Awhile back, I wrote:

If you’re not reading the Bible for fun you need to consider if maybe you’re doing it wrong.

which Todd liked but Paul compared to footprints (Ah, the sacrifices I make to be a great aphorist).

The other day, at the library I impulsively picked up a commentary on Leviticus. Since I am in the (interminable) process of moving my office down to the basement, I have a relatively clean desk surface. The plan is to put my NASB on it and the commentary on top and, if I get a real ambitious, a Hebrew text and a Hebrew dictionary. They will sit there in my work space and remind me to study. I’m a pastor and occasionally I remember that tools need sharpening and maintenance. Since I and my Bible are pretty much my only tools, and the Bible maintains itself infallibly well, improving myself seems an obvious need.

How many laypeople can afford hours a week to brush up on their knowledge of Leviticus? Not many. Many aren’t even reading the Bible much at all.

I think there are a lot of reasons that reading is declining. Some are liturgical and curriculum-caused, as John Armstrong notes. But I wonder if simple Bible reading wouldn’t still be declining even without this help.

I wonder sometimes, and offer for your consideration, that the way we emphasize the importance of the Bible may itself cause Christians to spend very little time with it.

It is true of course that studying anything can be less than fun, and yet you still must do it. But, if something needs to be read, portraying the importance of the material in a way that makes it harder to read is self-destructive.

I have several Bibles, the NASB and the ESV being my most common. I study them sometimes. I preach from them. But they are not very conducive for reading. What I read, right now, is a paperback translation of Genesis by Robert Alter. I can dogear the pages. I can read it on the toilet, something that some sort of neurosis prevents when the publisher is the Lockman Foundation.

Pretty soon I’ll be going to bookfinder.com to get the single paperback version of Matthew Fox’s rendition of Exodus.

Of course, all these single-person translations have huge drawbacks. I would be scared to have anyone rely on these without being exposed regularly to the reading of and preaching from versions that are less idiosyncratic. But the benefits of having these sorts of things lying around the house to be read in a Christian home far outweigh the liabilities. It’s simple really: if you can’t binge on a book the way you might suddenly binge on a favorite detective series, then you won’t read much. We complain about Biblical literacy but how often have you seen people carry around books the size and thickness of a Bible to read on the airplane or at the beach? The very form in which Bibles are published helps us revere them as dust collectors rather than read them.

It is not hard at all to go into a bookstore and find that there is a market (albeit a small one) for small paperbacks of Icelandic sagas, Medieval plays, and ANE myths. Penguin Classics, Oxford World Classics, and the Everyman paperbacks, however small their market share, do attract modern readers. I’m sure Christian Bibles sell far better, but I doubt they are read as much.

I have a great book of Norse myths sitting on my shelf. If I offered to read it to my children I think they would be fascinated. I don’t do it because the storys are not age-appropriate and I can’t justify spending time on false gods. But the stories are “cool.”

Yet the storys in Judges and elsewhere in the Bible are every bit as good. Why can’t I read them as adventure stories to my children? Somehow, even at a young age, my children have already picked up on the idea that the Bible is not the book to turn to for exciting stories. I have to wonder if the regular practice of family devotions (a practice I think is nevertheless worth continuing) hasn’t spoiled the Bible for them as literature.

At a certain point in my life, I suddenly began buying mass-market paperbacks of Shakespeare’s plays and reading them. Why? Because Kenneth Brannaugh transformed the way I think about them. Suddenly they were more about drama and less about scholarly sanctimony. In high school and college I was assigned Shakespeare. It never occured to me to read him for fun. (I already owned a big black hardback of all Shakespeare’s plays. When I suddenly got serious about wanting to read Shakespeare, I didn’t even glace at it. I went to a bookstore and bought a mass-market paperback. Some books are readable and some aren’t. You’re usually better off with a book you can hold in one hand, even if it doesn’t look flashy. Which kind is your Bible?)

What does the average Christian do when he reads the Bible? He reads it regularly (or starts to do so) for devotions. So he reads some small chunk and tries to get something properly pious from the text. What does this mean? It means he must stick to the passages that are already familiar to him and properly domesticated in the given interpretation so that they can inspire the correct thoughts and feelings. Otherwise, it means a great deal of work trying to figure out why God is asking you to spend a few minutes each morning in the genealogies of First Chronicles, or the instruction for entrail placement in Leviticus. (The sacrifices point to Christ we say, piously dismissing ninety percent of the actual text describing those sacrifices to oblivion in the Evangelical mind. If the only point is substitutionary death, then the Holy Spirit must really love the sound of his own voice.) After a few mornings spent in frustration trying to pry devotional material out of the text, the pilgrim often gives up his quest.

Maybe the books of the Bible aren’t meant to be read fifteen minutes at a time. Maybe you’re supposed to read Isaiah in three days. Maybe fragmenting the text over weeks and weeks of snippets will hurt your understanding of God’s word.

My advice is this: Put different books of the Bible on your reading list. After you finish something by Raymond Chandler or P. J. O’Rourke, let your next book be one by God. Then go back. Of course, if this means lumbering around with a big Bible, or reading from microfiche text this will be cumbersome. So I advise finding paperbacks of single books when possible. When you’re done, read something else. But put another book of the Bible in the rotation.

Reading a small bit everyday is probably good if you keep at it. So do yourself a favor: don’t try to get anything out of it. Why make the experience unpleasant? Why make it more tempting to stop your reading? You don’t need to apply what you read. You don’t. You have heard preaching and teaching for years, probably. Your applications are more likely to be memories of what you already know than true discoveries. Don’t try so hard. Don’t feel you must theologize or moralize. Just read the book. God wants His people to know him which means becoming familiar with his Bible as a whole. Atomistically trying to “get something” from a passage is a good way to make sure that you never gain that familiarity.

God told Abraham to walk through and around the Promised Land. Abraham would not have gone very far if he had decided to only travel for fifteen minutes in the morning. Especially not if he had stopped to examine every rock and plant.