Steve dreams up the ideal website to provide a pleasant and useful way to read, study, and search the Bible and the Writings of Swedenborg in many languages. In describing his vision Steve introduces a website (www.newchristianbiblestudy.org) that is growing steadily to match the dream. Read about the possibilities of the website, and the potential to get involved in this project. -Editor.
The world is home to two billion Christians. Many read the Bible. Many of those Bible readers “get it” that the literal sense must contain an inner meaning, and they’re looking for it.
Here we are in the New Church with an asset that other Bible-explainers don’t have—Swedenborg’s works—which provide a divinely given, true, cohesive, sensible explanation of the real inner meaning.
This is a huge opportunity for the New Church; maybe the best one we have right now. What’s the best way to work with it?
...that people are reading the Word, and decide to look for its meaning. If they happen to have a book of commentary on the shelf, they might use it. Mostly, these days, they’ll go online and search for it.
What will they search for? They will probably search, in their own language, for a snippet of text from the Bible passage that they’re wondering about, or the book/chapter/verse, or maybe a shorthand name of the story, e.g. Samson and Delilah.
What will they be interested in, when they find it? They’ll want an attractive user interface that seems to offer a good set of functionality without being overly complicated. They’ll want to go straight to the passage that they are interested in, and get a clear, useful explanation. They won’t want a hard sell, or to be converted to something new, or to be rushed, or to be overwhelmed.
If those hypothetical users are pleased with their search results, and the explanations they find, they might come back, or stick around, or bookmark the site, or gradually get interactive with it.
Okay, so, let’s say that’s a plausible chain of events. What, then, can we create, to provide a great experience/environment for those Bible readers?
a. In Swedenborg’s works.
b. In plain-language, accessible explanations based on Swedenborg’s works.
Such a site is doable. The New Christian Bible Study Project has a good site up already, and it’s pulling a steadily increasing stream of visitors from all over the world. We’re working hard on improvements and extensions. So far, we have organized and inter-related three sets of information in a big database:
From those three pillars of data, we’re able to make all sorts of connections. The most obvious ones are the places where the Writings cite or explain scripture. A Bible reader in many places in the world can now search the web for some Bible text, come to our site, read that section, and see links to the places where Swedenborg cites or explains that text.
Another new feature is built on plain-English explanations for over 300 commonly occurring words in the King James Bible. Wherever those words occur in the literal sense, we generate a link that can pop up a brief explanation of the word and its correspondences. Since we’ve started with fairly common words, it’s rare that a Bible reader is looking at a page with no links—so the idea of correspondences is brought out, early on.
We’ve been gathering translations of some of Swedenborg’s works—in Swedish, Norwegian, French, Dutch, German, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Zulu so far—and there are more languages out there that we’re working to get. We’re putting them in an on-deck circle on the site now, and we want to prepare and integrate them into the main database. Then, Bible readers in those languages can readily become readers of the Writings, too.
One of the most efficient things about all this is that each link spreads across all languages. With the right database structure comes a lot of leverage!
Building this site is a keystone for church growth. It rolls out the red carpet for worldwide Bible readers. It is on its way to being a dynamic platform that supports daily reading, research, sermon-writing, online discussions, and translation—and we think it can be very symbiotic with local congregations, and small groups.
Clearly, I’m promoting this project to you dear readers. I beg your indulgence for that, but the enthusiasm and conviction are real. We are very excited about the project—both as it is now, and for where it’s heading.
There’s a big list of things that have been completed, and another ambitious list of things we’re planning to do. If you would like to help, there are lots of opportunities. Here are a few examples:
Thank you for reading this. Please come and visit the site, and, if you feel so moved, get in touch!
The New Christian Bible Study Project is being carried out under the sheltering wing of the Pittsburgh Society of the New Church. Some work has been done by paid contract workers; other work has been volunteered. Funding to date has been provided by some New Church-friendly foundations, and by private donors. We’ve had important help from the Academy’s STAIRS/NewSearch project, and its prime mover Chuck Ebert has become an active member of the project team. Ian Thompson, whose biblemeanings.info site has blazed a trail in this area, has been an excellent source of content and advice. Likewise, it’s been fun and useful to work with Andy Heilman and the people who are doing good work on the Kempton Project.
Our project team includes Will Cooper, Laird Cooper, and me, working day to day on the software. Brian David has written most of the explanations we have in the system, and provided some fun but serious videos to illustrate various spiritual concepts and inner meanings to Bible stories. Jamie Uber has chaired our many meetings, and helped us in many ways, not least with corporate and intellectual property advice. Brian Keith, Peter M. Buss Sr., Andy Dibb, George McCurdy, Eric Carswell, Kurt Ho. Asplundh, Ken Alden, Goran Appelgren and others have provided sermons and longer works that are now on deck for processing. It’s already a broad-based effort, and will hopefully keep getting broader.
Steve is a member of the Pittsburgh New Church Society. He and his wife Caroline (Turner) have four children. Steve attended the Academy of the New Church, in the high school and the college, and graduated from Yale University.
To get in touch with Steve: www.newchristianbiblestudy.org sdavid@skymark.com +412.523.5145