Stewarding the Gift of Literacy
Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.
Kofi Annan
According to former United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, literacy is as essential to civilized life as dams and roads, a crucial pillar in building a world of hope. Literacy is more than making sense of words on a page, it is a door to ideas that help us understand the world and our place in it. Yet, though we exist in a time with the highest literacy rate in history across nations, the appetite for reading books continues to decline.
This is of particular interest to Christians, who were once known as, “people of the Word”. Reading is a significant element of the Christian life. Certainly belief doesn’t require a robust reading life, after all it is only, “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). One can be a Christian and be illiterate, but reading is undoubtedly a gift for the spiritual development of the Christian. This is why the Reformers prioritized the literacy of lay people as they translated Scripture into the vernacular. They saw literacy as a natural development from the doctrine of Sola Scriptura: Scripture holds the truths of salvation, and Christians ought to be able to read the Word of God for themselves. Scripture itself speaks to the importance of the written word, and thus the literacy required to understand it. Cees-Jan Smits notes, “literacy is so central to God’s design that more than 300 verses in the Bible speak of what is written, a reference to what has been recorded previously (e.g. ‘it is written…’). Scripture consistently looking back and re-evaluating God’s written word is the hallmark of biblical spirituality.”
And it isn’t just reading Scripture that benefits the Christian in their walk, Tony Reinke notes in his book Lit, “God is behind all truth, even the truth that is expressed in non-Christian literature.” With Scripture firmly planted as our authority, we can read along a vast spectrum of genres and sources and they can offer different facets from which we can understand God better, and how the moments of our lives are caught up in his great story.
Reading allows us to look at lines and loops upon a page and blend words that build into meaningful phrases that build ideas, and these ideas reveal to us goodness, and beauty, and truth–or the absence of them and the despairing result. We have access to a greater understanding of truth simply because we are literate. In appreciation of both poetry and fiction, T.S. Eliot said, “fiction takes an idea we know and makes it fresh in our minds.” We see this beautifully rendered in Victor Hugo’s classic, Les Miserables, as we read the fictional account of a priest who offers costly silver to the man who injured and robbed him, instead of turning him over to the police, and thus sparking a revolution of love that stands in stunning contrast to the bloody, confused revolution of 1832 France. Hugo gives us a soul-stirring image of what it means to turn the other cheek, and return good for evil. Reading books on science offers us more opportunities to marvel at the world God has made, even if the authors themselves do not acknowledge his hand in the intricate designs of galaxy swirls, DNA helices, and nautilus shells. Reading history gives us insight into the long and terrible story of humanity searching for meaning, and a consistent undercurrent of God working in and through humanity despite our consistent efforts to rebel against him. Reading poetry will give us fresh eyes for seeing the world expectantly. And reading across genres will give us better insight into how we read the different genres of Scripture. The Song of Songs is not so shocking when you have read other love poetry.
“Reading allows us to look at lines and loops upon a page and blend words that build into meaningful phrases that build ideas, and these ideas reveal to us goodness, and beauty, and truth–or the absence of them and the despairing result.”
Literacy is indeed a beautiful gift.
Given that literacy and the reading life are such aids in the Christian life, why does it seem like so few Christians use the gift of literacy to read more than product labels or the latest gossip? Seldom do we employ this gift to read books that open our eyes to who God is, who we are, and what the world is like. This is to our great detriment because, as Joe Rigney has put it, “good stories, faithful stories, are food for the soul, nourishing and strengthening us so that we can cling to what we know to be true, no matter the circumstances” (Lewis on the Christian Life).
We often fail to take hold of the great treasure of reading because we have allowed our literacy to become atrophied. It is a gift we have not stewarded well. We have become accustomed to a fragmented world that offers us quick pleasure through easy reading and viewing: 120 character Tweets, photo caption “blog posts,” and image driven media, that all require very little effort from us. All this fragmentation has debilitated our ability to concentrate on the more demanding effort of reading a cohesive work. We’ve culturally lost the desire to do the arduous work of reading a book, largely because we are not accustomed to the delayed gratification and self-discipline required to glean truth from them.
As Annan said, literacy is a bridge, but it does us no good if we don’t cross it. A literate world that doesn’t read is like building a well from which no one will drink.
“As Annan said, literacy is a bridge, but it does us no good if we don’t cross it. A literate world that doesn’t read is like building a well from which no one will drink.”
So what are we to do? We begin as anyone does when they are given a gift, we thank the Giver, and then we use it as He intended. Laziness and self-indulgence have no place in the life of a Christian, but our consistent veneration of entertainment often causes us to slip into them unnoticed. As with any discipline, we must be willing to put to death the idols that hinder our obedience, using our literacy well requires nothing less. We must choose the challenging--but rewarding--route of ardent effort and self-discipline by prioritizing using our literacy as a means by which we can love God with our mind, and thus stir our hearts as well.
Reading can indeed be a source of hope, if we read well. We must read rightly, with effort, with a fixed hope in Christ, remembering with both awe and trepidation that our reading life has eternal significance.
