(Are There) Passages to Know By Heart

This is the second of two week 1 discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Understanding the Bible as a Progressive Christian through Pathways Theological Education

Discuss the “Fifteen Passages to Know by Heart.” [This is in a publication called The Bible and The United Church of Christ.] In your response, indicate whether or not you agree with the importance of knowing Scripture by heart and list the passages you would suggest for a similar list to “know by heart” or to “be familiar with.”

 I think the most important line in Caldwell's article is not any of the specific verses, but rather his description of what he means by knowing a passage by heart - "The point isn’t just to be able to rattle them off; the point is to know them so intimately that they’re written on your heart." I strongly disagree with just learning verses in a vacuum, and I have my doubts about memorizing them at all. A lot of verses are only truly meaningful in the larger context or are extremely misleading without it. Among my favorite verses are the pairing of "beat their swords  into plowshares" (Isaiah 2:4 / Micah 4:3) and "beat your plowshares into swords" (Joel 3:10), in large part because I think part of the point of them is to remind us how important context is. (Although I absolutely want to live in a world where we all can, metaphorically, beat swords into plowshares and live in peace.) I think that learning verses by rote makes it easier to weaponize them. That isn't to say that the practice is bad, but when you only know a few verses, it is easy to put too much emphasis on them and not the rest of the story they are a part of. (Lists like [some number] Bible verses about [topic XYZ] need to be approached with similar caution.) For one of my classes, we watched some taped lectures from an evangelical school, Gordon College. One of those lectures talked about the problems of transmission of the Bible and the fact that we know there have been some transmission errors because manuscripts differ. One of the students in the original class saw this as a challenge to his belief in Biblical inerrancy, but wasn't able to verbalize how or even his belief in inerrancy beyond simply repeating "The Lord's word is flawless" (Psalm 18:30) over and over. In his case, having learned a (partial) verse to support and defend his belief was actually keeping him from being able to ask questions and gain clarification on a topic, he knew the verse but he hadn't brought it into his heart.

In my Bible study group recently, we were discussing how growing up queer in America, even if you are in an affirming church yourself (or even a UUA church where the Bible is merely one among several potential "sources of meaning"), there is this constant pressure to discuss and defend against the "gotcha" verses and how that interferes in having a full relationship with the Bible. And I notice this same thing in Christian Universalism, people spend so much time focusing on the hell versus salvation texts that they lose track of what the Bible as a whole has to teach us. As Robin A. Parry says "every theological system has its problem texts"(The Evangelical Universalist, p 154), and it's important that we don't just focus on (or in this case memorize) the texts that promote or defend our beliefs or, alternatively, call out beliefs we disagree with. (No one wants to define our own theology as reactionary, but sometimes we do define ourselves by who or what we are not.)

Another concern I have with verse memorization is learning differences. Some people find memorization very easy and others find it difficult to impossible. Some people retain information easily once they have memorized it and others have to constantly review in order to keep it. I have noticed that memorizing things like sentences or examples helps some people understand concepts and for others understanding starts with getting the gist and then implementing the knowledge in some way; requiring exact memorization does not seem to make a huge difference. I suspect that the actual personal value of verse memorization has a lot to do with where you fall in this learning spectrum.

Any verse that someone ends up memorizing because they find it valuable and reference and discuss it  - either with others or in their personal reflections and prayer (ie have taken to heart organically) is a treasure. But I'm not sure the same benefit comes from picking a verse and going over it in whatever manner works for you until you have memorized it. One might be able to imitate the first process and study, discuss and pray with a verse enough times that you do memorize it; but that isn't what we usually think of as verse memorization.

In the 1960's and 1970's editions of the Joy of Cooking, the introduction to the index talks about two kinds of knowledge, what you know and what you can find easily. The internet and the ubiquity of smartphones means that even if your memory of the verse is, as Caldwell puts it 'you just describe it by saying, “You know, it’s the one about…”', you can probably find it in a few seconds, likely in multiple versions and with notes and commentary. While I agree with Caldwell that our personal favorites deserve better than “You know, it’s the one about…”, I'm not sure how many more verses deserve more than that. And speaking of versions, memorization tends to trap us in one translation (unless we both know and memorize in the original language.) That may or may not be a good thing. In 6th grade, I attended an Episcopal school and we had to memorize the Lord's Prayer (I believe the 1962 BCP version), that is still the wording of the Lord's Prayer I think of 40 plus years later. My current minister rotates through different versions of the Lord's Prayer and some of the versions with more modern language really speak to my soul, but my mind still defaults back to what I learned in 6th grade. Had I learned that version by reciting it regularly with my family, the memories attached might outweigh the more archaic wording, but in fact, my family was UU and didn't attend a church that prayed like that and my 6th grade school was a horrible fit for me academically, emotionally and socially, to the point of being a damaging experience. I don't think most memorization experiences will be that extreme, but I do know several people who have read a section of the Bible in a new or unfamiliar translation and had it open their heart in some way and it would be unfortunate if prior memorization interfered with their ability to fully integrate that experience.

I think there are ways to engage seriously with scripture beyond just reading that don't necessarily require memorization or access to education or study helps. For my final project for Freshman calligraphy class (at a secular but private school), I made an artistic copy of the school chapter 1 Corinthians 13. The process of planning and carefully writing it out (and the slow process of doing so) allowed me to internalize this text without memorizing it and encouraged me to think about it. The practice of lectio divina is a more formal way of spending time with a piece of scripture. Putting a chapter or book of the Bible in audio format on repeat while you drive or do chores may have a similar effect.

I've covered which verses not to bring into your heart, but not really which verses I would suggest. Part of that is that because I am cautious and ambivalent about the value of memorizing verses on purpose, I don't have strong opinions on which verses one should pick for this task. As a list of meaningful verses, I mostly like Caldwell's list. As a universalist, I'd probably leave out John 3:16 because I think people get too caught up in the "everyone who believes in him" part, particularly when it is quoted as a stand alone verse. I'd add 1 John 4:8, but that may have as much to do with the fact that it was my grandmother's favorite verse as the verse itself. I prefer Mark 12:29-31 to Deuteronomy 6:4-5, but that is mostly because I have organically used and studied the former enough times that it has settled in my heart, not because I think it is actually the superior statement. Perhaps I spent too much time pondering the "glass darkly" in 1 Corinthians 13, but I think Revelation and the assumption that it (or anything in the Bible) is a specific message about what the next life will bring is problematic, so I would probably  leave out that verse.

There is a list of verses that I have considered memorizing. I am a big fan of the Narrative Lectionary, which is an attempt to cover all the important stories of the bible. My church uses materials from Spirit and Truth publishing that recommend a memory verse (often actually a partial verse) for each Lectionary Reading. No one in my church is memorizing them, or even paying attention to the fact that there are memory verses in the material, but it has occurred to me that if I actually did so for a year, those 30 or so verses might function as reminders for pretty much all the major stories of the Bible and that would be an amazing thing to be able to recall easily.