Perhaps even better advice would have been to sing a Psalm.