Martin Roth asks Can we live without the Bible? and tells of how a college lecturer had told him If you wanted to catch up with the people in your church you didn’t need to do a diploma. I could have taught you in an afternoon what they know.
Martin goes onto quote Prof Geeorge Lindbeck
The decline of biblical literacy has been abrupt and pervasive. Language, culture and imagination have also been debiblicised at a remarkable rate.The decline affects intellectuals and non-intellectuals, the religious and the non-religious, those inside the churches and those outside, clergy and laity and Bible-loving conservatives as well as purportedly less biblical liberals. .When I first arrived at Yale, even those who came from non-religious backgrounds knew the Bible better than most of those now who come from churchgoing families.
Every major literate cultural tradition up until now has had a central corpus of canonical texts. Without a shared imaginative and conceptual vocabulary and syntax, societies cannot be held together by communication, but only by brute force (which is always inefficient, and likely to be a harbinger of anarchy). But if this is so, then the biblical cultural contribution, which is at the heart of the canonical heritage of Western countries, is indispensable to their welfare, and its evisceration bespeaks an illness which may be terminal.
Is it any wonder our society is indeed breaking down? The vital place of a core set of authoritative values in society needs to be recognised much more than it is!
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