Choose Your Own Adventure Bible

Choose Your Own Adventure Bible August 24, 2016

The Babylon Bee is sort of the Christian equivalent of The Onion, with spoof news and similar offerings. Today, they announced that Zondervan had published a Choose Your Own Adventure Bible:

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While the folks at Babylon Bee were using this idea to poke fun at the ways in which people read not only their own views, but a focus on themselves, into the Bible, I think there is a sense in which it is absolutely appropriate to view the Bible as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. There are diverse stories, and so one chooses between them or enjoys them both in tension, like the multiple endings one reaches in CYOA books reading them again and again. There are open-ended stories where you are expected to either decide for yourself how it ends, or to ponder multiple possibilities: the Book of Jonah and the parable of the Prodigal Son spring immediately to mind as examples. And in other cases, such as Exodus and Revelation, there is a long history of reading oneself into the story, applying it to one’s own time rather than viewing it as just about the past. Many of the stories invite the reader explicitly to do just that.

Back in 2013 I blogged about the Bible as a choose your own adventure book. Take a look and see the amusing image I found to go at the bottom of that post!

What do you think? In what ways is it appropriate to view the Bible as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, and in what ways is it important to view the Bible as different from that genre?


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