Our Literarcy Bias: What it is and How It Affects Our Perception of #Scripture

Last updated on: September 5, 2013 at 5:15 pm by Guest Contributor

Our Literarcy Bias: What it is and How It Affects Our Perception of #Scripture 2013-09-05T17:15:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

by Crystal St. Marie Lewis

R3 Contributor

*This first appeared on the Crystal St. Marie Lewis Blog

I just finished reading an interesting essay titled “Why Everything We Know About the Bible is Wrong” by Robert M. Fowler. I found one of the arguments in the essay so important that I felt I should share it with all of you. According to Fowler, one of the fundamental problems for 21st century Bible readers is the literacy divide between the Bible’s readers and the Bible’s writers. Because we’re a highly literate culture with deeply embedded expectations of written materials, we often misunderstand the purpose of the texts recorded by the Bible’s newly-literate oral cultures.

For example, you probably learned to read when you were young, from people who also learned to read when they were young. You were raised at a time in history when a high percentage of people knew how to read and write. You are deeply embedded in a literate culture. This means that you share some experiences of the written word, and have some fairly consistent expectations of written texts. These experiences and expectations likely include two things:

You have used a textbook in your lifetime, or have read a book in a book club, or you’ve bought a book from a bookstore where there were five or more copies on the bookshelf. You know the experience of reading a “viral” article on a website, and take for granted that the content of that article will be the same for everyone accessing the website. Therefore, you expect certain written works to be uniform in content because you understand and automatically appropriate the outcome of mass production or mass distribution.
You have written a report which required you to quote a source, often with very detailed citations. Therefore, you expect that where there’s a “copy” of a document, there must also be an “original” or source to confirm the accuracy of what you’ve copied. And by the way, because you wrote book reports as a child (and for a growing percentage of people in American society, research papers in college) you place a high value on details and accuracy.

But when it comes to the Bible, have you considered the following?

“In an oral culture, typically no two performances of a story are ever identical. It is taken for granted that the oral storyteller will vary his or language in response to the needs of the moment, responding to the particular time, place and audience.” Fowler, pgs. 6-7

In other words, as a cookie-cutter textbook generation, we expect the Bible’s stories to remain static in overall content. However, the original hearers had no such expectation. In fact, they expected their stories to change with each storytelling event.

“The idea that oral communication was fluid and changeable bewilders and frightens many printed-book-literate people. (‘If it changes, how can we trust it?’) Even when we discover multiple versions of certain stories, we may still insist that there surely must have been an ‘original’ version of these stories. However, that is an attitude that comes from print culture, not an oral culture.” Fowler, pg. 8

Simply put, the desire for an original source document is one that we’ll likely never overcome because we’ve been taught that a “source” must always exist. We assume that in order for the written word to be valid, it must be verifiable, because we were raised in the era of book reports and footnotes. The Bible, however, is a not a term paper written to appease a persnickety professor. Rather, the Bible is a written collection of generations-old, evolving oral stories as they existed at the time they were written down. Someone chose to record a tiny piece of the evolving oral tales in writing, capturing one solitary moment in the life of the story. Even in cases where the works were copied from other documents, it is probably not proper to wonder where the “source” document is,
because the source was the spoken word.

From what I’ve gleaned in the essay written by Fowler and other writers, we erroneously believe that the preservation of God’s Word is the same as preserving each string of words.**** We also erroneously equate preserving God’s Word withpreserving an interpretation of the Word*.* We spend a lot of time chopping scripture into sound bytes and mining tiny details of our stories, but this is not how ancient storytellers and hearers engaged these stories… We differ in approach because our high level of literacy has made us letter-focused, rather than spirit-focused, when a more faithful use of the text would be to focus on the power of story to bring people together.

Follow Crystal on Twitter @crystallewis

Uncategorized

Previous Post

September 4, 2013

Tyler Perry Lays Hands On T.D. Jakes

Next Post

September 5, 2013 Syria Explained: How It Became a Religious War

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Amy Steele Andre E. Johnson Book Reviews/Series Brian Foulks Call for Chapters Carol Howard Merritt Classes Conferences Contributors Crystal St.Marie Lewis Daniel White Hodge Earle Fisher Eulogy Fredrick Robinson Guest Contributions Henry McNeal Turner Institutes Interviews Joseph Boston Katherine Whitfield Kimberly Peeler-Ringer Lectures/Roundtables Natalie Bullock Brown R3 Book Series R3 Contributor Rashad Grove Readers Reflections Symposiums Teaching Traci Ellis Travis Harris Uncategorized Video

Select a Month June 2020 February 2020 December 2019 November 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 October 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz