The Internet Monk 

"the power of opinion, the phenomenon of speech, the impact of truth"

A Webjournal edited by Michael Spencer

The Last Gasps of Literate Christianity 

by Michael Spencer

The comment wasn't all that unusual, but it has stuck in my head for weeks now. "Mr. Spencer, does it matter if I don't read the Bible?" The student speaking was one of my juniors, attractive and smart, and one of the more visible, serious Christians on our little Christian school campus. I could have simply answered the question with yet another admonition on the importance of Bible reading, but the question struck me as representing much more. It hit me right in a developing hypothesis that has taken up more and more of my thinking recently: We are living in the last gasps of literate Christianity.

For this excursion I want to define literate Christianity as Christianity primarily made up of readers, and of people who understand truth to be verbal, propositional and accessible in words, sentences and, of course, the printed page. I am NOT commenting on Biblical ignorance or the appalling prevalence of illiteracy at large. I am talking about the end of a form of Christian faith where clergy, laity, scholar, student, preacher and pew all looked to the written word as God's means of communication, and ordered their lives and worship accordingly. I am talking about the end of a form of particularly Protestant Christianity that was largely centered around the Bible, Christian books and the verbal communication found in the Bible.

Certain renegade sociologists have postulated a connection between the loss of literacy and the rise of violence among young males. The theory states that among the literate, the verbal thought processes associated with reading have an essential humanizing influence. These sociologists note that the rise of the audio-visual age and the rise of youth violence may not be related just to the content of what young people view, but to the actual development and use of the brain itself. In other words, literacy civilizes us, and illiteracy distorts us. The a/v age has produced unethical and immoral humans who cannot think linearly and logically, but think by their feelings and visual perceptions. Thus these new humans are more easily manipulated and agitated, and have less concern for the logical coherence of rational civilization.

Or so they say.

I am not signing on to this theory entirely, but I will agree to this much: the loss of literacy is not progress, nor is it neutral. It is regression and often introduces serious distortions in the human interaction with the world. Can this be related to Christianity and the current state of evangelicalism? Consider this...

The Bible has become largely irrelevant to the average Christian. Now we shouldn't be distracted by the sales of Bibles, or the use of the Bible in evangelical communication. What I am talking about is the relationship of the average Christian to the Bible. It no longer defines his or her worldview in a meaningful way. It is no longer synonymous with God speaking. It is no longer the source of truth. The irrelevance of the Bible to the average Christian isn't measured in laziness in the discipline of daily Bible reading. The irrelevance is measured in the way the Bible no longer defines, limits, guides or significantly influences thinking. So the average Christian, when looking at any issue, does not have an instinct to discover what does the Bible say and to follow that instinct to a conclusion. No, the typical evangelical simply asks how how he feels, and his feelings are his certain guide to what God has to say.

My young friend was apparently suddenly struck by the oddity that the Bible played no real part in her life as a Christian. Yet she was not disturbed, but merely bemused. In other eras, this would have been a discovery of a flaw so significant it would have called into question one's entire claim of discipleship. Today, the observation probably never entered her mind again, and certainly my admonition concerning the importance of reading scripture did not make any alteration in her path. I have been telling Christians to be students of the Bible for almost 26 years, and it appears to me that very, very few take this as anything more than yada, yada, yada. Among many Christians, reading of any kind, including the Bible, is seen as a genuine evil. Bor-ing.

One reason my friend doesn't feel a gaping vacuum where the Bible should be is that she is stuffed full of Christian media of other types. She is a "fan" of contemporary Christian music, a medium that will never be faulted for being bashful in claiming that it contains all the essential vitamins and nutrients for healthy Christianity. Listening to the current crop of Christian alternative rockers, hip-hoppers and rappers, the average Christian young person gets a version of truth that looks something like this: God is my girlfriend, one for whom I have romantic feelings of constant warm fuzziness. He loves me like the ideal girlfriend, except he won't dump me or ask anything of me. There are no real moral issues or dilemmas that ought to rally my generation, other than we ought to love people and share Jesus with our friends. Staying on a buzz with the Holy Spirit is the real point of worship. Jesus is better than drugs, but only because he feels better. And so on...

Millions of Christians believe this silliness is spiritual nourishment and truth of a kind that makes the Bible practically unnecessary. Listening to interviews with Christian musicians, one can understand why former CCM artist Steve Camp roundly condemned the whole business as vacuous Chicken Soup for the Deceived Soul. My friend is nourished on a diet of junk food masquerading as meat and vegetables. The Bible has assumed the status of  the founder of a college whose picture hangs in the wall, whose books are on the shelf, and who doesn't matter a bit in the day to day. She sees no connection between her relationship with God and reading the Bible. 

Now many of my readers will recognize the utter corruption of CCM as one of my frequent sump topics, so I must do better. And I will. Let's talk about the Bible as used in preaching, and in evangelical churches in general.

We find ourselves at a place where Sunday morning finds evangelical Christians demanding and being fed "practical" messages. How to's. Principles for. Ten Ways to. How to succeed and make things work. I need not acquaint any reader of this journal with such preaching. We have all heard it ad nauseum. And, we have heard the Bible used in it. Yet I will contend that such preaching is the very death knell of Biblical literacy.

First, such sermons are not expositions of the Bible's message and claims, but typically quite secular fare where Bible verses and examples make "guest appearances" to set up or "prove" the principle under discussion. The listener knows no more about the Bible, or the God of the Bible after the sermon than before it. The referencing of the Bible as support for a talk that would be just as true without the Bible is a travesty masquerading as a sermon. 

Secondly, the real message here is a construction of the speaker, and the speaker is standing in the place of the Bible. Rather than leading people into scripture, we are listening to Pastor so and so's material on whatever the topic of the day might be. This is a danger even for good preachers, and the result is a relationship not with the book but with the preacher. (I would even fault Spurgeon on this one. His method of topical preaching did little to promote understanding of Biblical texts as much as understanding Spurgeon's mind.)

Third, many of these preachers are Biblical illiterates themselves, some quite proudly so. They believe the sermon should demand nothing, spoon feed everything and make it all easy. They do not read the Bible. Instead, they listen to talks about how to grow churches.  (To hear Biblical preaching as it ought to be done, try www.capitolhillbaptist.org.) A thorough grounding in scripture is hardly the concern of a theological education these days. Try church planting, worship leadership or counseling for hot issues. The end of Biblical literacy may not be as pronounced among the clergy as among the laity, but I assure you the current crop of church growth techno-shepherds is not far behind the curve.

And this is not to mention the Charismatic churches that have openly devalued scripture by an increasing emphasis on prophets, prophecy, visions, dreams and other current revelation. I have to tell you what some prophet in the pew has to say will usually get a bigger hearing than the book of Ezekiel, even though one is Holy Scripture and one is nonsense on toast.

The chance of hearing anything other than the shortened and edited version of the Reader's Digest Bible in Contemporary slang on the big screen is virtually zero. Reading a chapter of the Bible in worship would be considered a waste of time. Every new Christian is encouraged to read the Bible, but any new Christian visiting the average evangelical church would be right to assume, well no one else does, why should I? Marcion would be proud.

Even so-called Christian education is surrendering. The typical church is offering a smorgasbord of topical fare all the way from getting out of debt to raising children. Video is the prefered medium, of course.To be fair, many are offering Bible surveys and book studies and other valiant attempts at promoting Biblical literacy, but in all honest, they are attempting to bail out the ocean with a bucket. The tide has turned and Biblical literacy is now valued far, far down a list of priorities in the average church. Yes, we are still carrying Bibles, but don't be fooled: it's a nice accessory. 

Before I say that television is the primary culprit here, I want to clearly state that I am not advocating some kind of fundamentalistic hatcheting of television. I am simply going to say that television has now altered our relationship to the literate, book-oriented world which came to us up to this juncture. Our minds do not work like they did when we were book-centered. Audio/video communication now dominates our world, and it is ridiculous to say this has had no impact upon not only our attention span, but out actual experience of cognitive reality. Our thinking itself has been bent away from the process of reading. Be afraid- be very afraid.

Television is the culprit. Anyone who teaches young people, as I have for a quarter century now, knows that the video mind and the book mind are most certainly at enmity. While movies and books sometimes interact in a way that increases readers, the more usual result is that hundreds of hours of VCRs, DVD, video games, television, CDs, computers and the rest are at the exclusion of books and the extermination of the concept of the Bible's foundational role in the Christian life.

This is a major issue for a religion that believes God has communicated to us in written form and our interaction with God is highly influenced by the reading and understanding of texts. God has not made a movie. He has not handed us a set of principles on a Powerpoint presentation. He has not given us an experience or a feeling. He has not chosen music or art as his primary means of communication. Even the incarnation of Jesus must be framed within the boundaries of propositional, verbal communication in scripture. In other words, we are a religion of the book because God is a God of the book. When, as a culture, we move to a mind that is hostile to the printed page and the reading mind, we are in trouble.

Where does all this leave us? In a perilous position that may endanger the actual existence of Christianity in its authentic form. We may be experiencing the emergence of an aggressive gnostic Christianity that places experiences and feelings above scripture. Gnosticism is, of course, a Christian heresy, but it is interesting how many liberals and radical revisionists speak longingly of a reapproachment with our gnostic Christian roots. Freed from the bounds of the practical use of scripture, evangelicals will be floating on a sea of cultural relativism,  without an anchor other than someone's idea of what Jesus and God ought to be like if they are going to relate to us as we are. Released from the obligation to be literate, logical, propositional and coherent, Christians will become, well...illiterate, illogical, experiential and incoherent. The dregs of postmodernism, so to speak.

What can we do about this? I think we have to talk about it, and not just say "read your Bible more," but a serious reassessment of the place of the Bible in our lives, our homes, our churches and our education. The cultural war against the mind that is bound by the written word is a war I do not think we can negotiate. We may assimilate all kinds of technological improvments in communication, but we cannot surrender the mind that thinks God's words as the words I am reading in the Bible. Preaching and Christian education must take the time to define everything in the Christian life in reference to the Bible. Christians must begin reading, out loud, to one another, silently, with a disciplined and intentional method and with the energy of a somewhat desperate repentance.

Otherwise, it will soon be cartoons on Sunday morning. And even worse, the assimilation of Christianity into a new age tidal wave of illiterate spirituality.

Michael@internetmonk.com                                                                             Post a Comment