The Danger of Serious Bible Study
I believe it’s important to study the Bible. Many approaches are useful in this, and I’ve discussed them elsewhere. But the idea of serious Bible study can become a problem.
I’m sure some readers are scratching their heads. How can it possibly be a problem to study the Bible seriously? Isn’t that obviously the right thing to do. Well, yes and no. Yes, if you understand serious Bible study to involve a variety of approaches that help you get an overview as well as deal with details. No, if by serious you mean spending hours over each word or phrase and never getting beyond looking at the text under a microscope.
It’s important to do fast reading, so as to get a good overview. It’s important to read multiple texts. These days I’m listening to the Bible using Audible as I walk on my treadmill. Now one thing I can tell you is that it’s very easy for me to get distracted and miss things. It’s also hard for me to remember where things are because I’m listening and not seeing chapter and verse numbers. It’s also impossible for me to stop and go over some little item over and over rather than continuing to get the big picture.
Do I miss some things? Certainly. But I also see some things that I wouldn’t see if I was reading directly from the Hebrew text, for example.
Once at a table in a church office I was reading from the Contemporary English Version, a translation designed primarily for those for whom English is a second language. It’s easy reading. Someone stopped to see what I was reading and immediately asked, “Why would you read that when you can read Greek?”
The answer was simple. Because I read English approximately 4x as fast as I read Greek. It’s easier for me to get an overview of an entire book and also of the entire Bible.
I once set about to see how quickly I could read the entire Bible. I had a great deal of work, but I’m a reader and almost always have some book. I simply decided that when I wanted to read it would be the Bible until I had completed it. I finished it in about 10 days. Again, people would ask why. Surely I couldn’t give the text the attention it deserved.
My answer would be that while reading slowly and agonizing over each detail, you can’t give the overall picture the attention it deserves.
Right now I’m writing daily meditations on one verse per day from Psalm 119. Thus I read one verse and then spend the day on it. That’s not quite the opposite extreme, because I’m meditating on it through my work day, not spending hours working through lexicons and commentaries. But it’s close. That’s also an important part of Bible study.
Each verse has a context. Too often we regard that as the verse before and the verse after or something similar. But that verse resides in a section of a book that might or might not be equal to a chapter, and that section resides in a book. That book is part of our canon of scripture, and we can see that canon divided into different sections. Is this among the wisdom books, the prophets, history? That is also context.
Because the Bible was given to the community of faith, we also have to look at the entire canon of scripture and what a particular text means in that canonical context.
“Seriously” in this context means at every level from every angle in every possible way. There is no one way. If we think the scriptures represent God’s word, a message from God to God’s people, then it’s rather important. If you don’t believe that, it’s another matter. But if you believe that “seriously” is very, very serious indeed!
So read your Bible fast or slow or anything in between. Spend hours on a single verse of minutes on a whole chapter. Try to combine these and get a picture of what God’s word is in your mind so as you look at a verse, you see it fitting into a larger picture automatically because you are so well acquainted with that larger picture.
You’ll be rewarded!
(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)
