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A couple of decades ago, young American Bobby Gruenewald standing in an airport security queue wondered whether technology could help him read the Bible more consistently. He launched a website, then in 2008 an app for mobile phones.
This week, that free Bible app, YouVersion – now offering more than 3500 translations in 2300 languages, including 89 in English – was downloaded for the billionth time, an extraordinary figure, even if many people have downloaded it more than once. In Australia, it has been downloaded 7.4
million times, half a million so far this year.
The Bible – there’s an app for that.Credit: AP
According to YouVersion, the app is opened a billion times around the world every 39 days and daily engagement is up 14 per cent this year.
The searches people are doing are particularly interesting, with a marked difference between Asia- Pacific (including Australia) and Europe. In the Asia-Pacific, people search most for “love” and “anxiety”, followed by “anger”, “hope” and “healing”. In Europe, clearly a more pessimistic part of the world right now, people search most for “stress”, “hope” (especially Psalm 91), “love”, “anxiety” and “depression”.
What does this thirst for the Bible signify? Above all, it seems to me, it is a search for meaning, for understanding in broader spiritual terms, for belonging.
Christianity in the West is experiencing something of a resurgence, especially among young men. This partly reflects a more unsettled world, a vastly more isolated, atomistic society thanks not least to social media, and a rejection of the idea that we are merely the hapless products of time and chance (along with several other factors).
These are all sociological explanations, but the spiritual explanation is more fundamental still: we are inescapably spiritual beings. Materialism – the idea that only matter is real, which adherents of scientism (not the same thing as science) advocate – just doesn’t satisfy, because it can’t explain to us the most important things, such as love, loyalty, justice, wisdom, commitment or, indeed, the human will.
We are spiritual beings, the Bible says, because we were designed that way. We are also moral beings, relational beings and thinking beings, which together amount to being created, as Genesis puts it, in the image of God.
God, after all, created our inmost being and knit us together in our mothers’ wombs (Psalm 139), has numbered every hair on our heads (Matthew, chapter 10), and loves us with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31), for God IS love (John’s first letter).
Saint Augustine put it both simply and profoundly, in his great work The Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord” he wrote. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
Barney Zwartz is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity
