Originally posted by Just Some Dude
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1) Should the church as a whole be exposed to the Bible as a whole? Yes. We should not focus only on the NT, and certainly not only on our favorite passages.
2) Is it important that the whole Bible be read through as part of the worship service? That might have been important in previous centuries when Bibles were hard to come by and thus people could only be exposed to the Bible at church. Today it's less pressing, and I'd go so far as to say that someone who expects church services to fill their "Bible exposure quota" will have a pretty impoverished spiritual life, compared to someone who's regularly studying the Bible at home as he should. Still, it's good for the people of God to hear to Word of God together. And also to hear it explained.
3) Is it important to read the Bible, during corporate worship, in the original languages? I can't think of any biblical warrant for such an idea. That seems more like icing than cake. However, when I teach at church, which I do often, I use powerpoint and stop on key words, showing their Greek spelling, pronunciation, and meaning, in hopes of improving congregational comfort with such things. We only have so many hours of instruction at church in a lifetime. I can spend those hours teaching people a foreign language, or I can spend those hours teaching people the Bible. I choose the Bible.
4) Is a standardized cross-congregational lectionary important? (Robrecht raises this issue) There are pros and cons. A lectionary ensures that "tough texts" are not skipped. It ensures uniformity. It also potentially reduces the freedom of the local minister to choose Scriptures that speak to the particular needs of the particular local church at that particular time, although I'm sure many ministers can tell tales of times that the assigned Scripture happened to be extremely apropos for some situation of the moment.
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