Apart from my recollection of singing in children’s choir in church, I have only two vivid memories of taking part in a religious performance at that tender age. The first came as a solo accompaniment to worship as I half-slid, half-shot out of a well-oiled pew and crashed onto the sanctuary floor.
The other occurred when I and a chorus of children my age sat on tiny chairs in an equally-tiny church classroom, each of us nervously awaiting our turn to recite a Bible verse.
The first performance only occurred once. But the second was repeated every Sunday morning for several years and served as my introduction to the fixation with memorizing Bible verses in Christian childhood education.
I have no intention of mocking the practice. I have frequently heard that committing Biblical passages to memory is a good practice. Perhaps one of the Psalms, or maybe a cluster of three to five verses that carry a critical message. I’ve done this a number of times myself. But this is too much for children to take on, so getting them started one verse at a time may be a good plan.
The problem arises when the one-verse-at-a-time practice continues past childhood. The New Testament holds almost 8,000 verses and the Old Testament nearly three times that many. Looking at the vastness of scripture one verse at a time is like gazing at the heavens through an extremely powerful telescope. We miss the broader picture, and the broader meaning that both the heavens and the Bible offer us.
Biblical scholars, for whom understanding scripture is a high calling, emphasize that capturing the full meaning of a verse requires that we examine the enclosing passage, whatever type of literature that passage may be. To isolate the verse from its neighbors is to do an injustice, not only to the larger passage, but also to the verse itself.
Theologian Leonard Sweet has coined the term “versitis” to describe our tendency to focus on scriptural minutiae, on a verse here and a verse there. Sweet believes versitis damages Christian understanding of the many stories in the Bible.
In his book, Tablet to Table, he argues that our understanding of the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus suffers greatly because we focus relentlessly on one verse, John 3:16, probably the best known and best memorized verse in scripture.
This verse, which begins, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”, is actually a small part of a 21 verse scene in which Jesus tell Nicodemus what it means to be born of the spirit, chides Nicodemus for not understanding this better given his role as a teacher of his people, and goes on to explain why He was sent by God.
When we land on a single verse, after sailing by the rest of its surrounding passage, we lose much of the meaning.
Versitis was not a problem when the Bible first took written form simply because there were no verses. Even chapters didn’t exist until the 13th century; verses appeared in the 15th, just in time for the great increase in literacy that came with the invention of the printing press.
These additions have made it easier for readers, be they believers in worship and devotional study, or scholars in debate and analysis, to locate specific passages.
However, these wonderful innovations have one great drawback – they make it easy to treat the Bible primarily as a collection of verses. This is a serious error. The Bible is actually a gathering together of writings of many types – long historical narratives, shorter stories that tell of the struggles within families, dialogues, letters, poetry, prophetic oracles, and advice for everyday life.
Whatever literary category they fall into, it is these passages – whether they are the poetic prayers found in the Psalms, the creation accounts of Genesis, the stories of the kings of ancient Israel, the oracles of Isaiah and the other prophets, the teachings, sermons, and parables of Jesus and the letters of the Apostle Paul – that are the fundamental building blocks of the Bible.
The biblical story is like a great building that has been fashioned from these blocks – not from individual verses – and we cheat ourselves when we forget this.
