In which our regular writers toss around
subjects a little more volatile than usual.
An Amy Julia Becker blog post from early 2015 suggests Christians should scale back our New Year’s Resolutions and quit trying to read the Bible cover to cover.
Tom: Mrs. Becker wonders about the helpfulness
of reading the Bible in its entirety and practically brags about not having
read Nahum “in ages”. You can almost feel the calculated poke in the eye to
Christians committed to getting through the whole Bible annually as she adds,
“Perhaps you’ll join me”.
Thanks but no thanks.
Toward More Focused Bible Reading
But tell me, what do you think, Immanuel Can? Do any of Mrs. Becker’s arguments for
more focused Bible reading have merit?
Immanuel Can: Well, one thing she says is, “broad reading
can also lead to a deceptive sense of accomplishment rather than to an
encounter with the Spirit of God who has inspired these writings.” I wonder
what she means. I would argue you can’t have any kind of spiritual or
existential “encounter” from something you haven’t even bothered to read
in the first place. The depth of your encounter is bound to be limited by how much you’ve read, is it not?
Tom: Indeed. I think she means that people should still read, but
concentrate on certain parts of the Bible at the expense of others. I think
it’s Luke she says she reads through almost every year. But that still means
her “encounter[s] with the Spirit of God” are limited to Luke plus whatever else
she reads, which she says is primarily the Gospels and the Psalms.
A Collection of Aphorisms
IC: Then it would seem certain she’s not spending much time on
context, but more on treating the Bible as a collection of aphorisms and short
stories that have no important connection to the larger pattern of teaching in scripture or
to the general span of history, wouldn’t you say?
Tom: This is it. Without the historical framework of the Old Testament stories from Genesis to the end of Nehemiah, you have nothing with which to inform the content of the Psalms or prepare you for the Gospels. You’re just grabbing them in isolation and, dare I say, blind ignorance. This is especially true of Psalms. How on earth do you know what you can appropriate from them as a Christian and what you can’t without the rest of the Old Testament? Are you going to start singing passages from the imprecatory Psalms in church, or would you rightly recognize they are Hebrew to the core? Not to mention their sentiments are specific to a particular set of circumstances, whether you take that to be future or historical ...
Anyone who attempts to understand isolated parts of the Old Testament without the rest of it is like a man who sits down to assemble a jigsaw puzzle and begins by tossing half the pieces in the garbage.
Written For Our Edification
IC: If she’s diminishing the value
of the OT, she’s being anti-scriptural. I’m thinking especially of what’s
said about the Old Testament by Paul: “These things were written
for our edification,” speaking of the relevance of ancient history to contemporary believers.
Tom: Absolutely. There’s a very good
reason that Sunday Schools teach Genesis, Exodus, David and Goliath and Jonah. For
one, when the Lord makes reference to them, it helps to know what he’s talking about.
But I suspect Mrs. Becker is only glib
about this sort of knowledge because she’s had it piled on in her youth and
takes what she knows for granted. It would be difficult to be so breezy about the value of
Nahum’s prophecy or the legal instructions in Leviticus if one didn’t already
have at least a surface understanding of what they contain.
Reading in Community
IC: Another thing I noted was her comment about the Bible being read “in community”. On the surface, that seems
good: Paul tells us to give attention to the public reading of scripture, doesn’t he? But here she’s pulled a phony “either-or”. It’s not either we read together, or we read alone; it’s both. But
she seems to run the idea of communal reading against the value of personal, devotional reading, doesn’t she?
Tom: I’m not a big fan of dismissing verses of scripture
on the basis that they’re “cultural”, but you have to be a bit disconnected
from history if you don’t grasp the fact that at least one good reason for
Paul’s instruction to Timothy to give attention to public reading is that many
in the churches of their day were either illiterate or didn’t have access to
their own copies of the Old Testament. Public reading was the ONLY way they’d
get the scriptures, whereas we have all sorts of options today. Moreover, Paul
also tells Timothy with respect to handling the word of truth, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved”, which suggests individual study is also important. So as you say, she’s created a
false dichotomy there.
Priorities, Priorities
Further, most Christians in the modern
world read all the time. If you can justify taking ten hours out of your week
for a detective novel or several hours a month to read the news or political
commentary online, how can you explain not even bothering to glance at Nahum
(which is three chapters long and takes all of twenty minutes to read at a
snail’s pace) in so many years you can’t remember? What you’re saying is that
you believe Nahum and other parts of scripture have less value to you than the
trivial nonsense we all fill our heads with daily.
That’s one thing to decide for yourself.
It’s another thing to teach it and encourage it, as she is doing here. At that
point you’ve kinda got to call her on it.
IC: Well, another thing I’d like to call her on is her arbitrary
personal distinction between “texts that tell the foundational story” and the
rest of the scriptures, which she clearly rates lower. She says the Psalms of
Israel are “foundational”, but somehow, at the same time, Leviticus isn’t. She
clearly thinks that the entirety of the Minor Prophets and Jude don’t rate, and
the epistles hardly get a mention. And compared to Luke, even three of four gospels are passed over by her. What are her criteria for that?
Unequally Profitable
Tom: Precisely. Now, I will give her this, IC: All scripture is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness, as Paul tells Timothy. It does not follow logically from that statement that
all scripture is equally profitable
at every given moment in human history. So I agree with her that Nahum is
probably less important to the Christian today than Luke. Nahum inveighs
against the now-irrelevant city of Nineveh while Luke tells the story of the
single most important human being in history. Nahum was indeed a significantly
more useful book 2-1/2 thousand years ago than it is today.
But that does not mean it is unimportant.
There are still useful lessons in Nahum to be learned, and I would argue they
are in all probability more useful than 99% of what Amy Becker is currently reading outside of her morning devotions. Moreover, her casual attitude to the significance of much of God’s word makes me wonder if Mrs. Becker is sufficiently familiar with her Bible at a deeper level to be making the sorts of
value judgments you’re talking about.
Defining “Foundational”
IC: It’s interesting that the Lord Jesus fulfilled 353 prophecies
of the Old Testament — the part of the Bible she views as less important
than the gospel of Luke — and relied on all of those for his verification
as Messiah. Moreover, it’s noteworthy that there are 228 references to the Old
Testament in the Gospels, including 58 of them in the book of Luke that she
claims is “foundational”. So now she’s in effect saying that we really don’t
need to understand all that Luke is talking about. It makes you wonder just how
many verses are left in her Bible.
Tom: I agree. All scripture is profitable, and I’d
rather not treat any of it the way she suggests treating Nahum, not least
because we might not have a clue about the spiritual value of what we’re excising
from our reading until we’ve made several passes through it at various stages
of Christian maturity.
Still, keeping all that in mind, I do find
it useful go completely through the New Testament more frequently than the Old,
just because I feel a more urgent need for the direct church teaching of the
apostles and repeated visits to the life of Christ. Currently I read a single
chapter from the NT and a single chapter from the OT daily, twice through each.
That takes me through the New Testament approximately 1.5 times every year,
and through the entire Old Testament roughly every three years. But I don’t
skip anything. The Holy Spirit doesn’t need my editing help. And that
second read helps me catch a lot that I miss the first time through.
Truth Mining
What’s your preferred method? I don’t think we’ve ever discussed this …
IC: I’m two OT chapters and one NT chapter, with the NT twice, once aloud. I’ve found that
reading aloud is a different way of making myself think carefully about what
I’m reading. And as you say, it covers the whole written word of God in a year
and a half or so. Like you, I’ve found that what you read in the OT has
powerful links to the NT. I actually don’t think you can understand the NT very
well at all if you don’t have a grasp of the rest of scripture.
Tom: You make a good point there: I tend to speed-read, which is fine for certain things but
horrible for Bible reading. Reading aloud helps me shake the habit of glazing
over the text and missing important things.
Back to the Grind
Look, I think I sort of understand where Mrs. Becker might be coming from. She doesn’t
want Bible reading to become a grind, and says things like “God’s grace extends easily to those of us who haven’t memorized any
verses lately and who can’t explain the inner workings of Habakkuk,” which is
quite true, as is her assertion that prayerful contemplation of a few verses is
more important than skimming chapters just to say you’ve done it. Who
could argue?
IC: Personally, I like Habakkuk … a lot. That closing poem is absolutely amazing, and one of
the most profound statements of trust in the Lord you could find in all of
scripture. But she can have her druthers, I suppose.
Tom: Oh, I love it too. But I recognize there are people who are
genuinely saved that will never take the time to enjoy it. And the Christian
life is a marathon, not a sprint. I read the whole Bible over and over because
I’ve discovered that an ever-increasing familiarity with the whole counsel of
God helps me immeasurably in that “prayerful contemplation” Mrs. Becker so values.
Diligence and Labor
IC: Sure. How can you learn to love someone you don’t really know? And how can we know God without
first engaging with him through his word? Apart from his word, how would any of
us know who he is at all?
Further, God has ordained that people who seek him are going to have to exert some
effort to achieve it. There’s discipline in loving God … it takes real
effort, and means pushing aside other things and obliging yourself to get down
to it. The Bible tells us it will be that way: it’s those who
“seek me earnestly” (or “early”) and those who
“seek me with all their heart” that find God: not the folks who expect it to come without effort, without
commitment and without struggle.
Tom: I agree; there’s work involved. But approached properly, Bible
reading should not always be a chore. I’d hate to think too many of my fellow Christians feel that way about it. If
it’s never anything more than hard labor when you pick up your Bible — if you don’t ever have those moments
of pure delight when something you’re struggling to understand finally clicks
into place — I think you’re probably doing it wrong. Getting below the
surface can be hard work, but it’s also joyful work, and there’s tremendous
benefit in it.
Maybe you need to consider things like the
Bible on audio CD in the car when you’re on the road, or a change of
translation, or a change of the time of day that you read, or whatever.
Who’s Calling the Shots?
IC: When we listen
for the voice of God, we must be willing to hear what HE wants to say, not
looking to hear only what we want — or find easiest — to hear. It’s
all about who’s in charge of the process; is God calling the shots, or am I
thinking he’s obligated to deliver to me only what I’m willing to receive at
this moment? To listen to God is to be open to whatever he wants to
say … even when I don’t always understand at first.
Tom: Right. For that
reason, deliberately reducing one’s exposure to the entire word of God is
never going to seem like a good approach to me.
No comments :
Post a Comment