CHAPTER 03

EAT THIS BOOK

I want to hold out for traveling widely in Holy Scripture. For Scripture is the revelation of a world that is vast, far larger than the sin-stunted, self-constricted world that we construct for ourselves out of a garage-sale assemblage of texts.

EUGENE PETERSON, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

MY HUSBAND AND I sat in the back row, new church planters eager for encouragement as we waited for the conference to begin. This was years ago, and while I don’t remember the name of the event or even the speakers, I do vividly recall my first impression. “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” boomed over the speakers as a group of somber men in suits filed silently onto the stage and waited, looking toward the back of the auditorium. Then, as if on cue, one stepped up to the podium and asked us all to stand in reverence for God’s Word.

What happened next stunned me. Four men marched down the center aisle, each holding one corner of a black box on which rested the largest Bible I had ever seen. We all stood silently as they made their way to the front with great pomp and circumstance, placing the Bible and its box on a draped table. The conference had begun.

To be honest, the whole thing felt terribly unsettling. While I’m certain their intent was honorable —to instill in us a greater esteem for God’s Word —the approach felt like overkill, bordering on bibliolatry. And yet it is this memory that I can’t get out of my mind as I prepare to write on the challenges we face regarding our relationship with Scripture as inhabitants of a pressurized, hyperconnected world. Perhaps those conference planners experienced the weight I now feel, one that compels me to put the Bible on display in some way that will, at the very least, make someone sit up and take notice.

While I am aware of how easily my passion might be misconstrued, I cannot overstate the gravity of the threats I believe we face as a people of the Word. There are the statistics alone —while nine out of ten Americans own a Bible, with the average home having four or five, 64 percent of the Millennial generation (ages 18–29) do not view the Scriptures as sacred literature, and 39 percent say they will probably never read it. Far more troubling, however, is that of those who claim to believe the Bible is God’s inspired Word, only 19 percent read it regularly (four or more times per week).

What motivates those who do find the time to read the Scriptures? The research here is also concerning. While just over half say they read to connect with God, this number is steadily decreasing. Instead, people are turning to Scripture more and more primarily for personal comfort or practical tips.[1]

What do these numbers mean, and how might they relate to our pervasive digital engagement? One answer can be culled from what people suggest as the primary reason they don’t engage more with Scripture —they are just too busy.[2]

Something about this rings hollow: If efficiency is the holy grail of technology, then we ought to find ourselves with more time on our hands, not less. This past couple of days, for example, I have done a host of things that once would have taken me two or three times as long —from writing letters to paying bills, from locating information to purchasing groceries and gifts —all made easier and faster because of the Internet. Technology, however, exacts a paradoxical price: It offers us a vast array of ways to fill the time that it saves us. As a result, we feel constrained to take advantage of its largesse —surfing more, texting more, tweeting more, watching more, pinning more, e-mailing more, listening more, playing more, and posting more —as well as responding immediately to anything someone sends our way.

I live in idyllic San Diego, California, where ocean breezes blow and the sun shines most of the time. On those very rare occasions when we have really bad weather (and by this I mean more than one day of heavy rain), San Diegans get almost giddy. Why? Not only because we need it for our drought-prone environment but also because we finally have an excuse to slow down, stay inside, curl up with a book, or watch a movie —without feeling guilty that we’re not going somewhere or doing something. Because our weather offers unlimited options almost 365 days a year, we who live here are prisoners of choice, ever obligated to make the most of what we’ve been given.

What the sun does to San Diegans is what the Internet does to all of us. By making itself available twenty-four hours a day, the World Wide Web compels you and me to take advantage of its endless opportunities until we can’t imagine life any other way. To extricate ourselves on a regular basis seems impossible, even for something as central to our faith as engaging with God in quiet to read and reflect on his Word.

There is an even greater danger, which is that digital life can fool us into believing we are absorbing God’s Word when our exposure is, in fact, negligible. For example, 81 percent of Christian Millennials posted Scripture on social media last year, with 13 percent saying they did so daily.[3] This is the sort of activity the Internet fosters. But how deeply do we engage with these short snippets that grab us with their fascinating fonts? Are we just gliding across the pages, picking and choosing and reposting without giving the text much thought? Is the extent of our theological reflection rooted in scriptural slogans or biblical tips from social media apps, YouTube videos, or websites?

Although it seems that any contact with God’s Word would be profitable and surely preferable to no contact at all, we may be deceiving ourselves. A steady diet of decontextualized parts is risky, and it will certainly skew our understanding of who God is and of his overarching purpose for our lives and the world in which we live. Recently, when I encouraged a young woman to broaden her interaction with Scripture, she explained that she really only likes to read passages to which she feels emotionally connected. Our failure to engage with the whole counsel of God’s Word is our great loss, for God longs to share his entire story with us, to draw us to himself through a grand narrative that includes an incredible array of structures and forms —from loving missives to sober admonitions, from tedious histories to tender tales, and from intriguing mysteries to mundane genealogies.

The Reading Brain and the Book of Life

The leading authority on the neuroscience of language, Stanislas Dehaene, notes that thanks to modern brain imaging, we now know that every time you or I read a single word in print, the combination of letters moves through our retinas and explodes into thousands of fragments within our brain, which then pieces them back together by asking a series of questions:

As I noted in the last chapter, all of this happens in a millisecond without our awareness, an astounding feat that causes Dehaene to ask, “How can a few black marks on white paper projected onto your retina evoke an entire universe?”[4]

Describing our propensity to read as a paradox, Dehaene points out that the human brain is simply like no other in its complexity and ability to learn. He estimates that recognizing isolated letters activates some five hundred columns of brain cells, and the number of neurons that fire when we combine letters into words and then string words together to make meaning is inestimable. Because only humans share these features of a literate brain, the neuroscientist concludes that it seems almost as if we have a “cerebral organ for reading.”

Think of it: Not only did God choose to reveal himself through words, first spoken and then put into print, but he created you and me with this inimitable capacity to read them. Why? The most important reason is that we might know him —his ways, his character, his attributes, and his heart —not through the finiteness of an image set in wood or stone but through words that live, that are layered, nuanced, multiform in their power to illuminate, and yet always able to raise us to new vistas of revelation.

The marvel of the reading brain is perhaps matched only by the miraculous events that surround Scripture’s history. While the Greeks invested the future of their culture in monuments that crumbled under the force of the elements, the Hebrews —wandering nomads more often than not —maintained theirs through holy words that accompanied them wherever they went. From Moses’ transcription on tablets of stone, to the Jewish scribes’ painstaking copying of the Torah scrolls on sheepskin, to the Greek codices of the early church inscribed on papyrus, God preserved his story. But this was just the beginning. For two thousand years this written record of God’s interaction with humankind has been at the heart of a high drama involving corrupt kings and power-hungry religious leaders, devoted scholars and innovative inventors, and a host of saints throughout the centuries who simply would not give up on their dream of making the Bible available to every person in their own language.

The ease with which you and I can access Bibles today belies the tortuous road those precious words have traveled to make their way to our screens or shelves. With more than nine hundred different English translations and paraphrases available to us, it is hard to connect with the story of a young scholar named John Wycliffe risking his life to translate the first English version of the Scriptures as he painstakingly transcribed it by hand. The 140 million of us who have downloaded the most popular Bible app over the past few years[5] have probably never considered that we could do so only because men like John Hus and William Tyndale were once burned at the stake for propagating God’s Word. Accustomed as we are to seeing the Bible top the bestseller list year after year with a hundred million Bibles sold or given away annually, we can’t even imagine Johannes Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century printing press with its first print run of just 180 Bibles.

An impressive 56 percent of Americans still say they believe the Bible to be the actual or inspired Word of God without error, which makes the fact that it is so rarely read all the more a conundrum.[6] But we are a people who live in an age of perpetual motion, and we tend to wear our busyness as a badge of honor. On those rare occasions when we do purpose to open the Bible and read, we may well find ourselves hopelessly distracted. Philosopher and theologian David Wells suggests that “the affliction of distraction” is the greatest challenge of our age, and he goes on to ask, “How, then, can we receive from Scripture the truth God has for us if we cannot focus long enough, linger long enough, to receive that truth?”[7] Indeed.

Confronting the Affliction of Distraction

In my daily devotional times I turn to my tablet to compare Bible versions and check commentaries. I also rely on a Bible app on my phone for memory work and word meanings. These are amazing tools, and I am grateful to have them. Yet when I want to read, ponder, meditate, and reflect on Scripture in order to commune with God, I pick up my well-worn print Bible. I made the switch back to it several months ago when I realized that something about the digital experience felt sterile, like shaking hands with someone wearing rubber gloves. The words are the same, and in fact more readable than my 1974 Broadman & Holman New American Standard Bible, with its archaic thees and thous. But something about a hypertext encounter with Scripture makes me restless, and before I know it, I’ll find myself checking e-mails or texts or even the weather. When I’m gazing at a screen, I find it hard to focus on God’s presence, to listen to the Spirit, or even to ponder the beauty of the words before me.

I don’t doubt that it’s possible to engage deeply with God via digital media, but I suspect that our devices are much better at distracting us than drawing us into times of reflection. Recently, I had a conversation about this with a group of seminary students. Each one shared how he or she did not have any consistent rhythm of communing with God over his Word. While a couple of these future church leaders indicated a desire to do so, others appeared not to have thought much about the issue at all. There was an almost palpable sense of angst about their harried lives as the young men and women bantered back and forth. My heart ached for these overloaded students who couldn’t even conceive of there being a better way.

The truth is that every Christ follower, by virtue of the Spirit who dwells within us, yearns for intimate communion with God. We are made for it. Prayerfully pressing into the Word that he has given us will not only transform our hearts and fulfill our souls but will also lead to more peaceful balance in all the parts of our lives. We cannot hope to live out our destiny as those called to know God any other way, but until we are convinced of this, we won’t forge ahead with the discipline and determination needed to change deeply ingrained life patterns. Wells so very powerfully reminds us of this:

If we are convinced that we need, above all, to know God, to know who he is in his character, that will trump every competing interest. But we have to be utterly convinced. Being halfhearted and divided in our focus will not get us where we want to be. . . . Without this ability to stop, to focus, to linger, to reflect, to analyze, and to evaluate, we begin to lose touch with the God who has called us to know him.[8]

This ability of which Wells speaks —to stop, linger, focus, reflect, and so on, in order to know God —may be harder to come by than it’s ever been. Because we’re becoming increasingly wired for activity and motion, establishing the necessary neural pathways in our brains will take intention, follow-through, and some unique ways of connecting with God through Scripture.

Two of these ways —one conceptual and one practical —can be particularly helpful here, not only in helping us find focused time with God in his Word but also in establishing this as a life practice. The first is receptive reading, which strengthens our ability to focus. The second is retentive reading, which enhances our capacity for attentiveness.

Strengthening Focus through Receptive Reading

Francis Bacon, known as the father of the scientific method, once wrote about the reading process: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Being a religious man, Bacon was probably hearkening back to times when the metaphor of eating a book shows up in Scripture. For example, the prophet Jeremiah offered these beautiful thoughts about ingesting God’s message:

Your words were found, and I ate them,

and your words became to me a joy

and the delight of my heart,

for I am called by your name,

O LORD, God of hosts.

JEREMIAH 15:16

Bibliophagy, a real word that is used to describe the metaphor of eating books, depicts an earthy engagement with the words we read that is almost palpable in its effect. Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, wrote a challenging little treatise on this process, appropriately titled Eat This Book, in which he points out that often our approach to Scripture is to use it for our own purposes —knowledge or inspiration or direction. He exhorts us instead to “eat” it for God’s purposes —to metabolize it so that it changes us:

Christian reading is participatory reading, receiving the words in such a way that they become interior to our lives, the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, acts of obedience, ways of love.[9]

I refer to this kind of engagement with God in Scripture as receptive reading —we actively consume his Word by asking questions, probing ideas and pondering our own lives until it seeps down into the very bones and marrow of our being. To receive God’s Word —whether reading a verse or two or an entire chapter —means to be thoughtful, disciplined, and deliberative about what we read, which requires a level of focus that may at first be difficult to maintain. But a consistent practice of even ten minutes a day can go a long way toward rewiring our brains for reflection and depth, making it easier for us to increase the time as our desire grows.

David Wells notes that there are three components to every communication —the words used, what the speaker hopes to convey, and the outcome the speaker desires in those who hear —all of which come into play in our interaction with God’s Word.[10] I have summarized these with three questions that can help us secure and maintain our focus as we read:

Whatever the methods we use to focus our minds and hearts on Scripture, we can never forget the wonder that the voice speaking these words to us is that of God himself. Because this is so important and so easy to forget, I always begin my personal focus in God’s Word by acknowledging his presence in prayer, affirming my awareness that I hold his living Word in my hands. This prepares my heart to eat the words, to embrace the kind of receptive reading that honors the author and moves my soul.

Strengthening Attentiveness through Retentive Reading

Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest theologians in church history, was a lover of Scripture, perhaps in part because of his dramatic conversion when he heard a childlike voice singing, “Take up and read, take up and read,” which he interpreted as a divine command to peruse the Bible. When he did, a light flooded his soul and the words from Romans 13 pierced his heart. For the next four decades, he displayed an unparalleled passion to know, understand, teach, write about, and live God’s Word. While much of what he penned was theological and scholarly, the following offers insight into how practical his approach was.

Whenever you read a book and come across any wonderful phrases which you feel stir or delight your soul, don’t merely trust the power of your own intelligence, but force yourself to learn them by heart and make them familiar by meditating on them, so that whenever an urgent case of affliction arises, you’ll have the remedy ready as if it were written on your mind. When you come to any passages that seem to you useful, make a firm mark against them, which may serve as lime in your memory, less otherwise they might fly away.[11]

Memorization of any kind, but of Scripture in particular, is both spiritually valuable and incredibly beneficial for your mind. Storing memories is something the brain handles in a unique way. Because it cannot retain all of the things we see, learn, or experience, neural pathways develop based on either the emotional strength of the input —such as any traumatic experience —or how much attention we pay to something through concentration and repetition. Attention is like a muscle in the brain: When we memorize something, we are giving our ability to pay attention a workout, which in turn strengthens and hones all of our cognitive capacities.

This is especially important as we grow older and the neural pathways in our brains begin to atrophy, causing memory loss and senility. Neuroscientist Anthony Newberg likens this to a car that starts wearing out, with various and sundry parts going bad a little at a time. Any memory-enhancing program, Newberg says, will improve a host of qualities —coordination, attention span, information processing, problem solving, social decision-making skills, even our intelligence itself.[12] Beyond that, memorization modifies our brains in such a way that the more we engage in it, the easier it becomes to learn and memorize even more.

When we memorize a passage of text, we internalize the words so that they become part of our makeup and our way of being in the world. Thus, when we commit things to memory, we are choosing to pay attention to those things that really matter; we are making an investment in the shaping of our personal worldviews. Yet, as important as this is, memory is becoming a rare commodity in this age of exponential knowledge growth.

Outsourcing Our Memory

More and more we rely on a store of information outside of ourselves. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have gone so far as to indicate that their ultimate goal is a chip that can be implanted in our brains so we can have immediate access to the already more than 18 billion facts in their Knowledge Graph.[13] While it is incredible to have so much information ever at our fingertips, the way cells wire together in our brains means that the more we turn to external resources instead of tapping into our own memory banks, the less capacity for retention we will have.

Not too many years back, when I needed a Bible reference, I would search my memory. If I couldn’t place the reference from memory, I would look up key words in a Bible concordance and peruse the list until I found the verse I wanted. Now all I have to do is ask my smartphone or begin to type a question in the URL field on my search engine —such as “what Bible verse talks about reaping?” —and I can instantly read Galatians 6:7 and related verses on scores of websites in any number of translations. While I could discipline myself not to use these tools, the truth is that I, like everyone else, find the convenience irresistible.

Although some argue that the face of knowledge has changed, that what we really need are new skills to retrieve and organize it, we are nevertheless spiritual beings. Therefore, accessing God’s Word on our devices, no matter how quickly or easily, can never replace having it hidden in our hearts. This is why I’ve become far more intentional about committing Scripture to memory. But first I had to overcome a strong personal aversion to the idea.

When I was a precocious elementary school child, my pastor signed me up for a Scripture-memory contest. He gave me one hundred Bible-verse cards to learn in preparation for the event, which was less than one month away. I know I labored hard over them, but to be honest, I don’t remember much beyond the dreadful contest itself. I sat there in the audience, palms sweating and heart pounding as if it would jump out of my chest as I tried to review those cards. They were beginning to look like some foreign language. Nevertheless, when my name was called along with that of a boy from some other congregation, I marched bravely forward. The two of us faced all those eager, expectant parents. The moderator began by giving me a reference to cite.

My mind drew a complete blank. The moderator offered the same reference to my competitor, who rattled the verse off like clockwork. Then I was offered a second reference, and a third, and a fourth, all of which drew blank stares from me. I’m not sure how long this agony lasted, but at some point I began to cry. My mom mercifully escorted me back to my seat.

Needless to say, I have never been a fan of that kind of rote memorization, although it has its own benefits, I’m sure. Yet retaining God’s Word is not only a valuable asset in our spiritual journeys, but it also uniquely contributes to the formation of our souls.

When God’s Word Dwells in Us

How often have you been deeply moved by Scripture in a morning quiet time, only to realize later that you cannot even remember what it was you read? The reality is that our brains are able to hold things in short-term memory for only about ten to twenty seconds. While study and meditation can help move God’s Word from short-term to long-term memory, it cannot accomplish this as well as the concentration and repetition that memorization requires. Therefore, if we want to go through our days with Scripture moving, guiding, and shaping us, we will need to commit it to memory.

This, then, is retentive reading. Far more than an approach to memorizing verses, however, it is a lifestyle of committing God’s Word to heart in substantial enough portions that it informs our way of thinking and being in the world. Jesus told his disciples that his words needed to abide in them (John 15:7-8), a sentiment Paul echoed to the church at Colossae: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16, emphasis added). What would it look like for Scripture to live in you, to remain present to you at all times? While smartphones have made it incredibly easy to carry our Bibles with us, committing Scripture to heart ensures God’s Word is always at work within us. Even when we aren’t consciously focusing on specific verses, the neural pathways we have created through memorization continue to produce reverberating effects.

We tend to memorize those things —such as oaths, pledges, or vows —for which we believe the language is so important that we have to know the words verbatim. Committing these things to heart, Thomas Newkirk notes, is “an act of loyalty and deep respect, of affiliation.”[14] Memorizing Scripture is all of this and more, a tribute to the God who generously reveals himself to us through the gift of language, for it demonstrates that we care deeply about the things he has said. We value them enough to commit them to memory.

Dallas Willard said that if he had to choose between all the disciplines of the spiritual life, Bible memorization would be first. He called it “absolutely fundamental to spiritual formation . . . because it is a fundamental way of filling our minds with what it needs.”[15] The formation of our souls is God’s intent when he instructs us to store up his Word in our hearts, assuring us that this will help us avoid sin, live purely, keep from stumbling, and find delight in doing his will. He invites us to bind his words on our heart, promising that they will guide us, plant our faith in deep-rooted soil, and nourish our souls like food does the body.[16]

When we commit something to memory for long enough and with enough repetition, we retain it for life. This is why you know your country’s pledge of allegiance even when you haven’t recited it for years. When I visited my grandmother in a rest home in her final months, she didn’t always recognize me, but her prayers were filled with Scriptures she’d learned long ago about God’s goodness and faithfulness. Memorizing Scripture is like money in the bank, a spiritual investment we know we will be able to draw upon a day or a month or a decade later, even to our final days of life.

Getting Practical

Earlier I defined retentive reading as a lifestyle of committing God’s Word to heart in substantial enough portions that it informs our way of thinking and being. By substantial portions, I mean having a goal of several verses, or a chapter, or even an entire book. This was once a normal practice among Christians, and I am convinced that anyone can do it with a little time, discipline, and focused attention.

I have tried a variety of methods through the years —from secular speed-memory plans to online programs to Bible-verse memory apps —but the one I’ve found most helpful and enduring is Andrew Davis’s An Approach to Extended Memorization of Scripture. He offers a number of excellent reasons for memorizing chapters and even entire books, such as having the overall context and understanding the big picture. My own motivation is that I’ve learned from experience that it is easier and more rewarding to learn a series of verses that flow together with a coherence and beauty only God could achieve than it is to piece together random verses like that Scripture memory contest of my childhood.

Davis points out that the Bible was originally penned for a largely illiterate culture whose exposure to Scripture was oral. Thus, when God instructed the people to meditate on his law day and night, he was telling them to commit the words they heard to heart so that they could focus on them during the daily grind of life and not just when exposed to religious events. For me, this means being able to walk through the passage or meditate on it while waiting at red lights or sitting in a doctor’s office or as my head hits the pillow each night. While today we are blessed with the benefit of literacy as well as instantaneous access to the Bible, I believe we will gain far more as we internalize God’s Word in the same way our spiritual ancestors did —by committing it to heart.

A Return to Simplicity

I learned about Andrew Davis’s Scripture-memory approach from a blog I regularly peruse, which brings me full circle here regarding the reading brain, technology, and our souls. Recently, my church joined an online Christian-media library that gives members of all ages access to an incredible array of Bible study and Christian-growth materials in every possible format: audio, video, printables, and online groups. Think of it —the finest teachers, the most popular studies, and cutting-edge media at our fingertips, any hour of the day or night! I can’t even imagine how beneficial this must be to churches large or small and to believers all over the globe. Yet to be honest, when I visit the site I feel a little like I’ve just been dropped into the middle of a grand amusement park. Turning this way and that, everything seems so enticing that I end up hopscotching around, reading a snippet here, watching a minute or two there, trying to settle on one amazing lesson over the other. Perhaps you can relate.

There is no question that our digital worlds offer us incredible ways to enhance our spiritual lives, and for this I am grateful. I believe that all of us ought to take advantage of anything that might improve our piety and form us as Christ followers. At the same time, it seems that perhaps we need to step back every now and then and consider how we are really spending our time and what contribution our spiritual activity online is really making to our relationship with God. The danger is that we can spend so much time nibbling around the edges of all the choices out there that we end up feeling spiritually sated while never having communed with God in meaningful ways through his Word.

In times like these, it behooves us to remember that as wonderful as it is to be able to access so many materials and options for growing in Christ, the most important resource we will ever have is the plain, unadorned Word of God. There is a blessed simplicity in sitting quietly before our Maker with only our Bible open in our laps. We read, we listen, and he speaks. Nothing else is really quite like it.