Biblical Literacy: Its Urgency and Decline
“If there is a great error being made by today’s Christian ministry, it is the reluctance to insist that Christians learn the Bible.”
In these brief reflections on the current state of Christian thought and life I am enumerating reasons for concern, concern that might lead us to action. No Christian will deny that Holy Scripture is the foundation of a believer’s faith and life, or, as the Shorter Catechism has it, that it contains “what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man.” So, no Christian is going to say that it is unimportant for the people of God to know the Bible well, well enough to bring its teaching to bear on our daily life. But the unhappy fact is that biblical literacy is in serious decline in the evangelical world.
For many years our Covenant College, the denominational college of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), has tested incoming freshmen on their knowledge of the content of the Bible. Many of these freshmen are from our churches. Their performance on that test has for years shown a steady decline. They know the Bible considerably less well than incoming students did several decades ago.
There are reasons for this. Christians hear much less preaching than once they did, with but one Sunday service rather than the historic two. Many of our churches make little concerted effort to teach the Bible in Sunday School or youth meetings. Attention is paid more to the affective than the intellectual side of Christian formation. The memorization of the Bible—once a staple of the discipleship of young believers—is rarely emphasized today. The number of students entering Christian high schools who can already recite the books of the Bible in order and at speed is vanishingly small. And Christian preaching is now widely subject sermonizing, not the careful exposition of biblical texts in their context. It is often the biblical idea, not the Bible itself, that occupies the preacher’s attention. What is more, every survey demonstrates that the preaching of the books of the Old Testament, the largest part of the Bible, is comparatively rare. The irony is that there has never been a time when so much of the best of Christian literature—the sort of reading that would, over time, make any interested reader well acquainted with the content of the Bible—has been made available in inexpensive editions; but, at the same time, biblical ignorance increases by the year.
The tragedy of this is not merely that an increasing number of evangelical, even Reformed, believers are not well acquainted with what the Bible contains. What is worse is the result: believers are not forming and not being helped to form for themselves a biblical mind. The knowledge of biblical history; the great personalities of that narrative and the life lessons communicated in their biographies; the unfolding history of redemption; the content of God’s law; the nature of prophetic preaching; the gospel history together with its interpretation in the letters of Paul, Peter, and John—surely all of this ought to be fixed in mind and, as time passes, understood in ever greater depth. But what matters is that, by this means, one learns to make right judgments, to be able to distinguish between truth and error, right from wrong, and to understand human life as he or she observes it day by day. From all this biblical content we learn why and how to love God and serve the Lord Jesus, what temptations we will inevitably face, and how best to surmount them. We learn what life is for and where true happiness can be found. We learn how to suffer in a distinctively Christian way, and how to die. From this wonderfully illuminating and inspiring biblical history and commentary we learn what it means to live worthy of the grace that we have been given. We also learn to understand the unbelieving world’s way of thinking and its inevitable failure to deliver on the hopes and dreams of all human beings.
Of course, believing Christians will confess the Bible as the Word of God, the only rule of faith and conduct. But the fact that every survey of evangelical opinion suggests that younger Christians no longer understand why gay marriage is a violation of both truth and love, are unable to convince themselves that promiscuity is appalling disloyalty to Christ, are no longer sure that one must be a Christian to be saved or that hell is a real place and an eternal condition—all of this and much more represents, at bottom, their failure to understand the Bible sufficiently to apply it to the questions and issues of life. And if one cannot use the Bible for the purpose for which it has been given to us, the confession of its divine authority is meaningless.
“The Bible’s authority and its content is a seamless web. Every truth is connected to every other.”
It was said of Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of 19th century London, that he had the Bible in permanent solution in his mind. Or, as one admirer cleverly put it, you could prick him anywhere and he bled Bible. Should this not be every Christian’s goal and every Christian parent’s goal in the discipleship of his or her children? The Bible’s authority and its content is a seamless web. Every truth is connected to every other. History, theology, ethics, and the description of believing life create an integrated, beguiling, and utterly persuasive account of reality, of things as they actually are, rather than as human beings—and too often even Christians themselves—imagine them to be. As Frederick Buechner put it:
The Bible is not first of all a book of moral truth. I would call it instead a book of truth about the way life is. Those strange old scriptures present life as having been ordered in a certain way, with certain laws as inextricably built into it as the law of gravity is built into the physical universe. When Jesus said that whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life will save it, surely he is not making a statement about how, morally speaking, life ought to be. Rather, he is making a statement about how life is.
When that is understood, when Holy Scriptures’ internal connections become clear and convincing in the mind, it becomes impossible for a Christian to pick out some offending teaching and cast it aside in the expectation that the larger edifice of biblical truth will remain unaffected. But to gain that understanding of reality, to understand what it requires of you, to appreciate how life-giving biblical teaching actually is, one must know the Bible. If there is a great error being made by today’s Christian ministry, it is the reluctance to insist that Christians learn the Bible, master its contents, and acquire the art of applying its truth to the thousand and one questions and experiences of human life. Every minister should enter his pulpit intending to make his people masters of the Word of God.
I am undyingly grateful to the man who convinced me to read the Bible through every year. I am now reading it from beginning to end for the 42nd time. He also taught me to annotate my Bible, and now the margins of my Bible and the extra pages I had to bind onto the front and the back are chock full of clarifying notes, cross-references, and illuminating quotations. My Bible has become the repository of all the most important things I have learned over the course of my life. As I pass by all that information when reading the Word of God I am reminded of it, and so it has become the permanent furniture of my mind. I urge you all to do the same.
