There was urgency in his voice as Dr. Eugene Habecker, president of the American Bible Society (ABS), described the challenge of "post-literacy," a phenomenon of twentieth-century society that, he says, keeps people in Western culture from reading the Bible.
"People in our society can read," he explained when I talked with him recently, "but they're just not choosing to. What they're choosing to do is to use the video or television medium as a substantial, if not primary, source of learning. They say: 'I'm not going to read the morning newspaper. I'm going to watch the news on television. I'm not going to go read the novel. I'm going to wait till the movie version comes out. I'm not going to read the Scriptures. I'm going to wait until....'" He shrugged his shoulders, threw up his hands, and said, "Until what? There's nothing there!"
So, Dr. Habecker and the American Bible Society are addressing that need by providing the public—especially young people who've "never broached the door of a church building"—with a video translation of the Bible. To date the ABS has produced just one segment of this new translation—a nine-minute video, with original rock music, depicting Jesus' healing of the man possessed with demons (from the fifth chapter of Mark). It's noisy, riveting, and powerful.
