Pop goes the Bible.
Dag Soderberg seeks to take the Bible out of the bookshop and onto the coffee table with Bible Illuminated: The Book. When a secularist non-believer like Soderberg seeks to illuminate the Bible, you know very little good can come out of it. The purpose of the Bible is to illumine, and can only truly be illuminated by someone that has in fact been illumined by it.
The glossy-paged Vogue-style Bible sold well in secularized Sweden precisely because it only appeals to a secularized post-modern mentality that limits the teachings of Christ to social justice and would rather honor celebrities as God's messengers than the Saints. Why else would Angelina Jolie, Al Gore, Che Guevera, Mother Theresa, Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela appear in the Gospel of Mark? Why else would an Andy Warhol poster and the ultrasound image of a baby with 47 chromosomes appear at the opening to the Gospel of Matthew, adjacent to highlighted verses on the birth of Christ? What purpose is there to a photograph of three young black men striking gangsta poses to "illuminate" Matthew’s account of the three visitors from the East? Probably the worst thing about the book is that it uses the awful Good News translation of the Bible.
One can only wonder what's next in the world of the big business of selling Bibles - a Jenna Jameson illustrated version of Song of Songs perhaps? After all, wouldn't such a text provoke discussion as well?
Maybe certain things should just not be discussed.
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| Dag Soderberg | ||||
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