The modernist Bible is a format of the Bible that was created in the modern period. All of the additions we’ve made to the Bible and the way we’ve laid out the text is a modernist phenomenon. Before that the Scriptures were not mass-produced—the printing and mass producing of the Bible coincided with this new format of the Bible, but it wasn’t until the 16th century that chapters and verses came together into a single Bible.

The Geneva Bible brought them together, and sadly made every single verse number a separate paragraph in two columns on the page, which effectively obliterated any literary aspect of the text at all. Suddenly what the Bible looked like was a list of numbered spiritual statements, each of them individually paragraphed, and the message visually was these are meant to be read alone and understood alone and out of context. 

The contention in my book is that this new modern format, which we then added cross-reference systems, which were first developed in the same period—section headings, footnotes—all this additional material created the Bible that was really a modern reference book rather than a reading book. In fact, our practices have followed the new form.

 . . .

There was no such thing as proof texting before the appearance of the format of the modern Bible. Before that you just don’t see the practices in the church. Nobody produced a list of supposed biblical doctrines and then backed them up with a list of proof texts. That way of using the Bible was born when the format of the Bible became something that was conducive to that. It tells people that the Bible is a certain kind of thing, and it can be used a certain kind of way. 

When you change the form of something, you change what people perceive the content is. Instead of seeing a letter, a song, a story, a proverb, a prophecy, what you see is a numbered list of statements. It all looks the same. You’re inclined to not pay attention to literary genre because they just look like a list of propositions. It harms our apprehension of the Bible in very specific ways when we change the way the Bible looks.

 Glenn Paauw in "Reformat the Bible: An Interview with Glenn Pauw"