Comments about the following article:
First, I removed the first few paragraphs as needless padding to an
otherwise well intentioned and well written article.
Second, I have some serious reservations with some of the article.
Memorizing the Bible is far less important than understanding it. And if
you read the Bible to understand it you will automatically remember large
parts of it. The article says that memorization is some sort of end unto
itself.
Third, what is missing -completely- is a view that I regard as
essential, that
the Bible cannot be understood for what it is if each and everything in it
is
taken from surface meaning. To actually understand it some serious study
is necessary, not simply reading and re-reading, say, Isaiah or Matthew,
but looking into the scholarship of Isaiah or Matthew, asking questions of
the text of Isaiah or Matthew, and being curious about everything in these
texts. It means willingness to find answers that maybe you are
uncomfortable
with , that challenge your assumptions, or that call for reconciling major
differences between for instance, Matthew and John.
There are still other problems with the article but it is 100% correct
in its observations that America has become a nation of Biblical
illiterates and
that this ignorance is destructive of our culture.
Billy
------------------------------------
Biola magazine
The Crisis of Biblical Illiteracy
By : Kenneth Berding
Christians used to be known as “people of one book.” Sure, they read,
studied and shared other books. But the book they cared about more than all
others combined was the Bible. They memorized it, meditated on it, talked
about it and taught it to others. We don’t do that anymore, and in a very real
sense we’re starving ourselves to death.
A Famine Of Bible Knowledge
Does this sound overly alarmist to you? People who have studied the trends
don’t think so.
Wheaton College professor Timothy Larsen comments that “it has been
demonstrated that biblical literacy has continued to decline. … Gallup polls
have
tracked this descent to a current ‘record low.’”
In “The 9 Most Important Issues Facing the Evangelical Church,” theologian
Michael Vlach cites “Biblical Illiteracy in the Church” as his final
concern. He agrees with George Barna’s assessment that “the Christian body in
America is immersed in a crisis of biblical illiteracy.”
New Testament scholar David Nienhuis summarizes his understanding of the
situation in an article titled “The Problem of Evangelical Biblical
Illiteracy: A View from the Classroom”:
For well over twenty years now, Christian leaders have been lamenting the
loss of general biblical literacy in America. … Some among us may be tempted
to seek odd solace in the recognition that our culture is increasingly
post-Christian. … Much to our embarrassment, however, it has become
increasingly clear that the situation is really no better among confessing
Christians, even those who claim to hold the Bible in high regard.
If I sound alarmist, I’m not alone.
These days many of us don’t even know basic facts about the Bible. I
remember a student — not a new believer — who asked a question after class
about
Saul’s conversion in Acts 9. She wanted to know whether this was the same
Saul who was king over Israel. No. King Saul’s story is found in the Old
Testament; the Saul of Acts — also known as Paul — is found in the New
Testament.
I can’t imagine such a thing happening to a group of German Lutherans in
the 16th century, or to English Puritans in the 17th century, or to Wesleyans
in the 18th century, or to modern Chinese-mainland Christians even if they
only have access to a few Bibles in their house church. Or even to our
believing great-grandparents in the United States. My paternal grandfather,
who never came into personal relationship with Jesus Christ, read his Bible
regularly and had many passages committed to memory.
When I was teaching at a college in New York, I assigned each student to
write a biographical sketch of an Old Testament character. I came across the
following line in a paper about the Old Testament figure Joshua: “Joshua
was the son of a nun.” This student clearly didn’t know that Nun was the
name of Joshua’s father, nor apparently did he realize that Catholic nuns weren
’t around during the time of the Old Testament. But I’m sure it created
quite a stir at the convent!
Meditating Day And Night
In the book of Amos, people who experienced a “famine of hearing the words
of the Lord” are portrayed as undergoing divine judgment. Amos paints a
picture of people without access to God’s revelation searching for a message
from God like desperate people — hungry and dehydrated — in search of food
and water (Amos 8:11–12). In Amos they want it, but are not permitted it.
In our case, although we have unlimited access, we often don’t want it.
The irony is intense. Who would deliberately and knowingly put himself
under God’s judgment? Would someone move his family to a land that was soon to
suffer drought if he knew ahead of time that God was going to send a
judgment of drought to that land (Amos 8:13)? Are we somehow positioning
ourselves in the domain of God’s judgment when we spiritually starve ourselves
by
not “hearing the words of God” (Amos 8:11–12)? Is this what happens when we
severely limit our engagement with the Word of God?
When God commissioned Joshua (the son of Nun), he charged him with these
words: “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall
meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to
all that is written in it” (Josh. 1:8). How often should you meditate on
it? Day and night. Why? So that you do what is in it.
The Old Testament book of Psalms leads off with these words:
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands
in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is
in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is
like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. (Ps. 1:1–3)
And in another psalm: “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the
day” (Ps. 119:97). Have you ever wondered how it could be his meditation
all the day? The psalmist didn’t have the Bible on his smart phone. Did he
carry around a big scroll under his arm? No, he had memorized the passages he
was meditating on and was thinking about them. He had committed large
sections of the Bible to memory.
The easiest way to memorize the Bible is to divide it into chunks and then
read one 10- or 15-minute portion over and over again aloud until you know
the entire passage. This method of memorizing is painless, edifying and
only requires a bit of consistent time. I know precious few who memorize any
Bible verses at all, much less large chunks of the Bible, and yet it’s not
as hard as most people make it out to be. And it can change your life.
Are you aware that the New Testament authors included in their writings
more than 300 direct quotations from the Old Testament writers — not counting
hundreds of other allusions and echoes of Old Testament language? There is
no evidence that any of these authors actually looked up the references as
they wrote. They simply knew their Bibles — that is, the parts of the Bible
that had already been written. How did they come to know it so well? They
worked on it “day and night.” They saturated themselves in it.
How Did We Get Here?
So how is it that we find ourselves in the middle of a famine?
1. Distractions
Every time I teach a class called Biblical Interpretation & Spiritual
Formation, I ask my students why it is that so few people in this generation
are
really zealous about the things of God. I can’t remember a time when I’ve
asked that question when someone hasn’t mentioned distractions. Social
networking, texting, television, video games and places dedicated to amusement
(“amusement” parks, for example) pull our attention away from God’s Word.
These fun and interesting activities occupy time that we could spend
reading, studying and memorizing the Bible and they distract our thoughts
during
time we could spend meditating on God’s Word throughout the day. When we
walk from one meeting to another, are our thoughts naturally moving to
Scripture and prayer? As we leave a college class session, are we thinking on
the things of God that we have learned from the Bible? Or do we immediately
check to see whether someone has messaged us?
In 1986, Neil Postman published an influential cultural essay titled “
Amusing Ourselves to Death.” He argued that personal freedoms would disappear
not when a totalitarian government imposed oppression from the outside (like
George Orwell pictured in his book 1984), but rather when people came “to
love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities
to think” (like Aldous Huxley depicted in Brave New World). Postman wrote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was
that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who
wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to
passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from
us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become
a
trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy
porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley noted in a later book (mentioned by Postman), we have “failed to
take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
We shouldn’t assume that these distractions have no effect on our
perceptions of God. One of my college-aged daughters was working at a
Christian
summer day camp. On one occasion she was talking with a group of elementary
kids about what God is like. One girl in her group responded, “I believe that
there are lots of different gods, like we saw in Hercules. Some are good
and some are bad.” She was referring to the Disney movie Hercules, which she
had watched that morning at the camp. This child’s understanding of God
was, at least to some degree, shaped by the polytheism displayed in the movie
she had been shown at a Christian day camp.
Might it be that our commitment to fun has resulted in famine, our laughter
has yielded loss, and our distractions are ultimately leading to our
destruction?
2. Misplaced Priorities
Priorities are not as simple as “God first, family second and church third.”
What does that expression mean anyway? Every time I have to choose
between reading my Bible and spending time with my children, should I read my
Bible? No. Priorities aren’t based upon a simple hierarchy; they require the
proper balance of activities in relationship to one another. But it is a
fitting question to ask: For a person who is working full time, what is the
appropriate quantity of time that should be spent (on average) with one’s
spouse or children, in house or yard work, exercising and resting? How much
time should you devote to building relationships with unbelieving neighbors
or serving in your church?
Let’s grant for the sake of discussion that the exact balance of priorities
will vary somewhat from person to person. Does this mean that we can
weight our priorities any way we want? Absolutely not. “Meditating day and
night”
on God’s Word is something that everyone must do. It is basic to the
Christian life. It seems to me, then, that in any weighting of priorities the
following scenarios are out of bounds:
* More time watching television than reading/studying/memorizing God’
s Word
* More time on social networking sites than reading God’s Word
* More time playing video games than reading God’s Word
Almost everyone I know spends more time on one of these activities than
they do reading, studying and memorizing the Bible. Shall we call this
anything other than what it is? We don’t like to talk about sin, but this is
sin.
James says, “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for
him it is sin” (James 4:17). We need a revival of the Bible. And many of
us need to repent of our misplaced priorities.
3. Unwarranted Overconfidence
Of all the diverse comments I have heard from Christians over the years,
the one that disturbs me perhaps more than any other is, “We already know
more of the Bible than we put into practice anyway.” This comment betrays far
more about the speaker than it does about reality. First, it demonstrates
that the one who said it isn’t trying very hard to learn the Bible. Second,
it reveals that the speaker is passive about applying it. And third, it
confirms that the speaker assumes everyone shares the same passive attitude
about the Bible.
To what end? Should we stop studying the Bible until we have perfectly put
into practice what we already know? The assumptions behind this statement
are not only misplaced; they are patently false. We actually don’t know
enough about the Bible, we aren’t putting enough effort into learning it, and
everyone doesn’t agree about this.
My sense is that comments like these are most often made by people who have
grown up in the church but who have never personally committed themselves
to learning the Word. So let’s get honest for a moment. How many of us who
grew up in the church learned more than a few disconnected Bible stories
simply because we attended Sunday schools and youth groups? Unless we decided
at some point to begin to read and learn the Bible on our own, we never
even learned how to find anything in the Bible, not even the stories.
(Example: In what book of the Bible is the story of King Saul whom we
mentioned
earlier? Answer: 1 Samuel.) We learned precious little about biblical
theology. (Example: How are the Old Testament sacrifices related to the coming
of
Christ?) We didn’t learn why we believe what we claim to believe. (Example:
How do we know that the Bible is true in what it claims?)
In short, the sense that we know a lot about the Bible because we grew up
going to church is misguided. Someone who comes to know Christ later in life
and devotes himself to reading and learning God’s Word will quickly
surpass the person who relies upon the passive “learning” that he thinks he
acquired from hanging around the church when he was young.
4. The Pretext Of Being Too Busy
I want to be careful about this one. Some people are dreadfully busy and
have no easy way of getting out of their plight. I think of single moms who
have to work full time just to make ends meet, who spend every evening — all
evening long — attending to the needs of their children (food, laundry,
schoolwork), falling exhausted into bed at night. Some people are simply
busier than others, and some of those who are excessively busy cannot easily
change their lot in life.
But on this one point we really shouldn’t budge: Reading and learning the
Bible is such a fundamental priority for all who want to call themselves “
Christians” that even a person in the category described above is not exempt.
Does she sleep at all at night? Then let her cut into some of that sleep
and read her Bible. Does she drive to work? Then she should listen to God’s
Word as she drives to and from work. (By the way, before printing presses,
most people learned God’s Word orally. It is an underrated but very useful
way to learn and memorize the Scriptures.) Does she eat dinner with her
children or tuck them into their beds? Then she can take out her Bible and
read a paragraph or two to them during one of those times.
Maxine Gowing is a woman in my church who came to the Lord at the age of
34. She was working two jobs and raising three children on her own at the
time. If anyone had the right to be excused from engaging with the Bible, she
did. But the woman who spiritually mentored Maxine strongly emphasized from
Day One how important it was to read and memorize the Bible. So Maxine set
to it. She read through the Bible cover to cover every year. She memorized
seven verses a week for 15 weeks out of the year. Then she reviewed those
verses during the summer. As a result, she committed to memory such
incredible books as Philippians, Colossians, Hebrews and 1 John. She told me, “
During those difficult years, I always had a verse somewhere in my mind to
fall back on. When my hot water heater broke, I was reminded that God cared
for me in my need because I knew it from his Word.” She also told me how she
grew in confidence about sharing the good news of Christ with people at her
work because she knew the Scriptures.
We need more people like Maxine because we’re in the middle of a famine, a
famine of “hearing” the Word of God.
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Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
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