Eugene Peterson has written persuasively about our need to devour the Bible and take it deeply into our lives as nourishing and essential spiritual food. This insight is shared with his usual wit and wisdom in his 2006 title Eat This Book.

Yet I have to ask: how likely is this to happen when the meal itself is typically served up in the form of small bits and pieces - crumbs, as it were? What do I mean? Simply this: our Bibles typically come to us in a fragmented, sliced-and-diced format. The Bible does not come to us as a full meal, and so we most typically experience it as a series of small snacks. The chopped-up presentation leads to chopped-up consumption.

The combination of NIDS (those Numeric Interference Devices, known as chapter and verse references) and all the other additives (section headings, footnotes, cross-references, study helps) have overwhelmed the text itself. They have become distractions - detriments to long, holistic, healthy readings of the Bible.

What should we do?

I propose that the way home to some good old-fashioned, whole-food spiritual feasting is to rediscover a sweet, organic Bible. Then we'll have something substantial to dig into and eat.

What is an organic Bible?

Before the numbers, there was the word. First the word was spoken, then written, collected and eventually copied. And then, frankly, it was added to and made to be quite complicated. An organic Bible is a Bible without the additives. It removes everything from the page of Scripture text that isn't Scripture. Pure Bible. It also repairs the individual books that were split up and separated later (Luke-Acts, Samuel-Kings, etc.).

Suddenly the Bible is readable again. Edible.

So what is a sweet, organic Bible?

Biblical authors chose real literary forms as vehicles for their messages. A sweet, organic Bible is a restored, literary Bible that allows readers to eat these books the authors actually wrote; narratives, letters, song lyrics, oracles, wisdom collections, apocalypses. It looks for and then reveals the natural literary sections the authors themselves presented. It delivers all this in a simple and elegant single-column text.

What emerges is the sweet spot of Bible engagement: reading whole books. Readers discover that the smaller messages they were always getting are actually part of bigger messages. Context makes a comeback. Now the meal is not only edible, it's delicious. All of this represents a core insight into the way things work in God's good creation: form and content are made to fit together. Present whole books of the Bible in an inviting, literary fashion, and that's what people will read.

Now, go eat your meal. And enjoy.

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