News Health: The Bible and the Newspaper

Happy Sunday,

“And let the peace of Christ, to which you were also called in one body, rule your hearts. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you.”

Colossians 3:15-16

The Bible and the Newspaper
Karl Barth, perhaps the church’s most prolific 20th-century theologian, left a theological legacy that we’re still unpacking today, and yet his most quotable quip wasn’t doctrinal—it was a simple piece of pastoral advice: 

“Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”

I’ve primarily heard this quote used to encourage Christians to pay more attention to the news (occasionally, the second sentence is omitted entirely from quotes). That’s not a bad takeaway—he is certainly advocating for news consumption, and if Christians never read the news, we risk our faith becoming abstracted from the world God loves—but it’s also not the main point Barth is making.

Barth is reminding us that the Bible > the news.

This quote convicts me in another (certainly unintended) way, because Barth didn’t instruct us to use our Bibles to interpret the “news,” but “newspapers.” It’s a reminder that in his time, the news was finite. It was held, read, digested, and then reused as the liner to a pet’s litterbox. 

If he worried that a 1960s newspaper could sway my interpretation of Scripture, what would he think about today’s news? Compared to Barth's day, the news today is unabashedly trying to interpret our world for us—it's engineered to provoke emotion, reinforce party loyalty, and keep us coming back for more.

This week, I’m going to work to keep the spirit of Barth’s entire quote. I will read my Bible. I will read the news. And the amount of time and weight I give each will reflect that I am not confused about their order of importance.

What do you think?
Jason Woodruff

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