Would it surprise you to learn that for most Christians across the two millennia of the history of the church, study of God’s written word was accomplished together with other Christians?
We contemporary Christians are used to the idea of personal Bible study. Personal devotions. Reading the Bible by ourselves. Reading through the whole Bible in a year. Using a Bible or devotional app on our phones. We are accustomed to a personal approach to Bible study.
There were two Germans who were very instrumental in making personal Bible study possible: Johannes Gutenberg and Martin Luther.
Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, eventually making it possible to print books quickly and inexpensively. Prior to the printing press, everything was copied by hand, which is slow, and expensive, resulting in hardly anyone having access to the printed Bible. No surprise, one of the first works of literature that Gutenberg printed was the Bible. The year was 1455, when he completes 180 copies of the Bible.
Of course it took time for the printing press to get widespread use. But just as printing was becoming common in early 1500s Europe, a Catholic priest named Martin Luther took center stage. Luther was instrumental in breaking away from the Catholic Church and starting the Protestant Reformation. One of the features of the Protestant Reformation is the idea of Sola Scriptura, referring to the primacy of the Bible in communicating God’s word.
Luther and numerous other reformers believed that the Bible was quite important, and thus they believed that the Bible should be translated into the common language of the people. German, English, French, Spanish, etc. They wanted to get the Bible into the hands of every person, and their timing was great because the invention of printing press made it physically possible and cost-effective to print Bibles. That led to growing efforts to translate the Bible and teach people to read.
I’m not suggesting that in the mid-1500s suddenly everyone who wanted one had a Bible. That reality would take time. One copy of Gutenberg’s Bible in 1455 cost the equivalent of three year’s wages for a clerk, but that was exceedingly less expensive than a hand-scribed Bible previously. As time when by, costs decreased, Bibles were translated into common languages, and slowly more and more people could read the Bible for themselves.
Thus, in the 1500s a new approach to the Bible was born. Personal Bible study. For the previous 1500 years, personal access to the Bible was the privilege of the wealthy, scholarly, priestly few. Everyone else, most people, had to go to church services to hear the Bible preached. The regular Christian would have no expectation of owning even a small portion of Scripture in their own language ever in their lifetime.
It was a travesty that Luther rightly wanted to change. He believed that if people could have access to the Bible in their own language it would fuel the Reformation and free people from what he believed was like a captivity inside the Roman church. He was right, and the Catholic Church would come to agree. As the decades and centuries went by, the influence of Gutenberg and Luther swung the pendulum from a communal approach to Bible study to a personal approach to Bible study.
As with so much else in life, when a situation swings from one extreme to the other, we can trade one deficiency for another. The ability to study the Bible personally has wonderful benefits. We can read the words of Scripture anytime we want. We can hear the truth of the Bible and apply it to our lives every day of the week. We can dig into its thought, mission, wisdom, and we can know the heart of God. But personal Bible study can also miss something important: The Word of God is given to a community.
I don’t ever want to return to the 1500 years of church history when most people had zero access to the Word of God, so they could only hear the Bible read and preached in church. But I do want to return to the 1500 years of church history when people understood that the Word of God is given to a community, and therefore they expected to study it together with other people.
The first Christians demonstrated this kind of communal study, and their communal approach to studying the Scriptures is what we’ll investigate in the next post.
Photo by Aaron Owens on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 