novus•lumen

I officially crossed the heritic line Sunday: I bought a narrative Bible, a TNIV Bible nonetheless! What did I buy exactly and why did I do this?

At the beginning of the year, Zondervan published their TNIV translation in “book” form, called The Story. Basically, the book is the text of the Bible without the chapters and verses. It is also written in chronological order, rather than by Book, and leaves some of the Books and chapters out, like Leviticus and some of Paul’s letters, to help with the flow of the narrative. No, Zondervan did not set out to destroy Scripture or piece together a more palatable version like Thomas Jefferson. Rather, their desire was to help people understand the grandness of God’s Story by displaying it in a sort of novel and narrative form. It is only in understanding the scope of God’s Story that we can understand our own. I also think this arrangement is necessary in order to try and recapture and reunderstand some of the originality of our faith, which was my reason for purchasing and reading it.

As I have mentioned before, I am in a period of reunderstanding several aspects of Christocentric Spirituality (my new euphemism for Christianity…), and one of those aspects is how we interpret, use, know and read Scripture. As I have mentioned in other posts, I believe the Bible is God’s revelation about Himself, His desires, His truth, and His reality. There is one version of that Truth, God’s version. There is one interpretation and meaning of the Text. Unfortunately, humans are fallible and finite, which prevents us from fully and completely knowing, understanding, and articulating that Truth absolutely.

While moving through this novus lumen period, I cannot help but wonder, sometimes, if we truly approach the Bible in the way in which God intended. A quote from Brian McLaren in A New Kind Of Christian got me thinking and wondering how the ancients approached the Breath of God. Through the protagonist Neo, Brian suggests:

[Moderns] want the [Bible] to be God’s encyclopedia, God’s rule book, God’s answer book, God’s scientific text, God’s easy-steps instruction book, God’s little book of morals for all occasions…I think that when you let go of the Bible as God’s answer book, you get it back as something so much better: it becomes the family story…It tells the family story–the story of the people who have been called by the one true God to be His agents in the world, to be his servants to the rest of the world. It is absolutely essential–to give the family a sense of identity, so we know who we are and why we’re here and where we’re going. And not only that, it’s wonderfully honest about our weaknesses and mistakes. I mean, there’s no mistaking who the hero is in this story–it’s certainly not any of the humans! So I think we need to let go of the Bible as a modern book, but that doesn’t mean we discard it. Not at all! When we let go as a modern answer book, we get to discover it for what it really is: an ancient book of incredible spiritual value for us, a kind of universal and cosmic history, a book that tells us who we are and what story we find ourselves in so that we know what to do and how to live.

While you may be aghast to reunderstand the Bible this way, consider this: Did you know the Bible was not originally inspired with divisions by chapter and verse? The ancient manuscripts didn’t have them. One man, Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro, started to do this from 1244 to 1248 A.D. He did this while creating a concordance of the Latin Vulgate, in order to help people look up verses of the Bible. But the typical modern chapter divisions were apparently devised by Stephen Langton, who was an Archbishop of Canterbury in England. He started to do this around 1227 A.D. Then The Wycliffe English Bible began using the system, as it was circulated in 1382.

As for the verses, one Jewish teacher, Mordecai Nathan, divided the Hebrew Old Testament into chapters in 1445. Later he and a scholar named Athias divided the Old Testament into verses in 1448. The system we see commonly today was put into place by Robert Estienne, or Stephanus who used the numbered verse system when printing the Bible in 1555 or 1551. Since the time of the Geneva Bible version (an English version published in Paris, 1560), which preceded the famous King James Version, nearly all Bible versions have used this same numbering system.

So as you can see, God did not breath His Word into existence in chapter and verse, rather those are human constructs. Now, I am not saying using this system is bad, sinful, or goes against Scripture. In fact, just because I bought this newly arranged version of the Bible doesn’t mean I am going to toss out my pocket NIV! Rather, I think this realization is instructive, because it points out one more human construct within the Modern version of Christianity. Sure, this construction has helped us memorize, digest, and interpret God’s Word, but perhaps the system has also turned the Bible into another philosophical text and stripped it of it’s ancient roots. I desire to recapture the ancientness of my faith and place within God’s Grand Story, and I think deconstructing some of the Modern human constructs around Christianity will do that, including this one.

More on my novus lumen moment with The Story tomorrow…

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