From “No Bible” to “Know Bible” Part 4: Location, Location, Location

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Editors Note: From “No Bible” to “Know Bible” is a 6-part series on the path toward great Bible engagement. Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

What does it mean to receive the Bible on its own terms? Dynamic, living Bible engagement happens when a community:

  • has good access to a well-translated text presented in its natural literary forms,
  • regularly feasts together on whole literary units understood in context,
  • understands the overall story of the Bible as centered in Jesus, and
  • accepts the invitation to take up its own role in God’s ongoing drama of restoration through
    the power of the Spirit.

When the Scriptures are received on their own terms like this they can once again become God’s speech act—instructing, revealing, convicting, judging, comforting, healing, and saving with all their intended power

Part 4: Location, Location, Location

Let’s suppose the preliminaries are in place and we have a well-translated and well-formatted Bible. This kind of Bible is intentionally built for reading and for understanding. We are committed to feasting (not merely snacking) and doing it together, in community.

So we take the plunge and begin. We read the Scriptures at length and in depth.

But if we are indeed doing more than scanning for our favorite verses, we can’t help but immediately notice that there’s something very unfamiliar, if not downright strange, about much of this material. The world that is described—from the things that people do to the way they think—is most decidedly not our world.

So we should never begrudge the Bible its context. It is not a problem to be solved, it is a gift to be received.

The ancient Near Eastern world is the natural habitat of all the stories of the Bible. The different kinds of writing in the Bible and the shape of the big story they tell are all deeply connected to this ancient world they were born in.

As when buying real estate, so in the Bible: location is everything.

The deep connection of the Bible to the real world, to a particular time and place in our long history, is a gift from God. This embeddedness of God’s revelation in God’s world—cultural, historical, human and complex—is exactly where we want his revelation. This demonstrates clearly that God takes our world and our setting with real seriousness. He does not merely drop his message from heaven in some timeless way. He comes into our world with his message, and ultimately with himself. It is precisely this world and our time—the human story—that God comes to redeem.

So we should never begrudge the Bible its context. It is not a problem to be solved, it is a gift to be received. For it is this context that tells us God is entering our own story.

Here, then, are the things we should know to put ourselves smackdab in the middle of the Bible’s action:

The Literary Context

The Bible is a collection of different kinds of writing from the ancient world. So the first question to ask ourselves when we’re reading is: what kind of writing is this and how does it work? How did the variety of literatures in the Bible—history writing, poetry, law codes, letters, prophecy, parables, proverbs, songs, and apocalyptic visions—function in the ancient world? The first location we must get familiar with is: how do these kinds of words do their work? What kind of book are we reading right now?

The Historical/Cultural Context

Next, we embrace the recognition that this revelation from God was given in particular historical moments and cultural settings. God didn’t change everything at once, but rather began working with people right where they were. So we see the Bible assuming ancient understandings of marriage arrangements (polygamy), how work got done (slavery), and who ran things (patriarchy). God introduces redemptive movement into all these contexts, but again, it didn’t happen all at once. We need to learn how to hear these sacred words the way their first audience would have heard them, and watch for how change was beginning to happen.

The Narrative Context

Finally, if we take seriously the fact that the Bible is an ongoing story, then we will learn to always ask of any particular passage: Where in the story are we? The Bible is a canon, an assembly of books that come together to tell the compelling story of God and the world. In stories, things don’t stay the same. They move along, so there are changes, surprises, and new developments. The Bible is no different. Just because something was true for God’s people in the earlier part of the story doesn’t mean it was his final word on the matter. God’s story moves toward God’s ultimate purpose. When we read we look for how the story is developing—what’s changing and what’s staying the same.

______________________________

Karl Barth once said that there is a strange new world to be discovered within the pages of the Bible. And it’s true, there is. The whole big collection is about God’s long-term project to turn this newness into the dominant reality of the universe. But this new world comes to birth within a strange old world that must first be understood on its own terms.

If we are willing to take this journey, to go back then before returning to here and now, the Bible’s promise is that we will find the enduring, restorative meaning that’s been there all along. Then we will ask: What is the trajectory of such a meaning into our world and our lives today? Where is the story going? And the Scriptures will shine their light and we will see everything more clearly.

Continue to Part 5: The Story of God and Us

From “No Bible” to “Know Bible” Part 3: Reading Together

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Editors Note: From “No Bible” to “Know Bible” is a 6-part series on the path toward great Bible engagement. Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2.

What does it mean to receive the Bible on its own terms? Dynamic, living Bible engagement happens when a community:

  • has good access to a well-translated text presented in its natural literary forms,
  • regularly feasts together on whole literary units understood in context,
  • understands the overall story of the Bible as centered in Jesus, and
  • accepts the invitation to take up its own role in God’s ongoing drama of restoration through
    the power of the Spirit.

When the Scriptures are received on their own terms like this they can once again become God’s speech act—instructing, revealing, convicting, judging, comforting, healing, and saving with all their intended power.

Part 3: Reading Together

We read a well-translated Bible, and we read it holistically. We read complete literary units. If at all possible, we read in a nice, clean, elegant Reader’s Bible. They’re built to make reading easier and better, so no surprise there. But wait. Who is reading? We are. We are reading.

Really? We? Yes.

Because, first, the research evidence shows most of us are not really reading the Bible very much. And second, when we do read it, it’s not really “we.” It’s more like me or you. Those who are doing something with the Bible are overwhelmingly doing it alone.

The fact is, we’ve largely privatized our experiences with the Bible. We hold up the “daily quiet time” as the center of what we’re supposed to do with the Bible. We’ve created a Bible culture in which an individual experience is at the heart of what a serious Bible reader does.

Alone with a Bible, I have my private time with God.

Which is fine.

Of course, we’re not against any of this. It’s great to read your Bible alone. Lots of very good things can and do happen.

But not all of the good things that God intended. Two historical points are really important right here. First, when the Scriptures were first experienced by God’s people, they were always experienced in community. There were very few copies, and so a village in ancient Israel or one of the earliest Christian gatherings would at most have a copy of some of the books that now make up the Bible. So these would be read aloud for the community, and people would simply listen.

Of course, they could listen well and remember what they heard, because they lived in an oral culture, not a book culture. And the historical evidence is that these experiences were interactive, not merely one-way communication. Leaders and people were processing the sacred words together.

But secondly, and just as importantly, the original audience knew that the Bible itself was a community formation book, not a private me-and-God book. The word “you” in the Bible is most often a plural word, not a singular. It is addressed to the gathered people of God and is intending to speak to them in their corporate actions and beliefs. As a group they are invited to get caught up in God’s great restoration movement.

We’ve moved away from this ancient, oral, community-based culture in lots of ways. In fact, it is worth noting that the Bible first became widely available to individuals in their own language right at the time that modern individualism was growing as a cultural force. We live and move and have our being in this individualism. It is the air we breathe. Without even thinking about it, we think and act in independent, self-oriented ways.

So for us, recovering a deep, transformative engagement with the Scriptures has to include rediscovering ways of experiencing the Bible together. And this means more than doing Bible study together. We must back up a step and find new ways of simply reading the Bible together, listening to it being read and letting these words wash over us.

Then we must craft new ways of interacting openly and honestly with what we’ve read or heard. We must learn the humility to speak our own views respectfully and well, and then listen closely and seriously to what others have to say.

This communal engagement will look more like a book club than a traditional Bible study.

Finally, we need to think about the communal implications of a passage, not only the personal impact for ourselves in isolation. Our Bible reading must explicitly raise community-based questions. What kind of community will embody this teaching or instruction? How can we become that kind of community?

Bringing community-based engagement back to our Bibles won’t happen unless we are intentional about making it happen. The Institute for Bible Reading has created a whole-church-based Bible reading program called Immerse precisely for this reason.

I don’t see, hear, experience, or know enough to experience the Bible sola me. I am too small a person to read the Bible only by myself. Together, we are the people of God’s new creation and we need each other. Even in our Bible reading, understanding, and, yes, living.

Continue to Part 4: Location, Location, Location

From “No Bible” to “Know Bible” Part 2: Feasting on the Bible

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Editors Note: From “No Bible” to “Know Bible” is a 6-part series on the path toward great Bible engagement. Click here to read Part 1.

What does it mean to receive the Bible on its own terms? Dynamic, living Bible engagement happens when a community:

  • has good access to a well-translated text presented in its natural literary forms,
  • regularly feasts together on whole literary units understood in context,
  • understands the overall story of the Bible as centered in Jesus, and
  • accepts the invitation to take up its own role in God’s ongoing drama of restoration through the power of the Spirit.

When the Scriptures are received on their own terms like this they can once again become God’s speech act—instructing, revealing, convicting, judging, comforting, healing, and saving with all their intended power.

Part 2: Feasting on The Bible

As we explored last week, the first step to deep Bible engagement happens when a community has good access to a well-translated text presented in its natural literary forms. The first half of this statement is now true for a fair part of the world (though the translation need remains for many). The second part of this statement is becoming a reality for more and more people as publishers increasingly realize the immense value in Reader’s Bibles.

Elegant reader’s editions give people the opportunity to regain something that’s been missing from our Bible practices for nearly five centuries: reading the Bible in its natural, uncluttered form. Reader’s Bibles reintroduce us to Bible feasting.

Bible feasting is reading whole books, taking in the literary units that the Bible’s first authors and editors created and intended for their audiences to read as complete works.

Bible feasting is reading the Scriptures as the kind of literature they were inspired to be.

Bible feasting is reading the Bible without distractions and interruptions. It is reading deeply, at length, and with more understanding.

Bible feasting recognizes the natural literary breaks that existed before chapter and verse numbers inartfully imposed their foreign structure on the Bible. The best kind of in-depth Bible reading is not just reading more (though it is that too!) — it’s reading better because we are seeing what the Bible really is.

Bible feasting is reading all those long-overlooked books like Judges, Zephaniah, Philemon, and Habakkuk and discovering the crucial pieces they contribute to the overall biblical narrative. Bible feasting is taking 35 minutes to hear the entire crashing chord of Paul’s anguished plea for suffering, servant leadership in 2 Corinthians. Bible feasting is seeing a whole sequence of parables in a Gospel and asking why they were put together that way. It’s reading all five of those sad songs of devastation and loss in Lamentations, allowing those few words of hope right in the center to hit us with their full force:

Yet I still dare to hope

when I remember this:

The faithful love of the LORD never ends!

His mercies never cease.

Great is his faithfulness;

his mercies begin afresh each morning.

In short, Bible feasting reacquaints us with an undiminished Bible. Eating the Bible whole is essential to receiving the Bible that God actually gave us. Feasting is the thing that gets us back on track to big, deep Bible engagement. If the Bible is going to be our story and form our lives the way it was meant to, then there is no shortcut to simply reading more of it.

So long as we merely snack on the Bible, taking preselected bits and pieces out of their bigger literary settings, we will never know the real Bible nor receive all its intended gifts.

Snacking on Bible verses allows us to set our own agenda, to hear only what we want to hear. Feasting introduces us to the complete message—good encouraging words and good hard words—that we so desperately need.

Snacking on Bible verses allows to set our own agenda, to hear only what we want to hear.Click To Tweet

There is a crisis in Christian identity in the world today. Too many who claim the status of Christ-follower allow this or that ideology to be the primary force that shapes and forms them. Too many Christians are getting the story of their lives from somewhere other than God’s Scriptures. If we are to know who we really are, and the story we are supposed to be living, then we have to re-immerse ourselves in these holy words—songs, stories, letters, and prophecies—that God gave us for a purpose.

There is a complete meal for us in the Bible. Feasting is the only way we’ll ever discover it.

Continue to Part 3: Reading Together

From “No Bible” to “Know Bible” Part 1: Form Matters

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The Bible is a library of books that do things. These books instruct, inspire, reveal, convict, judge, comfort, heal, and save. This means that the Bible is not merely a collection of static words. The Bible is rather a divine speech act.

The Scriptures promise that they contain the power to change things, to actually move the creation in the direction of God’s ultimate purposes for the flourishing of life. For this promise to be fulfilled, however, the Scriptures must be received, understood, and lived on their own terms.

But what does this mean—“to receive the Bible on its own terms”? What does that look like?

Reading and living the Bible well—what we could call dynamic, stellar Bible engagement—happens when a community:

  • has good access to a well-translated text presented in its natural literary forms,
  • regularly feasts together on whole literary units understood in context,
  • understands the overall story of the Bible as centered in Jesus, and
  • accepts the invitation to take up its own role in God’s ongoing drama of restoration through the power of the Spirit.

Over the next six editions of this series we’ll be unpacking some of the major elements of this view of Bible engagement in order. Welcome to a whole new Bible, making a whole new kind of difference in our lives.

Form Matters.

The first step in this process involves a paradigm shift in our thinking about the form of the Bible. We’ve all gotten used to seeing and using the Bible in the modern reference book format. For most of us, it’s the only Bible we’ve ever known.

But this format is of course our own creation—something we’ve done to the Bible long after the Bible itself was written. For the first millennium and a half of the Bible’s history there was no chapter-and-verse system laid over top of the text. It was in the sixteenth-century that the Bible was transformed into a standardized, numberized, two-column tool for looking things up.

Rather than reading.

So—no surprise—that’s what we’ve been doing. Using the Bible rather than receiving it. Looking up little pieces of the Bible rather than diving in and immersing ourselves in it. The modern form of the Bible itself tells us to do this. When you see a dictionary, do you sit down with it in a cozy chair and settle in for the evening?

But now imagine this. Imagine seeing the Bible as a library of books that looks like a library of books. Letters that look like letters and stories that read like stories. Nice, comfortable type, set in a single column so there’s no guessing about what is poetry and what is prose. And no additives! No numbers, notes, or nagging distractions. Just well-designed, inviting, easy-to-read, pure text.

Those chapter and verse divisions we added do not reflect the original divisions of the text. They don’t show us Matthew’s five natural sections—a new Torah. They don’t show us the three parts of ancient letters. They don’t show us the parallel structure in Luke–Acts of Jesus journeying to Jerusalem and then the gospel journeying to Rome.

And so on, through all the books in the Bible.

Because here’s the thing: all the books in the library actually have natural literary forms. The Bible’s authors and editors chose particular literary genres to say what they wanted to say. Sometimes they wanted to sing, so they wrote lyrics and set their words to music. The prophets collected their strong, emotional, poetry into stanzas. The apostles used the ancient letter form to instruct distant congregations. Storytellers, well, you know what storytellers do. Because different kinds of writing do different kinds of things well. And the Bible has a lot it wants to do.

This is the literary Bible God inspired.

This is what the Bible actually is.

And our Bibles should show us what the Bible actually is.

So we’ll read it on its own terms, the way it was intended.

We’ve now had a five-hundred-year-old history with the modern reference Bible. The evidence is overwhelming that most people don’t know it. Even people who say they like it often don’t actually read it. Pollster George Gallup was fond of saying the Bible is the best-selling, least-read book in America.

It’s time for a Bible reformation. We can do better by the Bible. It’s trying to be God’s speech act, his living and active word announcing his kingdom and transforming people. Rethinking how we format the Bible can welcome people back into good, deep reading.

The launch of a worldwide Bible reading movement starts with a Bible makeover. It begins with what we see when we look at a Bible. Fresh new Bible presentations embracing the original elegant simplicity of the Bible are the order of the day.

Maybe then the Bible can do more of what it’s trying to do in our lives.

Continue to Part 2: Feasting on the Bible

5 Tips for Reading the Bible in Community

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Bible with coffeeIn a recent survey the Institute conducted, we asked our audience where they usually find themselves reading the Bible. While 92% of them said they read the Bible alone or during their quiet time, only 31% said they read the Bible during their small group or Bible study. Clearly, reading the Bible alone – maybe accompanied by a cup of hot coffee and a pen – is the way most people choose to engage with God’s Word today. There’s nothing wrong with this on its own, but there’s a whole new world of understanding and engagement waiting for us if we regularly experience the Bible in community.

For most of Christian history, the personal Bible did not exist. Reading the Bible was a group activity because most churches only had one Bible. Only with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century did we see the Bible make its way into the hands of individuals on a mass scale. Since then, Bible reading has evolved into a solo sport. And while it’s certainly nice to have Bibles around our house that we can call our own, we’ve unfortunately lost the ancient practice of reading and wrestling over the text together.

If you’d like to try reading the Bible with your community of believers, here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Don’t make it all about finding the right answers

Most group Bible study guides today take a question-and-answer approach to the Bible. How does Paul identify himself to the Corinthians? Why might he do it this way? What does the word “sanctified” mean? All you have to do is open up your Bible and find the answer to the question. This diminishes the Bible into a sourcebook for answering the right questions to grow your faith.

Unfortunately in many group settings this can also lead to the person who is most knowledgeable about the Bible – perhaps they know Hebrew or Greek – taking over and providing all of the “answers” to the study guide’s questions. Other people in the group don’t get a chance to participate in talking about the Bible because they don’t know as much and therefore don’t think they bring value to the group. This situation can be especially intimidating for new believers.

Instead, open the discussion up for opinions and questions about the reading. A question like, “So, is there anything that stood out to you?” opens the text up for discussion at all levels.

2. Read big portions of Scripture

Try modeling your Bible discussions after book clubs. When book clubs meet, they usually don’t only discuss one paragraph or one sentence of the book. While they may dwell on a short passage for a while, they’ve often read large chunks of the book and can talk about how the story is progressing or what shifts they’ve seen in the characters. They can pick out turning points in the story and discuss what they think might happen as a result.

When your community reads the Bible together, read and discuss big portions. Read an entire letter from Paul or an entire story from the First Testament. Don’t be bound by chapters and verses – look at the content itself and determine a good stopping place.

3. Avoid “application” as the universal end-game

Bible StudyMany of us have been conditioned to automatically ask, “Okay, now what does this mean for me?” as we read. If a story or passage doesn’t have direct application to our lives today in the 21st century, it can be difficult to know what to do with it. Large portions of the Bible end up ignored because it’s hard to find something we can draw from it that we can start practicing immediately.

When talking with your community about a passage in the Bible, if you’ve found something you feel speaks to you that you can apply to your life, by all means share it with the group. But if it’s not there, you don’t need to reach for it.

4. Talk about things that bothered you

There are a lot of things in the Bible that are hard to digest. When we read alone we don’t have anyone to process these unsettling passages with, and when we’re in a group setting we sometimes focus discussion on the easier, more manageable parts of Scripture. We have a hard time talking about parts of the Bible that bother us, so we usually try to just push it out of our minds.

Talking through these uncomfortable passages with your community can be extremely helpful and valuable. It will help your group grow closer, and somebody within the group may have some insights to the difficult passage that can help make it more understandable. Even if your group can’t come to a satisfying explanation of a hard passage, wrestling over the text together will bring you all closer to God.

5. Be open to disagreement

Part of the beauty of group discussion is the opportunity to wrestle together over a passage and work together to sort out its meaning. It’s almost inevitable, though, that at some point there will be disagreement about the interpretation of a passage. When this happens, we have the opportunity to learn to see different angles on a Bible passage by listening well to other members of our group. And while we may end up holding different opinions, it’s important for these differences not to become deal-breakers for our relationships.

 

If your community has been in the traditional “Bible Study” mode for a while, I encourage you to try this “Book Club” approach. Read big chunks of Scripture together, then just open it up for group discussion. I think the results will surprise you.