Ponderings from Pastor Pamela's Pen
By Rev. Pamela Fitkin
As we keep learning about how to read the Holy Scriptures well, I also often think about how we “use” it or “yield” it.
Speaking about Holy Scripture and using it as we are called to in 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” is good, but that got me thinking about William Shakespeare's use of the Bible.
I have been wondering what would have been his Biblical source?
Well, he was born in 1564 and the Geneva Bible had been translated in 1560. The Geneva Bible had been the Bible of the people and most likely the Bible found in his home and the only book perhaps found in anyone's home.
Only two of Shakespeare plays are written after the King James Version of the Bible was printed. Scholars of Shakespeare agree that the Geneva Bible was his primary source.
Major Walter in his book Shakespeare's True Life said it well. “We believe that the home education of Shakespeare was grounded in the Bible. Had this book been sealed to his childhood he might have been the poet of nature, of passion. His humour might have been as rich as we find it and his wit as pointed, but he would not have been the poet of the most profound as well as the most tolerant philosophy. His insight into the nature of man (his meanness and his grandeur, his weakness, and his strength) would not have been what it is.” Shakespeare's power of inspiring us with sublime affection for what is good, and chilling us with horror by his fearful delineations of evil perpetually reminds us of the Bible.
But it is not really how we are to “use” the Bible.
We are to quote scripture carefully. We are to pray through it. We are to use it lovingly like the way King Solomon suggested in Proverbs 16:24. “Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.”
Let us keep learning to read well, but maybe more importantly is our employment of it.
