Verses 'R Us?

We've seen them everywhere--on signs at sporting events, etched into the eye-black of football players, silk-screened onto T-shirts cheap and pricy, inscribed on all sorts of toys, trinkets, and baubles. First, a couple of letters which good Christians recognize as code a particular book of the Bible, followed by a number, a colon, and another number. Most of the time the verses so referenced have little if anything to do with the particular product bearing the reference. But we're oh so convinced that this is a great form of evangelism.

Well, this harmless (?) Christian kitsch has been taken to a new level. It seems that the scopes of certain guns used by the U. S. military forces have also been used to display references. So the soldier catches a glimpse of a verse from the Bible while aiming, presumably to kill an enemy combatant. The irony grows when we learn that many of the verses point to Jesus as the light of the world. The weapon has one message about dealing with the world's problems; the text referred to has quite another.

My point is not to argue for a pacifist stance on all military conflict. That's a different issue for another day. The point for consideration here is that we have been brought to a place at which to consider the wisdom of using isolated verses from the Bible as a form of evangelism. As long as the "message" contained in the verses is out there, someone will see it and be saved. But is it so? Lacking context, devoid of explanation in terms of the larger story the Bible gives us, isolated from the community of faith which is being shaped by that story, one is left to wonder what has been accomplished. Particularly in a culture which has lost its ability to remember even the vague outline of the Bible's story of the world, and has been implicitly formed with the expectations and habits of a different one altogether, such short-cuts to evangelism are unwise at best.

What do you think?