The 100-Minute Bible

Today's London Guardian released a story about the new "100-minute Bible." It seems people no longer have time to "wait on the Lord," so a dumbed-down version of the Good Book is necessary. I keep thinking about Will Willimon's words in The Intrusive Word: Preaching as Baptismal Encounter: "The gospel is not a set of interesting ideas about which we are supposed to make up our minds. The gospel is intrusive news that evokes a new set of practices, a complex of habits, a way of living in the world, discipleship. Because of its epistemological uniqueness, we cannot merely map the gospel onto our present experiences. The gospel is not an archaic, peculiar way of naming our typical human experiences through certain religious expressions. The gospel means to engender, to evoke, a peculiar experience that we would not have had before we met the gospel," (39).

Anyway, here's the news release:

For the busy faithful, the greatest story ever told - in 100 minutes
Ed VulliamyThursday September 22, 2005
Guardian

They may be the words of the Lord. But there are simply too many of them for the modern attention span. That, at least, was the reasoning behind the launch yesterday of a more "user-friendly" edition of the great work.
The 100-minute Bible was published at the cradle and headquarters of British Christianity, Canterbury cathedral. It is a 57-page pocket-sized edition, the latest in the long and often turbulent legacy of the Holy Book, from Hebrew through Greek and Latin to Martin Luther, the glorious King James edition and various recent English translations. Entire cycles of frescos by medieval and renaissance painters may have derived from a few poetic sentences in the Bible, but the harsh reality of modernity suggests people just do not have the time to concentrate on the book any more.
The man who had the responsibility for condensing the Bible was the Rev Dr Michael Hinton, who spent two years on the task. "We have sacrificed poetry to clarity," Mr Hinton told people attending the launch. "Those who want a sense of the glorious poetry in the Bible will have to look elsewhere, but anyone who wants a sense of the story and the argument will find it here.
"This is a gateway to the Bible for everybody. We have to face the fact we live in an overwhelmingly secular society and must do all we can to present people with the story and what Christianity is about."
The Bible is summarised in elegant prose, without slang, and is not split into testaments. The Gospels are, said Mr Hinton, "central to the document", with the Old Testament dealt with chronologically, "incorporating the prophetic books into the story and dealing with a few books such as Psalms separately". They and Moses get a page each, for instance, as do the crucifixion and resurrection.
The publisher of the book, Len Budd, a former chairman of the deanery at Canterbury, said: "Is it a dumbing down of the Bible? Yes, but that's the world today. Although we as Christians love the Bible it is very user-unfriendly. People just don't have time to read it. If this book means more people can answer pub quiz questions on the Bible, so much the better."
It was "not an evangelical document", he said, but a version aimed at "interested outsiders", especially "young people who, quite honestly, don't know anything about the Bible, the story, or Christianity at all". He added that it had been written in a style to encourage page turning but lacked "literary gimmicks".
Mr Hinton said: "In the words of Frank Sinatra, 'regrets, I've had a few'. There are omissions." One of them is the book of Ruth, "which we just could not get in".
The audience at the launch included the Rev Stephen Cresswell, a senior Methodist, who was "curious". He said: "I was expecting at least a few more direct quotes."
Tony Washington, a youth officer for the cathedral diocese, said he hoped the new edition would "open the door for young people who these days just don't get to know the story".
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