And speaking of reading the Bible...

I can't post about the need to read through the Bible without also posting my thoughts on what Bible to read all the way through.  And as seems to be the fashion in the Bible-reading blogosphere these days, I've included a photo of my "Stack" – the Bibles that sit on my desk and get used on a daily basis as part of my daily Bible reading and study.  Granted, not all of them are technically Bibles.  I'm an Anglican and I find it impossible to divorce Bible reading and study from liturgy, and so you'll also see that my "Stack" contains a Prayer Book and the Divine Office too.

From top to bottom:

1) My beloved 1928BCP/KJV "Combo."  The Prayer Book Society printed these years ago and I didn't get one.  When they handed over the rights to the Anglican Catholic Church, I forked over the major dough for one of the new leather copies...then waited, and waited, and waited...for over a year.  But it was worth the wait.  The printing isn't the best ever and the leather cover is more durable and functional than beautiful, but this is my favourite book of the thousands in my library.  It goes with me everywhere and gets used every single day.  This is my "reading" Bible and my personal use BCP.  One big unexpected plus I found with this Bible is that it's a photographic reprint of the standard Oxford edition, so the pages exactly match my wide-margin primary study Bible (#5).

2) The Anglican Breviary was introduced to me by a good friend who also happens to be a priest.  It's essentially a translation into Cranmerian English of the Roman Breviary or Divine Office as it existed in 1911.  Calling it "Anglican" is a bit misleading as it's only Anglican in that it uses the collects from the BCP and the Coverdale Psalter and follows more or less the traditional BCP calendar – the rest is Roman.  This is the collected prayer tradition of Western Christendom.  It continued to evolve in the Roman Church beyond the time of the Reformation and thus I don't always agree with it's doctrine or the "saints" it commemorates, but neither is it something a Protestant can or ought to ignore.  I wish I had the time to pray all eight offices every day, but being in bivocational ministry and having a family, that's just not happening anytime soon.  I generally use the Breviary to supplement Morning and Evening Prayer from the 1928 BCP.  This edition was printed privately by a California attorney and Anglo-Catholic.  The printing is in both red and black and is absolutely beautiful – sometimes I can't help but sit and turn the pages and admire how classy it is.  The cover is some kind of "leatherette" and very stiff.  It looks great, but keeps the book from lying open except in the very middle, and is only in such good condition because this book rarely leaves my desk.

3) The Greek New Testament (4th edition, UBS Text) was a gift that the Canadian Bible Society gave to all seminary students taking Greek.  Somehow I've maintained this in reasonably good condition.  They didn't give away the spendy editions with "flex" or leather covers.  I don't generally do my daily Bible reading in Greek – I reserve that for more serious in-depth study and sermon prep.  One of these days I'd like to replace this with one of Hendrickson's wide-margin GNT's so that I can write notes next to the text.

4) The Oxford Revised Standard Version Bible (with the Apocrypha) is my modern-language Bible and the one that I've usually preached from.  I like using the King James personally, but have found that I need to preach from a modern text.  The RSV has it's problems, but overall it's a pretty good translation into modern, formal English and the fact that it still uses "Thee" and "Thou" in reference to God means it fits in well with the liturgy.  This is a mid-range quality leather copy that is no longer available.  Ever since the New Revised Standard Version (yuck!) came out the RSV has been disappearing, and I think this edition was only printed to celebrate the RSV's fiftieth anniversary.  The English Standard Version is a conservative revision of the RSV text and I expect to be switching to the ESV in my new parish, but they really need to release an Anglican edition that uses Thee/Thou and includes the Apocrypha!

5) I don't generally like "study Bibles" because the notes, if and when they're doctrinally sound, usually tell me things I already know and tend to be absent when I really do have a question about a passage.  My solution has been to make my own.  Number 5 is Oxford's Wide-margin King James Reference Bible in calfskin or as I sometimes call it: The Holy Bible: Ten Pound Version.  This is the mammoth of Bible's and is only smaller than Ye Olde Humongous Family Bible.  I went back and forth between Oxford's edition and the equivalent printed by Cambridge (the Crème de la Crème of Bible publishers).  Cambridge's includes a dictionary and concordance, but I like Oxford's thicker paper and stiffer cover – not to mention that the two high-end Cambridge Bibles I've owned fell apart within two years.  I love this Bible because I can write all sorts of notes, references, glosses, alternate translations, and definitions in all four directions around the text.  As another blogger puts it, "The wide-margin Bible is the thinking man's study Bible."  I think he's right.  If you're going to do serious Bible study a wide-margin Bible is a must-have.

6) Finally, at the bottom of the stack, but the most worn off all, is my Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.  I bought the smaller version of the same Hebrew Bible my first year in seminary and knew that it would by my favourite of all.  If you know me, you know that I'm just an Old Testament lovin' guy.  (Yes, my Sephardic roots are beginning to show.)  As much as I love the New Covenant by which I've been redeemed in Christ Jesus, I love the OT too.  Fact is, you can't really understand the New until you've really studied the Old.  You can never appreciate the grace that mercifully saves you until you first understand the righteous Law by which we all stand condemned.  I loved studying the Old Testament and the only way to really do so is in Hebrew.  My old cheapo (relatively speaking) student edition wore out years ago and was too small anyway, so I replaced it with the full-size (with a matching price tag) edition and love it.  Like my GNT, this is part of all serious Bible study.  If you're planning to purchase a copy, do yourself a favour and do what I did: buy the full-size edition.  Reading tiny Hebrew script is just plain hard on the eyes.  The German Bible Society cover is durable, but not very attractive.  If or when I someday wear it out, I plan to send this off to have it rebound in leather.

Sometimes I feel like the odd man out.  I use the King James for personal study and have always preached from the now defunct RSV.  A few months ago I visited a Bible study group when I was out of town.  There was a broad age range, but at 35 I was the youngest.  Interestingly only two of us were using the King James – the other was the oldest member of the group, who was in her 90's.  I've used other translations.  When I was learning to read my grandparents gave me a Good News Bible, which really did help at a time when I wasn't much of a reader.  I used the New International Version and New King James at various times, but eventually I drifted to the King James.  I'm certainly not of the "King James Only" school of thought.  I simply appreciate the language and the fact that for centuries this was the standard for the English speaking world.  For that reason I like the Revised Standard Version, even with it's shortcomings.  It maintains much of the formal flavour of the King James.  The NASB is written in language no one speaks.  Ditto for the NKJV.  And the NIV...well...it's the NIV.  I'd lost all hope for a really good modern translation until the English Standard Version was released a few years ago.  I'm very impressed with it, and as I said above, it will probably become my main preaching text as I move into a parish that uses modern-language liturgy.

Whatever happened to the Bible in a year?

I found myself pondering this question again when January first rolled around last week. It comes up every year – either with the beginning of Advent or alternatively with the beginning of the new civil year. You see, a number of years ago I got tired of using the Daily Office lectionary from the 1928 BCP as the basis for my daily Scripture readings and decided to try something different each year.

The fact is that every Christian – and even more so every clergyman – ought to be reading through all of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, at least once every year. We all make excuses and we all have to deal with major demands on our time, but if our time here on earth has been graciously given to us in preparation for a life of worship in heaven, shouldn't we be making the study of God's Holy Word a major priority? And really, when it comes down to it, it's not that hard. It works out to about four chapters a day, and just about anyone can manage that.

My parents and my Sunday school teachers THANKFULLY beat the need for daily Bible reading and study into my head from a young age. When I was young my grandparents gave me a Today's English Version and my mom would make up a monthly chart of daily readings and tack it to the wall near the head of my bed. By the time I was at university I had formed the habit of doing the best I could to read the entire Bible through each year. I was only vaguely aware of the Daily Office at that point and the Lectionary was only a confusing chart in the front of the BCP. But along came The One Year Bible, a copy of which was given to me in those years. It moves through the Bible from beginning to end with selections each day from the Old Testament, the New, a Psalm, and few verses from Proverbs. Then came the one I really liked: The Daily Bible. This was even better, because it took one through all of the Bible, but did so chronologically. Almost every year I made it through the Bible from page 1 to page 1957 (yes I used the same Bible for so many years and was so anxious by December to get to that last page, that I still remember the page number where Revelation 22 ended). Even though I wasn't using the Daily Office, I value those years of consistent Bible reading and study.

Eventually I learned how the Daily Office and its accompanying lectionary works and started using the BCP daily. The problem is that the revised lectionary of 1945 found in most 1928 BCP's doesn't take one through ALL of the Bible in a year -- it covers most of the Bible, but as I gradually learned, it's selective (and not just because it attempts to follow the Church Year), it's somewhat antinomian, and it begins to show the liberal bias that the Episcopal Church had by then already swallowed whole. I don't mind using such a lectionary every once in a while, but it's not good for a steady annual diet -- I found it shortchanged me in what it left out. Often I would read the missing portions of Scripture that fell between the specified lessons, but this still doesn't get one reading the WHOLE Bible.

So a few years ago I decided to seek out other options by perusing the other Prayer Books in my collection and sampling their lectionaries. What I basically found is this: up through the various revisions of the 1920's most of them follow the same pattern. Like Cranmer's original, they aren't tied to the Church year. They move through the Bible systematically and most of them, especially the older ones, cover every single verse during the year. (In fact, the oldest covers the Old Testament once in the year and the New Testament TWICE.) The original 1928 American lectionary falls into this category, as do the revised 1662 English lectionary, the Canadian 1918, the English 1928, the Irish 1926, and the Scottish 1929. By 1945 the Episcopal Church had lost the high view of Scripture it once had. Sadly the Lectionary of my own church, the REC, is much more like the ECUSA 1945 than it is the older ones. The Canadian 1962 is even worse and then everything took a dive off a cliff from that point on.

I've enjoyed several years using in turn Cranmer's original lectionary from the 1549, the revised English lectionary of 1871, the 1928 American lectionary, and my favourite: the 1918 Canadian lectionary. I returned to the 1945 in 2006 just to see what the difference was and I was jarred by how much it left out. I guess that experience drove me back to what I hadn't used in years: The One Year Bible. I used it's plan for all of 2007 with a few modifications. I like using the Coverdale Psalter as arranged in The Anglican Breviary, which covers all 150 psalms each week, so I used that instead. This year I'm getting a late (post-Christmas) start with the 1918 Canadian lectionary.

So this is simply the long way of stressing the need for each of us to be faithful to our calling to read the Word and to read it daily – and to regularly read it all. I've found it to be true in my own life that Christian growth stagnates, perhaps even retreats, when I'm not reading and studying the divine rulebook and manual. I've certainly seen it in others. I've known some very knowledgeable Christians whom you'd never know were Christians except for the depth of their theological booklearning. As I've come to know them the common denominator is a lack of consistent and daily Scripture study and prayer.

I urge you as the new (civil) year begins, to find a way to read the Bible through this year and then to make it an annual habit. Find a pre-1945 American BCP or some other old edition, download one of those old lectionaries from the internet, or support your local Christian bookstore and pick up a One Year Bible or Daily Bible and put it to use.