Week 43 Romans
I just did a quick calculation: there’s about eleven weeks left in 2020 so I need to read two-chapters-a-day. Which seems pretty nice, except I’ve been through this stretch of NT letters before. Sure, there’s some highlight-reel content; but there’s also a few Heartbreak Hills ahead.
A couple of years ago I read a biography of Hannah More. She lived a couple of hundred years ago but what she said about English readers sounded pretty contemporary. People wanted short versions of longer books; condensations; abridgments where an editor grabbed only key passages, main ideas, and sound-bite quotes. The rule was to highlight the highlights; the lows stayed in the dark.
Anyway…someone deciding to read through the bible is going to get the better and the worse. That’s just part of the deal.
And that’s why there’s the temptation and – let’s face it – an obvious benefit in not reading through. And starting into Romans today I get a reminder of that right away.
Note: Here’s the exact quote from Karen Swallow Prior (and Prior quoting Hannah More) from Fierce Convictions (Nelson Books: Nashville, 2014): ‘In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many (people) read anthologies of excerpted works that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts…(Hannah) More cautioned against…cultivating a taste only for “delicious morsels,” one that spits out “every thing which is plain…In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling…” (23; I added the italics).