Friday, October 16, 2009

A Bonfire of Bibles

I was hoping to do a substantive post about Hume tonight, but I'm quite tired and have a great many logic quizzes to grade. But while taking a short break I came across this post about a recent book-burning at a church in North Carolina. The church's announcement:

Halloween Book Burning
Burning Perversions of God’s Word
October 31, 2009

7:00 PM – Till

Great Preaching and Singing

Come to our Halloween book burning. We are burning Satan’s bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News for Modern Man, The Evidence Bible, The Message Bible, The Green Bible, ect. These are perversions of God’s Word the King James Bible.

We will also be burning Satan’s music such as country , rap , rock , pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel , contempory Christian , jazz, soul, oldies but goldies, etc.

We will also be burning Satan’s popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort , Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham , Rick Warren , Bill Hybels , John McArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll , John Piper, Chuck Colson, Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham , Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn , Joyce Myers, Brian McLaren, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa , The Pope , Rob Bell, Erwin McManus, Donald Miller, Shane Claiborne, Brennan Manning, William Young, etc.

We are not burning Bibles written in other languages that are based on the TR. We are not burning the Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva or other translations that are based on the TR.

We will be serving Bar-b-Que Chicken, fried chicken, and all the sides.

If you have any books or music to donate, please call us for pick-up. If you like you can drop them off at our church door anytime. Thanks.


Actually, it almost sounds like fun. We Americans don't have enough bonfires, and in its own weird way there is something extraordinarily striking about the very idea of eating good fried chicken and fixings while singing hymns around a Halloween bonfire of Bibles and Gospel music CDs. Chesterton or (perhaps better yet) O'Connor could write a stunningly good story about it. And, despite being a bit of bibliophile, I am pretty much indifferent to bookburning as such; I don't regard it as seriously different from any other form of symbolic protest, and while I think such protests are usually silly, there are worse things. But I always wonder where they are getting the books. Surely Amazing Grace Baptist Church isn't recommending that people steal the books first; but how many people attending a church like Amazing Grace are going to have handy copies of Westcott & Hort, or the writings of Mother Teresa and the Pope?