A World Without Scripture
Wanderings. August 22, 2025
One of the benefits of walking a solitary path is the space it creates for deep reflection and uninterrupted prayer. As I walk, I’ve been thinking about some interesting words of Jesus: “…everyone who hears these words of mine, and does them…” (Matthew 7:24). When I read those words, I think of Eugene Peterson’s line:
“If we want to read Scripture accurately, …it is necessary… to live them.”
As you read on, it is impossible to miss the point: things will go better in every sphere of life, religion, and culture if his words and ways are known and followed. It is impossible to miss a corresponding point: things will go worse if his words are not known and followed.
You might think I am being terribly biased toward Jesus. After all, we know friends, family members, and even whole cultures that have built good lives with little knowledge of, or acknowledgment of, the words and ways of Jesus. But here is the thing: these are not my words. They are his. Right now, I’m merely reporting what he said.
And history, in its imperfect way, bears him out.
For much of the past 2,000 years, we witnessed a working out of those words in the formation of western culture. This work of building life and culture on the words and ways of Jesus has sometimes been agonizingly slow, halting, and imperfect. Sometimes the vision, courage, and boldness needed to create real communities around his words and ways were insufficient, and people suffered for too long as a result. Yet even in its imperfect enactment, it is impossible to miss that the compassions, liberties, and dignities drawn from these words made life better.
Every now and then, a prophet is raised whose laments are ignored at our peril. One such prophet was Nietzsche, the German philosopher celebrated by secularists for his announcement of the death of God. Christians scorned him for his atheism. But both the secularists and the Christians got it wrong. Nietzsche, the son of a pastor, wasn’t celebrating—he was lamenting. He saw that when Christianity was abandoned, the scaffolding that upheld compassion, dignity, and truth would eventually collapse. Nietzsche warned that if Christianity were removed, its sustaining ideas and values would fall too.
Nietzsche died in 1900. More than a century later, the words and ways of Jesus are no longer known in the culture that was built upon them. They simply are no longer read. I know there is more to this than the decline of Bible reading, but the basic fact is clear: the Bible is no longer being read by most people. The average person in the U.S. opens the Bible and reads something from it only four times a year. Recent surveys show that fewer than 10% of Christians read the Bible daily, and a third rarely or never open it.
And here’s what strikes me: when I asked Nietzsche what happens to culture when Christianity is removed from it, he lamented. When I asked Google AI the same question, it shrugged: “Don’t worry—other religions and ideas will fill in the void, and life will go on.” Nietzsche would have wept. AI needs to read Nietzsche.
That’s part of why I’ve given this whole week to writing about Scripture. Christian spiritual formation isn’t built on a generic spirituality that floats free of the Bible. It’s rooted in a biblical story—one that tells us where the human story began, how it went wrong, how it’s healed, and where it’s headed. Spiritual formation’s overarching mission is to form us into the likeness of Jesus—the Living Word of God—not into the likeness of Scripture, the written Word of God. And yet we have to read the latter to be formed into the former. Dallas Willard put it this way:
“The Word of God is a real substance that nourishes our body and soul… It contains a body of knowledge without which human beings cannot survive.”
That is what I mean when I say this book is dynamite. It is not a relic of faith—it is fuel for life with God. My call this week has been to pick it up, hold it out, and say to anyone listening: “Hey! Did you hear what He said?”
Four Takeaways from the Trail
1) Read the words of Jesus more.
Get reacquainted with him. Rebuild your inner world with his words and ways becoming larger in your life. Read one of the gospels. Read another. Repeat. Don’t stop.
2) Learn to Listen to the Speaking Voice of God in Scripture.
Reading the Bible more is a good thing. But I imagine one the reasons we quit reading the Bible is we never were taught how to listen to these words as the living words of a God who is always speaking. I wrote about this yesterday in The Compass’s Gone Hiking post showing how the contemplative stream of Christian faith and spirituality gave me back my spiritual ears. But I like how Eugene Peterson says things, and he doesn’t disappoint when it comes to listening to scripture:
The Christian’s interest in Scripture has always been in hearing God speak, not in analyzing moral memos. The practice is to nurture a listening disposition—an involving ear rather than a distancing eye—becoming passionate hearers of the Word, not cool readers of the page.
3) Rehitch yourself to the whole biblical story.
Some popular church leaders have suggested unhitching Christianity from the older parts of the Bible. But without the Old Testament, the story of Jesus collapses. Dusty or difficult as some passages may feel, the whole story is what gives Jesus’ story its weight and glory.
4) Read in community.
Don’t only read alone. When Jesus first said his words about “hearing and doing,” he was speaking to a community. There are plenty of studies showing what happens when we do alone what we once did together—and it isn’t pretty. Formation deepens when Scripture is heard, spoken, and lived together. So, rejoin a community where the words and ways of Jesus are spoken, heard, and lived.
Turning for Home
As I turned for home on the trail, I kept thinking: a world without Scripture is like flowers cut from their roots. They may look alive for a while, but they wither. If our culture is drifting, go ahead and feel the weight of that. But only for a moment. Let that weight drive you back to these words—to hear them in silence, to live them in community, to let them form you.
The house built on rock still stands.
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