'Bible-less Christianity' in America's churches

Kenneth Briggs, a longtime religion reporter and former religion editor of The New York Times, went on a two-year pilgrimage across America to track the Bible's status in public life. The result was his book The Invisible Bestseller: Searching for the Bible in America, which was released earlier this month.

He recently did an interview with Religion News Service in which he offered some insights that should be of interest to evangelical Christians. They certainly were to me. Here are the questions and answers that I consider particularly important, even foreboding, for those of us who count ourselves in the evangelical camp:

Q: In all your travels and all the the different places you went looking for the Bible, was there any place where you were expecting to see the Bible where it wasn’t?

A: In the mega-type churches – the churches that were really heavily loaded with the visual and the audio and the rest of the electronic stuff, the music – I was really stunned by what I saw as that alternative verson of Christianity being delivered through those means. I didn’t consider it biblical in the fullest sense. I thought it was highly stylized – the versions of Jesus, who Jesus was, being filtered through these videos – and, in some way, I found almost shocking in how they seemed to vary from the much fuller picture that exists in the New Testament. So I was surprised by that.

Q: You write in the book about the emergence of “Bible-less Christianity.” Can you talk about how you see that play out in American culture?

A: The background, of course, is that the Reformation gave at least a segment of Christians access to the Bible in a way that hadn’t happened before. Most of our history has been a rather Bible-less Christianity that was dictated or defined mostly by the hierarchical church, not by people who read the Bible. . . . We gained the freedom to approach it, and then in the current age, we have ceded that exploration to media, to entertainment forms, to prepackaged interpretations that are delivered in video, audio and pulpit forms so that there’s a substitute Bible that isn’t the Bible, per se, at the same time that people aren’t reading.

If it is true there is what Briggs describes as "Bible-less Christianity," we probably can expect Bible-less Christians. In essence, what his observation seems to indicate is: Bible-less churches are producing Bible-less Christianity and Bible-less Christians.

How can we expect Bible-less churches and Bible-less Christians to stand amidst the torrent of cultural pressure that is likely in the future to engulf all of us who claim the name of Jesus? Without Scripture, how will we have the solid foundation to fortify us? "Bible-less Christianity" is setting up many confessing saints for a disaster.

May God graciously grant a renewal in keeping with the church-transforming, world-changing Reformation of nearly 500 years ago. Fortunately, there are an increasing number of evangelical churches committed to basing their worship, preaching, teaching and the rest of church life on the Bible. That is the intention of Covenant Community Church. May we remain faithful by God's grace.

Photo from WELS net.