I open my Bible to 1 Peter 2:8: “A stone that causes individuals to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.” By “open,” I imply I get out my cellphone, faucet on the Bible icon, and kind the verse in a search bar.
With one other faucet I can underline the sentence if I need. Spotlight it. Snip and reserve it into one other file to mirror on, sans context, at some later date. In my Bible app, there’s additionally somewhat grey field that appears like a speech bubble from a comic book strip, and if I faucet on that, it opens as much as present me a reference: Isaiah 8:14. It’s not hyperlinked to that verse, so as an alternative of leaping to the prophet, I’m inspired by the tech in my hand to shut the field and preserve studying 1 Peter: “They stumble as a result of they disobey the message.”
As we enter into a 3rd decade of what literary critic Sven Birkerts has referred to as “reading in an electronic age” and biblical literacy reaches new lows, what affect does this device have on Bible studying? How does it form our interpretations?
There’s a lengthy debate in regards to the appropriate understanding of sola scriptura. However no inheritor of the Reformation has ever taken it to imply we must always learn Scripture with none exterior assist. Protestants, in actual fact, have traditionally embraced improvements which may enhance engagement and comprehension, from common-language translations to check Bibles, commentaries, illustrated editions, and abridgments, to not point out smartphone apps.
You don’t need to harbor deep suspicions of progress, although, to surprise if the instruments we use to learn the Bible may, not directly, reshape how we learn. And if that’s the case, do they reshape it for the higher, or the more serious?
My very own analysis on the historical past of dispensationalism means that our Bible-reading instruments have, at occasions, modified our studying to such an extent they’ve even modified what it means to learn the Bible actually.
There have been quite a lot of Christian views on what a literalist strategy to Scripture ought to appear like. Literal can discuss with an emphasis on the inerrancy of the Bible; beliefs in regards to the historicity of sure passages; a selected understanding of the success of prophecy (which might not be actually literal, however symbolic); or the view {that a} passage must be learn within the plainest method potential and that’s why it’s necessary to grasp genres and authentic reception. For dispensationalists, literal studying relied on “phrase chains”—connecting verses via the “hyperlinks” of phrase utilization and treating key phrases like stone the identical wherever they have been discovered within the Bible. That strategy to the textual content wouldn’t have turn out to be well-liked with out the event of concordances.
Picture: Illustration by Michał Bednarski
Let me again up: Bible concordances date to the thirteenth century, when 300 Dominican monks beneath the management of Hugh of Saint-Cher produced a selective alphabetized index of the phrases they thought of most necessary within the Latin-language Vulgate Bible. Whereas it was a robust studying device for biblical students, the St. Jacques Concordance was rudimentary by in the present day’s requirements. Later Medieval concordances listed each incidence of many, many extra phrases.
With the Reformation got here demand for related works in vernacular languages. The primary English-language New Testomony concordance appeared within the 1530s, although it wasn’t very helpful earlier than the publication of the King James Bible within the 1600s made Scripture broadly obtainable.
The KJV acquired a wonderful concordance in 1737 when Alexander Cruden, a bookseller and reclusive scholar, completed cataloging greater than 77,000 phrases. It took him 26 years and several other journeys to a psychological establishment, however he lastly completed and revealed his exhaustive masterpiece: Cruden’s Concordance. It stays in print in the present day.
Cruden’s device for Bible studying was usually paired with different new aids, corresponding to Bagster’s Polyglot Bible, which provided readers 60,000 cross-references in a number of languages printed aspect by aspect, and new commentaries corresponding to Thomas Scott’s Commentary on the Complete Bible. All instructed, by the nineteenth century KJV readers had a lifetime’s value of instruments to assist them perceive the Bible in new methods.
These highly effective new instruments meant that common readers might, for the primary time, cross-reference any phrase within the Bible. The stone in 1 Peter could possibly be linked with the one Moses struck in Exodus 17:6, the one Daniel described as being minimize “not by human palms” in Daniel 2:34, and the one Jesus talks about falling on individuals and crushing them in Matthew 21:44. The cross-references created a brand new interpretive context, one which could possibly be extremely private or communal, relying on how the instruments have been used.
In the USA, this strategy to Scripture got here to be referred to as the Bible Studying Technique. It democratized what was normally the purview of students or well-trained pastors. Readers might now choose an English key phrase to check after which look at all of the makes use of of that phrase, extrapolating the which means of a textual content from the compiled examples.
Folks usually did this in teams, encouraging intensive Bible examine that fed into theological reflections. A gaggle may have a look at the phrase wait in Psalm 27:14, for instance; join it to Jacob’s plea in Genesis 49:18; cross-reference that with Paul’s eschatological hope in Romans 8:19, the place “creation waits”; after which speak about how God’s deliverance is a deep theme working via the Bible from starting to finish. Who God was delivering and what that deliverance seemed like could possibly be formed by the biblical context and narrative, nevertheless it was simply as usually conditioned by readers’ private circumstances and their explicit cultural assumptions.
The Scofield Reference Bible was a mainstay for hundreds of thousands of Christians steeped within the Bible Studying Technique. It was very fashionable and broadly distributed amongst some Christians. Cyrus I. Scofield, a minister intently related to Dwight L. Moody, included in his reference Bible intensive footnotes explaining his theology, which relied on an intricate cross-reference and concordance system working down the center of each web page of the Bible. Oxford College Press revealed Scofield’s Bible for the primary time in 1909, and it stays in print in the present day. Along with the on-page helps, Scofield included a 150-plus-page concordance index and directions to coach readers to construct phrase chains. He defined that phrase chains would “lead the reader from the primary clear point out of an important fact to the final.” And in case the reader didn’t get it, a Scofield abstract would solidify the which means at that final reference.
In its extra subtle implementation, studying the Bible with the assistance of concordances allowed individuals to expertise the unity of Scripture. As one other dispensationalist author within the early twentieth century, Isaac Massey Haldeman, defined, “an clever and passable examine of the Bible” required a concordance to comprehend {that a} “unity of design” animated the 66 books. Concordances allowed lay readers to expertise Scripture’s unity, at the same time as they downplayed or put aside historic context, human authorship, the unique languages, linguistic particulars, and infrequently the precise narrative.
Some conservative Christians, corresponding to Moody’s colleague R. A. Torrey, referred to as the Bible Studying Technique the “scientific” strategy to Scripture. Haldeman described concordances and cross-references as “implements” and “instruments” which, if used correctly, produced repeatable outcomes.
It’s uncommon, in the present day, to consider self-described fundamentalists touting science, however Individuals on the flip of the twentieth century have been embracing science as the final word arbiter of fact throughout all sectors of life. As biblical larger criticism appeared to undermine the authority of Scripture in academia, this concordance-based interpretive body was deployed to shore it up, scientifically.
We’d anticipate fundamentalists who needed to learn the Bible actually to care extra about how the primary Christians obtained Scripture. However the device they have been utilizing for his or her Bible studying pushed them on this different, “scientific” route as an alternative.
It additionally ready the bottom for a brand new theological motion, which got here to be referred to as “dispensationalism.” This developed out of the teachings espoused by the Unique Brethren—particularly the Anglo-Irish chief John Nelson Darby. He taught that humanity was divided into three elements: Israel, the church, and the nations. The nations didn’t have a covenant with God, however the church and Israel each did, so Scripture wanted to be “rightly divided” into the elements that spoke to Israel and the elements that spoke to Christians.
For Darby, what made “each scripture fall into place” was a Christian reader’s “religious understanding by the Holy Ghost of issues in heaven and our reference to them, and issues in earth and our separateness from them.”
That strategy to the Bible usually centered on prophecy, a style of Scripture Darby didn’t assume was aimed toward its authentic recipients, however future-oriented, predicting occasions that had not occurred but in human historical past, principally having to do with Israel. To grasp Scripture, then, you’d need to understand how a stone could possibly be a basis (Eph. 2:20), a stumbling block (Rom. 9:32–33), and one thing that might fall on individuals and crush them (Matt. 21:44), and the way all of these have been each really Jesus and a sequence of occasions that was going to occur (actually/symbolically) to Israel.
Darby promoted concordances, however he was a stickler for protecting separate “earthly” and “heavenly” meanings of explicit verses. This difficult the Bible Studying Technique that was in vogue among the many American Christians most desperate to undertake Darby’s teachings.
Individuals not steeped in the identical Brethren assumptions insisted that Darby’s distinctions could possibly be found from the Bible Studying Technique itself. As James Brooks, one among Darby’s most necessary American popularizers, assured readers, “the language through which prophecy is written is as easy and as simple to grasp as every other a part of Scripture.” Concordances, which catalogued phrases and never meanings, have been a part of what made that appear true.
The largely American story of dispensationalism’s growth after Darby exhibits how later readers tried to base his teachings in a plain studying of the textual content to carry them extra in step with the Bible Studying Technique. However the “plain” studying doesn’t seem so plain, in fact, with out the expertise that inspired individuals to learn that method.
After a number of generations of out of doors students chipping away at dispensationalism, and well-liked dispensationalism just like the Left Behind novels undercuttng its credibility, that strategy to the Bible has largely fallen out of favor. Dispensationalism is in decline, and the Bible Studying Technique shouldn’t be usually taught in seminaries or Christian schools.
But the studying instincts popularized by the Bible Studying Technique persist. The apply continues to have a robust impact on individuals. It nonetheless makes readers really feel as if Scripture is opening up, as in the event that they see into the obscurities of the Bible for the primary time and there’s no want for specialised language or historic coaching. With somewhat apply and a concordance, each reader can do it themselves, they usually may even declare that is the way in which to learn the Bible actually.
And concordances nonetheless exist, in fact. They’re beneficial instruments that we regularly take without any consideration. They are often amazingly useful to studying the Bible when used correctly. They’ve largely been changed by extra environment friendly instruments for normal Bible readers. I can do a phrase search on my app or, maybe, click on on a hyperlink that jumps me from one a part of the Bible to a different.
That mind-set in regards to the Bible—as a hyperlinked textual content—actually excites the favored Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. In one among his YouTube lectures on the Bible, he shared a graphic created by pc scientist Chris Harrison, displaying the greater than 65,000 cross-references in Scripture. Peterson marveled that in the event you adopted every one, “You’d simply journey via that perpetually. You’d by no means, ever get to the tip of it.” What insights that journey would produce, nonetheless, can be solely depending on the trail one selected to take. This countless selection is interesting to Peterson, nevertheless it must be much less compelling to Christians dedicated to the unity and coherence of Scripture.
In an age of limitless digital instruments to derive new meanings from Scripture, we must be cautious about how our studying expertise shapes and reshapes the context of the textual content. We don’t learn Scripture solo, to make sure, however the instruments we select can form and misshape our studying of the Bible. They’ll lead us to imagine we’re studying merely and actually when, with somewhat crucial distance, it definitely seems like a technique of breaking and remaking contexts to suit our programs.
I don’t assume that’s what occurs after I faucet open my Bible app. The expertise feels extra impartial than that. However historical past would recommend it’s one thing to fret about.
Daniel G. Hummel is the creator of the forthcoming guide The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the Finish Instances Formed a Nation (Eerdmans).
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