Literacy Bible Quotes

Bible literacy matters because it protects us from falling into error. Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their messages to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our Bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview. Disillusionment and apathy eat away at our ranks. Women, in particular, are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers.1

Before Gutenberg, libraries were small -- the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.

the disparity between Americans’ veneration of the Bible and their understanding of it, painting a picture of a nation that believes God has spoken in scripture but can’t be bothered to listen to what God has to say.

When women grow increasingly lax in their pursuit of Bible literacy, everyone in their circle of influence is affected. Rather than acting as salt and light, we become bland contributions to the environment we inhabit and shape, indistinguishable from those who have never been changed by the gospel. Home, church, community, and country desperately need the influence of women who know why they believe what they believe, grounded in the Word of God. They desperately need the influence of women who love deeply and actively the God proclaimed in the Bible.

Your love for others is the overflow of your love for God. Your love for God will increase as you learn to know him better. But never lost sight that your influence will be noticed in how you use your heart, not your head. Bible literacy that does not transform is a chasing after the wind. Christians will be known by our love, not our knowledge. We will not be known by just any kind of love - we will be known for the kind of love the Father has shown to us and we in turn show to others.

Even non-religious folks should read the key Bible stories. It’s essential for cultural literacy. Knowing these stories helps in understanding the many Biblical references in literature and art.

But sound Bible study is rooted in a celebration of delayed gratification. Gaining Bible literacy requires allowing our study to have a cumulative effect—across weeks, months, years—so that the interrelation of one part of Scripture to another reveals itself slowly and gracefully, like a dust cloth slipping inch by inch from the face of a masterpiece. The Bible does not want to be neatly packaged into three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day increments. It does not want to be reduced to truisms and action points. It wants to introduce dissonance into your thinking, to stretch your understanding. It wants to reveal a mosaic of the majesty of God one passage at a time, one day at a time, across a lifetime. By all means, bring eagerness to your study time. Yes, bring hunger. But certainly bring patience—come ready to study for the long term.

Many intellectuals in the Western world defended the half-century (1959–2008) dictatorship of Fidel Castro of Cuba by noting, for example, under Castro’s rule the literacy rate in Cuba rose to a hundred percent. However, Cubans were not allowed to read anything forbidden by the communist regime. In the view of Castro’s defenders, it is better to be unfree and literate than to be free and illiterate. The Torah’s view, however, would seem to be the opposite; it is better to be free and illiterate, just as it is better to eat a poor man’s food and be free than to eat a rich man’s food as a slave. Furthermore, the very concept of freedom carries with it the possibility of improvement of one’s circumstances. The illiterate are free to learn to read; the poor are free to work, retain the fruits of their labors, and improve their lot in life—perhaps even become wealthy, as so many have in the freedom of the Western, Bible-based world.

The tension between autonomy and expertise had been, at a basic level, fundamental to the Protestant experience itself from the Reformation forward, as the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, increasing literacy, and vernacular translations of the Bible undermined the clerical caste's monopoly on spiritual authority. In the twentieth-century United States, professional specialization, the Progressive emphasis on technical expertise, and simply the ever more complex nature of modern urban life pulled readers toward greater reliance on literary guidance, while the logic of consumerism, rooted in the all-powerful choice to buy or not to buy, further reinforced the notion of reader autonomy.

About two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible "answers all or most of the basic questions of life"—and 28 percent of them admit that they rarely or never read it!

Universal literacy, taken for granted today, was a direct result of the Reformation's reemphasis upon the centrality of Bible reading,

His curiosity aroused by seeing Sophia read the Bible, Douglass asked her to teach him. Naively, she agreed. He caught on rapidly, and Sophia was proud enough of her student to mention his progress to Hugh. He exploded. Literacy, he cried, would “spoil the best nigger in the world,” and “unfit him to be a slave.

Let’s follow the causal chain I’ve been linking together: the spread of a religious belief that every individual should read the Bible for themselves led to the diffusion of widespread literacy among both men and women, first in Europe and later across the globe. Broad-based literacy changed people’s brains and altered their cognitive abilities in domains related to memory, visual processing, facial recognition, numerical exactness, and problem-solving. It probably also indirectly altered family sizes, child health, and cognitive development, as mothers became increasingly literate and formally educated. These psychological and social changes may have fostered speedier innovation, new institutions, and—in the long run—greater economic prosperity.25

They called me 'the angriest Negro in America.' I wouldn't deny that charge. I spoke exactly as I felt. 'I believe in anger. The Bible says there is a time for anger.

Biblical literacy does not dispel all confusion and mystery from your life because while God reveals his will for you in the Bible, he does not reveal all the things he will do in your life for your good and his glory. God surprises you.

Further compounding the problem, biblical and theological literacy is at a new low.1 Frankly, many Protestants don’t know what the Bible says, nor what they should believe. Modern-day mysticism has swept professing Christians into the belief that if something feels right, then it is.

In a world that was even more chauvinistic than our own, the Torah mandates that the Israelite people love peaceful non-Israelites living among them no less than they love themselves. The German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen rightly identifies this law as the beginning of what is known as 'ethical monotheism': 'The stranger was to be protected, although he was not a member of one's family, clan, religion, community or people, simply because he was a human being. In the stranger, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity.

Biblical literacy does not dispel all confusion and mystery from your life because while God reveals his will for you in the Bible, he does not reveal all the things he will do in your life for your good and his glory. God surprises you.

The rabbinical form of Judaism that emerged from this movement emphasized literacy and the skills to read and interpret the Torah. Even before the destruction of the temple, the Pharisee high priest Joshua ben Gamla issued a requirement in 63 or 65 AD that every Jewish father should send his sons to school at age six or seven. The goal of the Pharisees was universal male literacy so that everyone could understand and obey Jewish laws. Between 200 and 600 AD, this goal was largely attained, as Judaism became transformed into a religion based on study of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the Talmud (a compendium of rabbinic commentaries). This remarkable educational reform was not accomplished without difficulty. Most Jews at the time earned their living by farming, as did everyone else. It was expensive for farmers to educate their sons and the education had no practical value. Many seem to have been unwilling to do so because the Talmud is full of imprecations against the ammei ha-aretz, which in Talmudic usage means boorish country folk who refuse to educate their children. Fathers are advised on no account to let their daughters marry the untutored sons of the ammei ha-aretz. The scorned country folk could escape this hectoring without totally abandoning Judaism. They could switch to a form of Judaism Lite developed by a diaspora Jew, one that did not require literacy or study of the Torah and was growing in popularity throughout this period. The diaspora Jew was Paul of Tarsus, and Christianity, the religion he developed, seamlessly wraps Judaism around the mystery cult creed of an agricultural vegetation god who dies in the fall and is resurrected in the spring.

Jesus’s parables are more like Zen koans than theological propositions.

The emergence of scientific inquiry had already begun this process, but Weber’s emphasis on the role of Protestantism captures a significant factor. Prior to the Reformation, southern Europe was economically more advanced than northern Europe. During the three centuries after the Reformation, capitalism emerged, at first mainly in Protestant countries. In this cultural context, economic accumulation was no longer despised—it was taken as a sign of divine favor. Protestant Europe manifested a remarkable economic dynamism, moving it ahead of a Catholic Europe that had previously been more prosperous. Throughout the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution, industrial development took place mainly in the Protestant regions of Europe and the Protestant-dominated regions of the New World, and by 1940 the people of Protestant countries were on average 40 percent richer than the people of Catholic countries. Martin Luther urged people to read the Bible, and Protestantism encouraged literacy and printing, both of which inspired economic development and scientific study (Becker and Wössmann, 2009). And Protestant missionaries promoted literacy far more than Catholic missionaries

There’s a wonderful book, Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero, which cites a poll that half of Americans can’t name Genesis as the first book of the Bible. This is part of the dumbing down of our culture. One of those books that 50 percent of Americans apparently aren’t reading is the Bible, or they would know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible. It’s sort of like, “I don’t know what Genesis is, but I believe it.

Among the many blessings of belonging to a faith which has such an important place for written scriptures, is the blessing of literacy and literary culture. It is a simple fact that the desire to read and share the Bible, translated into our own language, has been the main driver for literacy and everything that pertains to it: from the production of paper and the invention of printing, to children in learning their letters in elementary schools. The Word within the Words

Love you neighbor as yourself' makes sense only within a religious context. Without God, all that exists in the world is the physical; from where then would come the basis for legislating moral obligations? The inability to derive moral obligations without a metaphysical basis has been a bedrock problem confronting all atheistic philosophical systems. As Bertrand Russell, perhaps the twentieth century's most eloquent atheistic philosopher, wrote: 'I cannot see how to refute the argument for the subjectivity of all ethical values, but I refuse to accept that the only thing wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it.' Unfortunately, over many decades of writing, Russell was never able to formulate a stronger critique of 'wanton cruelty' than that he didn't like it. Even more unfortunately, there are many people who do like it, a factor which helps account for this century's Nazi and Communist horrors. Significantly the biblical verse does not read: 'Love all humanity as yourself,' but it specifically speaks of one's neighbor. After all, it is easier to engage in lofty statements about humankind than to show loving behavior to the person next door, who might be a rather flawed creature.

For many enslaved Africans, the Bible only became an avenue of resistance because it was one of the few books available to Black folks in a white, Christian-dominated society that prohibited Black literacy. Reading the Bible and applying its lessons of redemptive suffering, salvation, and struggle aided African Americans in their revolutionary fight against the “contradictions” of chattel slavery in a so-called democratic nation.

It’s hard to have interesting and meaningful conversations about the Bible with Christians. Really hard.3 Biblical literacy isn’t a strong point of American culture, but most active small group participants have a healthy familiarity with the text. Rather than make for more interesting discussions, though, our proximity to Scripture often has the reverse effect. People who know the “right answers” often think they are sufficient. Or people feel like they should have the right answers, making them reluctant to speak up.

As we cast our gaze back to the foundations of modern religious faiths, we should consider the times in which they developed. Recall that the printing press was invented in 1436. The literacy rate was likely minuscule and limited to the religious clergy or the wealthy. Considering a historical perspective, literacy levels for the world population have risen drastically in the last couple of centuries. While only 12% of the people in the world could read and write in 1820, today, the share has reversed: only 12% of the world population, in 2020, remained illiterate.

of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. On being compelled by force of arms to give up their slave workforce, Deep Southerners developed caste and sharecropper systems to meet their labor needs, as well as a system of poll taxes and literacy tests to keep former slaves and white rabble out of the political process. When these systems were challenged by African Americans and the federal government, they rallied poor whites in their nation, in Tidewater, and in Appalachia to their cause through fearmongering: The races would mix. Daughters would be defiled. Yankees would take away their guns and Bibles and convert their children to secular humanism, environmentalism, communism, and homosexuality. Their political hirelings discussed criminalizing abortion, protecting the flag from flag burners, stopping illegal immigration, and scaling back government spending when on the campaign trail; once in office, they focused on cutting taxes for the wealthy, funneling massive subsidies to the oligarchs’ agribusinesses and oil companies, eliminating labor and environmental regulations, creating “guest worker” programs to secure cheap farm labor from the developing world, and poaching manufacturing jobs from higher-wage unionized industries in Yankeedom, New Netherland, or the Midlands. It’s a strategy financial analyst Stephen Cummings has likened to “a high-technology version of the plantation economy of the Old South,” with the working and middle classes playing the role of sharecroppers.[1] For the oligarchs the greatest challenge has been getting Greater Appalachia into their coalition and keeping it there. Appalachia has relatively few African

Since seminary tends to academize the faith, making it a world of ideas to be mastered (I will write about this at length later in this book), it is quite easy for students to buy into the belief that biblical maturity is about the precision of theological knowledge and the completeness of their biblical literacy. So seminary graduates, who are Bible and theology experts, tend to think of themselves as being mature. But it must be said that maturity is not merely something you do with your mind (although that is an important element of spiritual maturity). No, maturity is about how you live your life. It is possible to be theologically astute and be very immature. It is possible to be biblically literate and be in need of significant spiritual growth.

As we show in Astro-Theology and Sidereal Mythology and The Trees of Life, the Bible reveals its secrets to those skeptical and persistent enough to follow the twists and turns of its convoluted text. Every chapter and verse makes perfect sense to the man armed with symbolic literacy and the occult keys of decipherment. Academics concede that the Bible’s text is full of

I would suggest that true literacy—the kind that matters—brings about clearer thinking and informed action. Thus, true biblical literacy involves an interaction with the Bible that changes the way one thinks and acts, and that kind of interaction takes time.

slave revolts, especially in Jamaica, were a far more regular feature of life in the colonies than history books have ever cared to reflect. Indeed, Christianity was eventually accepted for no other reason than it was the only route to literacy, as the Bible was the only book slaves were allowed, and in order to read it they had to be taught to read. However, the first black preachers immediately adapted the scriptures to acknowledge both their people's sufferation and their resolution to remain independent. And as for manner of worship, it was going to be as gloriously, vibrantly African as possible.

One way or another, the alphabet created a possibility that never existed before, namely of a society of mass, even universal, literacy. With only twenty-two symbols, it could be taught, in a relatively short time, to everyone. We see evidence of this at many places in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah says “All your children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children” (Isaiah 54:13), implying universal education.

Abraham’s readiness to obey God’s command shows him to be ethically deficient by later standards, but not by those of his age. True, God had revealed Himself to Abraham, but He had not made known to him the full ethical implications of monotheism. Since other contemporary religious believers sacrificed sons to their gods, God, in essence, was asking Abraham if he was as devoted to his God as the pagan idolaters were to theirs.

Deborah agrees to accompany Barak, but can’t resist a jab at the sexism of the Israelite society: “Very well, I will go with you. However, there will be no glory for you in the course you are taking, for then the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman