At Least The Medievals Had An Excuse

It's amazing what you can find on the shelves of your local Christian bookstore. What is even more amazing is the variety of shapes, sizes, colors, themes, and translations of Bibles available in the English language. If there is a subculture of any significance some publishing house somewhere will produce a bible for you. Don't get me wrong, I think that the availability of God's Word is an awesome thing. What does concern me, however, is that despite the easy access to the Truth, there is an alarming rise in Biblical illiteracy. The impact of this phenomena is evidenced in research conducted by the Barna Group. In an article from June 6, 2006 entitled, "Half of Americans Say Faith Has "Greatly Transformed" Their Life", Mr. Barna writes,

"The faith journey of Americans is also clearly influenced by their age. "While we cannot tell if the distinction in people's journey is due to life stage or to cultural shifts over time, it is obvious that people under 25 are substantially less likely to have undergone serious change as a result of time spent reading the Bible. With America already struggling from serious biblical illiteracy, the noticeable absence of the Bible in the lives of our youngest adults is likely to generate dramatic consequences in the decades to come."

It is patently obvious that there are external spiritual forces at work seeking to weaken families and churches by keeping them out of God's word. Despite the modern believers ignorance of spiritual warfare (which I will leave for another post), one of the greatest contributors to Biblical illiteracy is the church itself.

In a methodology reminiscent of the medieval roman church, many modern congregations and their leaders put greater emphasis on tradition than on the teaching of God's word. There are literally thousands of believers every Sunday who sit under the preaching of authoritarian pastors who have taken it upon themselves to be the sole arbiter of Scriptural interpretation. And why not? Most of these same believers even if not discouraged from personal Bible study would still be content to hear pastor so and so delineate for them, "thus sayeth the Lord". In an article entitled, "The Nature and Function of Theology", Gordon-Conwell seminary professor Dr. David Wells states,

"By a strange quirk of logic we have, therefore, come to repeat the errors we chastised the liberals and Roman Catholics for committing. On the one hand, by our historical amnesia we break our continuity with historic Christian faith as did the liberals and, on the other, we accord to some preachers a magisterial authority in interpreting Scripture not unlike Roman Catholics do!"

What makes this abandonment of personal Biblical scholarship so insidious is that it destroys any accountability a Pastor should have and gives him a godlike status. Thus a cycle of congregational laziness and pastoral megalomania combine to create an atmosphere that would have Luther, Wycliffe, and Tyndale rolling over in their graves. If pastors are not willing to break this cycle in their churches, regardless of the consequences, then we may be well on our way to a second "Dark Age". Church members too have a duty to study the Bible and to appoint pastors that will equip them to this end. We have God's word and the Holy Spirit to teach it to us. Let it be said of the modern church what was said of the Berean church of old,

"Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so." (Acts 17:11NASB)