Confessing Evangelical

A friend of ours (our former (Baptist) pastor, in fact) wrote to UK evangelical publication Evangelicals Now a few years ago complaining about the multitude of Bible versions now available, and in particular the market segmentation practised by publishers. You know the sort of thing: "The Spirit-Filled Life Bible", "The Student's Life Application Bible", "The Word Extreme Teen Bible", "The Women's Devotional Bible" etc. Our pastor commented that what he would like to see - what people really needed - was "The Sinner's Bible", but he didn't think this would find many buyers in the current market...

Brian Lee wrote a piece a couple of years ago in Modern Reformation on this same topic of "Study Bible Madness". His article lists some of the more egregious examples (the funniest being the "Woman, Thou Art Loosed! Edition"), but also goes on to identify the underlying problem:

[U]ltimate responsibility does not reside with the marketplace. It meets a demand which is symptomatic of a greater ailment, namely, Christian guilt for not reading their Bibles. When they do pick them up, they don't understand them, they're bored, the text doesn't make sense, it's irrelevant. The introduction to the Life Application study Bible sums it up: "Many Christians do not read the Bible regularly. Why? Because in the pressures of daily living they cannot find a connection between the timeless principles of Scripture and the ever-present problems of day-by-day living."

The Bible is viewed as a book of moral instruction -- "timeless principles" -- which is meant to solve problems in our everyday life. It is, in short, a manual, not essentially differing from the booklet that tells me how to program my VCR. No surprise that both gather dust and the four zeros are still flashing.

Thinking about it, I think the problem goes deeper than this - or rather the problem identified by Brian Lee is a reflection of an even deeper underlying problem - namely the current status within evangelicalism of the "first and chief article", justification. But my thoughts on that will have to wait for the moment.