Why does this make anybody feel like they are closing the final pages of the Bible and in the next moment make up their minds to begin all over?
In the case of Tim Allen the solution came after a year of reading slowly and deliberately which he called a complete reset of attention and expectation. In a recent blog the longtime sitcom star posted that he had read the whole bible not in a week-end spurt, but over 13 months, “word by word page by page no skimming.” Allen summed up the experience in the same breath as his next step: “Humbled, enlightened and amazed at what I read and what I learned. I will rest and meditate on so much. I will begin it again.”
Such mix completion, reflection and a revisit to the start are placed in sharp contrast to that which many people identify with Allen: a comedian, a punch line, a performer, and a commentator on culture. What has made his reading project less speedy, less spectacle, however, is his persistence with challenging passages and his letting them take time. He had foreshadowed the difficulty on his way through the prophets, and in one place, as he was treading a very thick walk, had said, jokingly, that he “need[s] a Snickers,” that already noted the effort of trying to read and visualize ancient words and pictures in a new light.
The relations between Allen and faith have never been brought out as straightforward. He has been outspoken on how the tragedy influenced his early understanding of God when his father was murdered by a drunkard when Allen was 11 and on his own admission, this act propelled him into years of uncertainty which he could not feel answered. He has in the past decades expressed in interviews that he was a churchgoer and that he had also experienced cynicism, a conflict that remained with him well in his adulthood. The religious conflict did not end with success, neither; Allen has also talked about the middle of 20s prison term following a drug charge as a time in which his “reality hit,” leaving bravado behind and him in direct confrontation with despair.
It is the endurance and not the epiphany that the story is based on albeit, at least, publicly. The Bible reading was done in bits that resembled the sound of someone learning how to continue to appear. In 2024, he said that he had “never took the time” to actually read Scripture, and that he was reading the Jerusalem Bible Old Testament and that the process was in “not at all what I was expecting.” Subsequently he made landmark achievements that many readers are familiar with: finishing his Ezekiel, making the transition to Daniel, from that onward to the New Testament in a year of concentration which he dubbed, “no drifting.”
A talk about the Apostle Paul gave one of the clearest glimpses of what interested his attention. Allen has explained that he was caught up in the concept of law, sin and human nature as Paul thought them, in contrast with the ruts of philosophical discussion which he believed had stagnated him through years. During the same period of research, he pointed out the scheme of Paul that law operates as guardrails revealing the wrong instead of eliminating it which became a very current prism through which ancient letters were seen.
In addition to study, Allen has also defined inner work which resembles emotional inventory more than scholarship. He wrote in 2024 that he had been unsuccessful in forgiving the man who murdered his father in over 60 years, and that he was now ready to write the words: “I forgive the man who murdered my father.” The choice to re-start the Bible therein is more akin to a victory lap than a workout- returning to a text that can and should and must contain both grief and purpose and not in a hurry.
Another statement that was not made by Allen was that he arrived. It was of reading, of resting and of returning one page awaiting like a home that one has visited before, and which demands something.
