With the passing of Thanksgiving, my e-mail box is filled with messages reminding Christians to put Christ back into Christmas. These chain messages admonish Christians not to say “Seasons Greetings” and to rebuke the “holiday tree.”
I wonder where these protectors of Christ were when we allowed the masses to take Holy out of the Bible. Publishing houses fill bookshelves across the nation with bibles of all varieties. No, I don’t mean NIV, King James or the Living Bible. I am referring to those helpful reference guides printed on almost any subject one can imagine from The Crochet Stitch Bible by Betty Barnden to No Holds Barred Fighting: The Kicking Bible: Strikes for MMA and the Street by Mark Hatmaker.
On a recent visit to a nationwide bookseller, as I perused the cookbooks, I discovered that Rose Levy Beranbaum had written both a cake bible and a bread bible. What a talented woman she must be! Beranbaum has written not just one but two bibles, while it took 40 authors to write the one, true Bible.
Upon returning home, I decided to do a quick internet search to see just what types of bibles are being published. Thanks to authors like Randi Foxx, Greg Green and Henry Owings, who respectively penned The Sex Games Bible: More Erotic Activities Than You Could Possibly Imagine Trying; The Cannabis Grow Bible: The Definitive Guide to Growing Marijuana for Recreational and Medical Use; and The Rock Bible, there are bibles for sex, drugs and rock and roll enthusiasts. In fact, in less than 15 minutes, I found over 40 bibles which made no reference to God. The title most closely referencing even a modicum of spirituality was Light on Yoga: The Bible of Modern Yoga by B. K. S. Iyengar. I find irony in this title as Eastern Spirituality focuses on self and the Bible teaches us God first, others second, and self last. The Bible of Modern Yoga seems contradictory to biblical teaching, while Dave Galey’s Bus Converter’s Bible just seems odd.
Even California’s Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote a bible. I find the title of Governor Schwarzenegger’s bible most enlightening of all. The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding: The Bible of Bodybuilding is almost a redundancy, since encyclopedia and bible are synonyms in contemporary language. Merriam-Webster.com contains an entry for both bible and Bible. A bible according to the website is “a publication that is preeminent especially in authoritativeness or wide readership,” while Bible is either “the sacred scriptures of Christians comprising the Old Testament and the New Testament” or “the sacred scriptures of some other religion (as Judaism).”
Dictionaries a half-century ago only included an entry for the proper noun “Bible.” The 1953 edition of Webster’s Elementary Dictionary contained two definitions under the single entry for the proper noun Bible: “The book made up of the writings accepted by Christians as inspired by God” and “a book containing the scared writings of any religion.”
It is interesting to note that the definition of Bible expanded during in the quarter century before 1953. The 1925 edition of The New Dictionary of the English Language had only one definition for Bible, a proper noun, defined as “the Book (or the Books) by pre-eminence; the writing of the Old and New Testament, whether in the original tongues or translated.” This study of the dictionary supports the hypothesis drawn in the bookstore: We Christians have allowed the secular world to commandeer our holy text.
The trend of allowing secularism to pirate religious text is not found in other religions. There is no Tennis Torah or Karate Quran for sale at the local bookstore. There is no definition for Torah or Quran in the online dictionary. The online dictionary has only entries for Torah and Quran which are defined as the sacred texts of their respective religions. Christians must take a stand to protect the sacredness of the Bible and work toward the elimination of bible and its secular meaning.
I wonder how many of those well-intentioned protectors of Christmas hit “send” to forward emails with messages advising “all Christians to join together and wish everyone you meet during the holidays a Merry Christmas,” and then refer to The Cake Bible or one of Beranbaum’s other books such as Rose’s Heavenly Cakes or Rose’s Christmas Cookies.
As Christians, we need not only to remember “Christ is the reason for the Christ-mas season!”; we must protect the Bible as God’s holy Word throughout all the seasons of our lives.
Most importantly we need to protect Christ for, as we celebrate our savior’s virgin birth, we must remember that our salvation comes through his resurrection. This we learn by reading The Word, God’s Word—the Bible.
Lisa Clemmer, Mechanicsville