What Is Your Bible Reading Style?
Mar 15, 2022
What is your Bible reading style? Do you skim through known stories? Focus on the Psalms? Perhaps, you feel most comfortable in the New Testament and avoid Old Testament jargon. Or, maybe the majority of your interactions with Scripture involve listening to sermons.
It is healthy to examine our habits. Our brains are wired for repetition; anything to make the daily processing easier. Unfortunately, many of these ingrained habits are no longer serving our best interest. If you have been listening to Bible stories since you were a toddler, you may have developed a style of interacting with the text that is no longer benefiting your growth. Reflecting on your reading style can enhance your approach to the biblical text, but also to your reading muscle in general.
I would like to highlight two types of reading styles: active (critical) reading and passive reading.
Passive reading is reading to get the basic facts. This type of reading involves:
- skimming quickly through information
- looking for a basic overview
- reactionary: meaning the reader does not have a lot of context to work from
- unsuspecting: reader is taking the author’s word for it.
Active reading, however, involves thinking deeply about a topic. A critical reader:
- is deeply engaged with the material, which includes a highlighter or pen/paper
- slightly skeptical of the content: meaning they desire to understand intent and context
- Reads through the text multiple times for understanding
- Underlines unknown words, writes questions in the margins
Have you ever considered that you might be a passive reader instead of an engaged reader? Many of us are passive readers these days. We scroll through our phones, breezing past random snippets of content, reacting to whatever catches our attention. This is the crux of social media, to get the most information out in the simplest format. However, in the process, we sometimes lose the ability to engage in a meaningful way.
One way to gauge your reading engagement is to evaluate your reading habits.
- When is the last time you read a book from cover to cover?
- How many books have you read so far this year?
Reading an entire book demands paying attention to a single topic for possibly hundreds of pages. The author takes a deep dive into a subject, defining key terms, posing questions, and laying out a recognizable organization to their argument. Even in a novel, the author takes the reader on a pre orchestrated journey, with the intention of not only entertaining, but also eliciting growth.
Take a few moments right now to think about your reading style in general, but also your Bible reading style. How can you become a more active reader? At Religion for Her, we want to help you engage with sacred literature afresh. Thinking about your reading style is one step in this process.
Next week: Active Reading Strategies!
Jennifer Metten Pantoja, author
