A deeper way of knowing

I recently started to learn John 1 by heart and there are good reasons to commend the practice of memorising scripture. But there is also an interesting cultural dimension: "When movable type started to bring relatively cheap books to people, there were those who lamented the death of learning and scholarship which hitherto had relied heavily on the memorisation of key texts. I think that perhaps those laments came out of a sense of the deeper understanding that could be gained from memorisation and so printing was seen as the harbinger of a dumbing down process in education. Cost is not an inconsiderable aspect of this; we are used to having a Bible that is whole and complete and cheap enough to have as a kind of reference book and that is because it is relatively cheap. Before Caxton, books were very expensive as a result of the labour intensive means of production. This means that for most people, to have scriptures was to commit individual books to memory when you had access to a book and to listen in such a way as to recall later [the disciplines of learning by heart can change the way we attend to things; the patterns we notice and so on]. This meant a closer and deeper acquaintance with particular books and passages involving pattern recognition and associations with personal life events in ways that do not generally happen now."
In fact we tend to relate to scripture differently as a result, I suspect. It is more external to us; less intimately known. In a sense perhaps less 'living'. It surely must increase the likelihood of the Bible being regarded as a kind of text book.

Now, I'm not actually commiting myself to say that one way is better than the other. They each have pros and cons. However we should be aware of the different mentalities that are produced.

There are liturgical implications, for example, too. When the community's biggest expense is a book, it is natural that it would be carried in with reverence -doubly so as it contains the word of God- and ceremony made of preparing to read it. However much of that ceremony becomes quaint and with a different emotional meaning when we all have Bibles to hand. The act of preaching is also diffferent; a preacher used to memorisation is more likely to pick up the patterns and meanings that go with memorisation while the post-print preacher is likely to be more textual and rely on the ability to cross reference. I note, in this context, that the eschatology that relies most heavily on the ability to cross reference by eye [post-millenialist dispensationalism] becomes a contender precisely in the period of history when the reference bible becomes a viable mass artefact.

Memorisation takes time while reference much less so. Memorisation forces attentiveness and several ways of recollection to be used so a more multi-layered approach using more mental styles and 'modules' is called for. When scriptures are available at the click of a search button are they more likely to be approached as factoids than words which we take to heart? As citations in an argument than a life-challenging companion? In short, as something we manipulate rather than a source of transformative power?

anamchairde: By heart; the deeper way of knowing: