Getting Serious About Bible Study

Could devotional reading of the Bible hinder the maturity of Christians? If devotionals become the pietistic substitution of devotion for serious study of the Bible, I believe categorically the answer to be yes.

Daily Devotionals or Bible Studies? - Apologia Christi.

Daniel’s article has started me seriously thinking about my own Bible reading.

As Daniel points out:

I confess, though, that the difference between "devotional Bible reading" and serious Bible studying is hard to define.

Most of my experience with anything approaching serious Bible study has been taking the Precept courses a member of my former church gave on the books of 1 Corinthians and Hebrews. Unfortunately, she went back to a “real” teaching job and the remaining Precept teachers in the area only offer night courses (which I can’t attend because I work second shift.)

But I did like the courses however. I liked going over the same passages every day and finding the subject break points myself. I liked looking up the Greek words used in the letters and finding their meanings.

So I have decided to get serious about my Bible reading. (Which in all honesty, I can’t call “Bible study.”) Not a “quit-my-job-and-go-to-seminary” kind of getting serious, but a “way-to-into-his-hobby” seriousness. I’m sort of modeling what I’ll be doing on the way “serious amateurs” approach hobbies like astronomy or photography.

As I see it, if I were a serious amateur astronomer I would be doing the following:

1. Spending a lot of money on equipment that I probably shouldn’t.
2. Subscribe to any useful journals/magazines on the market.
3. Look for any books that I can find on the topic.
4. Learn the jargon so I could understand the journals/magazines/books I was reading.
5. Locate and hang out with other people who share my same passion for astronomy.
6. Attending conferences, lectures, etc. geared toward serious hobbyists.
7. Building up an impressive (and possibly boring) knowledge base of what I know.

Accept for the first item, I’m pretty sure that a serious amateur Bible scholar would do all of the other items on the list. Perhaps specialty software could be substituted for equipment on the list. I had planned to learn New Testament Greek this year, so that might also be considered another item for the list.

My first step on this journey will be to see about identifying journals and magazines on the topic. One thing I’ve learned is that journals are a great asset in learning something new. They keep you up to date with what’s happening right now and they help point you to other resources. They also give you a better feeling that what you are involved in is a living community the way books can’t.