If we didn’t teach it - the very thing ordinands swear they believe to “contain all things necessary to salvation” - then what does that say?

If we don’t teach it, we’re simply engaged in mystification.

People need to be taught how to read the Bible as literature and the implications thereof, they also need to be taught how the Bible is one part of God’s self-revelation and how to use it as a means of fostering and deeping the relationship with God through it.

This should not be the Bible as literature *or* liturgy—it’s both, of course, and neither angle gets everything.

And didn’t you also say that the RCL would simply increase the number of “stories” that parishioners would hear? Again, how are parishioners supposed to get what they need?

It’s all well and good to say the liturgy should be better - but if it’s not, what then? Tough luck for the parishioners?

Sorry, I think we deserve better than that.

Anyway, the Bible is literature; people study literature all the time.

People don’t know how to pray, either, BTW, so advising them to “pray the Bible” is total gibberish. (It’s gibberish to me, too, BTW.)

You know, I was outside the church for 35+ years; I really do know something about the topic….

Early Judaism had the Temple and its liturgies.

Then, with the destruction of the Temple, its place was taken by the synagogue and Torah, and the Temple was never re-built.

Christianity had its liturgy and the Sacraments until their place was taken (in Protestantism, at least) by “Bible Study” and sermons, and the liturgy and spirituality has suffered ever since!

I think we need to realize that the vast majority of devout Christians who have existed in this world (and almost certainly the majority of those recognized as “saints” never even SAW a Bible, to say nothing of reading or studying it. What they basically learned was prayer and liturgy (and the place of scripture within liturgy, of course). And (as Joe says) the contemplative dimension of prayer was the most serious. (Surely, there were theological mechanists who saw prayer as blessed bribery or magic, but the devout went beyond that.)

I think scripture is a great enrichment, but we ought to be led to it by prayer and liturgy, not the other way around. After all, 75% of the Bible (certainly, the NT) was composed to be recited (or even chanted!) aloud in a liturgical setting, and not taken home to “study”!

And the scripture that has its place in liturgy ought to be poetic and specifically translated for liturgical use (i.e., with emphasis on style and beauty rather than only on academic details). What we need is more poets and actors on translation commissions! Under obedience (sic!) our Order has just changed from REB to NRSV, and it is so prosaic, so “American”, so sterile. (I always loved the Johannine Prologue where REB has “And what God was the Word was.” instead of “And the Word was God.”

I often think of a tiny example: the use of Psalm 19:4 - “Their sound has gone out into all lands, and their message to the ends of the world.” The pronoun subject of the sentence refers to “the heavens” and “the firmament”, but from time immemorial, the verse has been used in graduals, antiphons, etc. for commemorations of missionaries and apostles. Scripture USED liturgically.

I know I am far out here but it seems that all everyone thought they needed was a translation of scripture in order to understand it — which is utterly ridiculous (unless it is being read very mystically by contemplatives).

The whole Bible-First thing comes, I think, from theological and mystical poverty and deprivation. And that comes from the move to “relevance” in liturgy, so that the source becomes contaminated and the only thing left is bible stories.

Imagine Sunday School stories which tell children that God murders sinners by drowning them (Noah), that cheaters always win (Jacob/Esau), that God might want daddies to slaughter their sons (Abraham/Isaac), that God kills first-born babies (Egypt), etc., etc.

I know I’m a dinosaur (I apologize, but what do you expect at the age of 76?) but I’d like to see the Bible put back on the liturgical shelf where its writers intended it to be, so it is seen again as a “product” of theology and spirituality rather than the “origin”.

There must continue to be biblical scholars like the Greek classicist Ann Nyland (”The Source” or Gerd Thiessen (both sociologist and bible scholar), and that scholarship needs to be accessible to those of us part of whose ministry is to help our congregations to get a little past kindergarten level, but for scripture to displace serious prayer and liturgy has no justification historically or pragmatically.

Finally, I think “the essential truths and varied riches of the Christian tradition” can be taught best by centering that education on the nature of the Church, the Sacraments, and the Saints. (You know, I decided to be a priest at the age of 8, but I never even heard of “Bible Study” in the Episcopal Church until I was 28 and ordained for four years.)

Enough….

He could not see my point. Rather, it should be translated (as NRSV) to meet the structure and such of the Hebrew (forget that for Christians, it was the LXX that was the standard)–even if imho in the translation, the heart is lost. Rather, the Bible is to be studied in and of itself and for itself outside as not formative of a whole, but of its own. And that got us to the Hebrew Scriptures versus Old Testament/First Testament bit. Our Christian Bible is not the Hebrew Scriptures, even in those parts we share. We have ordered the texts according to the revelation of God in Christ. That needn’t necessitate anti-Judaism simply because that is our vital orientation.

Derek, you are the rare biblical scholar that I’ve met who is concerned about relating scholarship adn prayer, bible and liturgy.

What our recent translations tell me is that the Bible is not first a liturgical book. That it is neither the Church’s book, nor the book that proclaimed makes present the Word by the Spirit, but is rather a dead letter to be picked apart (and to pick faith apart) and even used to undermine essential doctrines of the faith (as found in our creeds)–which to me undermines the core of the bible itself.

There is a place for deep and rich and varied and even disagreeing scholarship, which is not only the scholarship of the modern period, I might add (patristics is not quite rich in this regard as well).

But for me, first and foremost the Bible is a liturgical work that “reads” us, and can only do this when approached in a prayerful way in proclamation and lectio and such. When we do, it gives riches and meaning and value and places us and our existence within the life and story of the Trinity.

Yes, as I’ve noted before I am coming out of a context where the modern is the dominant mode and others are scoffed at.