Daring to actually read it

I recently discovered this jewel from one of my favorite writers, the late Jaroslav Pelikan:

An appalling ignorance of the Bible seems to have become epidemic in our time. . . .

Yet like the beauty ever ancient, ever new of a Byzantine icon or of Gregorian chant, the stately cadences of the Book of Psalms and the haunting beauty of the Bible do run the constant danger of getting in their own way. The very familiarity of the Bible after all these centuries can dull its sharp edges and obscure its central function, which is not only to comfort the afflicted but to afflict the comfortable, including the comfortable who are sitting in the pews of their synagogue or church as they listen to its words. If it is true that every age manages to invent its own particular heresies, our own age seems especially vulnerable to an aetheticism . . . that finds the ultimate mystery in transcendence, "the mystery that awes and fascinates," in the beauty of art and music, which have the magical capacity to transport us into an otherworldy realm without at the same time calling us to account for our sins in the presence of the holy God and righteous Judge of all mankind.

To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments neatly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished---until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from "How shiny and beautiful they are!" to "Get that damned thing out of my mouth!" Once I begin to read it anew, perhaps in the freshness of a new translation, it stops speaking in cliches and begins to address me directly. Many people who want nothing to do with organized religion claim to be able to read the Bible at home for themselves. But it is difficult to resist the suspicion that in fact many of them do not read it very much. For if they did, the "sticker shock" of what it actually says would lead them to find most of what it says even more strange than the world of synagogue or church.

The passage above comes from chapter 12 of Pelikan's Whose Bible Is It?

Update: David Wayne has more at Jollyblogger.