Carl Trueman on the proliferation of Study Bibles, generally produced by publishers and para-church groups:
There are many comments one could make about the plethora of such Bibles. The most obvious is that, to any with eyes to see, it is a publishing racket, designed to reinvent markets and thus invigorate income streams. It helps establish the dominance of particular individuals within the evangelical world. It meets no real need in the church. It is simply a part of the economy of finance, control, and promotion that characterizes today’s Big Evangelicalism. Study Bibles create a need which they then generously fill, a bit like the Apple iPhone, whose constant but trivial evolution keeps the gullible customer permanently dissatisfied and thus willing to shell out cash for whatever comes next. But perhaps that is too harsh. At least this one is ‘centered on the gospel message’ which is good and praiseworthy, if completely inane as a statement. In my experience, the best Bibles I have ever read have generally been centered on the gospel message. Indeed, if you have a Bible in your possession which is not centered on the gospel message, I suspect you may find that it is not actually a Bible at all but something else entirely — a novel by Tom Clancy, for example.
It also seems that there is a certain oddity to the endeavor, a kind of incipient megalomania, even if such is not actually intended. I used to take a copy of whatever Study Bible came immediately to hand into my Reformation class, the one on the Protestant notion of the uniqueness and sufficiency of scripture, open it up to the inside page and say ‘The Holy Bible: Written by God. But edited by Top Man.’Read the whole post here.
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