On Monday, the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will launch the Poverty and Justice Bible at Parliament House in Canberra.

The media alert from World Vision explains:

"We are delighted that the Prime Minister will be launching the Poverty and Justice Bible. World Vision and the Bible Society in Australia have joined forces to publish a local version of the Bible, the first to highlight more than 2,000 passages of scripture that speak of God's attitude to poverty and justice."

As the Bible Society discovered last week with the release of the NSW Police Bible, these specialist Scriptures do generate a lot of interest and even excitement amongst non-believers.

If it gets more people reading God's Word, then surely that is a good thing?

Of course, it's not that simple. Red-letter Bibles have been controversial in Sydney Anglican circles, and this project clearly goes one step further.

However, I've agonised for two weeks how to broach this issue appropriately.
I am very sympathetic to World Vision's anti-poverty campaigns. In fact, earlier this year, I organised a fair trade community market and overseas development symposium at my church. So I am very loathe to start any discussion that might end up being perceived as part of some right-wing, anti-aid agenda.

As a result, I thought it would be more helpful to broaden the discussion by looking at two other very different 'single issue' Bible projects.

The Green Bible

In the May issue of First Things, Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College, took a blow torch to the new Green Bible in his article "Blessed are the green at heart".

The motivation behind the Green Bible is worthy: the hope is that committed environmentalists will become less antagonistic to Christianity and more to the gospel if they realise God is also green.

This is certainly a genuine problem.

The vox pops on the promotional website certainly shows some greeny-looking Americans with some troubling stereotypes about Christianity. The notion that the Bible teaches Christians to 'master' the earth and not to care for the environment appears widespread.

Yet, Jacobs argues, the problem with the project is not that environmental concerns are being incorrectly imposed on Scripture. To the contrary:

"The Green Bible has the great merit of treating a theme that really is in Scripture. The quotation from Romans 8 on the project's homepage. really is central to the biblical picture of redemption and really has been neglected in theory and practice."

The fundamental problems are twofold, argues Jacobs.

1. The project is implicitly subjecting God to human standards. 

"The Green Bible presents us with a curious kind of natural theology: we start with things from trusted sources - Al Gore perhaps? - and then we turn to Scripture to measure it against those pre-existing and reliable authorities.

2. The Green Bible shifts the readers focus away from Christ which should be central to the narrative.

"For Christians, Jesus Christ is not only the Way, the Truth and the Life. He is also as St Paul says, the end of the Law and its fulfillment.. Christ leads you to everything else, greenness does not. And the green lettering invites us to separate one theme from others, extracting it from the large story of which it is part. Is it fair to ask the Green Bible to make all these theological connections? Yes, because it's a complete Bible. The green lettering, the prefatory essays, and the concluding study guide suggest that this one theme is the interpretive key to Scripture. And that's simply not a sustainable claim."

For Jacobs if the project had taken a different shape - say the collection of essays coupled with an anthology of relevant parts of Scripture - then it "would surely have been a useful and valuable thing".

"But subjecting the whole of Scripture to one agenda - enfolding it in a single adjective green - is, I think, an ill-judged strategy for pursuing a worthwhile goal."

The American Patriots Bible

Perhaps you feel more relaxed that Jacobs about the Green Bible. After all it's clearly a 'novelty' ministry tool that may help us reach greenies. If we see them converted we can point them to a more standard Scripture.

But would you feel the same way if the colours change completely?

For partisans on the Republican right, the Bible is also being marketed in red, white and blue.

The American Patriot's Bible directly links Scripture with pivotal events in US history, through the use of insert boxes scattered through the text.

In my view this is American Civic Christianity at its most syncretistic. Even worse than the Green Bible, this project is actually imposing a nationalistic framework that is completely alien to the context of Scripture.

As the marketing blurb says.

The Word of God and the Shaping of America: The American Patriot’s Bible intersects the teachings of the Bible with the history of the Unites States while applying it to today’s culture. Beautiful full-color insert pages spotlight America’s greatest thinkers, leaders, and events that present the rich heritage and future of our great nation.

Conclusion

Looking at the big picture, this marketing trend in Bible publishing seems farcical. The Bible is not a chameleon that changes colour depending on its context.

But don't get me wrong. There is more grey here than black or white.

Surely it is not wrong in principle to add user-friendly reading tools to the Bible?

In the cases cited it is made clear to the reader that the inserted text doesn't carry the same weight as Scripture itself. After all even the Diocese's own Essential Jesus version of Luke adds relatively lengthy explanatory bookends. 

So some questions for readers:

1. Does World Vision's Poverty Bible fall into similar traps to the Green Bible and the American Patriot's Bible? Or is it a different case? Why or why not?

2. Is 'highlighting' parts of Scripture fundamentally different to adding extra bits to a Bible?

3. Is the marketing of single-issue Bibles heightening the public's distrust of the text by implying we can get the Bible to say whatever we want?

4. Does the positive PR that promotes Bible reading to non-Christians out-weigh other concerns?