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{"id":37867,"date":"2016-08-24T18:06:37","date_gmt":"2016-08-24T22:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=37867"},"modified":"2016-08-24T18:06:37","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T22:06:37","slug":"choose-your-own-adventure-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2016\/08\/choose-your-own-adventure-bible.html","title":{"rendered":"Choose Your Own Adventure Bible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The Babylon Bee<\/a> is sort of the Christian equivalent of The Onion, with spoof news\u00a0and similar offerings. Today, they announced that Zondervan had published a Choose Your Own Adventure Bible:<\/p>\n

$\"cyoa-696x394\"$ <\/p>\n

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 \u201cChoose Your Own Adventure\u201d 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\u00a0of 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\u2019s own time rather than viewing it as just about the past. Many of the stories invite the reader explicitly to do just that.<\/p>\n

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

What do you think? In what ways is it appropriate to view the Bible as a \u201cChoose Your Own Adventure\u201d book, and in what ways is it important to view the Bible as different from that genre?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"