I’ve argued before that British Christians don’t know their Bibles, and I’d like to push that thought a little further.
I think there are a set of nested problems that inform and intensify each other, I’ll briefly touch on each in turn, mention what I understand some of the causes of this to be and outline a possible path to health.
We don’t know our Bibles
Most Christians I speak with don’t know much of what’s in the Bible, because they haven’t read it. Many of them have tried to read it, but on their own and without frameworks, so they stick to the parts they can get their heads around.
If you talk about even which order the Old Testament ‘stories’ come in, most are at sea. There’s certainly no sense of a progression or connection to a wider narrative. Among those who know the Bible better you might be able to see how each character looks and doesn’t look like Jesus but not why because the unfolding story is elided.
People often know the right answers to ethical or doctrinal questions. Rarely do they know why God might forbid a particular thing, for example. It’s not a surprise that people start to question if God did really say that if they don’t know why.
We don’t know how to read our Bibles
Beyond that, when I sit with groups of university students and open the Bible it swiftly becomes clear that they don’t know how to read it either. Sometimes I wonder why they’re paying so much for university if they aren’t being taught to read but putting that aside I think this is more a failure of education than of the students themselves. They haven’t been taught in schooling or in the church to read a text well, or to read the Bible.
It doesn’t take that long to pick up the basics when actually reading with someone, in an environment when you’re taught to play in the text. This is what happens, I hope, around my dining table.
We don’t expect the Bible to speak to our lives
We might balk at this for we pay lip service to it at least. Even when we know the right answers the way people think in churches that I’ve known tends to expose a certain pragmaticism that doesn’t expect God’s word to speak to the situation.
I see this in leaders as well, I’m often told that the Bible ‘allows us to decide’ on issues that it doesn’t directly speak to. However, there’s usually no argument for this, or theological reflection on how the texts we do have might relate to this or that contemporary question.
It’s no wonder that people aren’t equipped to do this in their own lives if it doesn’t happen in the life of the church.
We aren’t that bothered by this
Here’s the kicker, because all of that could be true and I don’t necessarily think it’s the end of the world if we recognised it, it bothered us and we did something about it.
Of course, it wouldn’t be the case if we did. I fear, dear friends, that this apathy in the church is sin of which we reap the rewards.
Preachers don’t know how to read their Bibles
An academic recently said to me that the newer generation of leaders in his church world knew the ‘right answers’ but didn’t know why they were the right answers. They had been taught to know rather than to think, and so wisdom, or the possibility of passing these ideas on to a next generation eluded them. The only possibility is entrenchment leading to fundamentalism, or drift in the other direction.
You can see this if you sit and listen to a selection of sermons from church websites, honestly. It’s likely to be very thin on engagement with some of the deeper ideas in the text, and it may well make every passage sound like it amounts to the same. A friend recently told me that his church manages to make every sermon into ‘Jesus loves you,’ which is true, but without doing the work to show how this passage leads there or showing the riches of what else the text wants to teach you.
It’s no wonder no one wants to read the Bible, if every passage basically says Jesus loves you and nothing more then we’ll be fine with Romans and one of the Gospels.
We aren’t bothered by this, either
It’s not a surprise that we aren’t bothered by this: who in the pew is equipped to notice? Who holds the Pastor to account? It’s the Elders’ jobs to train their congregation well enough so they rebel against false teaching even in their beloved Pastor’s mouth.
How did we get here?
Charting a genealogy (a how did we get here narrative) is never easy, everything is influenced by a wider range of factors than anyone wants to suggest, but here are some of the key factors influencing these problems:
- The church exists to get people saved rather than worshipping the living God and growing as disciples of Jesus. The pyramid scheme mentality, that we see particularly in the infamous gospel camps for kids from the right kind of school, has heavily influenced conservative evangelicalism. We see its influence in charismatic evangelicalism as much through the American seeker-sensitive and missional movements (which are the same thing really, one coded for Boomers and the other for Millennials).
- Once you start to think like this, then helping people engage the richness and weirdness of the Bible isn’t the point.
- Pastors are not well trained themselves. I have no expectation that an elder has a particular kind of qualification. I don’t think University style degrees are the best way to train elders. I do think that all elders (paid and unpaid) should receive some level of training, that in-context training that includes some sort of academics should happen before someone is taken into full-time ministry, and that continuing training for pastors should be a basic expectation like CPD is in lots of the professions. In my charismatic evangelical world, little of this happens.
- British people don’t take anything seriously. Which is basically the whole problem here. Those who know both church scenes would say that while these problems exist in the US they are notably different in kind, which makes sense.
- Disintegrating community life. The Bible is meant to be read in community, as churches are divorced from communities and each other our ability to read and reason together falters.
- Declining literary culture. Yep, it’s the smartphone’s fault. I have to play to type.
- The privatisation of religion. As soon as a Rawlsian neutral public square tells us that religion is private, why would we expect the Bible to speak to what house we buy, what job we take, where we live, whether we get married or to whom, how we might educate our children, how we understand history, or what we eat and drink. There are a thousand issues besides, but slowly we start to believe that the Bible doesn’t even speak to the church or the Christian life. Religion is not private, the Church is a polis, a city, here to catechise the world.
What can we do about it?
On the largest scale, you and I can’t. No one person could. But we can pray to the Lord of Hosts that he would reshape the Christian mind of our nation.
On the smaller scale, we can do loads. I might want to do more, but ten students around the dining table to read the Bible is doing something significant. Maybe you could do that too.
Maybe you could run something for your church designed to create an appetite for more. If there’s any appetite, even if it’s small, keep going.
You could give to organisations doing this sort of thing, like the Leeds School of Theology, or King’s College, or you could give to me to further this sort of thing here in Birmingham and on the internet.
You can form networks of like-minded folk, if you’re in the UK and broadly in agreement and we haven’t connected: reach out. I’m often surprised by how much God blesses conversation as the medium for action. Ideas spring up unexpectedly when the right people get in the room.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
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