bradmeyerlive

Re-placing Scripture

I’m a fan of the Bible. I’ve read it more than any other book and am moderately familiar with portions of its origins, (take the Deutero-Isaiah controversy or the “Q Source Hypothesis,” for example). All that being said, over the last few years, I’ve heard voices muttering concepts about the Scriptures that have helped me to re-place the Bible in a healthier context.

I work in a relatively large church with a student ministries department. Over time, I’ve become quite aware that students don’t read books. No - I mean they really don’t read books. This is probably rooted not just in our YouTube culture, but the way in which schools present the concept of learning. I digress and hope to live to write about that another day. Its something of a new illiteracy, only this one is self-inflicted.

In 2004 as an experiment for a class I had taught to teens in a program called Remnant, I had students all turn their Bibles in and held them captive for a week, leaving just one Bible for the lot of 30 of them to rip pages out and pass it around like some kind of persecuted church. The experiment proved interesting: all but 4 of them lived their lives no differently. I suppose its odd that it took me 4 years to begin to ask more about it.

By 2008, I began to be nagged with a question: how do we teach students Christian thinking when they don’t read the Bible? Now mind you, I grew up in a non-denominational, Baptist-ish context, so this was a lethal question to me. 

I entered a thought experiment: if the global church seemed to get by prior to Gutenberg’s printing press (and the birth of Western mass-literacy), clearly there are principles we can apply to our context today. The answer is in their liturgy, authority, and stories. Theology prior to the 15th century was passed on like a torch to the next generation, and even among the Hebrew people, through stories and songs. Those who composed these mediums were very cautious with vocabulary selection to be clear, succinct, and to describe God as God is (through good hermeneutics and a Christ-centered focus).

All this being said, I still study Scripture, but I have come to value the global church much, much more than I once did. I trust the church, who gave us the Bible. The notion that one can be a Christian without the church is intriguing given the source of its canon.

Moving forward, I won’t ever tell students not to read the text (I actually do encourage it). As someone who would like to see them “get it,” my dream is to see the stories, emotions, themes, and melodies of the text come alive in their lives so much that they want to live lives that are fully alive.

Update: Below, you’ll find links to three past blogs on the subject from an old blog of mine.

1) Facing Illiteracy
2) Facing Illiteracy Revisited
3) Facing Illiteracy (Part 3): Christianese