# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1950_S1216
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

aud povs of real living, these words breathe life
phe earts of people and enable Christian famili
intimate and loving contact with their God *
2. Th
a - inte BIBLE should be arranged chronologicall
ent arrangement of the Biblical books is not self.

twenty-third Psalm after Neher’ has not intended. To read the

the fall of Jerusalem, Philemon
divine. That is not how God gave the Bible
We wish it were all as harmless as m

to grow by an

we have piled
him into it. Once

ts. The result is
confused“picture of the
first conception. And yet

in view of the hopeless

that most people have an interest-dulling
Bible, and it is hard to wipe out that
that picture ought to be clarified, also

PUBLICATION MATTERS

dle that Higher Criticism has made of the Bible. The task
eaching all things” is difficult enough without adding un-
nessary encumbrances.
The difficulty of an unchronological Bible stands in special
ef when we try to illustrate it. Page through Tissot’s Old and
ew Testament or any other illustrated Bible, and you are jarred
, the sequence of the pictures — that jarring is only an accentua-
tion of the disarrangement of the contents.

-The enactment of God’s plan of salvation was chronological —

: “that’s like saying white is white. Now, to study God’s ways with
«man as they happened, is a basically correct way of understanding

God gave most of His Word in a chronological sequence. What
the collectors and editors did with the revealed books is not the
fault of revelation. Now, the setting in which God gave His Word
is the best for reading it.

Your own experience in reading a chronological Bible will im-
mediately convince you that such a structure makes reading inter-
esting and richly meaningful. If you have never read the Bible
chronologically, the Prophets with the kings under whom they
lived, Lamentations with the fall of Jerusalem, Paul’s Letters with
his travels, there is a new delight waiting for you. All our theo-
logians, teachers, and lay people are entitled to that delight.

More than that, the chronological study of the Bible is Scripture
interpreting itself: Contemporary history is the vital “technicolor”
setting for the abstract truths of the Prophets and the Apostles;
and the doctrinal revelations are, as thought is to practice, a precious
enrichment of the bare historical records. Since Biblical history
and doctrine essentially belong together, it is basically correct to
read and study them together.

3. This FAMILY BIBLE should be a biographical series of
books.

The titles of these books might be: Adam to Abraham, Joseph,
Moses, Joshua, Gideon and Samson, Samuel, David, Elijah and
Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezra, Daniel, Esther; Jesus, Peter and
John, Paul.

The arrangement of the Bible in convenient smaller volumes
with biographical titles would give it a definitely more inviting
appearance. If you work through the Bible from Genesis to
Revelation, you realize that you have in your Bible a large col-

lection of literature that cannot without a loss of interest be packed:

into one book. On one of my shelves I have a complete edition
of Shakespeare plus separate volumes of Hamlet, Macbeth, and
a number of other plays. I never grab the complete edition. The