Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The sheer diversity of literature in the Bible is one of the secrets of its continuing popularity through the centuries. There is something for all moods and many different cultures. Its message is not buried in religious jargon only accessible to either believers or scholars, but reflects the issues that people struggle with in daily life.
The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.
If you see most people neglect the Bible, and many that can read never look into it, let it not harden you and make you think lightly of it, and that it is a book of no worth.
I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me - they're cramming for their final exam.
If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.
I don't pass myself off as a Bible scholar or a pastor or someone who knows all the biblical facts cover-to-cover. I'm just a guy whose life was changed by it. And that's about the extent of it. So I'm not easily offended when people struggle about where they're at with their faith at all.
Readers should aspire to what is excellent. They should refuse to read a substitute Bible. They should want a Bible that calls them to their higher selves - or to something higher than their current level of attainment.
I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable.
We can't allow, in my perception, our traditions, which in the Bible are really looked down upon, to stop, literally, the potential of the gospel reaching the youth of America.
No opposing quotes found.