«The Bible is the most commonly purchased, widely read, and deeply cherished book in the history of Western Civilization. It is also the most widely misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused. These reasons alone make it worth our time to study it. We can begin by considering the importance of the Bible in greater depth.
Why Study the Bible?
People study the Bible, and should study the Bible, for lots of reasons – religious reasons, historical reasons, and literary reasons.
Religious Reasons
Most people who study the Bible do so, of course, for religious reasons. Many people revere the Bible as the word of God, and want to know what it can teach them about what to believe and how to live. In this book our study of the Bible will not be in order to promote any particular religious point of view or theology – Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Lutheran, agnostic, or anything else. We will instead be approaching the Bible from a historical and literary point of view. But even from these alternative points of view, there are solid religious reasons for studying the Bible -- even for those people who are not themselves religious or interested in becoming religious. That is because in order to understand our world – and the religious people in it – we need to have a firmer grasp on the book that stands at the heart of the Jewish and Christian religions.
Historical Reasons
Arguably the most important reason for studying the Bible – especially from a historical point of view -- is because of its importance for the history of Western Civilization. The dominant religion of Europe and the New World for the past 2000 years has been Christianity; and Christianity, as we will see, grew out of, and alongside of, Judaism. Both religions continue to assert an enormous influence on our form of culture. This is true not only on the individual level, as people are guided in their thoughts, beliefs, and actions by what they learn in these religions. It is true on the broadest imaginable historical scale. Christianity has had the single greatest impact on Western civilization of any religion, ideology, or world view, whether looked at culturally, socially, politically, or economically. There is no institution that can even come close to the organized Christian church for its wide-ranging impact on the West. And at the foundation of Christianity –at its heart, one could argue – stands the Bible. If one does not understand the Bible, one cannot fully understand the course of the history of the world we inhabit.
And more than that, there can be no doubt that the Bible has influenced, and continues to influence, millions and millions of people’s lives. It is widely known that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time, without any serious competitor. What is not always appreciated is that the Bible is the best-selling book every year, year in and year out. So many copies of the Bible are sold every year that no one has been able to add them all up. One estimate from the year 2005 indicated that just in the United States, some twenty-five million copies of the Bible were sold. But what is most astounding is that the vast majority of those Bibles were sold to people who already had Bibles: over nine out of ten American households own at least one copy of the Bible, and the average household has four. As an article in the New Yorker magazine of December 18, 2006 put it, this “means that Bible publishers manage to sell twenty-five million copies a year of a book that almost everybody already has.”
Americans not only like owning and buying Bibles. They like reading them. A Gallup poll...»
No comments:
Post a Comment