BIBLE APPS: IS THE MEDIUM THE MESSAGE?

About a year ago, Christianity Today included a provocative article by John Dyer regarding the impact of new digital technology on readers of the Bible.

He began his article with a short review of the early technology waves to impact Christians and their effect on people's interaction with the Word. The first of these seems quite low-tech to us today but it had a major influence on Christians at the time. When Christianity began, the most common form of book was the scroll. It was horribly unwieldy in that it was heavy and bulky and therefore not very portable, took two hands to manipulate, and was almost impossible to rapidly skim back and forth in the text looking for earlier and later passages for comparison.

Therefore Christians became one of the first groups in the ancient world to adopt the new technology of the codex, our standard book format today consisting of bound sheets between two covers. These eliminated all of the above drawbacks of the scroll form. And Christians realized that they could easily flip through pages to find the passages they were looking for.

Then in the Middle Ages, the simple idea of numbering the chapters and verses was implemented. Today we cannot imagine carrying out individual or group Bible studies without this common aid. I still remember when I was a teenager, attending a mid-week Bible study at our church. Everyone had a King James Version except one forward-thinking college coed who owned a modern paraphrase which dispensed with verse numbers. We all dreaded her volunteering to read a particular passage since she never knew quite where to begin or stop, so she would just read and read until at last someone told her to halt.

The New Testament authors themselves seemed to have run into this same problem since there are a number of places where one of them may write, “As the Scriptures teach,” “David says,” or “Somewhere it is written.” If they had had numbered chapters and verses for the OT books at the time, we wouldn't have so much trouble identifying which particular passages they had in mind.

But even this simple innovation, as helpful as it is, can have its drawbacks. The main problem comes in when we begin to assume that the numbering system is as inspired as the words themselves. And this is not at all the case since it is easy to demonstrate the indicated breaks in the thought do not always correspond with the author's intended divisions.

And then there is the tendency, which I have seen in churches, to atomize the text into a series of totally stand-alone verses devoid of any surrounding context. This attitude can wreak havoc with any attempt to accurately understand the text.

The next two changes in how we viewed the Bible happened quite close together: (1) translation into languages which could be understood by all, not just priests who knew Latin, and (2) Gutenberg's printing press.

Both of these developments led to taking the Bible out of the exclusive purview of the ecclesiastical authorities and putting it within relatively easy reach of the common man.

But even this technology change had its drawbacks in the increase of splinter sects popping up (as they still do) and centered around some “inspired” leader's personal interpretation, no matter how far-fetched and heretical it might be.

As to the latest revolution in the way we interact with the Bible, Dyer notes that Christian evangelicals have been in the forefront of developing Bible apps with all sorts of aids, from searching by key words to comparing different translations side-by-side to including some classic commentaries on any passage in question. And these are available on both home computers and smartphones.

Dyer quotes religion professor Bryan Bibb as stating that “the current shift from codex to screen will be every bit as decisive as the historic shift from scroll to codex in the Greco-Roman world, or the shift from hand-lettered to printed manuscripts in the Late Middle Ages.”

But again, as with any other technology revolution, it is a two-edged sword. For example, Dyer is very enthusiastic about the fact that evangelicals are leading in this digital change since “these technological entrepreneurs brought to the digital Bible enterprise a distinctly evangelical outlook on the Bible as a object and as a religious text, and their beliefs about how culture, media, and religion interact were mutually shaped by the move into digital media.” And some of the resources “promote evangelical ways of thinking about Scripture, its purpose, and the ways one should read it.”

Dyer quotes Tim Hutchings as saying that digital Bibles “privilege evangelical readings of the Bible in their applications” although he hints of “the potential negative distracting notifications and skim-reading...and decreased comprehension rates.”

In addition, it turns out that there are some more subtle differences between utilizing the two forms of Bibles that are beginning to show up in studies. One such interesting phenomenon is described by Dyer as follows: “Bible readers tend to see kinder, gentler God when they read about him on a screen, and yet they report feeling more discouraged and confused by the encounter. Conversely, print readers tend to emphasize more of God's holiness and judgment but report feeling more fulfilled and encouraged by the encounter.”

Perhaps the best answer is to utilize both media: “Print and digital should be understood less as a strict dichotomy and more as a broad spectrum of Bible engagement experiences.” (Dyer)