Best Begin with the Book…
By the time you read this, the new year will have begun. Well, the traditional Christian year, anyway, which starts about four weeks before Christmas. The special prayer for that Sunday fascinates me somewhat – it’s a prayer for God to help us use the Bible well – ‘Grant that we may so read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’ it that it would bring us patience and confidence. I find that a little surprising; I’d expect the year to start with one of the grand themes of life - creation, Nature, History, Love, Heaven and Hell or the like.
But, a book? But then, come to think of it, we can’t do much with any subject, even if it’s only cooking a meal, without using the records of what others have thought, said, and done. So even if someone wants to attack Christianity, the only source of information about its founder that could have any claim to reliability, would be the New Testament. And since Jesus was a Jew, understanding him in terms of his cultural background drives us back to the Old Testament. So we can’t do without the Bible. And the Book gives us more. I may have a vivid encounter with God, but I still need to know something about Him! And while it gives me something I can share with others, it also saves me from slavish dependence on religious experts - I can read for myself. And, unlike pictures, a Book gives me power to use my imagination for myself. When that prayer was first used, in 1539, for the first time in history, Englishmen who heard it could read the Bible for themselves in their own language. The effect on our culture was colossal. The Book has a strange power to change people. Maybe we need to take that prayer seriously again…
Happy Christmas!
John Peck