Review: Museum of the Bible Offers Minority Report

From The Living Church, 21 Jan. 2018

The Bible is big, according to the new Museum of the Bible. It’s also influential, easy to understand, relevant to everyday life, and very American. The museum also suggests that the Bible is not all that complex or challenging.

The museum announces its presence with a text-emblazoned portal, three stories of the first chapter of Genesis, presented as a massively resized version of the plates used by the Gutenberg Bible’s printer. The entrance hall features enormous overhead screens, on which an ever-changing rotation of evocative photographs signals the technological thrust of the museum’s displays. The building’s glass-walled, futuristic cap offers stunning views of the U.S. Capitol, just two blocks away.

Though founder Steve Green deflected attention during a press conference to the institution’s 50,000 founding donors, the Museum of the Bible is his brainchild. Green, president of Hobby Lobby, began collecting biblical artifacts in 2009, aiming to present them to the public in a format that would garner wide attention. A committed evangelical who has taken his turn in the culture wars, Green knows how to make a political statement. His museum aims to educate and to inspire, but those brassy yards of bas-relief text are also a way of claiming a permanent corner of the public square for his people, the people of the Bible.

Good News from a Far Country

“Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see.”  St. Matthew 11:4

They ran a picture with his obituary in The Washington Post on Tuesday, “Star of the Green Hornet Dies at 82.”  I’d never seen Van Williams, the masked man with his gun pointed at the camera.  His starring role lasted only one season, back in 1966, more than a decade before I was born.  That had been the high point of his acting career, one show that no one really liked as much as Batman.  Williams had played a character here and there after that, and then hung it up to be a deputy sheriff and then a fireman in Southern California.[1]

I’ve read quite a few stories like this lately, as we slowly bid farewell to so many who stepped briefly into the public eye in that great flourishing of popular culture in the decades after World War II.  A few weeks ago, there was a famous dancer who had married a respectable dentist in her early twenties.  He didn’t like the way men looked at her on the stage, and she hung up those satin slippers for decades of ferrying children to music lessons and a hand of bridge once a week at the country club.  There was a man a few months before that who hit 23 home runs one golden summer in the mid-fifties.  He hurt his shoulder, and spent the rest of his life selling insurance in Western Nebraska.

Second acts can be very hard indeed.  Our talents fade.  Public taste is fickle.  The next generation always seems a little more clever and ambitious.  We wonder about the thoughts running through their minds as they watched the stop light and turned over restlessly in bed.  Was it all worth it?  Did I do something wrong?  Who am I now?  What will I do with the rest of my life?

The Story that 'Whispers His Name'

The cover, awash in oranges and blues, with little insets of Bible scenes, will look a little out of place among the serried ranks of prayer books and hymnals in our beautifully renovated church.  That’s purposeful, and if the aesthetics grate a bit for a few of you, I hope you will learn to be patient for all the right reasons.

Because putting a copy of a children’s Bible, perhaps especially a children’s Bible as good as Sally Lloyd-Jones’ The Jesus Storybook Bible in every pew at Saint Francis Church makes a statement about what has been important to us here for a very long time.  We love Jesus.  We want our children to come to know Him also, which is why we welcome them to stand and kneel with us as we worship Him week by week.  We discover Him in His Word, which is above all a story that “whispers His Name,” as this particular Bible’s subtitle has it.