Preface to the Fourth Edition
This fourth edition of How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth was prompted by a phone call from Doug having to do with updating the bibliographies in the Appendix. It did not take much reading of the third edition to realize how much things had changed in the past decade. Not only did the bibliography need to be brought up to date, but so did several other matters. Thus as is my wont, I took down a copy from my shelf and marked up page after page with red ink, so much so that it became clear that a thoroughgoing rewrite was necessary. At the top of the list was my own longtime passion of “getting rid of the numbers,” so that people will read the Bible the way they would read any book. In this edition the numbers, that is, the chapter and verse notations, are kept, of course, but now appear only in parentheses at the end of a sentence or paragraph. Understandably this involved restructuring various sentences; but it also gave us the opportunity to bring several other matters up to date as well. The result is a fourth edition of the same book that seems to have benefitted so many readers of the Bible.
It turned out that the most serious need for revision had to do with the biblical text itself. The need was clear, since the original NIV, also known as the 1984 NIV, is no longer published. As a longtime member of the Committee for Bible Translation, who are responsible for the NIV, it has been for me a privilege to bring the biblical text used throughout the book up to speed, in this case now based on the 2011 NIV. Thus as with any “revision” of a book, things have here been “updated” on almost every page. But the basic content has remained the same. Our aim here has been to make our own book more readable, but far beyond that to encourage an ongoing reading of the Bible on the part of God’s people. So we conclude this preface by repeating those words that St. Augustine heard that led to his conversion: Tolle, lege — “Take up and read!” meaning, of course, Scripture itself, hopefully with this little book helping you to read God’s Word better, with worship and obedience as the ultimate goal!
Gordon D. Fee
July 2013