Engaging in Real "Bible" Study
I am a college professor. Last summer I went to the office basically every day because I needed to have some writing done. Our campus gets a lot of Christian camps for most of the summer. One in particular caught my attention. It was a large group of teenagers—probably high schoolers from several states. I noticed that they were engaged in Bible Study every day. The problem is that they were seldom reading the Bible itself, or if they were, it was always mediated by way of someone else’s commentary. The teenagers had been given a three-ring binder, about two-inches thick in which they had the week’s Bible Study. A few—just a few—of the students actually had Bibles.
Unfortunately that is an all-too-common occurrence. We are living in a time when millions of people claim to live and to be guided by what the Bible says and teaches. I think that the students I encounter in my classes may be typical of a lot of Christians. I have discovered in my own classes, however, that very few of them actually know the Bible. They have done a lot of Bible Study, and yet they don’t know the Bible. That is because there is a misunderstanding of what Bible Study actually is.
When I was growing up, I myself engaged in a lot of Bible Study. I read the Bible, drew connections between phrases in the narrative and poetic passages, took extensive notes—in fact, I still have several notebooks with all the notes that I took in my own private Bible Study. While I don’t want to demean using some kind of guide to do Bible Study, I would suggest that people start reading the Bible more, instead of coming to it with pre-conceived notions. Besides, if one is looking for guidelines on how to read the Bible, those will be more useful once one has begun to read and to learn what the actual contents of the Bible are. Thus, nothing substitutes for Bible Study. But it ought to commence with actual reading and studying of the text itself—if it is to be Bible study.