My latest: on generation autodidact, in Mockingbird

This morning I’ve got an essay in Mockingbird called “Generation Autodidact.” It’s about bookworms like me who are constantly trying to fill in the gaps in their reading, and about Gen Z kids who don’t read books at all, and how they seek out learning anyway, and what they might do when they reach their thirties and forties, and how we should all think about autodidacticism in a postliterate age. Here are the first four paragraphs:

Every bookworm knows the rule: don’t roll your eyes at mispronunciation of big words or foreign names; the speaker is probably a voracious reader who learned the term not from speech but from the page. For instance, growing up I thought segue was spelled “segway,” like the scooter. When I saw the word in writing I mentally rhymed it with league, having no idea what it meant.

I don’t recall who set me straight on that one, but I’m forever grateful to my boss at the library where I worked during seminary. Barth, Rahner, and Schleiermacher no longer twitch in their graves when I say their names. I now try to recall this blessed ignorance when my students rhyme “Barth” with hearth, or when they give me funny looks when I refer to “Saint Augustine,” with emphasis apparently on the wrong syllable. Isn’t he the one the grass is named for?

I’d like to propose an analogue to the bookworm rule: don’t roll your eyes at personalized lists of Important Books to read in a year, or earnest admissions of having read and enjoyed Wrong Authors. The reason is simple: everyone has to begin somewhere. Someone ignorant of the classics is wise to begin there, with canonical titles she’s heard countless times but never tried for herself. Whether the titles thus heard are in fact classics is one of the things that, by definition, she cannot know in advance of reading them.

With literature, the only way to make a judgment about quality is by developing it through continuous exposure to, well, all of it — the good, the bad, and the middling. Criticizing an ill-read person’s unwitting plan to take up Ayn Rand, given how many times he’s seen her name pop up over the years, is an exercise in missing the point. Not only could our enterprising upstart not know Rand is bad before reading her, but spending time with her may well be the start of a search for beauty, not having found it in the dim dungeons of objectivism.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible

Over at Plough Bonnie Kristian (my editor at CT and the very very best) has written a wonderfully incisive review of the newly published Anabaptist Community Bible. Here are the final three paragraphs of her piece (bolded emphasis mine):

One big reason I’m no longer a member of a Mennonite church is that I moved to another state. But another big reason is that I saw firsthand how unsteady Anabaptism becomes if it is not solidly grounded in [a] foundation of scriptural knowledge and authority. Other Christian traditions – those that also catechize with creed and liturgy and tend to concentrate instructional authority in ordained, seminary-educated ministers – may more reliably hold on to their convictions without intensive, universal lay Bible study.

But Anabaptism doesn’t work that way. It requires understanding, as Roth writes, that “Scripture – and especially the teachings of Jesus – [are] a road map for living,” a map to be constantly consulted because it is always “relevant and authoritative for the Christian life.” It requires us to read the Bible, in Roth’s words, “with the expectation that it will change our lives.” Anabaptism requires the hunger for and submission to Scripture that, five centuries ago, its progenitors modeled to the death.

If the Anabaptist Community Bible can encourage that hunger, enticing Christians to consume Scripture like a community feast, its makers have done well indeed. That would not only commemorate Anabaptism but extend its legacy for generations to come.

Something clicked for me here, especially this: “…without intensive, universal lay Bible study.” That phrase is a useful descriptor for a cross-denominational phenomenon common to any number of low-church biblicist (even “primitivist”) traditions that arose particularly on the American frontier in the nineteenth century.

Intensive, universal lay Bible study: if anything is a desideratum of non-creedal, non-liturgical, congregationalist churches, that is it. Yet what happens when local churches or whole traditions that remain non-creedal, non-liturgical, and congregationalist—biblicist, in a word—no longer practice intensive, universal lay Bible study? It’s not indulging nostalgia to say that there was a time when biblicist churches were full to the brim of adults (and young adults, and teenagers, and children) who read the Bible every day, to the point where they had whole swaths of it memorized or rehearsable by paraphrase. I’m just old enough to remember those days, and I caught only the tail end.

I recall, while serving at a shelter north of Atlanta circa 2010, a homeless man in his 50s reciting whole paragraphs of arcane scriptural passages to me in perfect KJV. This guy had been raised in a bona fide biblicist church that practiced—nay, enforced—intensive, universal lay Bible study.

Yet today, as I have documented almost obsessively, biblicist churches are moving in a post-biblicist direction while younger generations have utterly lost even the rudiments of biblical literacy, along with literal literacy. (Translation: They don’t read, period.)

Beyond such literacy—beyond intensive, universal lay Bible study (should we call it IULBS?)—there is nothing left; at least, not if you remain, on the surface or even beneath the skin, biblicist-primitivist-congregationalist in polity, doctrine, and practice. The rug has been pulled out beneath your feet, the branch you were sitting on has been sawed off, the pillars have all been thrown down: there is nothing left.

Besides, that is, the Zeitgeist. But discerning the spirits is no longer possible when the word of the Lord in Holy Scripture is no longer known, cherished, prized, read. Where else is there to turn? Either to tradition or to the culture. I see no third option.

Update (Feb 13): There is another option, one I’ve mentioned before but had forgotten to include here, which is the singular authority of a charismatic, entrepreneurial, popular pastor. I take it for granted that this is a bad option, but it’s not only a live one; it’s one many churches and believers have chosen and even sought out.

I should add, too, that for the kind of post-biblicist traditions I write about in this post, the “charismatic option” is a nonstarter. Not because it’s unattractive or unthinkable, but because the Spirit without the Word is as rudderless as the Word without the Spirit is lifeless. Hence my reference to discerning the spirits by the gospel of the incarnate Word, which is just what Saint John commends to us in his First Epistle. Modern-day Montanism is just as undesirable as it was in Tertullian’s day.

My latest: how to raise readers, in Front Porch Republic

This morning Front Porch Republic published an essay of mine called “How to Raise Readers, in Thirty-Five Steps.” It’s a list of, as the title suggests, thirty-five things for parents to do to raise their children to be readers, with running commentary. It’s fun and light-hearted in tone, certainly the most “advice-y” piece I’ve ever written. Here are the first four paragraphs, before the list proper gets going:

It is not too much to say that everything in our culture pushes against habits of deep reading. Our ears are filled with noise, our eyes are stuck on screens, and our attention is scattered and distracted by a thousand entertainments.

Parents and teachers are worried; I’m both a dad and a professor, and I’m very worried. My worry increases when I think about handing on the faith. Not every believer needs to be literate, much less a casual reader of Dante or Milton. But Christian faith is irreducibly wordy, its details and contours forever fixed in the complex texts of Holy Scripture and sacred tradition. Readers are interpreters, if not by their eyes then by their ears, and bad interpreters can do a lot of damage.

Indeed, the very habits that sustain deep reading are crucial for sustaining prayer. If I lack the attention to keep my eyes on a page I can see, how can I have the attention to keep my heart on a God I cannot see? Reading is not necessary for prayer, but it is one helpful training ground for it.

Is it possible, then, to raise readers in a digital age? I think so. I’ve got four kids, two boys then two girls, who range from sixth grade to first. I can’t say I’ve done much well, but I have raised readers. Every child is different, and aptitude and opportunity both matter greatly. Nevertheless, within varying limits, there are certain things parents can do to make it more likely that their children will learn good reading habits—even become lifelong readers themselves. Here are the ones that have worked well for our family.

Click here to read the rest. I welcome other suggestions!

Ancient illiteracy

Literacy is not my area of expertise, whether ancient, medieval, modern, or contemporary. But I find myself talking about it a lot, so I thought I’d put down some markers here for the best resources on the topic, at least regarding mass illiteracy in those societies where Christianity took root early on.

Some relevant books include:

• Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 1988)

• William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Harvard University Press, 1989)

• Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (Yale University Press, 1995)

• Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford University Press, 2012)

• Carol Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Below are two long excerpts from Harrison and Gamble (the former is dependent on the latter); bolded emphases are mine.

First, Harrison (pp. 3–4):

In early Christianity … functional literacy was possessed by perhaps 10 per cent of the population. It was the preserve of a very small group of male citizens who were literally and metaphorically free: free (rather than enslaved) citizens, who had been educated in the seven liberal disciplines—those arts appropriate for free men (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). Having shared this homogenous education they were prepared for public service, and especially for those key jobs which required a facility in public speaking or rhetoric, and where the ability to teach, move, and persuade an audience of what they had to say was of the utmost importance: the law courts, the senate, the army, provincial administration. As we will see, this training meant that classical and early Christian culture was very much a rhetorical culture; one based on the practice and power of the spoken word. In this sense, we can speak not only of an oral culture, but of a much broader 'cultural' literacy, which those who possessed an ability to read and speak were instrumental in creating among a much larger, more diverse, less socially or gender exclusive group. The words of the formally educated—in teaching, law, politics, poetry, and (following the rise of Christianity) preaching and catechesis—were crucial in forming and perpetuating a shared world of memorial images, beliefs, expectations, and authorities, which together established what we have called a cultural literacy or a facility for “literate listening” among the illiterate majority in the ancient world. The unlettered were able to “read” and understand reality through the shared, often tacit, markers of complicit understanding, customary practice, and habitual ways of thinking created by speaking and hearing. It is this cultural literacy—the Christian culture which the writers and speakers we will be examining built up—rather than the formal literacy of the educated elite that will be out main focus of interest in examining how hearing formed, informed, and transformed the minds of early Christian listeners.

Next, Gamble (pp. 2–5):

To what extent were early Christians actually capable of writing and reading? The question has rarely been raised and has never been explored by historians of early Christianity. Biblical and patristic scholars have shared with classicists the sanguine assumption that literacy prevailed in antiquity on a scale roughly comparable to literacy in modern Western societies and so have imagined that early Christianity was broadly literate. This view has been tacitly disputed only by the early form critics, who aimed to study the oral transmission of early Christian traditions, and only for primitive Christianity, which they regarded as an illiterate or, at best, semiliterate folk culture that relied on oral tradition. But neither the view that early Christianity was broadly literate nor the claim that in its earliest phases it was illiterate is more than a hypothesis, and neither view has been systematically argued.

So the question remains unanswered: To what extent could early Christians read and write? This is a difficult question for several reasons. First, working definitions of literacy vary, and its indices are relative to its definition. If, despite the aid of empirical studies and statistical methods, it is hard to determine the types and extent of literacy in modern societies, it is far more difficult to do so for earlier periods, especially ancient ones. Literacy can refer to anything from signature literacy, which is the minimal ability to write one's name, to the capacity both to write lengthy texts and to read them with understanding. The problem of definition corresponds to the fact that "in reality there are infinite gradations of literacy for any written language," so that a useful definition would be neither too narrow nor too broad but would embrace a range of literacy and acknowledge its various types. Second, direct evidence about literacy is scarce for antiquity generally and scarcer still for early Christianity in particular. This problem may be remedied in part by attending to evidence about education and social class, for literacy has historically been a function of both. Comparative analysis is also useful. The diffusion of literacy in any society is known to depend on certain preconditions and stimuli, and we can infer the extent of literacy in ancient societies from data on the development and scope of literacy in early modern and modern societies by determining how far necessary conditions were satisfied. Third, the question of literacy in early Christianity is complicated by the fact that Christianity developed and spread in multi- cultural and multilingual settings and thus incorporated from the start a diversity that forbids the generalizations that are possible for more culturally and linguistically homogeneous groups. A Christian in first-century Palestine might have been thoroughly literate in Aramaic, largely literate in Hebrew, semiliterate in Greek, and illiterate in Latin, while a Christian in Rome in the late second century might have been literate in Latin and semiliterate in Greek but ignorant of Aramaic and Hebrew. So when it is said of a Christian holding the office of reader in the Egyptian church in the early fourth century that he "does not know letters," we should not suppose that he was illiterate, but rather that he was literate only in Coptic, not in Greek. Although the situation became progressively complex with the missionary expansion of Christianity into the provinces, the linguistic pluralism of Christianity was present from the outset insofar as Christianity originated in the Aramaic-speaking environment of Judaism while its earliest extant literature was in Greek.

The composition, circulation, and use of Christian writings in the early church are manifest proof of Christian literacy but say nothing in themselves about the extent of literacy within Christianity. The abundance of Christian literature from the first five centuries skews our perceptions and leads us to imagine that the production of so many books must betoken an extensive readership. Yet the literature that survives reflects the capacities and viewpoints of Christian literati, who cannot be taken to represent Christians generally. Even the wide use and high esteem for Christian writings among Christian communities do not indicate that the larger body of Christians could read, for in antiquity one could hear texts read even if one was unable to read, so that illiteracy was no bar to familiarity with Christian writings. Because neither the existence of Christian literature nor its broad circulation and use can reveal the extent or levels of literacy within Christianity, it is all the more important to have an idea of the nature and scope of literacy in ancient society generally, especially under the Roman empire.

In the most comprehensive study to date, William Harris has sought to discover the extent of literacy in the ancient world. Using a broad definition of literacy as the ability to read or write at any level, Harris draws on wide and varied evidence—explicit, circumstantial, and comparative—and takes some account of the types and the uses of literacy. He reaches a largely negative conclusion for Western antiquity generally: granting regional and temporal variations, throughout the entire period of classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman imperial civilization, the extent of literacy was about 10 percent and never exceeded 15 to 20 percent of the population as a whole. "The written culture of antiquity was in the main restricted to a privileged minority—though in some places it was a large minority—and it co-existed with elements of an oral culture." Although I have some reservations about the way Harris has posed and addressed the problem of literacy in the ancient world, his invaluable survey has made it clear that nothing remotely like mass literacy existed, nor could have existed, in Greco-Roman societies, because the forces and institutions required to foster it were absent. This recognition must stand as a firm check on the romantic and anachronistic tendencies that have too often guided scholarly assessments of literacy in antiquity.

If, as Harris recognizes, his conclusions "will be highly unpalatable to some classical scholars," they should be equally sobering to historians of early Christianity and its literature. There may be special factors in the Christian setting, but it cannot be supposed that the extent of literacy in the ancient church was any greater than that in the Greco-Roman society of which Christianity was a part. This is true in spite of the importance the early church accorded to religious texts, for acquaintance with the scriptures did not require that all or even most Christians be individually capable of reading them and does not imply that they were. It is also true should scholars reject the traditional view that early Christianity was a movement among the illiterate proletariat of the Roman Empire. In one of the most interesting developments in recent biblical scholarship, this conventional social description has been subjected to thorough criticism and revision. Studies of the social constituency of the early church have shown that, especially in its urban settings, Christianity attracted a socially diverse membership, representing a cross section of Roman society. Although it certainly included many from the lower socioeconomic levels, it was by no means a proletarian movement. Both the highest and the lowest strata of society were absent. The most typical members of the Christian groups were free craftspeople, artisans, and small traders, some of whom had attained a measure of affluence, owned houses and slaves, had the resources to travel, and were socially mobile. In terms of social status, Christian communities had a pyramidal shape rather like that of society at large. But since members of the upper classes were less numerous, high levels of literacy—as a function of social status or education, or both—would have been unusual. Still, moderate levels, such as were common among crafts-people and small business persons, may have been proportionately better represented within the early church than outside it. Yet these insights offer no reason to think that the extent of literacy of any kind among Christians was greater than in society at large. If anything, it was more limited. This means that not only the writing of Christian literature, but also the ability to read, criticize, and interpret it belonged to a small number of Christians in the first several centuries, ordinarily not more than about 10 percent in any given setting, and perhaps fewer in the many small and provincial congregations that were characteristic of early Christianity.

My latest: the rise of digital lectors, in CT

My April 18 Christianity Today column was called “Biblical Literacy in a Postliterate Age.” Last week, on May 8, CT published my follow-up, titled “Digital Lectors for a Postliterate Age.”

I’d always intended a sequel, and later this summer I may write a final column to complete a loose trilogy of reflections on Scripture, literacy, and technology in the church. This latest one covers a range of creative responses to postliterate believers, seekers, and drifters, from the Bible Project to Father Mike’s The Bible in a Year podcast to Jonathan Pageau and the Symbolic World to Alastair Roberts and many others. I call them “digital lectors,” readers and expositors of Scripture for a digital—which is to say, a postliterate—age.

In between the two columns, there were a couple noteworthy interactions with my claims about the state of biblical literacy (and literacy in general) in the church. The first was a conversation on the Holy Post podcast between Skye Jethani and Kaitlyn Schiess; you can find it on video here, starting around minute 33. The second was a response from Jessica Hooten Wilson (whom I quote in the piece), in a piece on her Substack called “The Post-literate Church.” Both engagements are friendly, thoughtful, critical, and worth your time. I’m grateful to all of them for their reflections.