The Profound influence of Reading
So everything psychology knows is skewed towards a tiny proportion of the world's present and historic population. So most of psychology is either plain wrong, or profoundly imbalanced. (Review, Part 1)
As a believer did you wonder why, when you read psychology texts, you sensed you were so often reading jibberish? Well, now you know.
OK, so the world has to rewrite all its text books on psychology.
(Oh the glorious advantage of revelation, where standing above the transient so-called-knowledge of a passing world, God, the one who created us in the first place, sees and knows all things and has authored final and ultimate truth in the Scriptures. What the Bible teaches about mankind is true for all time, set against the lies of the academy.)
Anyway, why is the West so weird?
Here is Henrich's first reason: we can read. It turns out that the act of reading actually changes the brain itself and has many knock-on effects on the rest of our thinking.
Psychological studies were all conducted on highly literate university students - that's why those findings are so way out. Lots of people in the world today are illiterate (at least 10%) and many many more are poorly literate. Very few are highly literate. And widely literate societies are a new and unusual thing.
So what does literacy do to our minds? Although he doesn't say this, my guess is that what he describes are the effects of high literacy, not simple literacy.
Says Henrich, among various physical and neurological effects reading increases our ability to remember, but reduces our ability to identify faces and narrows the way we think from more all-life holistic thinking to more analytic processing (page 3-4).
This last effect is perhaps the most important: literacy (or at least, or especially high literacy) narrows our vision of the world.
The effect of the Reformation
One can easily chart the rise of literacy in the West. It starts to rise in the 1500s, so guess what caused it?
The Reformation.
The Catholic church was quite happy for folks to languish in illiteracy for then they could not read the Bible and discover the errors of priests and popes. But Evangelicals like Luther knew that the only way to be saved was through God's Word, and so he wanted people to learn to read the Bible.
Instead of relying on a Latin Bible no-one could read Luther translated the Bible into German for the ordinary lads and lasses on the street. And he encouraged them to learn how to read.
And so literacy - as well as the Gospel - spread out from Wittenberg!
You can even draw a nerdy coloured map to show that the degree of literacy was proportional to how close a city was to Wittenberg - the closer the more literate, the further away, the less literate!
Since salvation is for everyone, the Reformation encouraged both boys and girls to read. (Note the difference with respect to what we hear is happening in Afghanistan today. I say 'what we hear is happening' because western media with its own shibboleths can be wildly imbalanced).
All this is documented in Henrich's book.
The Catholics, out of envy and a competitive spirit, then also introduced schooling, but never to the degree of the Reformers. The literacy differences between the two movements are very stark.
When the Gospel was taken to the world by the Reformers, guess what? They took with them literacy. Missionaries translated the Bible into the languages of the peoples and encouraged them to read.
Since western people could read, when industrial possibilities came about, guess what? There were lots of literate farmers able to work the machines and ramp up industry to what we call revolutions.
Enough for one blog, but we're only up to page 17.
Conclusions
The gospel of Jesus Christ has wide-ranging effects.
Christians encourage reading. Because we are 'people of a book', because God has spoken primarily in Scripture (he also 'speaks' through creation), to fully share the Gospel we must encourage people to read. Hence the vital and amazing work of Bible translators such as the Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Christians encourage both men and women to read the Bible. With regard to salvation, in Christ there is no male nor female. So Christian mission encourages both men and women to read.
So far, so good, or so it seems. What's to argue with or complain about?
Here's my initial guess at where things may go wrong.
Literacy is one thing. High literacy is another. To teach people to read is a noble endeavour. But since most of the big-name reformers were scholars who were highly literate themselves, they, unwittingly pushed not only literacy, but high literacy.
Unwittingly they expected of their followers not only the ability to read the Scriptures but to engage in the highly theoretical gymnastics of their theoretical - and so often secondary - doctrinal arguments.
Instead of teaching the people to follow Christ simply, they wanted them to understand and get passionate about detailed doctrinal squabbles of their day, many of which, in turn, were generated by the highly scholastic education they themselves had experienced (or endured). Remember the more literate you are the more analytical your brain becomes and the less you are able to see the big picture, the less you are able to see life holistically.
This is my guess, so far.
The problem is not literacy, but some of the unhelpful side-effects of high literacy.
The other reformation
There was of course another reformation. Running parallel to the one we have all heard of. A group of evangelical Christians saw much further than Luther and Zwingli. They saw that the local church community should be a loving Acts-like fellowship. Doctrine was the biggest concern of the cerebral big-shot reformers. True life was the passion of the anabaptist reformers. (If only they had worked together!).
But here's why I mention them. By and large the anabaptist reformers were ordinary literate folks, whereas the big-name reformers were all highly literate scholar types.
Perhaps that is why the magisterial reformers (the name given to the big shot reformers who used the power of the local magistrates to push through reform) were so analytically and doctrinally focussed. And perhaps with their literacy but not high literacy, that is why the anabaptists saw the Gospel more holistically.
Let's see!
If you want to read a brief account of the noble but forgotten Anabaptists, you can do so here: LOST REFORMERS
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