The Ability To Read Can Be a Blessing - Or a CURSE!

Are only the literate invited to the fullness of the Christian life?

Matthew could read. John could read. Perhaps one or two others of the followers of Jesus could read. The rest were illiterate. (The Sanhedrin once noted that these rough fishermen could not distinguish one letter of the Hebrew alphabet from another.)

In that day, written literature was found in schools for the rich, in the temple, and in private ownership of books. Only the wealthy could educate their children in actual schools. Outside of these schools (and the synagogues), the ability to read (not to mention write) was about as rare as astrophysics is to our society. How many astrophysicists do you know? And even if people in Jesus’ day could read, there were virtually no books available for them to read.

Some people in Israel were learning Latin and Greek, the languages of the foreign occupation troops, but that again was confined mostly to the wealthy and influential, and to that tiny group that today would be referred to as middle class, the tradesmen and merchants. Ordinary people such as fishermen simply never learned to read or write their own languages.

There were no public schools for the poor. And the poor made up well over 95 percent of the population! A few in these ranks did learn to read, usually because their mother had this skill passed down to her by her parents. This type of learning has sometimes been called “the madonna school” and constituted the main source a poor person had of becoming literate.

These are facts. That they are facts we dare not face lest our whole modern-day concept of how to live the Christian life crumbles does not make these facts any less true.

Do not impose your present-day understanding of literacy on people living two thousand years ago. In ancient days illiteracy was NOT a sing of ignorance, nor was literacy a sign of intelligence. To a large extent, literacy was a trade, similar to cabinetmaking or carpentry or television repair. (How many television repairmen do you know? Well, in Jesus’ day there was about that percentage of people who were skilled at reading and writing.)

In fact, we must not impose what literacy means today upon any society anywhere on earth before 1700A.D.!

Yet, despite these facts, from one end of the English-speaking world to the other, it is heralded from every evangelical pulpit, “You must read your Bible to be a good Christian.” That statement might sound like a sensible statement, after 1700A.D. But that statement would have made no sense at all to ANY society on earth previous to that time.

In the days of Martin Luther, for instance, when the printed word has been credited with bringing in the Reformation, the maximum number of people who would read what Luther wrote stood at about 5 percent! About 90 percent of that part of Europe affected by the Reformation was totally illiterate. Another 5 percent was only functionally literate, and were either too poor to buy Reformation literature or lacked the vocabulary skills to understand the writings of a Luther, a Calvin, or a Zwingli.

Even extending as late as 1800, the message that you must read your Bible every day to be a good Christian would have been irrelevant to most average Christians. At least 85 percent of all the Southern boys who fought in the Civil War, 1860-1865, could NOT read, and those who could read didn’t do it much.

Before the early 1900’s, this statement was the equivalent of saying, “You must have a master’s degree from the university in order to be a good Christian.” A master’s degree NOW and the ability to read 300 years ago has almost the same percentage of people in its ranks.

The twenty-first century needs desperately to ask the first century: Did Jesus Christ tie the victorious Christian life to being able to read? If He did, He certainly demonstrated poor judgment in picking His closest followers!

I am saying this: DID GOD, FACED WITH A CHOICE BETWEEN LITERACY FOR HIS FOLLOWERS OR INDWELLING THEM – DID HE CHOOSE LITERACY? Which opens more doors for more people to know Him?

Today three-fifths of the people on our planet are still illiterate! So what place have illiterates in knowing Christ and living out the Christian life?

There IS a way for the illiterate Christian to be equal to the literate Christian in knowing Christ. He need only be introduced to a few essentials about his salvation, the first of these being that HE HAS AN INDWELLING LORD. He need only learn that Jesus Christ lives in him in a permanent union and begin fellowshipping with that Lord. If the key to living the Christian life is not an indwelling Christ, then whatever else is picked as being that key is drastically limiting the number of people who can enter in. Evangelists or this age are very close to elitism, snobbishness, and the allocation of the Christian life to educated people, as they insist that Christians must master the contents of the Bible.

How many missionaries have come from visiting remote villages in Nepal, Africa, and the jungles of South America to declare they have just beheld the most beautiful expression of the church they have ever seen in all their lives – yet without it ever occurring to them that these beautiful Christians were virtually all illiterate!

Am I saying that reading your Bible is NOT necessary? I am saying that we who are literate and somewhat educated can consider ourselves blessed in what we have. And since we are blessed with our Bible, we should use it and become familiar with it.

BUT – the Bible is not the key to the Christian life. The key is Christ indwelling you in a living permanent union. And this key is ALL that most Christians down through the ages really had to live the Christian life.

Referring to the title of this article, how could literacy possibly be a curse? It is only a curse when we allow all of our reading and Bible study habits to take the place of quiet fellowship with our indwelling Lord Jesus. The centrality of the Christian life MUST BE our union with Christ. Two as one. Our whole spiritual growth in this life must be learning how to communicate with Christ in our human spirit to divine Spirit union.

I am NOT saying that the discipline of Bible study is wasted time. Far from it! We are blessed to live in an age when Scripture is readily available to us and here in our culture in America we are very literate. Thank you, God, that we CAN read your instruction Book on how to live!

But Bible study is just something extra we have today that the Christians from the first to the seventeenth centuries didn't have available. Being literate enough to read the Bible can never make us better at living the Christian life than those illiterate people were.

I am for the Church, prayer and Bible study. But we need to back away from a scenario that seems to exalt Bible over the centrality of our living union with Christ. My point is that the Christian life can, has, does, and will continue to exist apart from literacy.

The Bible speaks of many aspects or morality to the Christian life, but we must learn our inability to live this morality in our own strength and come to a total dependence and trust in the ever-present, ever-to-be-present Jesus Christ living the Christian life in us, as us, and through us.

Only the FIRST CHRISTIAN can ever live the Christian life.

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