"The books" and "The pastor"

[Laurie]

Mrs Eddy ordained the Bible and Science and Health to be the paster of the church.

In many other threads, people have discussed different translations of "the Bible". Currently, the Quarterly includes Golden Texts and Responsive readings from non-KJV of the BIble.

That is not the point of this thread.

My question is more about the "format" of "the Bible". There are printed Bibles. There are audio Bibles. There are online Bibles. Our church publishes Bible lessons as printed material, as pdf's, as hypertext, as mp3s and in many other formats.

So I don't think that "the Bible" has to exist in a printed, traditional book format in order to be "the Bible"

So my question is why is there a restriction against readers in the church using a condensed version of the Bible found in the pdf's published by the church in the Bible Lessons. Why must readers use Bibles which are printed on paper and bound? Is there something different about those types of Bibles as opposed to electronic format Bibles?

[Starlight Rider]

Article III, Section 4 of the Church Manual states "The readers shall not read from copies or manuscripts, but from the books." Reading directly from the books eliminates the possibility of copying errors.

Obviously, in Mrs. Eddy's day electronic Bibles were unheard of. I don't know if using electronic Bible formats would offer any real advantages over using books in church services. Perhaps a Kindle-like device might make it easier for readers to set up the readings (just download the citations from TMC and it would be good to go!). The only other advantage is that it might help prevent the reader from accidentally skipping a citation, but there's nothing to prevent the reader from accidentally pressing the "next" button twice, so maybe not.

Your question, however, seems to imply that books are obsolete. IMHO new technologies often provide great benefits, but often the old way of doing things works just as well and doesn't require batteries.

[Starlight Rider]

I forgot to add, that I think reading from a PDF printout just seems a little tacky. Sort of like serving a gourmet meal on paper plates.

[Susie]

The full text quarterly is great to follow along with as the reader's read and flip back and forth. I have heard that some readers will use those as support to be sure they don't skip a section.

I think Mrs. Eddy's decision was a wise one.

[Laurie]

tacky? To read from documents prepared by the Mother Church? please....

As for books not requiring batteries, they do require light whereas digital devices supply their own light.

I am also not saying books are obsolete. I'm just saying books can come in different formats

But, really, nobody has answered the question on why there is this restriction. One would hope that the PDFs supplied by ebiblelesson and mybiblelesson do not have mistakes in them so the argument of transcription errors falls away.

[E100]

Laurie—

As a moderator for these forums, I know that one of the main criticisms of Christian Science mentioned here (and in the general public) is that Christian Scientists read only selected parts of the Bible and so don’t know the Bible very well as a result. The argument is that if they read the whole Bible, they’d see that Christian Science goes against the Bible—a claim that isn’t true, but one that’s frequently made. If readers at public church services were to read, for instance, from a full-text <em>Quarterly</em> instead of from the Bible itself, that could well reinforce the suggestion that Christian Scientists don’t use and know the entire Bible.

That said, I don’t know that there’d be anything wrong with readers in churches using the “in context” version of the eBibleLesson for services, assuming an Internet connection is available and the readers are comfortable using computers. This version uses an electronic version of the entire Bible (and <em>Science and Health</em>). I think people would consider a complete electronic version of a book to be the same as the book itself; the format doesn’t matter. Most people would not consider a full-text <em>Quarterly</em> to be “the books” because, of course, neither the complete Bible or <em>Science and Health</em> is contained in a full-text <em>Quarterly</em>. Similarly, no one would consider, for instance, a 16-page compilation of passages from a classic novel to be the book itself.

[Laurie]

Thanks for all your comments. I guess there is no explanation written by Mrs Eddy on why she made that rule.

But to change the topic slightly and to respond to E100 above:

I actually think CS'ers (and especially children in CS Sunday School) have a much better knowledge of Bible stories, etc, than people who attend many other churches. Whilst CS'ers do have a tendancy to read bits and pieces of the Bible and not necessarily an entire chapter or book, they do in fact read the Bible and read it often.

[MikeDavis]

Originally Posted by Laurie

I guess there is no explanation written by Mrs Eddy on why she made that rule.

Laurie,

I have done a little research about Mrs. Eddy's inclusion of that By-Law in the Manual. I've not found much information, but it seems that at one point Mrs. Eddy allowed copies to be made and read from, but then changed her mind and felt that the reading should be done from the books. My impression is that there was a concern about mistakes creeping into the copies, as is often the case when copies are made by hand (see Bart Ehrman's book, Misquoting Jesus, for a fascinating accounting of mistakes creeping into Bible manuscripts during the centuries when scribes were copying these manuscripts by hand).

Please don't take what I've written here as definitive, as more research probably needs to be done to get closer to a definitive answer (if there is one), and I haven't had the time to do anything further with it at present.

[fetterless]

A first thought is that the books verify the source.

A second thought is because it is hard not to become aware of the context of the citation. That allows the reader to be aware of the rest of the idea/story while focusing on the selected citation and in turn that facilitates reading the citation with deeper understanding.

A third thought is related to the fact that the "the books" are our ordained Pastor.
A question: If a person had been ordained as pastor, would any congregation accept and be inspired, nurtured, satisfied, etc if their pastor's shoes, forehead, glasses, right hand, tie/necklace, lung, front tooth, watch and left earlobe came before them to deliver the Sunday sermon?

[Jacobus de Bruyn]

I for myself have found that reading ONLY from Full Text editions enpoverishes the experience, it is much richer to read from the books and see the context, and in the flipping of pages, often verses with new inspiration are found. But I do read from the full Text Edition too, it is so convenient for taking notes and jotting down commentaries.

For reading in Church, I would think it would be more convenient to read from a prepared text, and not from the books, but the books have this....authority, they install respect, love, affection.... You can kiss your Bible, hug it. Above all, it is the spiritual conviction with which the words are read, I don´t think the lessons read by a parrot would have the same effect. Jake.