Books about the Book

So have you actually read the Bible from cover to cover?


No.

And this despite having been a follower of the Lord for about twenty years. So really, all those books he is reading about the Bible, far from being helpful, as he claims, are actually getting in the way. What they should say, on page one, is "Please close this book immediately and instead read the Word of God".
But they don't say anything of the sort.

I didn't know anything about the world of Christian Literature until I started to attend a church. My first experience was down at that big Pentecostal place in town. There, they had a bookshop, or rather a book corner, with a counter that was manned (or, more accurately, womanned) at the busiest times of the day. I had a look at the offering and from what I could see the main author recommended was CS Lewis, and most of his books seemed to be on sale, together with another volume entitled the New International Version in various editions. There were, however, no Bibles.

I know you're going to say "of course there were Bibles on sale - you just said as much", but I should inform you that I do not consider "The Chronicles of Narnia" to be equivalent in any way to the Bible, which book, in the English language, should always have the words "King James Version" inscribed on the cover, spine, and/or frontispiece.

Then I attended a small Plymouth Brethren assembly, before we got at crossed purposes. Here, I remember sitting next to a young Indian gentleman who was clutching a book that might have been a Bible, but pride of place had been awarded to a brand new novella that promised to reveal insights on the gentleness of Jesus' teaching methods. I asked him what it might contain, and when he explained I asked him if it were not true that the same information could be found in that other book that he and I both had on our laps, and he allowed, with a sheepish grin, that this was very likely to be the case.

Finally, I ended up in an evangelical church where the preacher was a true bookworm, to the point that he had his own bookshop in the basement of the building, a matter that I was unhappy about at the time: I thought it was the wrong place for such a business, however religiously motivated. This fellow used to read Christian authors from times past and he often referred to them as great saints and urged his congregation to read more widely. He used to quote these men from the platform, including, as I recall, a long dead Bishop of Norwich, who may have been a worthy fellow indeed but, being a Bishop, he must have been schooled in the art of funny handshakes. 

Coincidentally, I am somewhat familiar with "Norch", having made a bivouac in a churchyard in the centre of town when I was hardly twenty-years of age and having slept there overnight for some reason that I cannot currently recall. I have never since done anything so bold or odd as sleeping in a churchyard in a city centre.

With regard to book-learning, I was not overly popular with the preacher because despite being a wordy sort of fellow by profession and by character, I refused to read anything at all that he recommended. One reason for this is that I only enjoy books with proper plots, characters and action so I cannot abide "serious" tomes, but the main reason is that I am such a new Christian that I needed to spend every minute of available reading time catching up on my knowledge of the Bible, which is packed with action, plots and characters so it ticks all the boxes.

The trouble with all this reading and intellectual activity, apart from its distraction, is that it sometimes inflates the ego, letting men focus on either their own understanding or the insights of other mortals, rather than the sheer majesty of the Word of God.

Then there's the matter of poisoning the well. Like in most other areas of human knowledge, in Christian literature in particular the addition of a little poison to an otherwise healthy exegesis is easily done and very hard to detect until it's too late. But all those authors of times gone-by were just men, and what's more they were men with access to the publishing industry, a matter that should be enough to alert the scrutiny of any experienced truth seeker.

Remember, for example, that even that old faithful Matthew Henry, one of the most well-known and beloved Bible commentators of the 17th Century, is celebrated with an obelisk on his grave, a sure sign that our good friends the Freemasons have been at work.