Understandest Thou what Thou Readest?

While home for the holidays, my mother enthusiastically showed me a self-published “Bible Study book” now in use at her local congregation. “I met the author,” Mom said. “He told me that, as hard as the book was to write, the work of promoting it has been even harder.”

I took a peek — and could barely conceal my horror.

The author’s “writing” apparently consisted of taking selected Bible chapters and blanking out every other word. Readers are encouraged to “fill in the blanks using their own Bibles” (provided, of course, that their Bibles are the same translation favored by the author — otherwise, readers are in for some real frustration).

The benefit of this method? “An intimate knowledge of what the Bible says.”

When did Bible study devolve into copying the scriptures word for word? What happens when “knowing what the Bible says” becomes more important than “knowing what the Bible means?”

I’m reminded of the preacher whose stern brand of fundamentalism dominated my childhood. His memory stunned us all — the man could quote the King James version of Scripture ver batim for hours.

Were his sermons engaging? Was his interpretation of them well-informed, rooted in scholarship about the culture and history behind the text? We never asked these things. Instead, we sat in our pews and marveled: “That man can really quote the Scripture, can’t he?”

We were so taken with his ability, in fact, that we began measuring other preachers by whether or not they had memorized the Scriptures they cited. (During more than one visiting preacher’s sermon, mother would punch me and whisper, “He has to read every verse!”)

Later in his tenure, though, our preacher became an increasinly bizarre and unhappy man. Sexual references in his sermons became more and more frequent. One Sunday, he shocked us all by saying a certain woman “couldn’t wait to get her hands in [a certain man’s] pants.” He started using the pulpit to chastize, in public, folks who dared to differ with his conclusions — religious or otherwise. In one case, he disliked the fact I was dating a certain young woman … so he paused his sermon to express his personal opinion about the situation.

Confronted by the elders, he never conceded that he’d done anything wrong. He was the master of the “Republican Apology,” saying only, “If what I said offended you, I’m sorry.”

In short: knowing a great deal about what the Bible said didn’t seem, in the end, to help the man deal with his own mid-life crises, treat others with fairness or compassion or respect, or admit and embrace his mistakes.

How sad.

Looking back, I have my years in the C of C to thank for a very concrete knowledge of what the Bible says. I can still quote scripture, and references in literature and cinema that fly by others still prompt a warm feeling of recognition.

I only wish that my childhood church had supplied, along with that line-for-line emphasis on what the Bible said, a glimpse of where those scriptures had come from, a grounding in the world and culture that produced them, and a grasp of the linguistic and historical and political forces that shaped them …

… in short, I wish I had grown up in a church that focused as much on what the Bible means as what the Bible says.