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The Least Read Best Seller?

By Ray Vincent.

Growing up in a Baptist church in Wales in the 1940s and 1950s, I learned about the Bible through Sunday School, Young People’s Fellowship Bible studies and ‘grown-up’ sermons. In day school too, although compulsory Religious Education was rather half-heartedly observed even in those days, we at least got some, and it was called ‘Scripture’. I remember particularly the time when our history master in the Grammar School, who was a Methodist local preacher, took us through the Book of Acts (in the Authorised Version, which was all we had then), impressing on us how we could get the best out of the Bible by reading it slowly – a lesson I have never forgotten.

In those days, most people, even if they did not go to church, were at least familiar with some of the Bible stories. Things are very different today. It is remarkable how, in radio and television quiz shows, people who are very knowledgeable about most things almost always fail to answer the simplest question about the Bible. This is a mark of the de-churching of society: most people today not only do not attend church, but have never attended Sunday School or had much exposure to the Bible in day school.

What is more disturbing is that this ignorance is largely shared by regular church-goers. There are churches, particularly of the charismatic style of worship, where the reading of Scripture is almost entirely squeezed out by ‘worship’ choruses, hearty prayers that are mostly about ourselves and how lovely it is to be here, and a short, emotional sermon calling on one or two familiar biblical phrases. There is an odd incongruity here between the theology, which insists on the total inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, and the fact that no-one actually seems to read it. In the more traditional churches too, the rise of ‘family worship’ has often resulted in bite-size selections from the Lectionary, often read by members of the congregation with no great gift for reading, and followed by a short, often bland sermon. The average person in the congregation can absorb very little of the Bible just by hearing it in this way, and intentional Bible study in the form of weekday meetings or private daily devotions is weak in many places. The Bible is rapidly becoming a foreign country for present-day British people whether they are Christians or not.

How can we get people to read the Bible? Sometimes I feel the question is: can we get people to read the Bible? Or perhaps the question is: do we even need to try? Is it necessary for Christians to be familiar with the whole Bible?

Considering the Bible’s history – how it developed and what its relationship with Christianity has been – this is not such an odd question as it sounds. Before the invention of printing and the spread of literacy among ordinary people, knowledge of the Bible was the preserve of priests and scholars. Lay people simply heard it in church, viewed it in passion plays and stained glass windows, and learned a few texts from it in their catechism. This was in some ways appropriate to the nature of the Bible, because in its origins and formation it was almost entirely oral and communal. The stories in the Hebrew Scriptures were handed down by oral tradition. The laws were probably well-established custom eventually formulated in writing. The ritual instructions were guidance for the priests. The Psalms were designed to be sung. The books of the prophets are collections from memory of things the prophets said in the royal court or proclaimed in the market-place. The Gospels began with the stories of Jesus being told when Christians gathered together for prayer. Probably the only parts of the Bible that were written by ‘authors’ in the modern sense of the word are some of the Wisdom literature and the New Testament epistles, and even most of the Epistles were meant to be read aloud to the congregation. The Bible, then, was mostly designed to be shared and enacted in the worshipping community rather than read as literature by individuals.  

It was the invention of printing and the rise of general literacy that changed the relationship of Christians with their Bible. The Reformers translated the Bible into the language of the people and encouraged those who could read to read it for themselves. In fact, a major contribution to the spread of literacy among working class people, especially in Protestant countries, was the evangelical motivation that led to the proliferation of Sunday Schools, Bible Societies and so on. This resulted in several generations of devout Christians who had little general education, but were deeply familiar with the Bible. It is this that we are losing today. A few centuries ago ignorance of the Bible was unavoidable for most people, but it would surely be tragic today if by apathy we neglect and lose this great gift.

My two books were motivated by a desire to encourage people to turn afresh to the Bible and enjoy reading it. Let the Bible Be Itself traces the history of the development and use of the Bible in order to challenge the false impressions and expectations people have of it. It points out, for instance, that the Bible is not a ‘Bible’ in the wider meaning so popular today, i.e. a complete compendium of information on a subject, systematically arranged for easy reference. Nor is it a complete statement of the essentials of the Christian faith, the whole Christian faith and nothing but the Christian faith. The Old Testament, as is widely recognised even by the most conservative Bible believers, is the Scripture of the Jews and not entirely or straightforwardly applicable to Christians. The New Testament came into being when the leaders of the Catholic Church needed to form a canon of authoritative Scripture to defend their teaching against what they saw as heresy. In forming this canon, they did not have the option of shaping a selection that would give a completely balanced and comprehensive account of the faith: they had to include all the writings that happened to be extant and were generally recognised as ‘apostolic’. What Christians had preached from the beginning was not Scripture, but the gospel or ‘kerygma’, that is, their experience of Jesus Christ and their beliefs about him. Scripture (the Jewish Scriptures at first, and then the early Christian writings) were the back-up to what they already believed and preached. Unlike Islam, Christianity is not founded on a book. It is founded on a Person, and the book is valued for the way in which it reveals that Person.

My hope was that this little book would help people approach the Bible realistically with some understanding of what it is. My second book, Chasing an Elusive God, was meant to build on this by introducing readers to some of the different kinds of material contained in the Bible, and to point out how it can be enjoyed as a human creation, the documentation of many people’s quest for God, for wisdom, for truth, for meaning and so on. I believe that Bible reading should be a source of pleasure and excitement rather than a duty or a pious exercise. The influence of scientific thinking combined with dogmatic preaching has made the Bible problematic for most people. We miss the real inspiration of it by asking all the wrong questions. How much of this story is historically true? What is the message of this passage? When was this prophecy fulfilled, or is it still to be fulfilled? How can the teaching in this passage be reconciled with other passages? Because we assume the Bible is authoritative in the sense of telling us what to believe and what to do, we struggle to ascertain the meaning of every passage, assuming that there is only one meaning and that we shall stray into heresy if we get it wrong.

My suggestion is that the Bible was never meant to be this kind of authority. It is inspired in the way that poetry and art are inspired. We need to listen to the telling of a story, the singing of a psalm, the preaching of a prophet, and feel the passion behind the words before we start worrying about what it might mean for us or what it might teach us about God. In this way we can enter into a living conversation in which we together with the Bible writers are on a quest for God and for truth.

I believe that God, both in terms of the day-to-day life of faith and in terms of our intellectual efforts to understand him, is elusive. We reach out for him by faith. The Bible writers were no more secure in their faith or confident in their knowledge than we are. Many of the Psalmists were crying out to God in their distress and not at all sure he was hearing them. Job was grappling with the unanswerable questions raised by suffering. The writer of Ecclesiastes was wondering whether there is any ultimate meaning at all. The Old Testament historians were not just recording a history: they were trying to see a pattern in it that could make sense of the Exile and other disasters that had happened to them. The New Testament writers were not explaining to us the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Atonement or the Trinity – those came centuries later. They were all busy coming to terms with their experience of Jesus and working out what his story meant for themselves and the world. They expressed it in different ways, and sometimes disagreed with each other.

I believe that learning to read the Bible in this way, not rushing into ‘meaning’, bowing to ‘authority’ or trying to ‘prove’ anything, but simply hearing what its writers are saying, is the essential key to a revival of interest in reading the Bible today.

This in no way detracts from hearing God’s word in the Bible: it is in fact a more realistic way of understanding how God speaks. If the Bible is God’s word, it is obvious that God speaks very rarely in direct messages from heaven. He speaks in what human beings say about him and what they say to him, whether in praise or in complaint and challenge. He speaks in events, occasionally in miracles but more often in the ordinary events of human life, leaving us to interpret their meaning. He speaks in conversations in which people disagree with one another (e.g. Job and his friends) and in preachers who overturn what others have said (e.g. Ezekiel 18, and the Sermon on the Mount). If the Bible is God’s word, we have to come to terms with the fact that even words said by Satan (Job 1.6-12; Matthew 4.3-9 etc.) can in some sense be God’s word! To look at the Bible with open eyes is to find a much more dynamic, living and inspiring sense of God’s word than is often conveyed by the ways we have traditionally read it.

If Bible reading is to be revived in the world today both among committed believers and in society generally, we have to begin from a clear and realistic understanding of what the Bible is. Not all will agree with the way I describe it, but the question of its true nature and function needs to be faced.

Editor’s note: Ray quite rightly draws attention to the ignorance of the Bible among, I would say, most people under the age of 60 in the UK today. In my parish, we believe we’ve found a way to start rebuilding general Bible knowledge and awareness, using a programme entitled “Open the Book”.

Using OTB, we now visit our local primary school every Friday in term-time to tell and enact Bible stories to the children. It’s a wonderful tool for laying again those foundations of Bible awareness which my generation took for granted. It may not bear fruit for years to come, but at least we’ve planted a little sapling and are nurturing it week by week. What’s more, we used to have a Sunday School with about half a dozen children – now we have a Friday School containing every primary-aged child in the parish! That’s a great result by any measure. More details about Open the Book can be obtained from their website: www.openthebook.net.