Christians are readers. We are “people of the book.” We own personal Bibles, translated into our mother tongues, and read them daily.
For Christians, daily Bible reading is the minimum standard for the life of faith. What kind of Christian, some of us may think, doesn’t meet this low bar?
This vision of our faith resonates for many. It certainly describes the way I was raised. As a snapshot of a slice of the church at a certain time in history—20th-century American evangelicals—it checks out.
But as a timeless vision of what it means to follow Christ, it falls short, and it does so in a way that will seriously impinge on our ability to make disciples in an increasingly postliterate culture, a culture in which most people still understand the bare mechanics of reading but overwhelmingly consume audio and visual media instead.
We can see how this literacy-focused idea of Christianity will fail in the future by looking to the past.
For most of Christian history, most believers were illiterate. Reading the Bible daily wasn’t an option because reading wasn’t an option.
This doesn’t mean Scripture was irrelevant to ordinary Christians’ lives.
But the sacred page wasn’t primarily a private matter for personal devotion; it was a public matter heard in the gathering of God’s people for worship.
The Bible was the church’s book—a liturgical book, a book whose natural habitat was the voice of Christ’s body lifted in praise.
To hear the Word of God, you joined the people of God.
Lectors read aloud for the benefit of all.
In these contexts, an injunction to read one’s Bible daily would’ve been as meaningful as advice about how to refuel one’s private jet.
For us, looking back, the lesson is that what we take for granted about following Christ may not be true for all believers, always and everywhere.
What’s appropriate or even necessary in our time and place may not apply to others. Discipleship practices may be more dependent upon technology and wider social practices than we often realize.
Tales of a dark age in which church leaders suppressed literacy so often miss their mark because it’s impossible to have a reading public without cheap books, and it’s impossible to have cheap books without the printing press.
The habits and purposes of reading occur in a society, in a culture, in a massively complex moral and technological environment.
Reading that strikes us as necessary in one time and place will be unnecessary—if not imprudent or outright impossible—in another.
Moreover, it’s not self-evident from Scripture itself that the Christian life is inherently a reading life.
How could it be, when every book of the canon was written at a time when most of God’s people could not read? In this light, our emphasis on personal, private reading of Scripture appears to be a modern innovation distinct not only from much of Christian history but from biblical history as well.
So literacy cannot be synonymous with faithful discipleship. That is given. However , The question is what role it plays once mass literacy is our social reality.
In many traditions, the church’s answer over the last few centuries has been to put a Bible in people’s hands as soon as possible and as often as possible, and to encourage Bible reading as a central component of one’s daily walk with Christ.
Christians are readers today because of the remarkable vision and untold labor on the part of mothers and fathers in the faith going back a dozen generations.
