Why Christians Read Their Bibles Poorly

by Gordon Fee

(First presented at the Undergraduate Bible/Theology Conference — Minneapolis, Minnesota, 20 April 2005)

We live at a most remarkable, but quixotic, time in history. On the one hand, never before in history has it been possible for so many people to know so much about the basic documents of the Christian faith, found in the Christian Bible; we have more translations, more resources, more helps, more options of all kinds: including audio and the internet. On the other hand, not since the eighteenth century that John and Charles Wesley stepped into has there been a greater dearth of knowledge of the Bible in Western civilization—not to mention in a very large part of God’s people themselves—than is true today. We can do very little for Western civilization on this score, but the lack of true biblical literacy on the part of God’s people should lead the church to mourning and repentance.

And even in this context, where students are being trained to become better students of Scripture, one must first of all become a better reader of the Scriptures, since that is what most of God’s people do the most. And herein lies part of the reason for a dearth of the knowledge of Scripture within the church itself.

I begin with an anecdote. A few years ago, a popular columnist in the Vancouver Sun wrote a piece bemoaning the fact that her teenage son had to ask her the meaning of a simple biblical allusion. Her complaint was that in giving up the Christian faith, as she and most of her acquaintances had, they ahd also lost something dear regarding their Canadian heritage: a language full of allusion to biblical people and events. A huge part of Western culture was in the process of simply disappearing, she bemoaned.

But this complaint could also be echoed in the church as well. In the language of the prophet, there is a famine of knowledge in the land, especially a knowledge of Scripture. And while there are a lot of inter-related causes for this dearth, I want to focus on just a few of them in this lecture. First, and briefly, I want to examine some of the Reasons why Christians read thier Bibles poorly; second, to point out some of the Results of this reality; and third, to point toward some Remedies.

I.  Some Reasons for Poor Reading

1. The first reason why most Christians read their Bibles poorly is endemic to our present culture. The fact is that even though the computer has increased the abundance of books by many-fold, we are in danger as a culture of losing altogether the fine art of sustained reading.

We live in a time when our senses are being bombarded with constant noise and entertainment. The stimulation from such an overload of our senses, especially sight and sound, is having the dual effect of creating a generation who are practically incapable of quiet in any form and who therefore feel the need for constant external stimulation. Reading is now accompanied by the blare of music, and the television has become something of the monster that many predicted for it years ago: where more sights and sounds bombard the senses in two minutes of commercials than would have happened in a full half hour just a couple of decades ago.

Such over-stimulations of the senses is already having its impact on the ability of people to engage in sustained reading even of a good novel—how much more so of these ancient religious texts, whose culture is so foreign to ours and whose narative art was initially intended not for the reader at all, but for the hearer, who in hearing these texts read over and over again not only knew their content, but could repeat them often verbatim with all the nuances and catchwords intact.

2. But our problems also stem from our varied forms of Christian religious culture. On the one hand, those who were born and raised in more liturgical contexts have very often never been taught that they should actually read the Bible for themselves. So what they know comes from the reading of the Biblical lections Sunday after Sunday. The result often is that the Bible has sense of “oldness”—like the stained glass windows and often the architecture and liturgy itself—so that the idea of reading, and understanding, such ancient texts in the contexts of one’s own, culturally modern home, would never even occur to them.

Related to this is the very “ancient” feel there is to the way the Bible comes to us. When people are told they should read their Bibles, their instincts, correctly, are to begin with Genesis. But one does not get very far into the narrative when the reader is confronted by the strange story about Cain and Abel. With absolutely no explanation we are told that God looked approvingly on Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s, and so Cain murdered him; and then, as if that were not enough, the episode concludes with another strange thing—a genealogy that focuses on the arrogance of an otherwise unknown man named Lamech, and then returns to Adam and Eve having yet another son, since their first son  has been rejected by God and the second son is dead. And that is followed by another, much longer genealogy. This is not easy reading, in the sense of normal, everyday stuff, and in many such cases some help is needed for the modern person to navigate their way through this tricky terrain.

Take, for example, the Book of Exodus. I will not ask how many of you have sat down and read Exodus all the way through; but this absolutely marvelous book has a way of turning off the modern reader, who is used to something considerably different in a story line. One can usually get through the first 19 chapters easily enough, and then the Ten Commandments. But after that you encounter the first considerable collection of laws—and these especially have an ancient ring to them, even more so when they are followed by 7 chapters of detailed instruction on constructing a tent for worship and sacrifice, which after a brief respite of narrative, is followed by 6 final chapters in which the whole thing is gone over once more in detail as they create the tent and its furnishings. I am prepared to argue with Christian that this is absolutely must stuff, which the Christian must know like the back of their hand—not for the reasons that are sometimes given, but precisely because of how crucial this book is in the story of the Bible as a whole. And with a little help one can learn how to read it well.

3. But the ancient feel of these texts is an obstacle for only some Christians.  On the other side is the more non-liturgical evangelical culture, represented by such diverse groups as Baptists, Pentecostals, Mennonites, and endless non-aligned Independents, who actually put a great deal of emphasis on personal Bible reading.  But this, too, commendable as it is, often unwittingly promotes a kind of reading that is absolutely foreign to the way people read almost anything else except the newspaper, and is mostly foreign to the way the Bible itself is given to us.

Two practices, wonderful and commendable practices, tend to militate against a truly knowledgeable reading of Scripture, so that most evangelical Christians, the ones who tend to read their Bibles the most, tend also to read them poorly.  And by that I mean, that even though they read them often, at the same time Scripture is seldom read on its own terms, from the perspective of the divinely inspired authors themselves. 

Unfortunately, most of our poor reading stems from what is also the evangelical Christian’s great strength—the conviction that Scripture is God’s very word, a word for the church for all times and climes, inspired by the Holy Spirit for the church’s growth and life in the world.

But our very habits based on this conviction often militate against our reading the Bible with minds renewed by the Holy Spirit so that we have a better sense of what the Bible is, how it “works,” as it were, and how it should inform everything about us:  our theology, our worship, and our lives in their totality—at home, in the world, at work and at leisure.

Our habits, therefore, which again I emphasize are in one sense commendable, have led us to two kinds of reading that tend to work against our reading with understanding.

a.  The first of these, what I call the non-contextual individualization of verses—is exemplified for me by a phenomenon that I grew up with known as the “promise box”—a collection of individual texts printed on small cards that dutifully found its way on our kitchen tables. The point of the “promise box” was for us each to hear God speak a word to us for the day, as a kind of constant reminder through the day of God’s constant presence by his “promises.” This “promise box” view of the Bible was greatly aided by the accidents of history, when a sixteenth century bishop decided to divide the text into chapters and verses for easy and ready access, and then in English the King James Version was actually published so that every verse became a paragraph on its own.

But I remember the difficulty I had, even as a lad, with picking out Joshua 1:9, which never started at the beginning, “Have I not commanded thee?” but with what came next:  “Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” I remember when I later encountered that text in its context in Joshua how strange it seemed that these words to Israel’s military commander on the eve of the conquest of the Promised Land should be applied personally and individually to my own life as a boy at school. True, I needed all the courage I could muster as a preacher’s kid in a secular school; but how, I wondered, did these words in a very case specific point in history miraculously become a word for me as I trundled off to school. 

Now don’t get me wrong; it is not that I don’t believe that God can take these words out of their original context and by the Holy Spirit cause us in our circumstances to hear them as words for us.  I do indeed believe that that happens constantly for those who look to God’s Word to hear directly from him. But this practice, as much good as it may have engendered, also fostered a view of Bible “reading,” which was not true reading. That is, because we were reading the Bible for personal devotion, we read it in a very fragmented way—a paragraph or chapter at a time, often without connectedness, and therefore without trying to understand what is going on, because we were basically looking for our “verse for the day.”

b.  And this leads to my second basic reason as to why evangelicals read their Bibles poorly, which comes directly out of this first one. Because we tended to be looking for a “word for the day,” we unwittingly did two things to the sacred text that stand rather directly in opposition to the way God chose to give us his word. 

On the one hand, we fragmented it and atomized it, with hardly any sense at all of its wholistic grandeur as God’s story in which by grace he is including us. At the same time, on the other hand, we thus also tended to flatten everything. Because all Scripture is inspired of God, and because Scripture came to us not the way it came to God’s people originally, as organic wholes, but rather in small doses called “verses,” we tended to read it all the same way:  narrative, prophecy, epistle, gospel, the Law, poetry all functioned in basically the same way. And only a good dose of common sense ever saved us from making the whole Bible look foolish. 

To put it bluntly, how odd of God to give us the Bible the way he did, when he could much more conveniently—for our way of reading it—have given it to us in the form of some 7000 propositions to be believed and 700 imperatives to be obeyed, with a few anecdotes brought in at the end so as to illustrate some of the propositions and imperatives. Why did he not do it this way, if our way of reading it was the way the texts themselves were intended to be read?

Why not simply shorten the process and be done forever with all those genealogies, sometimes puzzling stories, prophetic oracles that are so hard to read under any circumstances?  Why not give us the Bible the way we would prefer it, so that we can get on with reading it our way, and do so much more conveniently? Fortunately, our view of Scripture as sacred and divinely inspired kept people for the most part from actually repackaging it to suit their own habits and preferences.

II.  The (Negative) Results

That leads me, then, to say a few brief words about the negative results of this kind of “reading” of the Bible, since I have already, and will do so again, affirmed the positive side of things.

But the negative results are serious, so serious in fact that I have spent almost all my adult life trying to help Christians read and study their Bibles in a way that is much more in keeping with the way God gave these inspired texts in the first place.

a.  The first, and most obvious, result of reading the Bible poorly is our tendency to have a terribly fragmented understanding of what it is all about. We know some texts very well, and even where some of our favorite passages can be found:  Psalm 23, 1 Corinthians 13, for example. Moreover, if we have been in church much of our lives, we also have a generally good sense that there are two parts, the first dealing with God’s ancient people, Israel, and the second dealing with Christ and the church. And we also have a good sense that these two parts are connected in some very important way(s).

But if we were asked to tell how the basic story works out, or how any given book—Hosea or Philippians, say—fits into the whole, we might feel just a bit more intimidated. “Hosea? Let’s see, that’s a part of the Old Testament isn’t it? Yeah, he’s one of the prophets. But I tried reading it once, and I simply couldn’t follow the story line! When I finished I didn’t have a clue where I had been or how I got there. So why read it that way, since it simply turns out to be a waste of time?” And “Philippians? Oh that’s all about “joy,” and Paul’s saying “for me to live is Christ and to die is gain.”  But “fit into the whole? What possibly do you mean by that?”

The result is that most Christians have some fairly good idea of the New Testament, but except for the Psalms, a few scattered proverbs, and some of the more memorable stories, the Old Testament remains a singular mystery.

b. And this leads to the second unfortunate result:  that we miss a great deal of the New Testament itself because we are so poorly informed about the Old. And the point to make here is that the first readers of these New Testament documents, those whose heirs we have become, had a much greater awareness of what was going on not simply because it was written to them, in their language and culture, but because they were biblical literate in ways that most contemporary Christians are not. The result is that not only do we often not hear God’s word in the way they did, but we miss very many significant aspects of the New Testament as a result.

Most Christians have some sense that the New is related to the Old. How could one not see that, given how often the Old is cited in the New, and often in the language of “fulfillment.” But the New Testament writers do far more than that. Just note the following realities:

1. Most of the New Testament was written not to Jews who had followed Jesus, but to Gentile converts, in a culture that was basically illiterate, in the sense that only about 17 or 18 per cent of the people could read or write.

2.  The only Bible these early Christians had was the Old Testament, which of course was never called that, because they didn’t have a New Testament. So the Old Testament was simply referred to as “the Scriptures.”

3.  And I remind you that the culture did not have the same form of media and literary blitzing that became so common in the Western world.

4.  The net result of these realities is that these people knew their Bibles infinitely better than most of us do. Because most of them didn’t read, they were read to; and also because they couldn’t read but were read to, they had far better, sharper retention than we tend to have. And that also means that they heard not only the Old Testament texts when they were cited, but also when they were referred to more indirectly, and sometimes when the language was only echoed.

And it is precisely at this point where all the reasons for and the results of our poor reading of the Bible merge to make us far less knowledgeable about the Bible than these earliest Gentile Christians were.

At this point, let me borrow an illustration from my former student and present colleague and friend, Rikk Watts. When he was a student at Gordon-Conwell seminary, he was listening to a lecture in which the phrase “fourscore and seven years ago” was used.  Since Rikk was from Australia he hadn’t a clue as to either the what or the why of that “ancient English” in a modern lecture in America. So he asked some classmates afterward, “What happened 87 years ago?”  And they all drew blanks, because they had not heard anything about 87 years ago. So when Rikk picked up the lecturer’s own language, the light dawned.  “Oh, they said, those are the opening words in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; and the lecturer was not talking about something that happened 87 years ago, but was alluding to Lincoln’s address and its significance for the point he wanted to make.”

My point is that there is hardly an American of my generation who would not recognize those words and their source, and instinctively be able to fill in all kinds of blanks both as to the historical setting and many of the stirring words of the rest of the speech as well. And that, friends, is precisely how the early Christians heard the Old Testament as it was alluded to and echoed in hundreds of ways throughout the New Testament writings. So if we are going to be better readers of the New Testament, we simply must become better readers of the Old—and all of this because we believe that the Biblical story is the single most important reality in our modern world.  Before concluding by offering some illustrations of this issue, let me first offer some brief suggestions that are sure to lead to a more informed reading of the Bible.

III.  Some Steps Toward a Remedy

So how do we help people become better readers of Scripture?  Let me suggest three things:

1.  People need to learn to read in meaningful sections; and in order to do this they must get rid of the numbers. As useful as those number are for finding things, they are absolute distractions when it comes to informed reading. Not only are they all too often put in the wrong place, but they give people the idea that God had something to do with giving us a Bible in “verses”! And as long as people have numbers, they will read “a chapter a day looking for a verse for the day,” which in turn will keep them basically illiterate about Scripture as a whole. Fortunately, there will soon be such a Bible on the market, published by the International Bible Society, which attempts to format the Bible so as to be in keeping with almost everything else people read. But whatever else, in order to read well, one must get rid of the numbers.

2.  People need to learn to read Scripture aloud. Silent reading, which works well in libraries, thank you, does not work well if people are trying to read with understanding and memory. Silent reading is a modern invention, whose advantage is reading more quickly—and please continue to read the newspaper and Time silently! Everyone in antiquity read—and prayed—aloud; this was simply the norm. The advantages of reading aloud are two: First, it slows one down enough so as to catch all the words, and often the nuances; second, three of your senses are involved not just one, which makes for better memory.

3.  Most people will need to read with some kind of guide, such as our How to Read the Bible Book by Book.  Whatever else, the guide should be a guide, not a commentary or study Bible that explains too much and gives the reader someone else’s opinion as to the meaning of what is being read. The guide should guide the reading, not comment on the meaning.

If one were to do these three things, there is some hope that bad habits of generations of Christians might finally be broken and good habits and good understanding of the whole of Scripture take their place.

IV.  Some Illustrations

Let me conclude this lecture with some illustrations of the concern expressed at the end of Section II.  The first is taken from the well-known account in the Gospel of John, where Jesus, speaking to the Pharisees (a point often unfortunately missed because of a disastrous chapter break at this point), refers to himself as the good shepherd. Evidence that he is the true shepherd is found in three ways:  that his sheep know him and listen to his voice; that he lays down his life for his sheep; and that he has sheep other sheep to bring into the fold. 

But this is not simply an illustration drawn from a pastoral analogy of a shepherd with his sheep. With these words Jesus is offering himself to Israel as the fulfillment of the promised great Davidic shepherd that is promised in the book of Ezekiel. So first let take a brief look at Ezekiel, since this prophetic book is so poorly known by Christians.

Ezekiel belonged to a priestly family who were among the first large wave of exiles taken to Babylon by Nebachudnezzar in 598, some ten years before the final siege in 588 that led to the total destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC. Among that first wave were most of Jerusalem’s prominent people, including King Jehoiachin and Ezekiel’s family.  Five years later and 7 years before the actual fall of Jerusalem, when Ezekiel turned 30, the year that he would have entered the priesthood in Jerusalem, Yahweh appears to him among the exiles in Babylon and commands him to prophesy words of warning and hope to the exiles regarding the future of Jerusalem and the greater final future of God’s people. And this prophetic activity continued for a 22 year period both before and after the fall of Jerusalem.

His book stands in sharp contrast to Isaiah and Jeremiah, in two significant ways:  (1) his oracles are all dated and all but one of them are in chronological order; (2) his oracles are full of images of a most unusual kind, that serve as the forerunner for later Jewish apocalyptic visions. 

The collection is thus presented in three clear parts. Part 1 (chs. 1-24) is a collection of the oracles that announce the coming destruction of Jerusalem, a word that the exiles would not believe because they had come to believe that Jerusalem was inviolable. Part 2 (chs. 25-32) presupposes the fall of Jerusalem, and announces God’s judgments on the surrounding nations as well, as a word of comfort to Israel that their God is the sovereign God over the nations—despite the Fall of Jerusalem and the present exile. Part 3 is where our text fits in. After an oracle in ch. 33 about Ezekiel’s own role in things, he receives a series of oracles which in turn promise the restoration of all that had come to an end with the fall of Jerusalem: the Davidic kingship, the land, Yahweh’s honor by way of a new covenant, his people, his sovereignty over the nations, and his renewed presence among the people through a restored temple.

This final series thus begins with out text (ch. 34), which promises the restoration of the Davidic kingship under the figure of the king as shepherd (for good reason, given who David himself was).  So Yahweh promises that he will again shepherd his people through another David, who will stand in stark contrast to the former kings who caused the sheep to be scattered. “I will save my flock,” say Yahweh, “and they will no longer be plundered.  . . . I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd.” It is not possible that when Jesus spoke the words regarding the “good shepherd” (recorded in John) to the Pharisees in Jerusalem that they could have missed what he was saying. In direct contrast to the “false shepherds” (9:41), whom Jesus accuses of being blind, who by claiming to see when they do not are thus guilty of sin, Jesus announces that the true shepherd is not like them, a thief or robber, but is the one whose voice the true sheep know. And so he goes on to claim to be the messianic shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep and gathers other sheep (thus fulfilling the promise to include the gentiles).  So clear is this to the Pharisees and others that it leads to head-on encounter some time later at the Feast of Dedication.

And so it goes everywhere in the New Testament. So an informed reading of the Bible will cause people to begin to look for the many ways the whole is held together. 

Look, for example at the well-known stories that begin the birth narrative in the Gospel of Luke. The story begins with a pious, barren women, Elizabeth, whose story is told with echoes of the barren Hannah at the beginning of the story of David, who gives birth to Samuel who will eventually anoint David; just as the barren Elizabeth’s son John will anoint by baptism Mary’s greater David, Jesus.  Note especially how the story of John’s birth ends with these words, “And the child grew and became strong in spirit,” and how these words echo what is said of the young Samuel (1 Sam 2:26), that “the boy Samuel continued to grow in stature and in favor with the Lord and with people,” which is then echoed again of the boy Jesus in Luke 2:52.

Then as the story proceeds to Mary, she is told by the angel, that her child “will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”  Here you can scarcely miss the echoes of the Davidic covenant from 2 Samuel 7:14 and 16, about David’s son, that “I will be his father, and he will be my son. . . . and your house and kingdom shall endure for ever before me; your throne will be established forever.”  And then both Mary and Zechariah break forth in songs that are simply full of messianic hopes that come directly out of the Psalter. It is hard to miss any of this; yet ever so many people do, and in so doing fail to catch the import of the story that Luke himself intends it to carry.

And so I could go on and on.  But interestingly, the most frequently asked question I receive is this:  Do you really think that these Gentiles would have caught all these echoes? And my answer always is, “yes, of course, because they knew their Bibles infinitely better than you and I do.” And this is one of the primary reasons for the two “How to” books.*  So that people will learn to read their Bibles and understand them better than they do, and in so doing will begin to grasp how the biblical story holds together from beginning to end, so that in knowing their Bibles better they will also know better where they—and all of us—fit into God’s story.

*  How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth, 3rd ed., Fee & Stuart, Zondervan, 2003 & How to Read the Bible Book by Book, Fee & Stuart, Zondervan, 2002