Information Related to "Britain's Need to Return to the Bible"
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The availability of the Holy Spriptures is at an all-time high, but the anomaly is that the demand for biblical knowledge remains at a new low.
by John Ross Schroeder
LONDON-In spite of some popular television advertisements to the contrary, this is most certainly not the age of the train in Britain. Time was when railways dominated the transport landscape here. No more. Today they struggle just to keep a small share of the freight and passenger market.
There is a parallel in this story with the Bible here in Britain. In an important sense, this is certainly not the age of the Bible, either. Or, to put it another way, it is not the age of faith. Jesus Christ Himself once asked the question: When the Son of Man comes, shall He find faith on the earth?
True, the availability of the Holy Scriptures is at an all-time high, but the anomaly is that demand for biblical knowledge is at a new low. We who are trying our best to convey this precious good news in England constantly run right into this massive barrier of biblical ignorance. Our work of publishing the gospel has been greatly impeded simply because the majority of people are largely unaware of the contents of this most basic of textbooks.
The Bible of centuries past
In the time of translator William Tyndale, the people of Britain would risk death to own just a few pages of the Bible in their native language. Today we can buy the Bible in a variety of translations for relatively little money. Yet sad to say real public interest is all too lacking.
A new biography profiles the English visionary William Blake. It turns out that Blake's closest and most significant attachment was to the Bible. As Blake's biographer Peter Ackroyd marvels: "It is hard to re-imagine a culture in which that book was the central and pre-eminent text, through which the world itself was to be understood" (Blake, p. 25).
Yet, according to British historian Christopher Hill, "The Bible was central to all intellectual as well as moral life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (The English Bible, p. 21). Clearly, at one time the Scriptures were an integral part of the British culture. No more is that true in this secular age.
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