Why I don't study the Bible (much anymore)

Short answer: Stalking is not friendly.

Long answer:
Without going into details other than that I an a sinner saved by the grace of God, I was a stalker for a while. Not in a call-the-cops kind of way, but definitely in a that's-kind-of-creepy kind of way. And when I think about why I, as a bona fide nerd, have turned away from study of the Bible, the best answer I can come up with is that stalking is not actually the same as friend-ing.

I love to stalk ideas. Right now I'm on the hunt to find out what the latest and greatest is on multilingual brains. Exciting stuff. But when it comes to God, at some point I realized that rather than stalking God, I should accept the invitation to be his friend.

In my stalking God phase, I could geek out on Greek verb forms and textual criticism and commentaries and translations and I could tell you a lot about some passage or idea in the Bible, but there was a disconnect between that and submitting my life to Jesus as King. Kind of like knowing when someone would wake up and waiting for the light to go on in their window versus actually, I dunno, meeting up for breakfast.

Eugene Peterson writes books with provocative titles including Eat This Book about which I remember just about nothing except the encouragement to be nourished by the word of God. This for me is the much healthier way to engage the Bible. The Bible is not a mysterious text that I need to intellectually know and master. Instead, it is one way that the infinite God has chosen to reveal his work and nature to me.

First, there are other ways to interact with God; prayer, service, the sacraments like baptism, marriage, and communion, signs and wonders, the list does rather go on. As a cerebral person, I had to learn that God is in my life not my head. Second, God is beyond our comprehension so "mastery" of the Bible will not lead to mastery of God or mastery of our understanding of God. Instead, as the Holy Spirit guides our reading we can be drawn to know our loving Creator in an intimate, meaning close to our hearts, fashion.

This is not to say that no one should study the Bible ever. I have benefited greatly from reading the work of Bible scholars past and present. I assume they have been given a different grace than I and are not creepy God stalkers.

And I think that all believers would benefit from having a few tools to help them understand the Bible which was written long ago for a culture rather different from ours, and that's before you even step foot in the translation wars. A few tools is a world apart from having a dedicated detached workshop.

The great commandments are to love God with everything and to love others as ourselves. This may require the occasional in-depth study, but I think more often it is staying near God, saying yes to Jesus in big and small ways, day after day.

The gear and the goods

So recently our church changed the translation of its pew Bibles which reminded us that we needed to figure out what Bible to get our children which reminded me of what the point is.

When I was learning about photography, I stumbled across this phenomenon where some people love photographic gear more than they love making beautiful pictures. They get huge thrills out of the engineering of the thing that makes pictures, that's their interest. And that's great and it takes up a lot of pages on the internet, but it's not photography. It's gear.

I did my senior thesis in college on Bible translation, and I'll say that for 99% of people any Bible translation done by a committee is fine. The issue, particularly for the big English Bible translations, isn't which translation? The issue is do you read the Bible? For 99% of people who are thinking about picking one translation over another the only question that needs to be answered is, "Will I read this?" The 1% are people who study the Bible. And honestly, for people who study the Bible, they need many translations including the Greek and the Hebrew.

So if you love the King James Version because Grandma always read to you in the KJV, if that's what'll keep you reading the Bible, read the KJV. If you are a nerd who likes awkward phrasing that reminds you that you're reading a translation from Greek and Hebrew, knock yourself out on the New American Standard (NASB) or English Standard Version (ESV). I'm a nerd, I like those versions too. If you gravitate to a version that's more like what you encounter in everyday language there's the New International Version (NIV) and the New Living Translation (NLT). Biblegateway.com and The Bible app are great places to review the same passage in many translations. Pick the one that you're ready to read a lot of.

Currently, I'm doing my daily Bible reading from a devotional called Seeking God's Face (my review of the book). I didn't even know what version I was reading until I looked it up today. Wouldn't have been my first choice (TNIV), but it's still be a great resource for daily Bible reading.

A second consideration is what are your friends reading. If you're in a situation where you're reading the Bible with other people, depending on the circumstances you might want to have the same version they do. Alternatively, you might be in a group where it is beneficial to have a few different translations on hand.

From there, onto children. For our kids, I'm looking for a sturdy Bible with large print that is easy on young eyes. That would be my primary criteria except that these are my kids. So it would be also nice for my kids to use the version that we're most familiar with and the version that I did most of my scripture memory in.

This is where things become tricky. I have done almost all Bible memorization from an out-of-print version of the NIV. It went out of print two years ago, before my kids started reading, before I knew to care about this. So now I'm stuck between learning verses with my kids in a new version or hunting up old versions of the NIV on ebay. What a pain.

If you're not in my boat, I would probably recommend the latest NIV version because it's a nice compromise between oddly contemporary and oddly archaic. (And it's in print.) If you want to see some kids' Bible verses in different versions, here's a pdf of Awanas verses for 3-4 year olds.