Until this year. This year I agreed to read four chapters of Bible every day. And it turns out it’s not as scary as I thought. It can even be fun. Here’s five things I’ve found about the Bible:

1. It’s not magic. The Bible is a book just like any other book. It isn’t a magic book that answers every question or makes you more Christian. It’s a normal book; it just happens to be the book about God and what he’s done.

2. It’s not big. The Bible isn’t one big book; it’s lots of little books. Actually, most of them aren’t even books. They’re all sorts of different writing, from letters to poetry, from history to fables.

3. You don’t need to get it. The Bible is more like Lord of the Rings than a maths textbook. You don’t have to puzzle over it until you ‘get it’. You can just read it. Immerse yourself in the story and enjoy watching it unfold.

4. Read it like a novel. You can’t just read a few pages of Lord of the Rings and know what’s going on. The Bible isn’t any different. Don’t just read a few verses. Read a whole book, or at least a few chapters at a time. Then you’ll get what’s going on.

5. It’s not boring. This is the most surprising – sometimes the Bible really is unputdownable. When you read the Bible like a normal book, you can really get into the story. Sometimes I find I’ve read more than my four chapters, and I want to keep reading.

The Bible is a normal book. It’s not magic, it’s not big, it’s not hard to understand. Don’t let your Bible sit on the shelf shouting insults at you. You wouldn’t take it from your flatmate, so don’t take it from a book.

‘If there’s anything in life we should be passionate about, it’s the gospel…passionate in thinking about the gospel, reflecting upon it, rejoicing in it, allowing it to colour the way we look at the world and all of life.’

It was an issue I found to be really helpful. I know in my head the cross should be central to my life, but I find in busyness I often move away from it or assume/forget it’s message. Mahaney pushes the reader to see that Jesus’ cross was my cross, his atonement was for the guilt of my personal sin, his death for me when I rejected him.

As is typical of all Mahaney books this is easy to read with lots of practical illustrations and he makes what can be difficult theology easy to understand! The book goes through the topics of: defining the cross of Christ, defining what it means to live a cross-centred life and outlining the three main dangers to the cross centred life. It has discussion questions at the end of the chapters which make it perfect for small group discussions and equipping one for pastoral care.

This is going to make me sound super-nerdy, but I found this cool website the other day.

In 1844 a guy called Constatin von Tischendorf found a 4thC copy of the entire Bible in a monastery in Sinai. Since then it – the Codex Sinaiticus – has ended up in 3 parts in various libraries and museums in Europe. It’s interesting because it’s an important example of how the Bible was put together when there wasn’t yet an agreement on which books were canonical. It’s full mistakes and corrections as the three scribes who worked on it tried to get it right. Now you can check out the 1600 year old document for yourself, because they’ve scanned in the pages and put them on a website!

John Dickson and Greg Clarke discuss the Codex on their CPX website, including some of the controversies surrounding it. It’s pretty easy just to live in the moment, but looking at the pages of the Codex is a good reminder of the rich Christian history we’re a part of and how much we have to thank God for.

interesting fact: The Codex is made from pages of goat skin – apparently over 300 goats were ‘harmed’ in it’s making.

What’s interesting is that neither Micklethwaite or Wooldridge are especially religious themselves, nor do they uncritically accept religious assumptions. They recognise that religion is not always a force for good, especially when coupled with the power of the state. But, with thorough research and analysis, they argue that God is alive and healthy in the twenty-first century, and that’s not such a bad thing.

The Australian carried an interesting excerpt from God is Back a few weeks ago. Read it here.

But how did the churches know whether a certain books should be included in the New Testament? We often say that the books in the New Testament are “inspired” (“breathed out” by God), and that’s what sets them apart. This is true, but only in hindsight. We often imagine this to mean that God handed these books to us already written, as if Paul’s hand was moved for him as he wrote things he barely understood. As we saw at Hub, this definitely wasn’t the case. Paul wrote what he thought for people he knew.

The Catholic Church has a different take. It says that the books are in the New Testament because the church said they would be. That is, the early Christians decided which books they would trust, and that’s why we trust them now. This is even more problematic than the ‘handed down’ idea. If the books are only in the New Testament because the early Christians liked them, why should they be any better than other books?

The books in the New Testament weren’t handed down to us, nor were they chosen by the early Christians. The New Testament formed as of the early church recognised the authority of the apostles and their writings, and placed itself under their teaching. The books in the New Testament are there because the church recognised that these were the books with the most trustworthy teaching about Jesus, what he did, and what it means for us.

And we’re still doing it. We recognise that the books in the New Testament tell us the truth about the gospel. So we read them, study them, and work out what they’re saying, so we can know more about Jesus and live better lives in response to him.

The philosopher Joseph Budziszewski discovered this, too. He explains his sin as “getting stupid to get away from God”:

I have already noted in passing that everything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things He has given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast.  Human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students…now that’s sin.

It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense.  Paul said that the knowledge of God’s laws is “written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.” The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structure of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them. Well, I was unusually determined not to know them, therefore, I had to destroy my mind. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. Think what this did to my very capacity to love them. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good…denies the reality of persons…denies that his commitments are in any sense in his control?

Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all of the components that have God’s image stamped on them. The problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how many he pulls out, there’s still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. But because there was less and less that I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more focused. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I thought I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. But I was the fool.

Taken from the the essay Escape from Nihilism by Joseph Budziszewski. Photo by the trial via Flickr.

“A common argument, attributed among others to C.S. Lewis (who should have known better), states that, since Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he must have been either right or else insane or a liar: ‘Mad, Bad or God’. Or with artless alliteration, ‘Lunatic, Liar or Lord’. The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal. But even if that evidence were good, the trilemma on offer would be ludicrously inadequate. A fourth alternative, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken. Plenty of people are.”

There’s lots in this paragraph to make me cranky. It’s patronising, smug, and historically misleading. But its main problem—almost too obvious to need mentioning—is that Dawkins’ fourth alternative to Jesus as ‘Lunatic, Liar or Lord’ is not merely ludicrously inadequate, but blatantly, spectacularly, laughably wrong! Honestly thinking that you’re God when you’re not isn’t some new category—Lunatic, Liar, Lord, or Look I honestly thought I was God and what do you know it turns out I’m not—it’s a textbook case of lunacy! How has Dawkins not seen this? (And what was his editor doing?)

There are literally hundreds of errors and misrepresentations in ‘The God Delusion’, but this is the worst that I’ve come across. You don’t need to know anything about history, philosophy, or religion to recognise it. All you need is half a brain and 30 seconds—on a bad day. So why does a brilliant man like Dawkins appear to believe it?

In Ephesians 4:18 Paul says that those who don’t trust in Jesus “are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.” It seems to me that Dawkins’ problem isn’t fundamentally intellectual—in many ways he’s a brilliant man—but when it comes to God, hard-heartedness makes you stupid.

Obviously the different options all have advantages and disadvantages and the best choice will depend on what you would use it for, your level of technical expertise and ability to make use of what the programs offer, your computer’s hardware capabilities, and available funds.

Perhaps the place to start would be – why use bible study software at all? The ink and paper variety functions very well so why bother? That’s certainly worth asking before you go throwing any cash down on something. If your only use of the bible is in personal reading, taking it to church or Hub then you have little use for Bible software. It’s just not as good for sitting down and reading, and it’s not transportable with the exception of PDA/smarthphone versions.

On the other hand, if you want to study the bible and not just read it; if you lead a small group and want to really come to grips with a passage, to contrast all the different english translations, to explore how it connects with the rest of scripture, do word studies on key words, see how commentators have grappled with a passage, use other reference books – dictionaries and so forth; and if your skills allow, grapple with the text in its original languages and do sophisticated grammatical and syntactic analysis; you’ll either need a large free table, a pile of books and plenty of hours to scour through finding the information you need… or software.

Over the next weeks I’ll try to give you a snapshot of what’s out there, what it can do and who it would be useful for.

I realise that part of the problem is that I have the attention span of a newt. I need some discipline in order to sit down and read a book. The other problem is that the books haven’t been interesting enough. Harry Potter—no problem. Through a glass, darkly—I want to die after after a chapter.

So a question for you lot: What are your tips for reading? When do you read? What do you read? When do you give up on a book and when do you persevere?

In Wright’s opinion—which I suspect is correct—many Christians have unthinkingly accepted our culture’s hope of dying and going to heaven as a disembodied spirit, instead of realising that our final hope is to be resurrected on the last day to worship God forever in the new creation.

Wright points out that when our final hope is to die and go to heaven we start misinterpreting parts of the Bible like Philippians 3:20a and Ephesians 2:6. We read these verses (and lots of others) as saying that our hope is to go to heaven. But for Paul ‘heaven’ isn’t so much the place people go when they die as “the place where the divinely intended future for the world is kept safely in store” until the new creation when they will be a visible reality. In Wright’s words, “If I assure my guests that there is champagne for them in the fridge I am not suggesting that we all need to get into the fridge if we are to have the party.”

Can anyone think of any other verses that talk about heaven as the warehouse for things that will become visible realities in the new creation?