Category Archives: Books

Footnote 39 – Safed the Sage

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Footnote 39 — William E. Barton, The Parables of Safed the Sage (Chicago: Advance Publishing Company, 1917).

THE UNOPENED WINDOW

I LOVE the work of William Eleazer Barton (father of Bruce Barton of Jesus-as-salesman genre of books). WE Barton was an Illinois native (and Lincoln scholar, particularly of Lincoln’s religion) who preached in the Chicago area before affiliating with Oberlin and then migrating to Vanderbilt when Oberlin’s School of Theology merged with Vandy’s Divinity School. Late in life he became a mentor to a young Vanderbilt grad student, Henry Lee Saint, who late in his life became my major professor at Vanderbilt. Barton was also Editor of Bib Sac for several years. His Safed & Keturah sagas are a hoot (but often with a serious kick). I especially like the Parable of the Potato Bug, among others. Here’s another good one:

THE UNOPENED WINDOW

“Now there came to me a man with a Sad Countenance, and he said, O Safed, thy words of wisdom are known to all men, and thy virtue exceedeth even thy wisdom; may thy days be long among men.

And I heard him, and I answered not; for the man who cometh unto me with a Little Too Much Taffy and Then Some hath an Axe to Grind. And I said, If thou hast Business, say on; for Time Passeth.

And he said, O Safed, I have a neighbor, and he is an Undesirable Citizen. His house joineth hard unto mine upon the North, and he annoyeth me continually. He and his Kids keep up a continual Rough House, which greatly annoyeth us. And he hath Daughters, and there come to see them Young Men, who sit with them on the Porch till Any Old Time at Night, and they Laugh and Raise Ned so that sleep is driven from our eyes, and slumber from our eyelids. Yea, and when we look that way we see things that Vex our Righteous Souls.

And I said, Are they Immoral? If so thou mayest call the Police.

And he said, They are not what you might call Immoral, for my wife hath watched them much through the Window; she hath a place where she sitteth and watcheth while she Darneth Stockings; yet are they noisy; yea, they are the Limit.

And I said unto him, How many windows hath thy house?

And he said, My house standeth Foursquare, and it hath windows toward the North, the South, the East and the West.

And I said unto him, Move thou over to the South side of thy House; thou shalt have more Sleep and Sunshine. Yea, moreover, speak thou unto thy wife that she Darn her Stockings where she hath less to see.

And he went away angry. But I counted it among my Good Deeds.

And I meditated thereon, and I considered that there are many people who live on the North Side of their own Souls; yea, they curse God that they hear the racket and are sad; and behold, their South Windows are unopened.”

-from The Parables of Safed the Sage, by Wm. E. Barton, Advance Publishing, Chicago, 1917.

My List of 20 Authors and Significant Books – What’s Yours?

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SW Lib S-CGiving in to a fad which I strongly resisted for awhile, here’s a list of 20 books which have shaped my personal intellectual development. It was frustrating but enlightening to do the introspection necessary to accumulate and then pare down to 20. All such stand-alone lists are probably sterile, unless (as they were with me) they are integrated into broader reading in conversation with an extensive web of other classical and “Great Books” authors. But these were “first introductions” to a protracted corpus of similar works, or provided multiple significant “aha moments” in their own right. Many of the specific titles are representative of a “train” of comparable works by the same author and/or others who interacted with them in an intellectual engagement. In more or less chronological order as I encountered them, this list omits MUCH (and, yes, it has notes at the end!)

1 – Jack Finegan, Light From the Ancient Past
2 – Earl West, Search for the Ancient Order (multi-volume)
3 – E.L. Jorgenson, Great Songs of the Church
4 – Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
5 – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
6 – The Diary of Anne Frank
7 – William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale, Blackford Oakes novels
8 – Homer Hailey, The Minor Prophets, John, Isaiah and other commentaries
9 – Ed Harrell, Social History of the Disciples of Christ, 2 volumes
10 – Bernard Ramm, The Pattern of Authority
11 – John RW Stott, Christ the Controversialist
12 – John Warwick Montgomery, Where is History Going? and The Suicide of Christian Theology
13 – Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
14 – G.A. Kerkut, Implications of Evolution
15 – Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
16 – Kenneth A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and Old Testament
17 – Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and Voyagers to the West
18 – C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and so much more
19 – Gordon Fee & Stuart, How to Read the Bible For All Its Worth
20 – Ronald Numbers, The Creationists

Other “honorable mention” influences would certainly include G.K. Chesterton, Richard Hofstadter, N.B. Hardeman, James McPherson, George Marsden, Everett Ferguson, Stephen Ambrose, D.A. Carson, Mark Noll, George Will, N.T Wright, Fred Craddock, Rick Atkinson, and Fleming Rutledge, among others. This list of 20 could easily become 50 or even 100, especially if older classics were included. Three other works are significant, though in somewhat different ways.

A – The Geneva Bible – I omitted the most continuously-formative work (”the Bible”) but I’ll single out the Geneva, a 1599 copy of which (as well as several more recent replicas) has been in my family for generations. Purchased from a Chicago bookdealer by my great-uncle, who lived here following his discharge from the US Navy in WWI, it then passed to my grandfather, James Otto Wolfgang, and upon his death in 1975 to my father, James Harold Wolfgang, and thence to James Stephen Wolfgang. Not only the text, but the marginal notations, the typography, the woodcut illustrations, and even the paper contain lessons in their own right.

B&C – Two works for which I served as a “knowledge contributor” rather than simply a “knowledge consumer” are the Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Eerdmans, 2004), and the new hymnal Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (Sumphonia Productions, 2012). Working on the “other side of the page” provided new insights, and these works continue to teach me afresh.

NOTES:

1 – A part of my early teenage intellectual awakening, Finegan’s LFAP was on my grandfather’s bookshelves, and I spent many fascinating Sunday afternoons trying to wrap my developing brain around its contents. In this text, and several to follow, Finegan introduced me to the worlds of Biblical archaeology and chronology, and the world of Ancient Near Eastern texts and Biblical manuscripts.

2 – Earl West was a multi-generational family friend (performed my parents’ wedding ceremony), whose multi-volume history of the “Restoration Movement” (also on my grandparents’ and parents’ bookshelves) taught me at an early age the basic plotline and biographical storyline of the movement and its controversies – and ignited a passion to learn more.

3 – Jorgenson was one of several hymnals I sang from as a child, including L.O. Sanderson’s Christian Hymns #2, which often contained simple melodies and harmonies which sounded good when everyone sang their part. But Jorgenson took things to a new level. I was singing from his hymnal during the same time I was playing in high school and regional music groups under a very good conductor (a graduate of the world-class School of Music at Indiana University – as were several of the song leaders at church, who in turn instructed other song leaders, including my father, in the basics of leading a congregation in the worship of God in song, skillfully and with insight). Great Songs helped integrate what I was learning at school in music and English composition, including poetry, with what was happening “in church.”

4 – Began to help me confront the reality of evil, both as an act and as a power – as well as the power of story.

5 – C. S. Lewis’ classic (and others, read later) opened up new and different ways of “explaining” Christianity, as well as modeling excellent writing as the Brits do it.

6 – Ditto # 4 – Began to help me confront the reality of evil, both as an act and as a power – in other contexts outside the USA.

7 – Buckley introduced me to the world of the “public intellectual,” the confusing maze of academic discourse and pretensions, the wonders of arcane vocabulary, the importance of intellectual rigor in political discourse, and the power of fiction to expound truth with an impact sometimes lacking in non-fiction. I have read most of his books.

8 – As with other authors on this list, Homer Hailey’s influence on my life was not limited to his books, or even as a preacher, professor, and counselor, but also as mediated through other influential figures in my intellectual development, including but not limited to Ferrell Jenkins, Melvin Curry, and Phil Roberts. As with Buckley and Harrell and Montgomery below, I have consumed nearly everything he wrote.

9 – Probably the closest thing to a formal “intellectual mentor” in my life (I once called him “the surrogate older brother I never had”), Ed introduced me to the stubborn fact that theological issues are not merely theological. There are “layers of the onion” which must be peeled back to reveal how social forces, including class, race (and gender), and many other factors influence theological ideology and religious behavior, and the necessity to integrate the study of religion into the broader descriptions of political, economic, social, intellectual, military, and other aspects of the human endeavor. Ed once said that I was perhaps the only person who had read everything he’d ever written (adding, “but Steve even reads cereal boxes and the phone directories” – too true!)

10 – Ramm, whose book on authority came to me by way of Harry Pickup, Jr., (another profound influence in my life as a young preacher), was one of the bright stars in the early evangelical constellation; this foundational work led me to a string of others.

11 – John RW Stott, first encountered through his book on Christ as a controversialist, was introduced to me by John Clark, a self-educated intellectual and formative influence on my early spiritual development. In many ways, it replicates themes in Stott’s other works, expounding “Basic Christianity,” the gigantic paradox of the cross of Christ and the scandal of worshiping a crucified man, murdered by state sanction as a common criminal or worse.

12 – Montgomery, like Stott, served as both an introduction and a bridge into the worldview of evangelicalism, at once alike (not least in its rejection of both modernist and post-modernist ideologies) and different from the “restorationism” I have written about myself. As with many other works on this list, what I found most attractive was JWM’s broad, interdisciplinary background in classics, philosophy, library science, Biblical studies, history, and modern theology.

13 – Kuhn is often at the head of “Most Influential Books,” especially of the 20th century – and deservedly so as one of very few works which has had widespread cross-disciplinary impact. Read with fascination as I began a doctoral program in the History of Science at Emory University (along with his Copernican Revolution), Kuhn was, as for many, one of the most formative influences on my thinking, surpassing even many on this list and opening up a long list of related works.

14 – Kerkut’s compact but tightly argued monograph taught me not only important distinctions between “general” and “special” evolution (“macro-“ and “micro-“) but also to challenge prevailing assumptions and “received wisdom” – and that doing so is not always received well by others. To actually meet and interview him (and be “served tea”) in his laboratory at the University of Southampton while I was working on my own dissertation, was a special treat, putting a human face to a respected scientific name.

15 – Braudel demonstrated with staggering breadth how much of the human enterprise can and should fall under the historian’s gaze and pen, describing it in a single (and yes, again, multi-volume) work. Despite its title, this work surveys everything from demography to warfare to numismatics to zoology and nearly everything in between, from the Bronze Age to modernity, as well as confronting concepts of stasis and change over time with which every historian must grapple.

16 – From AO&OT to his “magnum opus” On the Reliability of the Old Testament, the breadth of Kitchen’s output is stunning, ranging from the scholarly translation of ancient texts to academic works on Egyptology and “popular” books on Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical history. I first encountered his work (in the library but not on the reading lists) at the seminary where I earned my MDiv. There, his “conservatism” was ridiculed and snickered at by small-minded faculty and grad students – none of whom could carry water for Kitchen, intellectually. Legends in their own minds, they seemed intent on demonstrating their own snobbish “superiority” – which attracted me to his work, first out of curiosity and then with respect.

17 – Bailyn is one of the the most influential American historians of the 20th century, not only for his own Pulitzer- and other prize-winning works, but also as the advisor of a long train of Harvard PhDs who became influential (on me and many others) in their own right, including other Pulitzer Prize winners like Gordon S. Wood (my favorite and, yeah, the guy Matt Damon cites in Good Will Hunting), Mary Beth Norton, Richard Bushman, Jack N. Rakove, Pauline Maier, Philip Greven, Michael Kammen, and MANY others.

18 – Woodward, the dean of a whole corps of Southern historians, introduced me to the thicket of questions of how race, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, and a host of other related issues have played out in American history – at a time when this Midwesterner, recently married to a lovely Southern lass, engaged in graduate studies at Emory University in Atlanta, was preaching for a church in a racially “transitioning” neighborhood in the midst of racial tensions only three years following the King assassination. An intriguing and challenging read, it was not only formative in its own right, but lead down numerous other worthwhile rabbit trails.

19 – It is difficult to single out one book in a whole cluster of important works on crucially important questions of hermeneutics and interpretation of texts, but this one stands out and has become a classic.

20 – A path-breaking, even-handed, award-winning monograph on an important subject previously ignored by historians and other segments of academia (and an area I’ve worked in, and published a bit myself), this is a model of following the evidence where it leads. If there is “a book I wish I’d written,” this might be it.

Footnote 33 – Robert H. Gundry, Jesus The Word According to John the Sectarian: A Paleofundamentalist Manifesto (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 73–74.

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“[T]he sense of embattlement with the world is rapidly evaporating among many evangelicals, especially evangelical elites, among them those who belong to the “knowledge industry.” In the last half century they have enjoyed increasing success in the world of biblical and theological scholarship. They reacted against the separatism of the fundamentalist forebears, who precisely in their separation from the world knew they had a sure word from God for the world.… with the consequent whetting of our appetite for academic, political, and broadly cultural power and influence are coming the dangers of accommodation, of dulling the sharp edges of the gospel, of blurring the distinction between believers and the world, of softening—or not issuing at all—the warning that God’s wrath abides on unbelievers (John 3:36), in short, of only whispering the word instead of shouting him, speaking him boldly, as the Word himself did.”

Robert H. Gundry, Jesus The Word According to John the Sectarian: A Paleofundamentalist Manifesto for Contemporary Evangelicalism, Especially its Elites, in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 73–74; cited in Steve Wolfgang, “Good News of Victory,” in The Gospel in the Old Testament, Ed. Daniel W. Petty (Temple Terrace, FL: Florida College Press, 2003), p.202, LOGOS edition.

Footnote 32 – Bob Greene, Duty: A Father, His Son, And The Man Who Won The War. HarperCollins, 2000, 2009. Kindle Edition, pp. 13-15.

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Bob Greene’s book about his father’s death reports conversations he had with Paul Tibbetts, who lived in retirement not far from the Green family home in Columbus, OH. For those who might not know, Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. (February 23, 1915 – November 1, 2007), was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force, best known as the pilot of the Enola Gay – named for his mother – the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in the history of warfare. That bomb, code named “Little Boy,” was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945.

Any child of “Greatest Generation” parents, especially those of us who are losing or have lost them, can surely relate to Greene’s reflection on this Memorial Day. Today I am remembering James H. Wolfgang (August 13, 1922 – March 20, 2015), whose one and only “European trip” was via Omaha Beach in 1944, and for whom Memorial Day was always very meaningful.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Do people know my name?” Tibbets asked. He was repeating the question I had just asked him. A soft, private look crossed his face.

“They don’t need to know my name,” he said. The deed he had carried out was one of the most famous the world has ever known; it will be talked about in terms of fear and awe forever. He, though, even here in the town where he lived, was not as famous as the local television weatherman.

“People knowing my name isn’t important at all,” he said. “It’s more important—it was more important then, and it’s more important now—that they know the name of my airplane. And that they understand the history of what happened. “Although sometimes I think that no one really understands the history.”

And so we started to talk. Neither of us knew it that day, but it would be the first of many conversations—about the war, about the men and women who lived through it, about their lives, and the lives of their sons and daughters: the lives of those of us who came after them, who inherited the world that they saved for us.

As I sat with Tibbets that first day—thinking of my father in his bed just a few miles away—it occurred to me that Eisenhower was dead, Patton was dead, Marshall was dead, MacArthur was dead. And here was Tibbets, telling me in the first person the story of how the great and terrible war came to an end.

… gradually the stories would expand in context, would begin to explain to me certain things not just about this man, but about the generation of men and women who are leaving us now every day.

It is a wrenching thing, to watch them go. As the men and women of the World War II generation die, it is for their children the most intensely personal experience imaginable—and at the same time a sweeping and historic one, being witnessed by tens of millions of sons and daughters, sons and daughters who feel helpless to stop the inevitable.

For me, as my father, day by day, slipped away, the over-whelming feeling was that a safety net was being removed—a safety net that had been there since the day I was born, a safety net I was often blithely unaware of. That’s what the best safety nets do—they allow you to forget they’re there. No generation has ever given its children a sturdier and more reliable safety net than the one our parents’ generation gave to us.

The common experience that wove the net was their war. And as I began to listen to Tibbets—to hear his stories, later to question him about the America that preceded and followed the war from which his stories came—I realized anew that so many of us only now, only at the very end, are beginning to truly know our fathers and mothers. It was as if constructing that safety net for their children was their full-time job, and that finally, as they leave us, we are beginning to understand the forces that made them the way they were.

Tibbets began to speak, and as I listened I thought I could hear a rustle of something behind the words—I thought I could hear the whisper of a generation saying goodbye to its children.

Books As Friends

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Here’s the fairly well-known account of J.W. McGarvey’s farewell to his “friends” (his books) from the Facebook page, “Friends of the Restoration.” As someone on the page observed, “One who does not have them cannot understand the sentiment involved.”

https://books.google.com/books?id=zITVAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22lands+of+th One who does not have them cannot understand the sentiment involved e+bible%22+mcgarvey&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GAAGVbLpFe_dsAS44IKgAQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22lands%20of%20the%20bible%22%20mcgarvey&f=false

“I had already been upstairs in my library to take a last look there, and as I gazed upon the rows of familiar books I said within myself, ‘goodbye, my dear old friends; and if I never see you again, God bless you for the good you have done me and the happy hours we have spent together.” (Lands of the Bible, p. 387).

Book on the origin of Israel available

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This book is still available on Kindle at $2.99

Ferrell Jenkins's avatarFerrell's Travel Blog

Daniel I. Block’s book, Israel: Ancient Kingdom or Late Invention?, is available in Kindle format today for $2.99. The retail price of the hardback is $28.

The publisher (B&H) of the 2008 book describes it as

a collection of essays responding to the radical claims that Israel and its history actually began following the Babylonian exile, and that the history of Israel we read about in the Bible is a fictionalized account.

Contributors are leading Bible and archaeology scholars who bring extra-biblical evidence to bear for the historicity of the Old Testament and provide case studies of new work being done in the field of archaeology.

The book includes the following essays dealing with some of the current discussions in Biblical studies.

  • Israel – Ancient Kingdom or Late Invention? – Daniel I. Block
  • The Value and Limitations of the Bible and Archaeology – Alan R. Millard
  • Contextual Criticism…

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Can We Still Believe the Bible?

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Daniel B. Wallace's avatarDaniel B. Wallace

Can-We-Still-Believe-the-Bible-200x300

Craig Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary, has written another outstanding volume. Blomberg is a committed evangelical, but not one with a closed mind. As he says in his preface about the environment of Denver Seminary (quoting Vernon Grounds, former president of the school), “Here is no unanchored liberalism—freedom to think without commitment. Here is no encrusted dogmatism—commitment without freedom to think. Here is a vibrant evangelicalism—commitment with freedom to think within the limits laid down by Scripture.” Blomberg’s writings have always emulated this philosophy. His research in the secondary literature is consistently of superb quality, and his discussions of problem passages and issues, especially in the Gospels, is always well informed. Rather than clutter the narrative with documentation, Blomberg has wisely used endnotes instead of footnotes (though I personally prefer footnotes, I understand that most readers see them as a distraction). This book has nearly…

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Not What You Think: Most Popular Bible Translation?

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Not What You Think: Most Popular Bible Translation?

NIV vs. KJV: Surveys and searches suggest the translation that most Americans are reading is actually not the bookstore bestseller.

Excerpts from Christiaity Today — read more at http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/march/most-popular-and-fastest-growing-bible-translation-niv-kjv.html?utm_source=ctweekly-html&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_term=13563403&utm_content=255150180&utm_campaign=2013

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra        [ posted 3/13/2014 11:17AM ]The Most Popular and Fastest Growing Bible Translation Isn't What You Think It Is

When Americans reach for their Bibles, more than half of them pick up a King James Version (KJV), according to a new study advised by respected historian Mark Noll. The 55 percent who read the KJV easily outnumber the 19 percent who read the New International Version (NIV). And the percentages drop into the single digits for competitors such as the New Revised Standard Version, New America Bible, and the Living Bible.

So concludes “The Bible in American Life,” a lengthy report by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Funded by the Lilly Foundation, researchers asked questions on what David Briggs of the ARDA, which first reported the results, calls “two of the most highly respected data sources for American religion”—the General Social Survey and the National Congregations Study.

The numbers are surprising, given the strong sales of NIV translations in bookstores. The NIV has topped the CBA’s bestselling Bible translation list for decades, and continued to sell robustly in 2013. The high numbers of KJV readers confirm the findings of last year’s American Bible Society (ABS) State of the Bible report. On behalf of ABS, Barna Group found that 52 percent of Americans read the King James or the New King James Version, compared with 11 percent who read the NIV.

The KJV also received almost 45 percent of the Bible translation-related searches on Google, compared with almost 24 percent for the NIV, according to Bible Gateway’s Stephen Smith.  In fact, searches for the KJV seem to be rising distinctly since 2005, while most other English translations are staying flat or are declining, according to Smith’s Google research.

Smith, whose research on how technology is shaping Bible use is profiled in this month’s CT cover story, blended data from Google Trends and the Google Keyword Tool to see how English Bible translations compare in search terms. Bible translation searches may not necessarily be an indicator of Bible translation usage—a Bible Gateway study earlier this year found dramatic differences between the cities most likely to search for Bible verses and the American Bible Society’s list of top “Bible-minded” cities.

Nevertheless, other studies also indicate that the KJV remains the translation powerhouse. A 2011 Lifeway study, for example, found that 62 percent of Americans—and 82 percent of Americans who regularly read the Bible—own a copy of the KJV.

“Although the bookstores are now crowded with alternative versions, and although several different translations are now widely used in church services and for preaching, the large presence of the KJV testifies to the extraordinary power of this one classic English text,” Noll commented in the IUPUI report. “It also raises most interesting questions about the role of religious and linguistic tradition in the makeup of contemporary American culture.”

READ MORE AT http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/march/most-popular-and-fastest-growing-bible-translation-niv-kjv.html?utm_source=ctweekly-html&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_term=13563403&utm_content=255150180&utm_campaign=2013

CT has reported on ABS’s State of the Bible reports, including how the Bible gained 6 million new antagonists in 2013.

A Film Any Person of Conscience Should Probably See

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A Film Any Person of Conscience Should Probably See

Bette and I saw “12 Years A Slave” this weekend (we often wait to see it in one of the inexpensive late-run theaters). 

It was brutal, raw, and offensive on many levels — and ought to be seen by persons of conscience. Here are a few excertps from Crosswalk.com, detailing the particulars. Read more at http://www.crosswalk.com/culture/movies/12-years-a-slave-movie-review.html?ps=0

We’ve seenslavery depicted on film before, but not like this.

12 Years a Slave is the adaptation of a little known memoir by 19th-century African-American Solomon Northup, a free man by birth living in New York who was kidnapped into slavery. It’s a visceral, relentless look, one so unflinching that I became genuinely concerned for the welfare of the actors.

It also examines the business of slavery in detail. Seeing the system at work compounds the oppression. This shame didn’t happen just by force but by calculation, one of perverse sociopathic indifference. Human bondage was not just circumstantial; it was societal. The scope communicates the hopelessness.

Indeed, slavery was the very foundation of an entire economic culture, one on which a civilization was built and sustained. It required people to be kept, moved, and treated worse than animals because there is a spirit and soul in humans that must be dehumanized. We see how the intricacies of a Slavery Society do that, and why slave uprisings – which may make for provocative historical fiction – rarely, if ever, occurred. Violence breaks the body, but it’s the system that breaks the soul.

Read more at http://www.crosswalk.com/culture/movies/12-years-a-slave-movie-review.html?ps=0

iPads in the Pulpit – Bible Design Blog

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iPads in the Pulpit – Bible Design Blog

iPads in the Pulpit

Posted by  on Thursday, August 22, 2013

Excerpts:

[A previous post] “got a lot of people thinking, which is to say, it got them riled up.”

An iPad in the pulpit, Barrett contends, sends a different message than a physical Bible to the congregation, because people associate the iPad with media consumption. The physical book we now think of as the text, whereas we still distinguish between the e-reader, a technological device for consuming the text, and the text itself. When the pastor flashes his iPad, we see the device, not the Bible.

…. “many culture critics [argue] that the use of e-books contributes to the problem of illiteracy. The way we experience the text via a Bible app leaves us with less of a sense of the big picture, how the whole book fits together. And because the virtual text is disembodied, its symbolism seems at odds with Christian theological values: “as physical beings who gather together as an assembly in a tangible place,” isn’t it strange to replace the physical book with a multi-use e-reader? Might not the physicality of baptism and the Lord’s Supper be set in uncomfortable relief when the proclamation of the Word loses its physical touchstone? Not to mention, the use of e-readers removes the physical proclamation inherent in carrying a physical Bible into the world. People see your printed Bible and react to it very differently than they do to your iPad.

Open The iPad Mini has lower resolution than the Clarion, but higher opacity. It’s slimmer, too.  ….

The convenience of Bible apps is a good thing.

Thanks to smartphone Bible apps, people have access to the text at times and in places they ordinarily wouldn’t. Most of us don’t carry printed Bibles everywhere we go. I can’t count the number of times prior to the advent of smartphones that I wanted to check a quotation, look up a cross reference, or simply read but couldn’t thanks to the fact that I didn’t have a physical copy of the Bible near to hand. Those days are pretty much over. Because the technology is still relatively new, people who don’t ordinarily take an interest in the Bible seem to get excited about it …

But e-readers are not an unqualified good.

My hope for e-books is not that they’ll go away, but that in the future they will get better, eventually surpassing physical books. They have a long way to go, however….

The downside I see with the use of Bible apps is not the software itself, but the larger context of the media consumption device — not the e-books, in other words, but the e-readers. When sermons bored me as a kid, I found myself flipping through the color maps in the back of the Bible. If you bore me while I’m holding my iPad, I have more sophisticated means of distraction at my fingertips.

I use the ESV Study Bible app in church from time to time, mainly because I appreciate the notes but don’t have a special load-bearing harness required for carrying the printed edition. (I exaggerate, but the thing is heavy.) While I’m not one of those people who forgets to switch his phone to silent mode –– my phone lives in silent mode –– I can’t seem to open it without a flood of notifications spilling across the screen. I’ll admit I’ve found myself glancing at incoming e-mails when I was supposed to be following along with a reading.

We give ourselves far too much credit when it comes to multi-tasking. The people in my life who rely uncritically on screens tend to be the most scattered and disengaged, the most shallow. (Sometimes I’m one of them.) This is not because such outcomes are inevitable with the switch to screens. It’s just that they’re harder to avoid, requiring more discipline. Still, some context is helpful. I’ve done a lot of Bible reading in church that had nothing to do with the sermon simply because I was more interested in the text than I was in the sermon….

There’s a larger question: screens in worship. And e-readers aren’t the worst offender.

Our anxiety about small screens in worship seems belated, mainly because the battle seems to have been fought and lost some time ago. For many evangelicals, at least, the idea of worshipping without screens is rather scandalous. Hymnals are remembered as something akin to a medieval torture device. Ditching them in favor of the then-new projection screen is supposed to have liberated worship. Instead of looking down, we could look up. Instead of each worshipper absorbed in a private world, ours eyes could be fixed on the same object.

To be frank, if I could give every pastor in the world an iPad in exchange for pulling down the projection screens, I would do it in a heartbeat. My tolerance for misspelled, unpunctuated lyrics projected onto sentimental backdrops ran out long ago. The conversion of our churches into something resembling a mid-tier sports bar is more than a subtle shift, and the messages it sends are not subtle, either. For every instance of the technology being used well, there must be a thousand examples of it used poorly. In my mind the experiment has failed, only most of us are too deep in to back out now.

Perhaps that knowledge is what makes some of us want to push back against the enthusiasm of early adopters. Once a medium is embraced uncritically and goes mainstream, people come to expect its use. So what if it’s used badly –– that badness has become the new norm. Some people prefer it, just as they prefer other inferior experiences to which they’ve grown accustomed.

To the extent that the rise of the new screens prompts us to go back and examine the question of screens as a whole, I welcome the scrutiny. It seems to me that Bible apps in worship have a lot of potential, but if we adopt them in the same spirit with which we have adopted projection screens, the results will be similar: a flawed norm whose ubiquity tends to mitigate against necessary course corrections. …

Paper as a technology should not be sold short.

One footnote is in order, since this is a site dedicated to the physical form of the Bible. Don’t sell paper short too quickly, as if its the technology equivalent of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the First World War. While I’m a lover of obsolete technology, my thing for print isn’t an expression of that fondness.

Before there was a digital revolution, there was a desktop printing revolution which made print a more viable and flexible technology than ever, putting the tools of the book into the hands of the people of the Book like never before….. Paper is still the best technology for a lot of applications, and there’s no reason why churches can’t be places where print is done well…My point is, people who feel defensive about printing often do so out of an anxiety that printed books can’t defend themselves. Like the arts, they need some kind of subsidy to survive. I’m not sure that’s the case. All print needs, really, is for people who’ve overcome their uncritical love of screens to recognize that, for all their potential, screens aren’t the solution to every problem. Sometimes paper is better technology. The ideal future would be one in which we use the print where print works best and e-books and apps where they work best without letting the means of delivery or transmission loom larger than the message itself.

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Read more at http://www.bibledesignblog.com/2013/08/ipads-in-the-pulpit.html