It probably should be no surprise that in our age of fast information and instant access someone would come up with this idea: Tweet the Bible.
WeathersAuthor Scott Douglas (the librarian, not the novelist) has begun an effort to tweet every chapter of the Bible. Of course, tweeting through a Twitter account allows only 140 characters or less per tweet, so his effort will amount to a radical summarization. He has named this “The Twitter 140 Bible,” and you can see it on his website of the same name or follow it on his Facebook page.
Douglas calls the project “Tweet-vangelism” because he hopes that it will not be an end in itself. Instead, he wants his Twitter Bible to generate enough interest in the Bible among young, tech-savvy adults and youth that they will decide to pick up and read the whole thing.
Douglas should be commended for his innovation and for making a genuine effort to grab the attention of the next generation and get them to read the Bible. On the other hand, his effort has two inherent problems – problems faced by every effort to summarize, condense, or paraphrase the Bible.
First, a condensed summary of the Bible is still, actually, not the Bible. We have already learned from past paraphrases and devotional snippets that people rarely move from the part to the whole. Instead, as with those of us who rush through their morning reading in a devotional book that included one verse of Scripture, people who click on a morsel of Scripture will rarely turn to the whole book out of interest. Instead, they smile in self-satisfaction and tell themselves that they have, in fact, read the Bible.
And second, rather than promote the Bible, Douglas trivializes it. I know he doesn’t mean to. But whenever we imply that verses can be reduced to snippets, chapters to phrases, and whole books to tweets, we say that the Bible in its entirety is irrelevant. Get a bite, eat a scrap, and you’ll be satisfied. Never mind the context, the narrative, the doctrine.
The lesson? Never let the part substitute for the whole. Pull out your Bible. Read it. Devour it. And teach the next generation to do the same.