By The Rev. Dr. Carl Grosse

Outside the Bible, I prefer to read non-religious books. David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin are two dependable authors. I enjoy business biographies as well, and one of my personal favorites is Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury (yes, she’s in that Cadbury family). For a while, I read thrillers by authors like Robert Ludlum and Vince Flynn. I even read a few of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels (the book version of Bond is different from the movie versions). As a brain workout many years ago, I read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (yep, he did plant the seeds of what became Social Darwinism) and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Both books gave me the expected workout and made me feel like a doofus.

Authors have identifiable styles and messages. David McCullough’s books emphasize individual character, how it’s shaped and how it shows up in critical moments. Doris Kearns Goodwin compares and contrasts associated individuals to show how each influenced the others in ways that made them all greater.  Thriller writers use violence, sex and intrigue (because we can’t help ourselves) to package their versions of the struggle of good versus evil. Both Darwin and Hawking applied superb logic to natural observations and mathematical statements, leading to remarkable conclusions about biology and cosmology (and also about God, whom both saw as pointless given their views of reality). 

We tend not to read the Bible this way. We pick and choose snippets here and there to support particular purposes outside the Bible, in the process failing to grasp recurring elements and consistent themes that would indicate the Bible’s “identifiable style and message”. From a technical perspective, the reasons we have a canon, why these 66 books are packaged together and how they’re packaged, push us to take a meta-analytical view of the whole Bible. Canonical studies are a distinct field in the academic world, reflecting a concern for understanding the Bible more holistically. 

Increasingly, I’m cautious when someone quotes the Bible or makes a religion-infused comment claiming to reflect what “the Bible says”. It’s so easy to lift a passage and make it support whatever you want it to. From start to finish, the Bible does talk about how God wants us to conduct ourselves. I have tried to convey this in my teaching and preaching, not because I’m on somebody’s bandwagon, but because it truly is a main concern of the Bible. If we honestly claim to love God and follow His word, then we shouldn’t we be able to get past our own opinions and appeal to that word as an objective and superior reference?