Ouch and Amen

What if the general biblical illiteracy that surrounds us – which we all lament even among the sermoned and radioed and quiet-timed and Bible-studied masses in the church – is the result not of the stupidity or carelessness of the hearers but rather of the denseness and wrongheadedness of us teachers? What if we are ruining the Bible for parishioners by the modern ways in which we insist on presenting it to them?… The versification of the Bible encourages the kind of abstraction-mining and proof-texting that postmodern readers feel makes the Bible frustrating, contradictory, confusing, and even dangerous (able to be misused and abused for all kinds of misguided purposes) – and boring. (Leonard Sweet, Brian D. McLaren, Jerry Haselmayer, A is for Abductive)