This phenomenon of reading without understanding is becoming more widely apparent. Without context and more understanding, their thin study of Scripture only compounded their ignorance and misunderstanding over time. Most of my students, even the ones who had some sort of church or institutional Bible training, were caught off-guard by basic questions that I was asking about the Bible in their hands. Others read a passage, or maybe a chapter.Įven when this practice superficially resembles their grandmother’s or great-grandfather’s daily habit, its effects can be entirely different. Some of them would read just one verse a day. Many were playing Bible roulette every morning, letting the Scriptures open to any page and asking God to show them what they should learn from the verses. They lacked extended communal readings of Scripture where it was safe to interrogate the text and puzzle over its meaning.įor them, Scripture reading was an individual’s responsibility with a necessary outcome: God showing the reader something from the passage that is immediately relevant to his or her life. When my freshmen described their daily quiet times, I began to understand some of the disconnect. Only when devotional time is situated within a matrix of Scripture study habits can it regain its power to transform our thinking and our communities. Time-tested traditions of long-form Scripture engagement expose us to and familiarize us with the contents of Scripture. Such microdosing of Scripture without a grasp of the whole can easily distort our interpretations. They might have read one small passage every day, but they did so to integrate it into their wider understanding of Scripture gleaned from more robust engagement outside of daily reading.īut my students who do not practice more robust forms of traditional Bible engagement-such as inductive Bible study, yearly Bible reading plans, the lectionary, or lectio divina-have few tools to help situate a daily meditation on a verse such as “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom. However, thanks to various forms of study over time, they often understood the context of the passage they were meditating on-what came before and after it. Like my students, these Christians from the Greatest Generation also practiced short devotional readings every day. When I pastored a church in the early 2000s, these theological concepts were considered basic matters that my 80-year-old parishioners (some with only high school diplomas!) seemed to understand deeply and apply to their lives and ministries. “As a whole,” Ed Stetzer wrote in 2017, “Americans, including many Christians, hold unbiblical views on hell, sin, salvation, Jesus, humanity, and the Bible itself.” Like many American Christians, my students didn’t seem to understand details required to grasp the whole sweep of Scripture. Their daily devotion to Scripture seemed to distance them from understanding key parts of it. How could my students be reading the Bible so much yet have so little understanding of the Torah, pay almost no attention to its focus on the new heavens and new earth, and be confused over concepts like salvation and evil? CT previously discussed the Lifeway Research statistics that reveal this trend of Bible illiteracy among the wider population. The way daily quiet time is typically practiced today is unlikely to yield the fluency required to understand and apply biblical teaching. It is a way many American Christians have been reading the Bible for decades: through “daily devotions” or “quiet time.” And almost 1 in 5 churchgoers said they never read the Bible.īut for my students, many of whom read the Bible daily and have chosen to attend a Christian college, their poor grasp on and application of Scripture seems to be due to the way they engage with it. It was the American Bible Society’s largest recorded one-year drop in its annual State of the Bible study. From 2021 to 2022, Bible engagement-scored on frequency of use, spiritual impact, and moral importance in day-to-day life-fell 21 percent among American adult Bible users. I began to realize that their poor grasp of Scripture wasn’t necessarily due to a lack of reading, although that’s also a large problem in the US. Yet despite their constant engagement with the Bible, they were shocked by what we found in Genesis-such as there being some things God appears not to know (Gen. They were fluent in Christian theological clichés. They could even recite key verses from memory. Every semester, devout Christian students would report to me that they read their Bibles every day. The disconnect crystalized 12 years ago when I (Dru) started teaching an introductory Old Testament class to freshmen.
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