The Case for Pew Bibles
Written by William E. Boyce and K. J. Drake |
Saturday, February 18, 2023
The pew Bible has a valuable place. It is a celebration of the gospel, the triumph of the early church, and the spirit of the Reformation. And for a generation of digital burnouts, the pew Bible helps us connect with a crucial truth: that salvation is physical, tangible, earthly, and available for all.
Do pew Bibles matter? Churches of all styles have had to ask this question in recent years. The increase of church plants using secular spaces for worship means that church planters must contemplate the extra weight, hassle, and expense of providing Bibles for their congregants each Sunday. The rise of technology means that many congregants come to church with merely their phone for a Bible. On top of those societal factors, the pandemic forced most churches to remove pew Bibles for a season, leaving room to reevaluate their utility in worship.
But these questions are not just theoretical; they can be profoundly personal and pastoral. Recently, I (Billy) had the opportunity to worship in the pews with my kids. As a pastor, my preaching schedule rarely affords me the opportunity to spend the entire service with my family. So it was a special treat to watch my kids interact, not only with the liturgy, but with the liturgical tools around them. What grabbed my attention most was this: at some point, each of my four kids (ages 5.5 through 11.5), took out a pew Bible for personal use.
So, we must ask: in this post-COVID, post-modern, post-literate, technological, consumer society, do pew Bibles matter? Does the connection between the Word and the form of accessing the Word matter? Is something lost when we depend on digital media for our Scripture consumption? Is projecting the Scripture passage onto the screen adequate for whole-person and whole-church discipleship and mission, or can a case be made that pew Bibles are an essential part of making God’s Word accessible for all?
Part 1: The Accessible Word: Christian History
The physicality and accessibility of the Word of God is a continual theme across Christian history. From the Scriptures themselves through the Early Church and Reformation, there has been a constant mandate for spiritual leaders: make God’s Word physically accessible. God’s people are a people of the book.
In Deuteronomy 17, for example, Moses makes an odd requirement for Israel’s future king: “he shall write for himself in a book a copy of the law … it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them.” (Deut 17:18-19) Such a bookishness was unknown as a requirement of the Ancient Near East ruling class, and yet before all things — military power, courtly procedure, or administration — the king ought to write by his own hand the Law of God. For the king, the Word was to be accessible.This theme recurs throughout Scripture. The biblical authors presume that meditating on the Law, which is the precursor to actually obeying it, requires the external composition of a literary work. Oral culture was not enough; God’s spoken Word needed to be written and re-written as a whole, in order to be absorbed (e.g. Deut 6:9; Jer 30:2).
This focus on the written text has been a prominent feature of Christianity throughout the centuries. One of the key characteristics of early Christianity, according to scholar Larry Hurtado, was its unusual bookishness. The early Christians were committed to making God’s Word physically accessible for others, going so far as to eschew dominant forms of producing texts by using the codex, rather than bookrolls or scrolls. Says Hurtado,
The bookroll was the prestige bookform of the day, and so, if Christians wanted to commend their texts to the wider culture, especially the texts that they read as scripture, it would seem an odd and counterintuitive choice to prefer the codex bookform for these texts. Indeed, it would seem like a deliberately countercultural move. … It certainly had the effect of distinguishing early Christian books physically, especially Christian copies of their sacred books.[1]
This shift had several advantages. First, because of the cheaper production of the codex, more physical copies of Scripture could be produced. The codex made the sacred Scriptures more physically available to the people of God. Second, the codex form allowed for greater ease of study and cross reference as opposed to the cumbersome nature of the scroll. In God’s providence, this widespread availability of the codex empowered later Christians to more accurately translate and further propagate God’s Word. Indeed, the widespread historical attestation of Scripture — far more than any other classical text — owes to the early church’s commitment to the accessible Word.
This emphasis on the availability of the Bible is shot through the Reformation as well.
As Luther was hiding in the Wartburg, avoiding the wrath of the emperor and pope, he turned his attention to translating the New Testament in German, which would definitively shape the national tongue. Luther’s motivation was to make the very words of the Lord accessible to Christians: “Neither have I sought my own honor by it; God, my Lord, knows this. Rather I have done it as a service to the dear Christians and to the honor of One who sitteth above, who blesses me so much.”[2] William Tyndale, the famed English Bible translator, is said to have aspired, according to John Foxe, “If God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than [a learned Catholic theologian] did.”[3] As these few examples show, the Church has a historical commitment to making Scripture available in written form. The accessibility of Bibles is a venerable part of Christian history.
Part 2: The Accessible Word: Phenomenology
At the same time, pew Bibles make a valuable contribution to the experience of worship. Without pew Bibles, something is tangibly missing from our liturgical space. As we see constantly in the Old Testament, and reaffirmed through the Reformation, liturgical space has a catechetical effect. The physical things in our worship space teach us about God and about the anticipated experience of worship.
-
O Come All Ye Miserable
Sometimes we short change salvation, by thinking Jesus saves us and pays off our debt to God. We think of it like a massive debt we get into, so someone generously pays it off and we have a bank balance of zero, so we can start again without that debt hanging over us. Too often that’s how we wrongly think about the salvation God promises. Jesus pays our debt and gets us to zero, now I have to start earning God’s favour. When I do good my spiritual account goes up, when I fail it’s like a spiritual direct debit. God is pleased with me when I’m in the spiritual black.
What is Christmas all about? We look forward to Christmas and all it brings, yet it’s hugely complicated and complex. It’s like an articulated lorry. Christmas is the cab, but with it comes the huge 44 tonne articulated trailer of expectations, traditions, and busyness that Christmas pulls around with it. There’s the expectation of seeing the family – all of them at some point, of food cooked to perfection, of family time without conflict or needle, and certain family traditions that have to repeated year after year.
So often what comes with Christmas is what we mistake for Christmas. So what is Christmas all about? The angels sum it up beautifully “good news that will cause great joy for all the people.” Christmas, the birth of Jesus brings not just a flicker of a smile, not just a temporary warm fuzzy feeling, not just joy but great joy, literally ‘mega-joy.’ It’s another of those great Christmas words. It is on Christmas jumpers and cards and decorations; joy. But what does it mean and how do we embrace it? And how can we know great joy not just at Christmas?
Joy is a strong word. It means to be glad, to be happy, to rejoice and celebrate. And the Bible isn’t anti-joy, God isn’t a killjoy, the Bible is full of joy because God is the giver of joy. It begins with God creating a world that is “very good” – overflowing with bounty and beauty. And God puts Adam and Eve into that world to find joy in it. That’s still true isn’t it? Just think of 5 things that bring you joy, 5 things that make you happy? Go on, stop and actually do it!. They were all created by God because God is generous and provides things that bring joy.
As you read the Bible you see joy and rejoicing in all sorts of things. There’s the joy of birthday and wedding celebrations. There’s joy at feasting and celebrating victory in battle. There’s joy in good wine. Proverbs tells us a wise son bring joy to his parents. In Song of Solomon there is joy and rejoicing in marriage and the intimacy it brings. God is a joy giving God, every moment of joy we experience, from the joy of celebrating a last minute winner, to the birth of a child, or the joy of that first mouthful your favourite meal cooked to perfection, is given to us by a joy giving God.
But the Bible is also honest about the problem we have with joy. Joy leaks. It’s like a balloon or tyre with a slow puncture, it gradually lets us down. In the world this side of the fall we’re tempted to seek joy in the gift when every gift was always intended to point us to joy in the giver. And therein lies the problem, things bring us joy but that joy is only temporary. We’re like a bucket with a hole, we have to constantly top our joy up to maintain any semblance of it. Constantly seeking new joy. But parties end, celebrations finish, our children aren’t always wise or delightful and nor are our parents, marriages are hard and so is intimacy, food spoils, wine turns, and reality intrudes. Joy leaks. And the danger is we become consumed by our search for joy, insatiably hungry for something it just can’t give us.
The joy we experience is meant to point us not to the gift but the giver. But because of sin we tend to forget the giver in pursuit of the gift. In the garden the real joy was relationship with God, but it is easily lost.
That’s not unique to us, it’s a universal problem. It’s the problem of Israel. They knew great joy. They knew the joy of being saved miraculously from slavery, and brought through the Red Sea – we tend to think seeing a miracle would change everything but Israel are proof it doesn’t – because they soon grumble and moan and fixate on gifts not giver. They’re given a land with houses built, vineyards dug and cities walled, but they soon become fixated on the gifts, trying to fill their bucket but unsatisfied because they forget the giver.
Read More -
What A Tangled Web
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, April 15, 2022
We have abortion bills that flip-flop on fetal personhood and candidates for the Supreme Court who defer to biologists while trying to avoid gender essentialism. This conceptual chaos, rooted in a denial of reality and responsibility, can only lead to chaos. To quote Sir Walter Scott, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.Confusion over what it means to be human continues to dog public life in the West. Soon after Anneliese Dodds, the Labour party shadow secretary for women, revealed that she does not know what a woman is, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson deferred the same question to biologists. That move was odd: It was obviously an attempt to play to the progressive trans lobby, but it actually revealed Jackson’s lack of understanding of the current debates surrounding gender. Jackson implied that she sees the issue as one of biological essentialism. Contra de Beauvoir, it would appear that she believes one is born a woman; one does not become one.
It is easy to poke fun at the confusion that ensues when reality is denied in the service of the latest political fads and fakeries. Yet while we laugh at the silliness, we may forget that the real confusion here is not over the political excesses of gender theory and the supine surrender of our leaders in the face of its obfuscations. The deeper issue is the confusion over what constitutes a human person. And that has tragic consequences for the most vulnerable in our society.
As a case in point, consider two bills currently under consideration in the Maryland House of Delegates. Both deal with abortion and are clearly meant to be preemptive strikes in case Roe is overturned by the Supreme Court. House Bill 1171 (Declaration of Rights – Right to Reproductive Liberty) proposes a change to the state’s constitution so that Article 48 will read as follows:
That every person, as a central component of the individual’s rights to liberty and equality, has the fundamental right to reproductive liberty which includes the right to make and effectuate decisions regarding the individual’s own reproduction, including but not limited to the ability to prevent, continue, or end their pregnancy. The state may not, directly or indirectly, deny, burden, or abridge the right unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means.
In many ways this is standard pro-abortion fare, assuming as it does that the baby in the womb lacks personhood and thus has no rights.
Read More -
Confessional Confidence in a World Gone Mad
Expressive individualism contends truth must be the most authentic expression of what comes subjectively from within us. In contrast, confessionalism affirms that truth exists objectively outside us and should shape us. The Christian worldview demands we conform to reality and truth as it comes to us from God via general and special revelation. Confessionalism helps us in that endeavor. In Crisis of Confidence, Trueman shows how confessions can strengthen our faith against prevailing ideological trends. That’s a welcome encouragement in a world gone mad.
What should Christians do when it seems the world has gone mad? Many believers in the West face that question daily. Action seems more effective than theological precision when dealing with the madness of crowds. Isn’t theological precision a luxury for when the church is prospering? That question presumes that rigorous theological reflection and insistence on tightly formulated doctrine is a nicety but not really what the church must pursue for the spiritual well-being of God’s people.
In Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity, Carl Trueman argues that careful theological reflection and historical rootedness are necessary for the church’s well-being precisely in moments of cultural discomfort. This lightly revised edition of his 2012 book The Creedal Imperative deepens Trueman’s case that confessional Christianity is biblical and consistent with the church’s historical practice. It’s an antidote for much of what ails the church today.
What Is Confessionalism?
Confessionalism entails the attempt to summarize the Scripture’s teaching into a public statement of our beliefs. As Trueman, professor of historical theology and church history, notes, “A confession is a positive statement of belief” that “inevitably excludes those who disagree with its content” (31). To write a confession is to endeavor to be transparent and cogent about what we believe to be true according to God’s Word. It’s an effort to be accountable to how we’ve understood the Bible and its implications.
Most confessions in church history were written in times of cultural and theological turmoil like ours. As author and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers wittily argues in her essay “Creed or Chaos?,” “Teachers and preachers never, I think, make it sufficiently clear that dogmas are not a set of arbitrary regulations invented a priori by a committee of theologians enjoying a bout of all-in dialectical wrestling. Most of them were hammered out under pressure of urgent practical necessity to provide an answer to heresy.” Thus confessions are most important when cultural beliefs exert pressure on foundational doctrines.
Confessions are also vital to spiritual formation within the church. According to Trueman, “The person who knows the [Apostles’ or Nicene] creed knows the basic plotline of the Bible and thus has a potentially profound grasp of theology” (136). Historical confessions help inform contemporary moral formation because “they offer both a framework for ethical thinking and helpful examples of how Christians of earlier eras applied such thinking to the issues of their own day” (155).
Read More
Related Posts:
