Jeremy Myers wrote a blog post “Biblical Illiteracy is Not a Problem.” I really wanted to be able to disagree, given the title. But I don’t.
The point of his post is that, if Christians knew only small snippets of the Bible – “Love God” and “Love your neighbor” – and actually practiced it, that would be OK, even if they did not know more. From this perspective, it is not illiteracy, but refusal to put into practice what we do know, that is the real serious problem.
Perhaps one could talk of Biblical fluency just as we talk about fluency as an achievement beyond mere literacy in other domains. If people know the Bible inside and out, they will realize that it is not a set of pat answers or unchanging dogmatic statements to be assented to. And hopefully they will notice core principles related to love and justice.
On a related subject, Candida Moss has an article in The Daily Beast that tackles the need for something more than Biblical literacy, but from a different sort of angle.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In