I’ll give you, it’s not the best question. We all intrinsically know what books are and how they work, it’s not a complex technology. A couple of boards with some paper glued or sewn between, right?
Except, I fear that as we move into a post-literate society, its less instinctual than you might think. If you hang out on Twitter (I’m not calling it the other name) you’ll find about two or three times a year someone will go very viral suggesting that reading books is for losers.
Of course Twitter is full of book-lovers so it gets lambasted as well as lauded, but what’s interesting is that this isn’t some muscle-headed school bully all-grown-up and broadcasting their Neanderthalic opinions. It’s always some sort of highly successful techbro who presents as hyper-intelligent and wants us to understand that reading books is fundamentally inefficient.
After all, once the blog post exists why read books at all? They argue that books are too long and take too much time and the information within them can be gained quicker through other media. Publishing is dead, they proclaim, long-live the tweet.
Most people don’t think like them, thank the Lord. But I think this outlandish opinion is just the end stage of a set of attitudes that are baked into our thinking in the modern moment and exacerbated by our new modes of communication and information transfer.
Because the internet is largely shaped for information transfer—partly due to being viewed on a screen—the spaces that develop virtually tend to be coded for information transfer. That ultimately causes the problem above, because the fictional techbro’s biggest mistake is that he doesn’t know what a book is and he doesn’t know what reading is. He thinks that they’re printed webpages, that their end is information: that they exist for knowledge.
The problem is, books exist for wisdom.
This might all seem esoteric and distant. I’ve certainly never encountered the book-hating techbro in the wild. However, I have frequently encountered young Christians who think that reading the Bible is designed to gain them knowledge. Their attitude hasn’t been taking to its reductio ad absurdum like our Tweeter’s has, but it’s the same at the core.
They are of course wrong, we read the Bible to meet God. Secondarily we read the Bible to gain wisdom. This might seem like a false dichotomy as you can’t gain wisdom without knowledge; that’s true as far as it goes. The thing is that if we read for knowledge then we can truly master a text. It’s possible to learn all it contains. If we read for wisdom then we submit ourselves to be mastered by a text.
It’s fair that there are books which contain little wisdom and some which it would be a terrible idea to be mastered by. For an example of this, look at the corner of the internet that’s made Harry Potter their entire identity. This is, I think, the definition of a ‘great’ book, one its worth being mastered by. The Bible, as the very words of God, sits at the top of that hierarchy. But as always, that which God gives us echoes into reality through common grace so that it is possible for humans to write books worth being mastered by.
The most obvious examples are some of the greatest works of fiction ever written—the best of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Austin. For some modern examples consider the novels of Susannah Clarke or Eugene Vodolazkin. There will be many more. Thomas Ward suggests that the only way we can be changed by this sort of book is by ‘cracking your head’ on them.
What’s my point here? Firstly, to simply say that it’s OK if you don’t understand something on the first reading. Sometimes that’s because it’s poorly written, but often that’s because it’s difficult to grasp and it will take repeated rereading to get what it’s trying to tell you. It took a book to say it because that’s how long it took to say it.
Sometimes the obscurity is required, sometimes it’s bad writing. Anderson gives the example of Dante’s Divine Comedy—what’s it about? You can give some one sentence answers that are true but fundamentally lacking:
“The Divine Comedy is about a man who descends through hell and ascends to heaven for the sake of a woman. Along the way he learns his love for the woman is a shadow of his love for God. It is about fourteenth-century Italian religious politics. It is about an author’s pursuit of fame and his efforts to sanctify it. And so much more. Every answer is true in what it asserts and misleading in what it leaves out. The only complete answer is to read the book from the beginning.”
Matthew Lee Anderson, Called into Questions, 81-82
Secondly to say that our habits of reading the Bible, mine included, probably don’t inculcate wisdom in the all the ways they could. Reading snippets, reading on our own, and submitting our questions to the text before we’ve allowed the text to submit its questions to us, are all habits that don’t tend to produce wisdom.
A strong, questioning, community is required to learn wisdom from the Bible and from the best of human endeavour. This is one the reasons that social media tends to distort our ability to react to things wisely. Wisdom is slow. Wisdom is careful. Wisdom is formed in community. A keyboard warrior with a blog (eek) is not primary a place to find wisdom. Beware those who never speak on difficult and contested issues—though its primarily Pastors who should be doing this—but also beware those who speak too fast. If you find someone who dashes out a blog, or a thread of tweets or Facebook post, on whatever the latest issue in the discourse is, it is unlikely that their habits are forming them towards wisdom. That’s not the same thing as saying that their advice is necessarily unwise, but I am claiming that their habits are destructive to their wisdom. Social media is corrosive to good thought.
Good thinking happens, but where? Regular readers won’t be surprised: around tables. We need to be challenged, critiqued, test out our thoughts among those who already love us and have broken bread with us, before we throw them to the baying mob. This is before we consider the perverse incentives created by the algorithms themselves: denunciations apart from argument are rewarded.
Should you withdraw from these settings because they’ve corroded our minds? Some of us should, yes. If you’re going to stay, though, you need to secure your mind. You do that with age old practices: go to church, pray, read the Bible with others, eat with them around a table and speak of matters deep and light, read books and be mastered by them.
I do think much of the world’s problems can be solved this way. Is this simplistic? Not at all, have you ever tried it? But it is simple.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
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