But is it practical? (Part 3)

"Come on, now," I recently heard someone protest when they heard about The Books of The Bible, "if we get rid of chapters and verses, don't tell me the pastor's going to stand up and say, 'Everybody open to the place in John where Jesus changes the water into wine.' "

Well, I'm a pastor. And I'd love to have a congregation that was biblically literate enough to be able to do that. (I think many of our people actually could already.) I'd love for them all to be able to say to themselves, "Now John begins with the 'book of signs,' and changing the water into wine was the first sign, so it must be right . . . here." Hey, I'd even settle for them knowing this is recorded somewhere near the beginning of John. What is the goal of our preaching and teaching, if not to train our people in the word of God? How can we be content with such a low level of biblical literacy that we don't expect our people to be able to find things without following the numbers by rote?

But I'll bet things really aren't that bad. Let's do a little experiment. Everybody open to the place in Genesis where Joseph gets sold into slavery by his brothers. I'm not going to give you a chapter and verse reference. Just find the place, based on what you know about the book.

No, really, everybody open to the place in Genesis where Joseph gets sold into slavery by his brothers.

That wasn't so bad, was it? I'll bet it went something like this: "Abraham, too early . . . Jacob, too early . . . hey, here it is." You know your way around the Bible better than a lot of people are giving you credit for. We don't really need to keep using chapters and verses the way we have been in a lot of cases.

But beyond this, how often would it really be so hard to give notice of the sermon passage before the pastor stood up to preach? You pastors do prepare your sermons in advance, don't you? (Please tell me that you do.) Then aren't there a lot of ways besides chapters and verses to let people know what you're going to be preaching about, enough in advance that they can even prepare their own hearts and minds by reading and reflecting on the passage?

In my own church, I send an e-mail newsletter out to the congregation every Thursday. In it I always tell them what passage I'll be preaching from. Often I will provide the text of the whole passage in this e-mail. This newsletter also gets posted on our web site.

And in our bulletin, now that most of the people have their own copies of The Books of The Bible, we list the scripture lesson this way:

John 2:1-12

The Books of The Bible, p. 1743 ("On the third day a wedding took place . . .")

Yes, we still give the reference in "feet and inches," for those who haven't gone metric yet. But I have to tell you, people seem to be finding the lesson a lot faster with the page number and callout phrase than they used to by book, chapter and verse. It all feels pretty practical to me.

Chris Smith

Chris Smith is the pastor of University Baptist Church in East Lansing, MI and author of "The Beauty Behind the Mask: Rediscovering the Books of the Bible" from Clements Publishing.

But is it practical? (Part 2)

Now that people are finding out about The Books of The Bible, I've been hearing them say things like, "This would be great for personal devotional reading, but I don't think it would really work well in groups." I've wondered exactly what they meant by this.

To be fair, let's assume that everybody in the group has a copy of The Books of The Bible. If they're studying a particular biblical book together, this will allow each of them to read all the way through it first, enjoyably and meaningfully, as the foundation for the group's discussions. How is that a problem?

I've had several other people say to me, in fact, "This is great, now I won't have to print out my own copies of the text without chapters and verses." Apparently there were all of these bootleg versions of the Bible being created out there to get around the problems of the customary presentation. Now you can all come in from the cold.

But what about when the group begins taking up individual passages within a book? You're in 1 Corinthians, for example, and talking about lawsuits between believers. Everybody opens to page 1523 and Paul's teaching is right there. In fact, it's now clearly set off from his next topic, Christians going to prostitutes. If you were taking a chapter-by-chapter approach, these two items would be thrown together instead. The night you tried to talk about them both, you'd probably have a pretty high-energy discussion, but it wouldn't be very coherent. In The Books of The Bible, on the other hand, you see clearly that you'll be taking about one subject this week and the other the next week. How is that a problem?

Perhaps what people actually mean when they say "I don't think it would work well in groups" is something like this. In devotional reading, you just pick up where you left off the last time. All you need is a bookmark. But in a group discussion, an idea may occur to you spontaneously that makes you want to direct the others to another place in the Bible that you think relates to the topic at hand. How do you get them there quickly, so that the discussion doesn't bog down? (And so that you don't lose your own train of thought!) Isn't it easier to say, "Turn to Matthew 5:39" than to have to say, "I think something else that relates to this is on page 1631. It's in the first paragraph. No, not that indented paragraph, the one right above it . . . ."

In other words, the real objection to using The Books of The Bible in groups seems to be that it doesn't allow us to cite passages spontaneously without regard to their context. With chapter and verse numbers eliminated, the only way to do that is to describe their position on the page. And that can be clumsy, even comical.

So we want to keep using the chapter-and-verse format in groups because it allows us cite passages without regard to their context? Now that really is a problem.

Wouldn't everyone in the group benefit much more if we said something like, "In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus was contrasting the ways of the kingdom with religious tradition, he said something that I think relates to the lawsuits we've been talking about tonight. This is on page 1631. When Jesus told us to turn the other cheek, he also said, 'If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.' What do you think he meant by that?" By the time that last question has been asked, the others in the group will probably already have located the statement and will be considering it in its context.

Do you see what's going on here? Mo betta Bible reading. In groups.

Chris Smith

Chris Smith is the pastor of University Baptist Church in East Lansing, MI and author of "The Beauty Behind the Mask: Rediscovering the Books of the Bible" from Clements Publishing.

But is it practical? (Part 1)

Hello, everyone. Glenn Paauw has asked me to share some of my own thoughts with you, as a member of the team that helped IBS develop The Books of The Bible. If you've been following Glenn's series on "Why would you do that?" I'm sure that, in terms of the thinking and goals behind this edition, you really "get it" by now. But you may still have one hesitation: "Will this really be practical?" In other words, you may be thinking things like:
- "I'd probably enjoy using this as a reading Bible, but I don't think I'd use it as my study Bible."
- "This would be great for personal devotional reading, but I don't think it would work well in groups."
- "Come on, now, if we get rid of chapters and verses, the pastor's not going to stand up and say, 'Everybody open to the place in John where Jesus changes the water into wine.' "
I'd like to share some thoughts about each of these concerns, starting in this posting with the first one.

What exactly is the distinction between a "reading Bible" and a "study Bible?" (I've actually thought about this a lot, since I've been asked several times whether The Books of The Bible "isn't just a reading Bible.") The only conclusion I've been able to come to, based on the distinction that's being drawn, is that a "study Bible" is one you don't read.

Think of that--a book that you don't read! That's like a pool you don't swim in. You might check the pH from time to time and add chlorine if necessary. But you never jump in with both feet and come up beaming, shaking the water from your hair. You just "study" the pool.

Or it's like a meal that you don't eat. You might measure the internal temperature of the meat with a thermometer, or calculate the nutritional value of the food. But you never sit down at the table, brandishing knife and fork overhead for immediate use after a heartfelt but brief prayer of thanksgiving. You just "study" the meal.

That sounds awful to me. So why are we so eager to subject small sections of the biblical text to minute analysis, but never really read the books that make up the Bible? For that matter, why don't we realize that an eager, inquisitive reading through these books must provide the foundation for any study we wish to make of the smaller parts within them? I can't think of a better and more practical "study Bible" than one that makes it comfortable and enjoyable to do this foundational reading.

As Richard Moulton wrote in his preface to the Modern Reader's Bible,
The revelation which is the basis of our modern religion has been made in the form of literature. . . . And the best treatment for this literature is to read it. For those who wish there exists a vast apparatus of all kinds of helps in Bible study. But let us not forget the subtle and besetting danger in all literary study--that the process of studying tends to eclipse the literature itself. Scholarship can do much for the Bible: but imagination and literary receptivity can do more.

Pass the potatoes!

Chris Smith

Chris Smith is the pastor of University Baptist Church in East Lansing, MI and author of "The Beauty Behind the Mask: Rediscovering the Books of the Bible" from Clements Publishing.

Why would you do that? (Part 7: Always showing the text in one column)

In this our last entry in the “Why would you do that?” series, we look at the importance of presenting the Bible’s text in a single-column. People have asked, “Why is that a big deal?” And our accountant pipes in, “Yeah! It’s costing us a lot of money to print all those extra pages.” Others have pointed out it makes the whole book bigger, bulkier and harder to carry around. And it’s true, always showing the text in a single column gives you a Bible with a lot of extra white space.

So why insist on it? It’s more than just the fact that regular books are printed in a single column and we wanted reading from The Books of The Bible to be like reading other books. The key is that the literary forms of the biblical books are a big deal, so showing them is too. When you start saving all that space and money in a two-column setting, you are also making it harder to see that proverbs are different from poetry, poetry from letters, letters from narrative, etc., etc., etc. (We won’t even discuss the recent three-column settings. For shame.) Narrow columns have a way of obliterating the visual cues (spacing, indents, etc.) that can unveil literary type.

Take your typical poem in the Bible. The key element of Hebrew poetry is the parallelism of the lines. By relating two lines (or sometimes three) to each other, biblical authors take the idea expressed in the first line to a deeper level, or challenge it, or express it another way. When a single line of this poetry can fit on a single line of the page, the reader can clearly and easily see how sets of lines work together.

But look what happens when you try to squeeze this poetry into a narrower column. Suddenly that one line can’t fit, so you have to run it over to the next line. But to differentiate it from the second line of the couplet, you have to indent it. If it’s a long line, sometimes you can even have two run-arounds and you have to indent that second one too. When you look at a whole page of this, you see a jumble of indents and lines. The visual message is simply confusing. The original literary form has, as I said, been obliterated. This, you can be sure, is no help to readers in understanding the parallelism that the author intended.

Similar things happen with other literary types. A commitment to a single-column text reflects a commitment to the experience of the reader. It’s a way of saying that Bible engagement matters more than finances. It’s an expression of respect to the sacred writings.

-Glenn

Bonus sneak peek at upcoming blogs:

But is it practical? A three part series by Bible Deign Committee Member Chris Smith
Hey Augustine! You can’t study a Bible like this, right?
The Speed Trap: the problem with finding things too fast
C.S. Lewis on using a book vs. receiving it
People of the Book. Who? Us?
Gnowing the Bible like a gnostic
Why reading whole books matters
Why literary type matters
An open letter to Bible publishers
The Books of The Bible and Bible reading communities
The Books of The Bible and daily devotions
The Books of The Bible and the story of the Bible
The difficulty of paradigm shifts
and more . . .

Only the beginning....

Life is exciting around the office right now. A handful of us were out in the warehouse yesterday shipping out the first copies of The Books of The Bible. If you preordered yours, it should be showing up on your doorstep in the next few days. Be sure to drop us a line and tell us what you think.

In the next day or two, we'll have a new article up by Gordon Fee titled, "Why Christians Read Their Bibles Poorly." As always, Dr. Fee delivers. You'll find it in the Resources section along with links to the books in our Pastor's Pack by Dr. Fee and Chris Smith.

Later this month, we'll be launching de-versify.com, an interactive community that will include discussion boards, contests and more. The Facebook group is already up and running. Come check it out!

And keep your suggestions coming. This is only the beginning.

—p