How the Printing Press Killed the Church
(and is making small, innocent children cry.)
Before I infuriate adamant bible-holding church goers, benevolent Christian Bible reading citizens, or fiery preachers, let me explain.
As a child, I can remember holding my father’s thick leather Bible in my meagre hands. My arms shook at the weight of the colossal book that far outweighed my “Illustrated Bible for Children.” With great expectation I said farewell to my trusty steed, and said hello to a “real” Bible for the first time. With a breath of expectation, I opened the cover and prepared my eyes for what was to come. To my great surprise, I saw Genesis 1:1, followed by an endless sea of words, and nothing more. Confused and frustrated at this anticlimactic event, I continued flipping in search of something, anything, other than a smattering of words. Certainly I would find something of use in this Holy book. Perhaps God would send me a magical genie, a voice that boomed from Heaven, maybe even Jesus Himself, dusty sandals and all!Dejected, I decided that I had to work with what I had and read a sentence. Slowly words entered my brain, a quite fragile process as I sputtered them inside my miniature sized brain. To my demise, the only words I clearly understood were “ a, the, and and” forcing tears to well up in my eyes as I became certain that I would never understand God, and most importantly, I would fail the test to get into Heaven. Surely God would not let a Biblically illiterate man into His dwelling place of Biblical bookworms.
Although blaming the printing press for my confusion of the Bible, as well as destroying the entire church may seem a bit extreme, I believe there to be a greater correlation between the two that must be understood. In order to completely understand this relation, we must first understand the mastermind behind this vile object, Johannes Gutenburg.
Gutenburg was a secretive tinkerer with a passion for beauty, detail, and craftsmanship. Although he is widely recognized as a great inventor now, his entire life was consumed in poverty as he was an unsuccessful businessman. Little is known about the actual process of the invention because Guttenburg kept it largely private, only mentioning a “secret art” to his friends. In 1446, or so historians guess, Guttenburg printed his first page with moveable type. By 1500, presses across Europe had published almost 40,000 books. Currently, according to research done by Google, there have been 129, 864, 880 total books published in the world.
“So what?” you ask. This is what: Before the printing press was able to mass produce thousands of books on command, there was something that is foreign to the world today. That foreign something is community, and that community was formed through books. Not the reading of books in a library where if you uttered a word out loud the librarian would throw you out, but the reading of books that echoed through mountains, over hills, and reverberated off of trees. This oral reading was the movie theatre of the preprinting press world. Families would gather around, strangers would come in waves on the streets to hear someone read a book. Why? Because it formed community, and community formed relationships, and relationships formed life. There was a time when reading in one’s head was ludicrous, selfish, and illogical. In fact, it was not until the 10th century that reading silently in one’s head became normal.
Now, let’s narrow the oral tradition to the church. The reading of Biblical passages has exploded from the pages of individually owned Bibles to the infinitely accessible internet. It is no longer comical for a pastor to say “take out your Bibles, or iPhone, or whatever electronic device you have,” simply because accessing the Bible electronically has become prevalent to the Western world.
There are several very positive implications to having such wide access to the Bible, however there are also several negative connotations. First, as mentioned above, church has become less of a community focus as the people can simply hold their own Bible studies at home with the same passage that the pastor is reading. Second, the more that people own individual Bibles and read passages alone in their locked bedrooms, the more and crazier the ideas produced. It is really quite simple to read a passage and create incredibly far-fetched conspiracy theories in the absence of people questioning the motives and reasoning behind opinions that are created about Biblical passages. All it takes is to light a fire and add fuel until it is out of control, attracting nations of distracted Christians to the large flame and abundance of light that has been produced. Lastly, reading the Bible silently creates Christians who are complacent in their understanding of Scripture and rely on going to church once a month to develop an understanding of the perplexing passages, or rather to keep oneself from going to hell.
It is in this perplexed and confused state of mind that I found myself in as a young lad, craving for understanding but being left to defeat the baffling language called the Bible by myself, with only my two wandering eyes and my restless mind to assist me. Although it is impossible to change a nation already set on reading inside of one’s head, it does not take much effort to read a sentence out loud, and then another, and then another until a whole word, sentence, paragraph, chapter and book is read. So go ahead, read out loud, get kicked out of libraries, and create your very own movie theatre with your voice. Who knows, you may just save a child from crying tears of confusion. (and don’t worry Mom and Dad, I figured out how to read the Bible after the 100th try and am pretty good at it, too.)
