The Problem With Bible References

I had a very interesting discussion this past week with some of my students when we were driving home from our mission trip to Atlanta.  We were listening to a pastor deliver a message and he referred to a few Bible passages using chapter and verse ("Please note what the Bible says in Ephesians 3:15...")  As I listened, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share some thoughts, which I am now happy to put in written form.

Bible references - the chapter and verse numbers - are both good and bad.  They are good because they serve the purpose of making references easy.  If I'm quoting from Isaiah, and I don't have a chapter and verse to point people to, it makes such referencing very unwieldy.  Without references, it's almost impossible to find a particular sentence in a book as large as Isaiah.  So from that standpoint, chapters and verses are very helpful in so many ways.

But there are significant problems with the references.  First, they are not divinely inspired.  They are late additions to our texts.  As such, they often fall in strange places.  A good little article on this can be found here:  http://www.gotquestions.org/divided-Bible-chapters-verses.html

This blog (http://dedicatedlion.blogspot.com/2009/07/who-divided-bible-into-chapters.html) offers these insights:

"New Testament scholar A. T. Robertson advised, “The first step in interpretation is to ignore the modern chapters and verses” (Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, p. 101; cited in Daniel Fuller, The Unity of the Bible, p. 102). Some of the chapter breaks are in fact very poorly placed. Take, for example, the very first one in the Bible, where Genesis begins its second chapter. Genesis 2:1 is continuing the story of Genesis 1, summarizing it by saying “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them,” and telling what God did on the seventh day. It would be nice to have day 7 in the same chapter with days 1-6, especially since it only takes three more verses to round off the sequence of thought. Furthermore, Genesis 1 consistently calls the creator Elohim, and this name (the ordinary Hebrew word for god, just as deus is the Latin word, gott is the German, and dios is the Spanish) continues to be used for three more verses. Where should the chapter break be? The second chapter of Genesis should start at 2:4, where the formula “these are the generations” (an important structural marker through the remainder of the book) occurs, where the 7-day sequence is done with, where the narrator flashes back to the creation of humanity, and where the word Elohim is set aside and God begins to be referred to as the LORD God. Notice that criticizing the chapter break is not criticizing the word of God; it is pointing out a lapse in judgment on the part of Stephen Langton (who established the first chapter-verse system in the 13th century), whose work was very recent– not even a thousand years ago!– compared to the antiquity of Genesis."

The problem is that these chapter breaks can seriously influence our reading of Scripture.  They can lead us to believe that new thoughts are being offered, when in reality they are simply continuations of previous thoughts.  Or vice-versa.  As Robertson said above, ignore them when doing serious study.

Second, and more problematic, the chapter and verse numbers give us freedom to pull verses out in isolation.  I cannot tell you the number of times I've heard people say, "Here's a great scripture...." and then give a single verse.  Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but a singular sentence pulled out of its context is not a "scripture".  It is a sentence in the midst of a larger context that exists in a particular book in a canon of scripture, to be more precise.  This passage isolation can be very dangerous to our understanding of the text.  Let me use a simple example.

The most well-known verse in the Bible is John 3:16 - "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life."  Now, that verse, taken in isolation, appears to be saying something particular about the nature of God's love.  We read that and we think that the "so" is quantitative.  Jesus here seems to be saying that God loves the world so much that He gave His Son for us.  And, while that seems to be consistent with the thrust of Scripture (His love is indeed vast!), that is NOT what is being said here.  

If you look at the context, you'll see that Jesus is having a conversation with Nicodemus, a Pharisee.  Jesus is teaching him what it means to be born again, and He references a story in the Old Testament (of course, they wouldn't have called it that back then), from Numbers 21 (see? a reference can be helpful!).  It is the story of Israel's rebellion (they complained against God), God's judgment (poisonous snakes came and bit them), their repentance (they acknowledged their sin and asked Moses to intercede for them), and God's gracious provision for their salvation (Moses made a bronze serpent, attached it to a pole, and if anyone looked upon it in faith, they were saved).  

After referencing that story, Jesus then said, "For God so loved the world...."  The "so" here is not "so much"; rather, it is "in the same manner".  The "so" is a comparative statement, not a quantitative one.  

When we read Bible verses in isolation, we usually miss the point.  We usually misread the text.  When Paul wrote Romans, he wrote a long letter to the church in Rome.  He did not write a series of individual verses.  The letter flows together as a cohesive case, and pulling individual verses out in isolation from the rest of the passage is just asking for interpretive trouble.  

It is difficult to read the Scriptures apart from chapters and verses.  We are so used to them, and they are so helpful to point us to specific places in the Bible.  But they carry with them significant dangers.  It is important that we are aware of these dangers as we seek to understand what the authors are trying to communicate.