Lectureship that Challenges What is, in the Name of What Can Be

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 23 May 2013 1 Comments
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Question

Is there a good Bible study book you would recommend for a group of lay people to use that is not agenda riddled? I am looking for one that looks at the Bible within its cultural and historical background in which each individual book was written and leaves room for an open-ended discussion of the universal ideas that are inspired in those texts.

Answer

Dear Mary,

From your question I get a picture of the kind of Bible study you might have endured in your lifetime. A “Bible Study book” is almost always the product of an evangelical- fundamentalist mentality. The reason I say that is that the phrase a “Bible Study Book” assumes that one can embrace in a single study guide a minimum of 66 books, not including the Apocrypha, that were written over a period of about one thousand years (ca, 1000 BCE – ca.35 CE), by a variety of authors, and in at least two different languages. A study group wishing to use such a book will tend to do so only for the few weeks that the group will meet. A class organized this way simply does not plan to engage the Bible seriously. One should not expect anything good or significant to come out of such a study. Most Bible studies in churches using that kind of material, amount to little more than the corporate pooling of common ignorance, which is then under-girded by a study guide that would embarrass almost every biblical scholar in the world. Given that format, my conclusion is that there is no such thing as a single volume Bible study book.

There are, however, thousands of volumes on the individual books of the Bible written with competent scholarship by competent scholars that will take you through and into the meaning of each of the books of the Bible. The problem with most of these books, however, is that they were not written for the average reader and thus are considered too difficult, too complex and even too involved for most people. Groups using such books get discouraged quickly.

Readers of this column might recall that in recent years, through most of 2008-2010. I did a series under the title: “Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.” That week-by-week series began with columns outlining just how the first books of the Old Testament were actually formed and it ended with a brief analysis of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. I put each book of the Bible into its cultural and historical perspective and analyzed briefly its message. All of these past columns are available online at www.johnshelbyspong.com to subscribers in the archives thanks to my publisher, ProgressiveChristianity.org. Subscribers may access them at any time online. That material was then gathered, edited and published as a book in the fall of 2011 by Harper/Collins under the same title: Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World. That book, reflecting its own origins, was written, as I hope this column and all of my books are, not for the minds of theologically-trained seminary graduates, but for searching, educated lay men and women who do not have theological training. Indeed, I know of instances in small town America where a particular church subscribes to this column and then reproduces it for use each week in teaching adult Bible classes. I get reports back from them from time to time on great debates that have issued from those gatherings. So I recommend that resource to you for consideration.

If your group wants to go into depth about a single book in the Bible then a volume written by a competent scholar on that particular book can be studied with intensity. My coming book (June 11, 2013 from Harper/Collins) on John’s Gospel, entitled The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic is written with exactly that purpose in mind.

I hope this helps. My great ambition in life is to leave the Christian world a little more biblically literate than I found it.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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