Isn't the Bible too hard to read out loud?

Short answer: No. Long answer: Try harder.

Last time, I explained how God’s word is our greatest asset in discipleship and mission, but that the Church doggedly refuses to make the most of it. Evangelicals, being big Bible fans, might say that this isn’t the case in their church. Actually evangelical churches tend to have the fewest and shortest readings as a prelude to the sermon. This rather implies the sermon is the main event. And I don’t think it is.

I’m a fully-fledged Reformed guy, standing firmly and joyfully in the tradition of the Puritans who revived preaching in England. But what would they make of our Bible-lite approach? And do our congregations really know their Bibles? I think they would be horrified at our Biblical ignorance, not to mention our lack of Psalm-singing. So why don’t churches make more of scripture in services? And why don’t we read it well?

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This time, I’m going to robustly deal with one objection to my plea for more scripture in our services which is this:

Scripture is full of long genealogies, repetition and unfamiliar words, hard to pronounce names, and places we’ve never heard of. Are we really meant to hack our way through that every week? Less is more, surely?

No. It isn’t. Less is not more. Less of God’s word is less of God. More, please.

Granted, it’s a bit of a straw man, but you get the idea. Many of my readers will have been in a church service, clenched in embarrassment while someone who clearly hasn’t read ahead is stumbling their way through a reading. And we can all see that the name ‘Sennacherib’ is coming.

Would you let someone who really can’t play the guitar lead your worship? Or let’s say that they can play the guitar. A bit. But they don’t practice. They rock up and hope for the best. Some might say that that is their experience of church music, which would be a real shame. But in the main, we expect our musicians to have some basic skills in music and rehearse a few times. Why don’t we apply the same standard to the reading of scripture? And so why are we surprised that they can’t pronounce ‘Sennacherib’? That one’s on all of us. Not just the reader.

An Imaginary Friend

Let’s invoke the spirit of a Puritan here. Let’s give him a properly Puritan name and call him ReadsTheBibleLoads Johnson. What would he say to the admittedly highly flammable objection that “scripture is full of long genealogies, repetition and unfamiliar words, hard to pronounce names, and places we’ve never heard of”?

He would say, “Brother, why have you never heard of these names and places? Were you not taught them as children? Do you not burn valuable candles reading them as the sun sets, and rises?” To which our best reply is that we have Netflix and Instagram. That’s what we watch at night and scroll through in the morning.

“But surely,” ReadsTheBibleLoads Johnson continues, “you at least hear these names and places on the Lord’s Day as scripture is read at great length as you gather to hear God’s word before celebrating around the Lord’s table? Does your heart not leap as you hear God’s holy word read?”

Mental Maps

If our services were soaked in scripture, read well, we would be more familiar with the places and the names. If the Bible is hard for us to read, how is that the fault of the Bible? If we don’t know our Bethesdas from our Bethlehems, that’s on us. The sad fact is that many of us have a clearer map of Middle Earth or Albert Square in our head than Ancient Israel. This is not a good thing.

Yes, there are long genealogies, but we’re not enthralled by them because we don’t know who the people are. We’re not even curious.

But even if some the names are obscure, or unexplained, and there’s rather a lot of detail, such as the allotting of the land in Joshua, why don’t we work hard to figure out a way to present it comprehensively – and commit ourselves to the idea that the Author knew what He was doing?

Commit, Darling

You could say The Royal Shakespeare Company hold the bard in higher esteem than evangelicals hold the author of their own sacred text, the Bible. They give the playwright the benefit of the doubt. So when the actors encounter a difficult scene, or a long soliloquy, they talk to the director and figure out how to present what’s been written. They commit to the character, the bard and the text. And it’s not even inerrant or inspired by God. But no-one’s editing Mark Anthony’s ‘Friends, Romans and Countrymen’ speech because ‘it’s a bit long’.

So I’ll round off with something I wrote in The Sacred Art of Joking about how alien the text of the Bible seems to us, and how we can learn from our own heritage of appreciating Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s plays are 400 years old and in a recognizable form of English with comprehensible situations. The latest parts of the Bible describe events which took place 2,000 years ago under the Roman occupation of Palestine. But there is also material from the Israelites’ captivity in Babylon and their slavery in Egypt, hundreds and thousands of years earlier. The Bible is a very foreign country.

When one watches Shakespeare’s plays performed well, the differences in language and customs rapidly melt away. Physical action, body language and vocal tone go a long way to mitigating the unfamiliar turns of phrase.

All of the above require effort, rehearsal and training. But none of these things come about in isolation. There is now a tradition of open-air Shakespeare plays that tour the country over the summer months with their productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It. There is also a permanent home for Shakespeare’s plays, the Globe, on the South Bank in London, that aims to recapture the feeling of being at an original Shakespearean play. Performing at the Globe is now a professional aspiration for many young actors and actresses, just as many great actors long to be given the honour of performing Hamlet.

The result is a culture of Shakespearean theatre that seeks excellence. When one goes to see any performance of a Shakespeare play, one rightly has high expectations of enjoyment. If it’s a comedy one expects to laugh, despite Shakespeare’s world being unfamiliar to us.

In order to rediscover and re-present the richness of the biblical texts, which would help Christians see the comedy inherent in the Scriptures, there needs to be a change in the culture within the Church. This could involve a rediscovery of the long-lost theatrical traditions of mystery plays that died out in the Reformation.

Perhaps, one day, Christian actors might be inspired to perform Scripture even more than Shakespeare. Others could use their gifts to train Scripture-readers to do this better, just as there are many who seek to equip musicians use their gifts more effectively in the service of the Church.

Given this renaissance isn’t happening any time soon, and we need to dramatically improve the quality of our scripture reading right now, how can we improve things? We’ll make a start on that next time. So please subscribe and you’ll get the next instalment emailed to you for free.

But if you can’t wait, why not listen to the next episode of the Cooper and Cary Have Words podcast, which drops early and unedited (but with jingles) for our Patreons or members of Cooper & Cary Plus on Apple Podcasts.