When in an era of individualism. Each person is looking out for themselves and is trying to maximise the personal benefits they experience from any given endeavour. This includes reading the Bible.

Our overemphasis on finding ways to apply Scripture to our lives has transformed the practice of reading those holy words into an activity for personal gain. While it does contain a lot of applicable wisdom, The Bible Is Not All About You.

In this book Anna Hutchinson offers a different and supplementary vision for what it means to apply the Bible - transformation. She argues that there is value in engaging with the story of God, even if it that doesn't result in a neatly packaged 'take-away' lesson.

Making hermeneutical theory and her empirical research accessible and down-to-Earth, the book will make a case for the Bible being transformational and applicatory because it changes us as we read it, not just because of personal lessons we can extrapolate from it.

The key to this, however, is making sure we hear the Bible 'on its own terms' and immerse ourselves in its strange world. In order to do that we have to be reminded that first and foremost the Bible is a historical collection of texts. It simply isn't all about us.