Have you seen the
Personal Promise Bible? It’s a Bible that you can special order to
insert your name into biblical passages.
If I got one I would see my own name show up all over the Bible. 2 Peter 1:4 would become:
“By which He has granted to Billy His precious and exceedingly great promises; that through these Billy may become a partaker of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust.”
You can also have your spouses name added places too…
As tempting as this might be for my narcissistic side, which is substantial, I am deeply troubled by this Bible. It makes the very text focused on the individual rather than on God or the Community of faith. The Bible was not written for you. It was written for us. It speaks of a communal people in community with a communal God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). Scripture is sacred because of the community is sacred and the community is sacred because they are joined together in the life of God.
That reality is side tracked when we make the Bible into a personal document from God to us. I love reading the Bible by myself, I try to do it every day, but the thing that is powerful about reading the Bible by ones own self is that it connects us to the life of the people of God through thousands of years and unites us with Billions of Christians reading those same words. Scripture’s very power is connected to the way that is removes us from a purely personal relationship with Jesus and unites us to a community. This project seems to want to rip that power from the text for the sake of a more personal encounter with the text. In my opinion the way people read the Bible today needs to get a whole lot less personal.
I’m not the only who seems to have noticed this troubling version of scripture Rachel Held Evans comments on this new version as a sign of a rampant individualism infecting the church in the article “
The Bible: It’s just not that into you” saying:
“While this product may be an extreme example, it points to the profound influence of Western individualism on our reading of the biblical text. Passages that were originally written for groups of people, and intended to be read and applied in a community setting (the nation of Israel, the various early churches, the first followers of Jesus), have been manipulated to communicate a personal, individual message…thus leading the reader away from the original corporate intent of the passage to a reaffirmation of the individualistic, me-centered, and consumerist tendencies of American religious culture.”
I agree 100%
Not only that but there is a huge issue with exegesis. Substituting proper names pronouns might make it more personal, but it can also butcher the authorial intent of a text. If you want to understand what a text of scripture is saying we need to remove ourselves from the text not add ourselves in. Sheesh.
I’m sure the people behind this have the best of intentions, but honestly this is a disastrous idea. Still… the narcissist in me is a little tempted to order one.
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