Tim Challies wrote last Saturday in a Crosswalk.com blog that he’s witnessing a disturbing trend: Christians coming to worship not with a traditional paper & ink Bible, but an electronic Bible on an iPod, smart phone, or other such device. He encourages his readers not only to not bring an electronic Bible to worship, but to not do their daily Bible reading with one either.

Challies quotes two “gurus of the technological age”, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, to support his thesis. He argues, supported by quotes from McLuhan, that you can’t separate the medium and the message. “The medium is the message,” McLuhan says. Challies claims it’s folly to discount this fact, and also puts into this category singing hymns from a PowerPoint image instead of from a printed book, and listening to sermons online instead of listening in a pew.

I don’t get it, but then I’m one of the ones in our congregation (yes, there are more than just me) who follows the Bible class teacher as he reads from Scripture, I search cross-references, and I even look up Greek words on the Bible that’s loaded onto my iPhone. What’s wrong with that? So I really don’t get the “medium is the message” argument. When it comes to God’s Word, the Message is the message. That Message is the same no matter what the medium. Challies argues that when reading the Bible electronically, sure, we read the same words, but “in a way that influences us toward a different worldview, a different way of understanding the reality of those words.”

I still don’t get it.

There’s another reason I like my iPhone Bible in Bible class. Let’s say the teacher is answering someone’s question, and he says, “Paul says ‘the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing’, but I don’t know where that’s found.” Maybe I’d like to know where that verse is recorded. It’s a lot easier to do a search on my electronic Bible than it is to use the mini-concordance in the back of my NIV Study Bible to find it.

Maybe I’m just deluded and sheltered in my own little iPhone thought-cloud. Maybe there’s more to this that I don’t get, and maybe I really shouldn’t be bringing my iPhone to Bible class and worship. (At least I’m one of the “good guys” who turns the ringer off during services.)

Let me know what you think.