Some readers may remember back to1983 when The Return of the Jedi, the third of the Star Wars movies, was released. I do not remember seeing the movie, but I do remember a conversation with a friend from school. He assumed that I knew all about the Jedi, asking, “Aren’t they in the Bible?” I remember being amazed by that comment as we both attended school in Ballymena, the heart of Northern Ireland’s Bible-belt. How was it possible for someone growing up in that setting to confuse the Jedi with the Jebusites?
Alas, such examples of biblical illiteracy are now the norm in Australia and New Zealand. In 2023 the Bible Society of New Zealand published a Bible engagement survey entitled, New Zealanders and the Bible. The results are, perhaps, not as alarming as previous studies, but they are concerning. A minority of New Zealanders surveyed – 41% – identified as Christians. While 80% of professing Christians owned a bible, only 39% claimed to interact with it often. Of the rest, 21% said that they lack self-discipline, 20% said they get distracted by other activities, while a further 20% said that engaging with the Bible is simply not a priority. Thus, it comes as no surprise that only 16% of professing Christians believed that the central message of the Bible is salvation from sin through the cross of Jesus.
The statistics for the 59% of New Zealanders who did not identify as Christians are even more alarming. Only 36% claimed to own a Bible and 50% had no interest in reading one even if they had it in their possession. Almost a fifth had no idea what the Bible is about.
These are not just statistics. They are symptoms of biblical illiteracy. Many other manifestations of this malaise are all around us, if we have the ears to hear them in the conversations we have with our neighbours, and if we have eyes to see them in our culture. However, it is important to define the term biblical illiteracy before we proceed to ask how it has come about, how it impacts on our Churches and their witness, and what we can do in response.
Biblical literacy
At its most basic, biblical illiteracy is the opposite of biblical literacy. Biblical literacy is the ability to read, understand, apply and profit from the Bible. We might compare it with the literacy that is taught in our schools. There children are not simply taught lots of facts about the world around us, but how to access and make use of information by reading. Basic literacy is a skill which enables people to get where they need to go by reading maps and signposts. Literacy enables us to find out what is going on in the world by reading newspapers and magazines. It equips us to fill out a job application and shop online. In the same way biblical literacy enables us to function as disciples of the Lord Jesus in God’s world.
Biblical literacy is more than simply knowing facts from the Bible about the Canaanites, the construction of the Tabernacle or the journeys of the Apostle Paul. This is important information, and we should resist the temptation to refer to it as “Bible trivia.”However, biblical literacy is the ability to access all this information, connect it to the big story of the Bible, and appreciate its significance for our daily lives.
An important feature of biblical literacy is the ability to recognise that there are different types of literature in the Bible. These are sometimes called “genres” or family groups. As we grow in our familiarity with the Bible we learn to recognise that the narratives of Genesis and Samuel are different from the poetry of the Psalms; and that the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus are different from the apocalyptic literature of Revelation.
Each of these genres makes different assumptions and abides by different rules as it communicates God’s truth to readers. We understand the distinction between different genres instinctively when we lay down our newspaper and take up a novel to read it for pleasure or a train timetable to find out when we need to arrive at the station. Biblical illiteracy, by contrast, reads Leviticus as though it were an apostolic letter to the Church. Hence the ill-informed question, which we are sometimes asked, “How can you condemn homosexuality yet happily eat shellfish?”
The goal of biblical literacy is not simply accessing and remembering information from the Bible, but finding in the Bible a light to guide our feet and the lamp that guides our path (Psalm 119:105). When we read the Bible, not only does it make us wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ (2 Timothy 3:15), it also equips us for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17). A biblically literate Christian will be as much at home in the Bible as a good accountant is at home in the current tax-regulations. The details are at the tip of his fingers, and he knows what to do with them.
The impacts of biblical illiteracy
By contrast, however, we are wrestling with the problem of biblical illiteracy. It is a serious problem, and we need to consider how it impacts us and our ministry. It is a problem, first of all, because God awakens sinners from their fallen state by means of the Bible; and secondly, because God transforms believers, building them up in faith and holiness, also by means of the Bible.
First of all, we can observe that biblical illiteracy blunts the impact of the biblical gospel on those who do not know the Lord Jesus as their Saviour. Paul describes the blessings Timothy enjoyed by learning the Scriptures at an early age in 2 Timothy 3:15, “from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” In this case familiarity did not breed contempt but facilitated saving faith. Even if the path to saving faith does not always prove to be a smooth one, the knowledge of God’s word from an early age is like a seed which the Spirit brings to life in his own time. Sadly, widespread biblical illiteracy has robbed many of that residual knowledge of God’s truth.
Many today are more like the Ethiopian treasury official who was bewildered as he read Isaiah 53. In Acts 8:31 he asks, “How can I [understand it], unless someone guides me?” We can, however, take heart from the Ethiopian’s question.The Spirit of God had just sent a reliable guide into the desert to help him understand the Bible. Many people today are bewildered when they hear the message of the Bible, but they are not beyond the power of God’s word. The God who sends his messengers to explain the Bible also sends his Spirit to illuminate the hearts of those who hear it. Biblical illiteracy may make our witness more challenging, but it does not present an insuperable obstacle to God’s mighty work of grace.
Then secondly, biblical illiteracy hinders the growth of new (and not so new) believers in holiness and assurance. That is because it robs them of a vital spiritual resource. When Paul set sail from Miletus he commended the Ephesian elders“to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build [them] up and to give [them] the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.” (Acts 20:32) That gracious word builds strong believers when they feed upon it. In Psalm 119:11 the Psalmist tells God, “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.” When we do not have God’s word stored within us, we will not know which way to turn.
We can see the fruit of biblical illiteracy in the fact that ministers and elders today often need to explain aspects of Christian living to new Christians that would have been obvious to previous generations. It is by no means obvious to some who have newly come to faith in Christ that Christians give a proportion of their income to support the ministry of the Church or attend worship services every Lord’s Day. I know of one Church treasurer who had to explain to a new believer that buying a bunch of lottery tickets and putting them in the offering plate was not a biblical way of stewarding the Lord’s resources.
Equally alarming is the vulnerability to temptation of those who have professed faith for many years but have failed to lay up God’s word in their hearts. Temptation comes suddenly and unexpectedly. The only way of preparing ourselves for temptation is by constant meditation on the Bible and its teaching. Our Lord’s response to Satan’s temptations in Matthew 4:1-10, show that he had not only read and memorised verses from Deuteronomy 6 and 8 and Psalm 91, but also that he had understood their context and meditated on their meaning.Our Lord’s responses are powerful examples of biblical literacy and its benefits.
Those who know and love the Lord Jesus will similarly immerse themselves in the Bible. Anyone who has read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress will recognise the influence of the Bible on every character, event and conversation in the narrative of the hero’s journey from the City of Destruction to the Heavenly City. This is what prompted Charles Spurgeon to say of Bunyan: “Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his soul is full of the Word of God.” What a vivid description of biblical literacy!
Countermeasures
How can we counter the biblical illiteracy which is so prevalent in secular western nations today? We counter biblical illiteracy by cultivating the biblical literacy which we see in our Lord and those who learned from him. Let me conclude with three suggestions.
The first is that we make it our aim to learn how to handle God’s word. Not only do we seek to know the contents of the Bible, but also how to profit from the Bible. A model that I have found helpful is one developed by the Navigators in the 1950’s. We learn to handle God’s word by looking at the fingers and thumb on our hand. Five activities are involved in handling the Bible. We hear it, we read it, we study it, and we memorise it. These are the four fingers we use to handle the Bible. But it is the thumb which gives us a firm grip, and that is meditating on the Bible.
The second suggestion is that we make it our aim to train new and young believers in the skills of handling the Bible. Again, this is more than simply teaching Bible content, but involves teaching the skills of reading, valuing and applying Bible truth to daily life. Here we will need to be patient with those who come to us from a background of biblical illiteracy. We may need to spend time each week with new believers simply reading the Bible with them. We may have to answer some very basic questions as they encounter passages which are strange and unfamiliar to them. In the process we may discover that there is much in the Bible which is strange to us. We are all on a literacy learning curve.
A third suggestion is that we intentionally build church cultures which immerse the Christian community in the riches of God’s word. This may mean making it our aim to read whole chapters of the Bible from both Old and New Testaments in our worship services. It will require preachers to make it their aim to preach through every part of the Bible. Martin Luther described how he prepared to preach by studying every part of the Bible.
“I study my Bible as I gather apples. First, I shake the whole tree that the ripest might fall. Then I shake each limb, and when I have shaken each limb, I shake each branch and every twig. Then I look under every leaf.” Such preparation results in preaching which cultivates biblical literacy, first in the preacher, then in God’s people, and then flowing from a “bibline” people into our biblicaly illiterate world.
Mr Andrew Stewart, is Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological College, Melbourne and a member of the Geelong Reformed Presbyterian Church, Australia.
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels
