Thought on 2 Timothy 2

Today’s reading: Hosea 1-2; 2 Timothy 2

The church today needs a better middle-ground stance on what it means to, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”

Looking around at the broader church today, at least in the West, you tend to see one of two attitudes toward the Word among Christians: (1) A flippant, almost dismissive view of learning the Word, or (2) An overly scholastic devotion to the Word. Between the two extremes, I would much rather see people erring toward the second, but I also feel like that second position, in a way, helps drive the first, which is really problematic.

In that first group I would put a great majority of Western Christians today who genuinely love the Lord, but who have no personal life in the Word to speak of. They know the stories and passages most often taught in Church, and aren’t even necessarily opposed to attending an adult Sunday School class on occasion to learn a little more than they do in the Sunday services, but that’s really the end of their knowledge and exploration of the Word. The reason I say that I think the second group has the impact of driving the first is that I have often heard statements from well-meaning Christians and pastors in that second group like, “Reading isn’t studying the Bible.” There’s this notion that devotional reading is all well and good, but that doesn’t really count as learning the Word; for that you have to “study.” If you really want to learn the Bible you have to learn to do inductive studies, and word studies, and have various commentaries available to you, and your Bible should be all full of notes, highlights, underlinings, etc. And the problem is, if that's the bar for learning the Word, that's a really high bar to get over if you've never even read the New Testament yourself, let alone the whole Bible...

I've said it before on this blog, and I'll say it again here, I think that mentality is a HUGE mistake and leads those Christians who do "study the Bible" to a significantly less complete understanding of the Word than they could otherwise have.

What other book would you ever approach that way? What other book series would you ever suggest someone will best understand by picking a random chapter near the end of the series and doing a sentence-by-sentence breakdown, counting the number of times each word appears in the chapter to determine which words are most important, gathering dictionary definitions on those words, etc. etc. etc.? The answer is "none," that would just be stupid! And yet, that is exactly what so many advocates of "Bible study" teach!

Don't get me wrong, I'm clearly not at all opposed to studying the Bible, but I really do think the way Christians are taught to "study" it is largely a waste.

I always go back to examples like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. If you want someone to enjoy the series, you don't tell them to study the series, you tell them to read it. As you read a series, there will be ideas and themes getting developed that leave you watching for the payoffs and answers later in the series. If you enjoy it, you may read it again, and on the second read you're going to notice more details now that you know where the story is going. The better you know story, the better you know the world the story takes place in, the better you know the characters, etc., the more likely you are to notice something odd or to question why something is the way it is, or how it fits into the broader narrative. It's at that point that you "study." You don't study just for the sake of studying, you study to find an answer to a question the rest of the story doesn't answer, or that the rest of the story leaves open, or that maybe you just don't have the cultural or historical context to answer.

I have old notes from incredibly thorough inductive studies of New Testament books that took us months and years to slowly crawl through verse-by-verse, that today I don't even really consider worth referencing. Why? Because I didn't know the source material! Sure, when a Old Testament passage was quoted we would follow the footnote and cite it, but did we understand that OT book well enough to know why that passage was being quoted? Even if we read the surrounding paragraphs, that's not always sufficient as the specific quote is less important than the theme or idea developed around it in the rest of the book. On top of that, those notes break the passages down in ways, and using techniques, that we would never apply to any other document we were reading and trying to understand. When have I ever counted word occurrences in an email to know what my coworker most wanted to communicate in their email? Never! I trust they know how to write in such a way as to communicate their point. And you know what? So too did the Biblical authors...

It has been many, many years since I have "studied" any passage of Scripture like you're "supposed to" study it. I read Scripture a lot, I memorize it on occasion (though generally a whole book, not individual verses), and I ponder over questions and themes in it, but that's really it. Unless I run into something I can't quite figure out, or a wording that seems off that makes me wonder if maybe the original Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic is just hard to translate into English, I'm content to assume the authors and editors knew how to write a compelling story that would draw their readers in and communicate the points and ideas that were most important. And the reality is, when I stopped "studying" the bible and just started spending that time reading it instead, my understanding of so much of it became so much more complete, and I started to realize how immature so much of my understanding, especially of the New Testament, previously was, and I started enjoying the Scriptures so much more.

And when you think about it, isn't this what Paul's admonition to Timothy was? When he spoke to Timothy about rightly handling the word of truth, there were no volumes of commentaries for Timothy to reference, or original Hebrew resources to compare his Greek Septuagint to. Paul wasn't expecting Timothy to show him how many of his scroll he had highlighted and marked up the next time they saw each other. He was instructing Timothy to read, learn, and understand more deeply the plan of redemption and salvation unfolding through the Scriptures and finding it's completion in Christ. If that was enough for Timothy, what has changed for us? 

If we want to be workers approved by God, rightly handling the word of truth, we might need to consider spending less time studying the Bible and more time reading and enjoying it together in the power of the Holy Spirit.