Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. According to a new survey conducted by Glue and the Barna Group, Americans are reading their Bibles more. As a recent article in the Christian Post summarized, quote, approximately 50% of self-identified Christians report reading the Bible weekly, the highest level of Bible reading among Christians in more than a decade, end quote. And the trend is especially pronounced among millennial and Gen Z men, and it represents a 12% rebound from the lowest point of Bible reading in 2024.
This is good news.
However, according to the very same study, only 36% of Americans believe that the Bible is 100% accurate. That's a number significantly down from 2,000 when it was 43%. In fact, and I quote from the article, just 44% of self-identified Christians strongly affirm the accuracy of the Bible. That is not good news. On a radio broadcast back in 1952, the eminent theologian Carl F.
H. Henry commented on a poll from his day that found 99% of Americans believed in God. With a justified cynicism, however, he said this, the vast majority of Americans today may believe in a ghost god, a phantom god, a God who makes very little difference in the great decisions of life and even less in the cares of everyday existence. End quote.
Well, his concern proved correct. It was years later in their book, Soul Searching, The Religious and Spiritual Eyes of American Teenagers, that Christian Smith and Melinda Denton described the dominant world view of American young people as moralistic therapeutic deism. In other words, even those who claimed to believe in God, which was the majority, believed in a caricature instead, a God who existed on their terms and was involved in their lives primarily to make them happy.
So if people today are reading the Bible more than they have in years, but believe less in its authority, then Henry's claim about America's fickle religiosity still applies. It's a tendency of fallen humans, after all, to create God in our image. This is a tendency that is at the root of all idolatry. To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, we want the blessings of reading the Bible without its authority. After the Exodus, only weeks after God had inflicted the plagues on Egypt and miraculously opened the Red Sea, the Israelites begged Aaron to make for them gods.
He produced a golden calf. to which they proclaimed, and I quote, these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Aaron then announced, to morrow shall be a feast to the Lord. In other words, rather than bow before God as He had revealed Himself to them, they chose instead to apply to God what was unworthy of Him. And of course it did not end well.
A few generations later, facing an invasion by the Philistines, the corrupt sons of the high priest Eli took the Ark of the Covenant to the battlefield.
However, they were not supposed to do this. And God was not a tool to be used or controlled. Instead, they lost the battle, they lost the ark, they lost their lives. Those who use the Bible for their own ends rather than to submit to its authority are like the theologians of the 19th century who used the Bible to justify slavery, or those today who claim that the Bible somehow backs the murder of the unborn through abortion. But God's word is not our plaything, neither personally nor culturally.
God will not be mocked, nor will he be controlled. Still, because the Bible carries the authority of God, any increased engagement with it is still good news. Throughout history, the great works of God in revivals and reformations always came because of a renewed love and study of the Bible. To reverse the image from C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle, the new Bible readers who are calling on God might be surprised when He actually shows up.
They may wish to keep him at arm's length, but his word does not return void. And this time, it won't either. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.
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