“The Bible tells me. So?”

The Vizsoly Bible, in Vizsoly
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A couple of months ago, Bill Leonard, Professor of Church History and Baptist Studies at Wake Forest University wrote a reflection on what so often happens when people get into a “Bible quoting” mode. We wrote:

Lent, the season of reflection and repentance, offers opportunity for those of us who live in and out of the Bible to acknowledge that the church’s history is full of acts and imperatives thought to be grounded in Holy Scripture that led the church to make horrible mistakes.

The Bible in 50 Words . . .

Interesting video from Igniter Media over on YouTube-
The Bible in 50 Words (and many of them rhyme!)

What would your 50 words be if you were telling the Bible story?
What would you include? What would you leave out?

Where do you get your financial advice?

Kim Kardashian Fragrance Launch, Glendale, CA on February 22, 2011 - Photo by Glenn Francis of www.PacificProDigital.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kim Kardashian, The Donald trump Bible for money advice. So goes the headline on a story at Faith and Reason. According to writer Cathy Lynn Grossman, a recent poll by the American Bible Society discovered that Americans are far more likely to look to figures in popular culture for guidance on money and what to do with it than to the Bible.

Maybe that’s not surprising, given the counter-(American)cultural way that the Bible deals with wealth (see the Between the Lines entry for this coming Sunday).

What’s amusing, though, besides the thought of theoretically faithful people taking financial advice from the Kardashians, is that the American Bible Society presents the results of its survey as part of an advertisement for a new product: The Financial Stewardship Bible. I guess instead of selling all and laying it at the feet of the apostles, you’re just supposed to send it to ABS.

Point- Tap – God has an App?

On my way to somewhere else, I ran across this video for a new book by Dudley Rutherford. Rutherford is apparently a pastor of a 10,000 member church just off the Ronald Reagan Freeway northwest of Los Angeles (actually about 40 miles as the crow flies from where I grew up).

So what I wonder is: is this a clever bit of inculturation, a way of presenting the Bible in a way that the mobile generation will understand? Or is it a woeful misrepresentation of what the Bible is and how one should relate to it?

What do you think?

Jimmy Carter and the Bible

Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Former President Jimmy Carter is featured in an interview over at Huffington Post, occasioned by his new book NIV Lessons From Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter. As you may remember, President Carter has for many years taught a Sunday School class at his church in Plains, Georgia, and this book brings his observations and reflections together with the Bible text. (Yet another tactic for marketing additional copies of the best-selling book of all time, as Timothy Beal has noted in The Rise and Fall of the Bible, but that’s a topic for another time.)

I’ve always appreciated Jimmy Carter’s honesty and forthrightness, and he offers some thoughtful responses to what have now sadly become common questions about the Bible- did God write it? How can you read Genesis and believe in science? What about women, and gays, and exclusivist faith?

One observation:

There are many verses in the Bible that you could interpret very rigidly and that makes you ultimately into a fundamentalist. When you think you are better than anybody else — that you are closer to God than other people, and therefore they are inferior to you and subhuman — that leads to conflict and hatred and dissonance among people when we should be working for peace.

It’s well worth a look.

What’s in your Bible?

Ran across an interesting chart that shows visually the differences in the content of the Bible according to the Samaritan, Hebrew, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Protestant traditions:

The differences, as one might expect, are mainly among the “Apocrypha,” “Deuterocanonical,” or “Inter-Testamental” books, but look also at “The Acts of Paul and Thecla,” “3 Corinthians,” or “The Book of the Covenant.”

The chart only compares content, and does not describe the order in which the books are placed, which differs greatly between the Jewish and Christian traditions. It all goes to show that when you talk about “the Bible,” you might give a little thought to “which one?”

No King James Version?

The 400th anniversary year of the King James Version is now over, but it is still interesting to ponder what the world would be like without the profound influence of that translation of the Bible not only on Christian worship and practice, but on the language, metaphors, and poetry of the English Language. As one believer is said to have stated, “if the King James Version was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it’s good enough for me!”

Over at Christian Century, Mark Noll, Professor of History at Notre Dame University,  suggests what the impact might have been if the King James Bible had never existed. Some of the costs he imagines are “awkwardness” in corporate worship and problems with Bible memorization. On the other hand, the promises might well have included less of an inclination in Protestant Christianity to believe that the Bible offers a singular message. Furthermore, the KJV provided a perspective on slavery and servanthood that allowed supporters of slavery in the Americas to argue that slavery had divine sanction.

Whose Bible Is It?

Bruce Gourley at the Baptist Studies Bulletin muses about who “owns” the Bible:

Growing up in church, I collected a number of Bibles by my teenage years. There were many Bibles in our house, and to distinguish my scripture from those of my parents or brother, I would write my name on the inside cover or one of the pages thereafter.

College, seminary and some years of ministry passed before I fully realized the inadvertent symbolism of the now-worn Bibles bearing my name: scripture is molded by individual believers, whether consciously or not. The reader, in short, becomes the owner of the text.

He explores how the Bible is read to support all manner of individual perspectives, but then notes:

Many of us own the Bible in both dimensions: at times we force scripture to reflect our personal prejudices or desires, and in other instances we permit it to feed the “better angels of our nature.”

You can find the full column at the Baptist Studies Bulletin.