“If this robust three-fold mode of reading happened naturally and was common today, we would not need the book you’re holding in your hands. But in reality we often don’t read this way.”
The book (which, truth be told, you are unlikely to be holding in your hands while you read this here review) is Come and See: The Journey of Knowing God through Scripture.
While the author Jonathan Pennington doesn’t frame his book this way, Come and See reads like an appendix to an excellent book I have been recommending to people for decades: How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren.
The chief problem with Adler and van Doren’s book is finding a way to convince people to read it. From the title, most people assume it is about acquiring literacy. It is not. The book assumes the reader is literate, which is good because writing a book for people who are not literate would be a bit odd. How to Read a Book explains to literate people how to actually read a book, not in the sense of reading the words, but in the sense of getting the most you can out of a book. It is a rigorous practical manual, explaining the four levels of reading, and what you need to know to read different literary genres. If, for example, you try to read novels and poems and scientific works and history books in the same way, you are a very poor reader. You will get vastly more enjoyment and knowledge and wisdom from books if you learn how to be a more active reader. How to Read a Book is not only excellent, but as the authors explain, it is a practical book and they happily explain how you should read their own book.
For all of its amazing breadth, How to Read a Book does not directly discuss how to read the Bible. If you read with attention, you can piece together advice on good Bible reading. The history books need to be read differently than Paul’s letters. It explores many of the questions a reader should be asking while reading the Bible? It explains why it is really important to read books in the Bible as a whole unit in one sitting so that you can see how the book coheres. And so on.
Pennington, though, has made the challenge of learning to read the Bible a lot easier. As Adler and van Doren would surely agree, the Bible is not just a collection of history and practical books. Learning to read the Bible deserves its own explanation, and Pennington’s book could easily be tacked on as an appendix to Adler and van Doren’s book. Fortunately, you don’t have to read How to Read a Book first. Come and See reads perfectly well as a stand-alone book.
As the quotation at the outset of this review explains, Pennington is very concerned that most people are very poor readers of the Bible. I fully share his concern. (Indeed, in an indirect way that concern was the origin of this here blog and the accompanying newsletter.) Most Bible reading these days is ripping short passages of scripture out of context and then reading or listening to a short exposition of that passage full of folksy anecdotes and an immediate practical application. There are no other books which are read the way that most people read the Bible. Take the most recent book you read an imagine someone reading it by flipping to a random paragraph or chapter and treating it as a standalone passage. Why don’t we read other books that way? It is a horrible way to read books.
This raises an immediate challenge for a book like Come and See. Who is the audience for this book? People who don’t know how to read the Bible well. But, as Pennington’s concern indicates, most people don’t know that they don’t know how to read the Bible well, so how will they know they should read a book about how to read The Good Book? It is an odd circular problem.
Setting that problem aside for a moment, what does Pennington have to say in Come and See? The book divides the reading experience into three parts, bringing them all back together in the end to note that if you aren’t simultaneously reading all three ways together, you are not reading the Bible well.
First there is informational reading. There are two parts to this, and the simpler one is understanding that there are very different literary genres in the Bible and the different genres need to be read in different ways. If you do not understand that the gospel of Luke is meant to be read in a very different way than the book of Psalms, you are reading poorly. Pennington shows how to notice what is important in the assorted genres in the Bible
But informational reading also includes a lot of the basics of how to read any book. The books in the Bible were written in particular times and particular places, so learning more about the world in which the books were written illuminates all sorts of details about the book. If you don’t understand, for example, how first century Greece was different than 21st century America, then there is no way to understand many parts of the New Testament. In addition to knowing the background, it is important to see how a given book works as whole. The gospels, for example, are carefully constructed narratives, where how a given episode is described and which episodes come immediately before and after it are a large part of the overall message of the book. Treating each incident as an isolated event misses a lot of what the book is doing. And finally, to read a book well it is good to know how other people read the same book; if you only ever see what you personally notice in a book or what one other person notices in a book, then you will miss the riches of the book.
Informational reading is exactly the sort of thing you can also learn in the Adler and van Doren book. It is the sort of reading we should have all learned in school, but most of us never did. If someone never learned how to read poetry, is it any wonder that the person is a very bad reader of the Psalms?
But informational reading is only one part of reading the Bible well. It is good to understand that the Bible is a book that can be read according to its assorted genre types. But, it is more than that. It is also a theological book and to be fully understood, it needs to be read with an understanding of the theology underlying it.
“Theology” is one of those words that conjures up images of large dense and very dull tomes read by people who never see the sunlight. Reading theologically does not mean you need to blow the dust off of molding books. Reading theologically means understanding that for a few thousand years, people have been studying Scripture and have discovered quite a few things about God which can be pieced together by reading deeply. When we come to the Bible, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. For example, the Old and New Testaments combined teach about the Trinitarian nature of God—that there is one God, that God has three parts, and each part is fully God. To read Scripture well means reading it with an understanding of such theological basics. We don’t even have to spend time figuring out what constitutes the theological basics. That is the point of the Creeds; we just need to read things like the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed and understand that these are the basic truths with which a theological reading of Scripture begins.
To read without an understanding of theology, to imagine that when you, the Reader, open the Bible you are exploring strange new worlds is to guarantee that you will be a bad reader of the Bible. Reading theologically is the way to unlock the depths of the teachings about God, to see that the book is deeper than any human mind, not just your mind, can fathom. Reading theologically helps us to understand God as He has revealed Himself and avoid the trap of simply seeing God as a mirror reflecting our own shallow reading.
If we only read informationally and theologically, however, the Bible is simply a large, potentially interesting doorstop. We must also learn the third avenue to reading: transformational reading. The Bible doesn’t just tell us about God and His works, it teaches us what God wants of us. It teaches us what the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, who sent his Son to die on a cross for us, wants us to do today and tomorrow and for the rest of our lives. We seriously misread the Bible if we miss the idea that when God says He wants us to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves, it was not just an empty platitude but something we really should be doing day after day.
As Pennington argues, the goal of thinking through these three ways of reading is not to learn one of them and do it, or to read every part of the Bible three times in those different ways. The goal is to learn how to read the Bible well, which means having all of these three things going on in the back of your mind simultaneously. If you don’t read like that, you are reading the Bible very poorly.
Come and See is in the Adler and van Doren category of a practical book. As they note, “To fail to read a practical book as practical is to read it poorly. You really do not understand it, and you certainly cannot criticize it in any other way.” Moreover, “If you are convinced or persuaded by the author that the ends he proposes are worthy, and if you are further convinced or persuaded that the means he recommends are likely to achieve those ends, then it is hard to see how you can refuse to act in the way the author wishes you to.”
In other words, the first question to ask yourself is whether it is a worthy end to read the Bible well. If so, then the next question is whether you are reading it well if you are failing to think through the informational, theological, and transformational questions the Bible raises. If you know you are not reading the Bible well, or if you don’t know if you are reading the Bible well, then you are the audience for Come and See.
(Once again, the obligatory note: the federal government requires me to say that the publisher Crossway sent me a copy of this book so that I could review it. Presumably the government requires this in case you don’t trust me to be an honest reviewer. Which raises the question: if you don’t trust that I am being honest, why are you reading this review in the first place?)
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