Back in 2008 Mark Bauerlein published a not-so-subtle book called The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. It was recommended by Harold Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind as “An urgent and pragmatic book on the very dark topic of the virtual end of reading among the young.”

Also in 2008 Nicholas Carr of Wired magazine wrote an article in The Atlantic titled, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr confessed that:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

What does it mean to read something? Is it legalistic to think that you need to read every word before it counts? Does skimming count for reading a book? What about listening to an audio book?

The increase in our antsy-ness as we read and the decline in our tolerance for deep or close reading affects the way we approach reading the Bible, the Greatest Book. Proverbs 30:5 reminds us that “Every word of God proves true.” There are no throwaway parts of scripture. Skimming His Word shows that we don’t take him seriously, but so does a legalistic running our eyes over every word without grasping the message.

What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast Read the Whole Bible Every Year?

Intro

Discipleship aims to catalyze the personal spiritual transformation that theologians call sanctification. Discipleship is a type of deep learning. Exposure to information does not produce transformation, yet most discipleship programs major on passive encounters with content. Join me today for a stimulating discussion of the merits of personal Bible reading.

Wrestling, Not Reading

This is the fourth episode this season on discipleship. If you’ve listened to the other three (which I recommend for needed context), I’ve tried to make the case that nothing less than individual wrestling with ideas can produce personal understanding and ownership. Unless biblical concepts rule your thinking, you will not be transformed. Exposure to a powerful sermon that aims to persuade remains a blip on the radar until you personally lock onto the target idea and wrestle with its justification. That might happen naturally for a few highly motivated individuals. For most listeners it will only happen due to a purposeful discipleship program that takes them beyond passively hearing to actively wrestling with the pastor’s argument. The most productive way to do this is by using well-crafted questions in a small group discussion. I do mean a discussion and not a lecture about the sermon or questions that the teacher eventually answers. The atmosphere should be a communal wrestling which includes pushback, nudges, and corrections—active engagement, not passive exposure.

I’ve said before that telling is not teaching because for the audience it is a passive encounter with a body of information. The same thing can be said about personal Bible reading. For many people daily Bible reading is more of a matter of discipline than a personal encounter with eye-opening, heart-transforming truth. They struggle to stay focused and to “get something out of it.”

When the focus is “getting something out of it,” many resort to using a brief devotional like those in Our Daily Bread. While these may be edifying, they are like snack foods—you can’t build a healthy spiritual life that way. Someone took the time to extract a thought-provoking nugget from scripture in a well-written devotional, but it wasn’t you. You are a passive recipient, and consequently you are very likely to quickly forget what you read.

It isn’t just you; most people have trouble remembering what they read. Pamela Paul, now a columnist and previously the editor of the New York Times Book Review and thus a professional reader confessed in a 2018 interview,

“‘I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.’

For example, Paul [said] she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. ‘While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution,’ she says. ‘Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution.’

[Reading for her] …is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.”

Perhaps that’s you and the residue from your Bible reading. If it is, you’ve probably entertained the thought “what’s the point?” That’s a very good question. Something needs to change. Before I work toward a solution, let’s look at the bigger picture.

Remember that the printing press was invented by Gutenberg in 1440 and the first Bible for the masses (the Gutenberg Bible) was printed in 1455. This means that it was impossible for most people in Bible times to have a daily Bible reading schedule. Memorization was of paramount importance in recalling scripture. Committing to memory the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible) was an important goal for Jewish boys. Written copies of the Torah were scarce, and many Jews were not literate, so memorization came primarily from hearing others recite scripture.

This means that daily Bible reading is not commanded in scripture. To be clear, I’m not against reading your Bible daily, but I am saying that we must be careful not to unduly elevate the commands of men. Ecc. 12:13 summarizes our responsibility: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” To fear God is to reverence Him and by implication wanting to know as much as we can of what He has chosen to tell us. We are to treasure His words and find direction from them.

The process of committing scripture to memory in Bible times involved more than mere repetition. The mind needs some structure in order to remember. This means looking for a narrative or for a logical sequence. This is not a requirement for reading. Reading is fundamentally a decoding of symbols and syntax which get us back to words in sentences and paragraphs. This product is what oral communication delivers directly. We can hear speech but fail to engage with it and the same is true of our reading.

 Memory: Encoding, Not Recording

Neither speech nor reading constitute a file transfer protocol that copies content into our brains. If the brain decides to pay attention to words and sentences, it begins a process of encoding. Encoding means the brain will take apart what it hears or reads in terms of the ideas (the concepts) in the content. It will attempt to enrich our existing conceptual categories and/or create new connections between concepts. There is no raw information storage in the brain—only assimilated concepts can be retained.

Take for example the thought from Psalm 119:11 (NASB 1995) “Your word I have treasured in my heart, That I may not sin against You.”

Your brain may remember those exact words due to brute-force memorization, but that can be accomplished without understanding. If we look at how the brain seeking understanding unpacks this verse in order to encode it, it will start with the concepts: word, treasured, heart, and sin. Each of these is a category in the brain that represents a pattern previously recognized. In the event the category hasn’t yet been created, the work would begin by recognizing there is a new idea that doesn’t fit anywhere.

The nature of the categories (that is the concepts) can be enlarged and enriched by looking at other instances of the concept. For example, the concept of “word” contains the Bible, but it also includes all of God’s communication to humans. Hebrews 1:1-2 (ESV) helps here: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.” Continuing, the concept of “treasure” includes everything that I value highly. This includes love letters from my wife, as well as money and other valuables including identifiers like my social security number and passport. Because these are valued, I may hide them, i.e. put them in a safe and secure place. In this passage I put them in my heart, i.e. the core of my being, the seat of my mind, will, and emotions. The reason I put them in this safe place is to prevent sin. Sin is a broad concept including sins of omission and commission. I haven’t put God’s communication in a safety deposit box that I never open. To the contrary, I am well aware of what He has said, and I put that communication in a place I can readily access so I can remind myself of His expectations and the grace He promises that will enable obedience. The net result of such deliberative thinking may be to remember the exact sentence, but with the incalculable benefit of understanding. That is the goal. Prov. 4:7 (NET) “Wisdom is supreme—so acquire wisdom, and whatever you acquire, acquire understanding!”

Study, Not Reading

This means that reading is not the right word for what we should do when interacting with God’s word. Reading is only the decoding of symbols and syntax, and we need to go much further, or we will indeed be “forgetful hearers.” This calls for daily Bible study and not mere reading. More on that in a minute.

Because of the hectic schedules many of us keep, pastors and Bible teachers often try to soften the time commitment for our daily contact with scripture. For beginners they may suggest 5-6 minutes per day will allow the entire NT to be read in one year. For the more ambitious, they promote reading through the Bible in a year with the assurance that it will only take 12-15 minutes per day. Crossway publishers has a site where they tell you how long it will take to read each book of the Bible. It sounds like the New York Times which has taken to labeling articles similarly, so you’ll have an idea of the time commitment as you decide whether to go past the title of an article and actually read it. In all of these instances this is surface reading. It is not a thoughtful reading. You’re going for the gist.

John Piper is an advocate for reading through the Bible yearly. Here are his thoughts on the practice:

“We read the whole Bible — even though I know we are reading parts of it fast and not understanding everything we read because we’re not stopping to look everything up or find out what things mean that we don’t understand. I get that. That’s true for me as well. I still think it’s important to cover the whole range and grow in understanding year after year, rather than think we have to stop and understand everything we’re reading.”

Piper acknowledges that reading through the whole Bible in a year is likely to mean reading much of it without understanding. However, you can’t as he says, “grow in understanding year after year” without moving out of coverage mode; that is to say, you’ll have to stop reading at times and study even though it means you may not finish your scheduled daily reading. The coverage monkey creates unnecessary pressure and even guilt.

Some people make coverage more likely by turning to an app that reads to them while they drive or do other things. The Bible becomes the soundtrack for a part of their day. No doubt this is a better choice than many others you might make, but don’t kid yourself that this is equivalent to you reading and it is certainly far from studying the Bible. When you don’t have to do the decoding intrinsic to reading, you reduce brain involvement. It is easier to drift off or be distracted when you are being read to. Indeed, I read to my wife each night to put her to sleep. I only put myself to sleep once while reading to her!

I understand the need for pastors to preach “the whole counsel of God” to get the big picture. Indeed, I think this also applies to our study of the Bible. Left to ourselves we will likely repeatedly read favorite chapters and books of the Bible and leave large sections of scripture untouched, especially in the Old Testament. Although it is not directly commanded in the Bible, I believe that reading through the Bible should be a goal early in your spiritual journey. The Bible is mainly a narrative sometimes simplified as “from a garden to a city.” The fact that there are 66 books in the Bible written by some 40 authors over 1,500-2,000 years doesn’t mean there is nothing that holds them together. That would be true of a human book. The unity of the Bible is remarkable and a testament to its supernatural origin.

Reading the Bible through means we are more likely to see the flow of the narrative. We can help ourselves by including a simultaneous reading of resources including God’s Big Picture by Vaughan Roberts. Few of us have the space to follow author Philip Yancey who tucked himself away alone in a snowbound Colorado cabin for two weeks and read the Bible in its entirety. He concluded that the big picture is, “God doesn’t care so much about being analyzed. Mainly, he wants to be loved.” (p. 50 Disappointment with God.)

There is also big picture benefit in reading large sections of scripture in a concentrated manner when a time of illness puts you in bed or a vacation opens a chunk of free time. I think you need to read through the whole Bible at least several times, but I think you need to do it slowly seeking understanding—not in a single year. If this becomes a yearly ritual, you put yourself right back in the middle of John Piper’s coverage conundrum.

The command in Proverbs 4:7 is clear: “acquire wisdom, and whatever you acquire, acquire understanding!” Understanding the Bible as an integrated whole will not be completed in a lifetime. You need to focus on smaller goals that will contribute to this over-arching goal. In short, your reading needs to lead directly to studying. Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren said,

“When we contrast active with passive reading, our purpose is, first, to call attention to the fact that reading can be more or less active, and second, to point out that the more active the reading the better. . . . [A reader] is better if he demands more of himself and of the text before him.”

p. 5 How to Read a Book (emphasis in original)

It is both amusing and ironic that Adler and Van Doren titled their book How to Read a Book. After all, how can we read their book if we don’t already know how to read? The answer is that we know how to decode symbols and syntax and we stop there. This has been a problem for generations. James Mursell of Columbia University’s Teacher’s College said in 1939,

“It has been shown, for instance, that the average high-school student is amazingly inept at indicating the central thought of a passage, or the levels of emphasis and subordination in an argument or exposition. To all intents and purposes, he remains a sixth-grade reader till well along in college.”

quoted in How to Read a Book

Adler and Van Doren call this analytical reading and the goal is nothing short of understanding what you are reading. To this end you must become an active reader and leave behind the idea that reading is a passive exercise whereby you merely absorb what the author has to say.

Wrestling is Required

This podcast has been devoted to deep and durable learning since its inception over 65 episodes ago. A central truth is that exposure to information does not produce transformation; and discipleship is intrinsically transformation. Nothing less than individual wrestling with ideas can produce personal understanding and ownership. The question then becomes one of the length of the wrestling match and not whether you will wrestle. As you grow in spiritual maturity you can build on what you understand to take on more difficult books or passages in scripture.

One additional caveat: there is a strong tendency among serious students of God’s word to jump too quickly to commentaries and other reference works. They look to adopt a prepackaged position before they have a personal position. My view is that you should struggle on your own until you think you have the major logical framework of a passage in hand before you look at a commentary. For glimpses of how to do that you can look at the previous two podcasts on polarization where we studied Ephesians 1-3 together. It’s fine to do word studies using Strong’s concordance and to use alternative reliable translations to help decipher the author’s argument but resist the temptation to go beyond that until you think you understand. If you are unsure and you’re stuck, work until you can clearly state what your remaining questions are and then go to the commentaries.

So, here’s what I recommend for the first few decades of your discipleship quest. Get a good Bible reading schedule and mark off the readings as you do them. I prefer to alternate books in the OT with those in the NT. You might want to consider a chronological Bible. Read at a rate that will allow you to ask questions of the text and ferret out the author’s argument. Mark your Bible, or even better, print out the relevant chapters so you can mark up the printed pages with arrows, circles, highlighting, color codes, marginal notes, etc. Reacting to what you read is a must for comprehension!

How deep you go depends on the amount of time you can schedule regularly. It also depends on your own background and how difficult study is for you. If you are working for a basic understanding of individual passages and books while working toward reading and studying the entire Bible, I’ve found two to three years to be a good pace in place of the yearly goal. For several decades I’ve followed this practice using the M’Cheyne plan that takes you through the OT once and the NT and Psalms twice. Don’t worry about the morning and evening reading designations or the dates—just keep going and work on one book at a time alternating between the OT and the NT. I also read from a different reliable translation each time through.

Lately I’ve taken time out of this schedule for months-long in-depth studies of Galatians, Ephesians, and Romans. I will go back to the through the Bible approach when I conclude my study of Romans.

Mark 12:30 (ESV) records Jesus’ answer to the question of which is the most important commandment: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” This total commitment includes loving God with all your mind. When we commit ourselves to knowing God as He reveals Himself in His word, God by His Spirit progressively renews our minds.

In closing, I join with the Apostle Paul in Philippians 1:9-10 (ESV): “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.”