Horrors! A Plague of Bible Reading!

. . . or so I might be led to believe by reading Christians Spend Too Much Time Studying the Bible (HT: JakeBouma.com). I don’t know enough about the pastor who wrote this, so I can’t say whether it provides an appropriate balance for his congregation. Perhaps he is plagued with church members whose noses are always in their Bibles causing them to neglect families, jobs, and service to their community.

But I must say that I haven’t encountered many of the type of Christians to whom he seems to be speaking. Some liberals have a stereotype that sees evangelicals totally involved in doctrinal and Biblical studies, leaving no time for social action or for actually living the gospel. It’s balanced, I think, by those evangelicals who imagine liberals joyfully shedding orthodox doctrines for no better reason than that they don’t like the feel of orthodoxy. Yet I have actually met very few examples of these stereotypes. The overwhelming majority of evangelicals I know are very active living the gospel as they understand it, and most liberals reject doctrines for what seems to them, at least, good reasons.

This post seems to imagine most Christians as being sort of like the Pharisees, studying doctrines and traditions in great detail, and presumably also tithing their “mint and dill and cumin” so to speak, while “neglecting the weightier matters of the law.” (That’s from Matthew 23:23 for you Biblically illiterate folks!) Perhaps someone could show me a survey or some other type of evidence as to where this is largely the case today. I certainly do believe many Christians neglect their duty to love others, but I fail to see where it happens because they are too busy studying the Bible.

Perhaps I just haven’t been around enough, but I’d love to find the church that requires an admonition to study their Bibles less. Perhaps I could preach there and I could allude to Bible stories I imagine are well known, and not have to provide a summary.

Brian Jones, the post author, makes some good points:

1. There truly were no leather bound New Testaments dropping from the sky immediately after the resurrection.
2. Christianity truly has prospered in times of limited literacy.
3. Very few early Christians could have afforded the cost of a complete Bible in times when they had to be transcribed.
4. It is quite possible to be a good Christian with limited Bible knowledge.

But I believe that he has failed to truly think through any one of these possibly valid points. Let’s look at them briefly, one at a time.

1. There truly were no leather bound New Testaments dropping from the sky immediately after the resurrection.

Does anybody but me see at least one culturally conditioned error here? No, I don’t mean “leather bound.” I’m talking about the idea that one would have to have the Bible collected into one place before one could get busy studying it line by line and verse by verse. We have a prejudice toward collections and large volumes, but smaller manuscripts were common in Biblical times. It didn’t mean people studied less. It meant they studied differently.

Further, he seems concerned only with the New Testament. While the New Testament canon was not settled for some years, there was considerable stability in the major portions of the Hebrew scriptures at that point, certainly the Torah and the Prophets. That made a considerable amount of Bible available for studying along the way.

2. Christianity truly has prospered in times of limited literacy.

I’m reminded of the testimony I heard from a Cambodian pastor. He told how they lived in a refugee camp along the Thai border, and they had only one Bible for thousands of Christians. One leader kept the Bible and they would all have times to go and study with him. Otherwise they worked from memory.

We have very little tolerance today for long Bible readings, but in a time of limited literacy, public reading was a much more common practice. (By “public” I do not mean to imply large audiences, merely that a literate person would read to a group.)

The importance that these people placed on the Bible is reflected in how quickly they translated portions of it into new languages as the gospel progressed. Again, they didn’t study less, the studied differently.

3. Very few early Christians could have afforded the cost of a complete Bible in times when they had to be transcribed.

Quite true. We should be very thankful that the Bible was preserved through times of such hardship and that it is so accessible today. It is a great blessing. It’s quite possible that one of the reasons we actually study it less is that it is so much more easily available. We would value our Bibles more if someone was trying to burn them all.

4. It is quite possible to be a good Christian with limited Bible knowledge.

Just so. It’s also quite possible to become a “good” Christian in the last moments of your life as you are being executed–witness the thief on the cross–but I wouldn’t recommend it if you have any alternative. Just because you can do something doesn’t make it the best thing to do.

All this doesn’t support the conclusion:

Most Christians today assume that to be a Christian means to have a personal relationship with the Bible instead of the risen Jesus.

In this case at least I have met examples of the breed. They quite worship their Bibles, and fail almost completely to find the God of whom the Bible speaks. But they are not as common as the quoted paragraph implies.

What we need is balance. The Christian life consists of many spiritual disciplines. Studying the Bible is just one of these. Bible study can also be a purely intellectual discipline. It can be practiced for the wrong reasons. But in my experience it is rarely those people who are actually dedicating large amounts of time and effort to Bible study who are actually missing out on the rest of the gospel.

Most commonly it is those people who talk most about the Bible and study it least who also seem to practice bibliolatry–they worship their Bibles. Not really, you know. What they actually worship is themselves, and the ego stroking they get from those who believe they are studying their Bibles. They don’t have to actually study.

A plague of Bible reading? Bring it on!