The “Biblification” of Scripture: Ups & Downs of Canonical Technology - Brad Jersak

The Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan is most popularly known for the slogan, “The medium is the message,” which was his call to be mindful of the implicit impacts that come with the adoption of any new technology. He suggested four questions (labeled “the tetrad of media effects”), which helps us see the ups and downs of any new medium:

1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?

Today, technology advances so rapidly that whatever you can imagine is likely already in development or patented somewhere. The pace of our lives and social obligation to keep up puts mindfulness in the back seat. Speed-of-light communication has drawn us into our smartphones and the parallel universe of social media without sufficient attentiveness to McLuhan’s questions. “The Social Dilemma” (2020) was a wake-up call to the alarming levels of algorithmic manipulation and privacy invasion to which we’ve assented… but had little to no effect on our practices. The world system simply does allow me to be a Luddite.

Prior to the digital age of computers and the internet, the greatest technological breakthrough was surely Guttenberg’s printing press. With the printing press, in concert with the impulse for Scripture translation, came the mass production and distribution of the Bible in the language of the people. It’s easy enough to see how Gutenberg’s gift could enhance, make obsolete, retrieve, and subvert the practice of Bible reading (and even literacy) wherever the Good Book became available. I suppose much ink has been spilled on that question.

The Bible as Technology

What fascinates me is how the Bible itself became a technology that repackaged and reframed the Scriptures, with real effects on the message itself. Scripture has always come to us through delivery systems: oral and written, scrolls and codices, liturgies and lectionaries. These are, in themselves, technologies. How might the medium—the way we package and deliver the scriptures—affect or become the message itself?

Said another way, the Scriptures were reframed with new and sometimes problematic assumptions when they became “the Bible.” The Scriptures as read by the church in the context of worship vis-a-vis the Bible as a bound book on my bedstand may have the same content, but their different shape and use may render differing interpretations. This is especially true when a hyper-individual reads the Bible as a “flat book” (every page has equal authority) versus when the community reads a collection of Scriptures serving as witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ.[1]   

The Biblification of the Scriptures

Using McLuhan’s tetrad, consider:

1. How does the Bible medium enhance Scripture reading?

We could say that the Bible gathers together the Scriptures into a single collection that clarifies which books our Christian tradition considers inspired by the Spirit. We give that collection priority in terms of authority in our lives and churches. The Bible, seen as a holy book, is set apart from other sacred literature and communicates the uniqueness of our Scriptures. We come to see that we are not only in possession of a library of independent and disconnected booklets but that the many books have converged into a coherent, grand saga.

2. What does the Bible medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

I’ve moved McLuhan’s third question up to point out a corollary. Having the Bible in one affordable book and accessible in one’s own language retrieves the Scriptures so that we can once again hear them in our own languages. The authors who produced the Scriptures in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek meant for those who heard them to understand what was written. But through great stretches of Christian history, lay people could only hear the Scriptures read in foreign languages (e.g., Latin) through priests who might not understand it any better than they did. That someone can now hear and read John 3:16 in their own tongue is a grand retrieval.       

3. What does the Bible medium make obsolete in Scripture reading?

The above is all-too-familiar (and celebrated by Protestants) but there is also a downside. As a bound collection of books available to every individual in hardcopy, on a smartphone app, or online, what gets lost? What previous medium might become obsolete that compromises the message?

I would suggest that the liturgical reading of the Scriptures in the context of community worship and the lectionary cycles with its connections of linked texts provided an essential medium for understanding the message that both preceded the Bible, and which is not so obvious in the printed version. In other words, the “divine liturgy” of the church is a medium that functions to frame the Scriptures within the canon of faith—the message of the gospel—showing how they work together within the drama of redemption that inexorably points to Christ, crucified and risen. So too the lectionary cycles: these frame the Scriptures within the church calendar precisely in order to lead us to Christ and his gospel.

Fr. John Behr suggests that reading the Bible apart from its gospel framework, preserved in the liturgical tradition, may not even be reading it as Scripture. If I sit down with my Bible and flip it open to any page in the book, I’ve potentially removed that page from its specific role in its gospel context. One could study the Bible their whole lives and yet miss the essential reality to Whom all the Scriptures point. Certainly, Jesus’ opponents had.     

4. What does the Bible medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?

This then suggests a terrible reversal if the Bible medium enters the extremes of bibliolatry: we see this subversion when the Bible is elevated to the right hand of the Father and honored with the title “Word of God”—the name that belongs to Jesus Christ.

Through a flat reading of the Bible, I have often seen particular Scriptures used to argue against the very teachings of Jesus Christ, justifying from the idolized text that which the Word himself forbade. When the Bible becomes our final authority, Jesus is demoted and becomes a mere episode in the Good Book. Ironically, the message of the Scriptures becomes lost to the medium we call the Bible when its Emmaus Way framework is subverted with the new technology.

I recognize this may be entirely new material to readers unfamiliar with liturgical calendars or liturgical services, but consider that our Jewish roots observed an annual cycle of feasts and fasts, that the Gospel of John is organized according to these events, and that Jesus consciously framed those festivals as prefigurements of his story.     

What then?

No, I haven’t thrown out my iPhone or canceled my online accounts. Neither will I discard my excessive collection of Bibles or cease all private study of its wonderful pages. But what I can commit to is submitting my reading of the Scriptures to their gospel context. I can read them in the way prescribed by the church, as the message concerning Jesus, the One who is the I AM whose day Abraham foresaw, the One of whom Jesus says Moses wrote, the One to whom all the Prophets and Scriptures bear witness. And I will see the Scriptures within the canon of faith before I imagine them within the Moroccan bindings. And I will read and hear the Scriptures as a product and function of the church, ancient and modern, that faithfully stewards them.    

Summary

I'm seeing ever more clearly how the annual calendar of feasts and fasts, and the weekly divine liturgy, are the framework through which we see the Scriptures come together to tell our story of redemption both yearly and weekly. By stripping Christianity of the liturgical framework in which all Scripture has its role and place in the great story (in the name of breaking free from tradition and religion), we're left with a Bible organized only by genre, with no clue how Moses, the Prophets and all the Scriptures prefigure the Passion, and a randomized sequence of mini-series contrived by independent preachers.

 

The calendar is like an auger that cycles deeper and deeper through the clay to access the pure springs of a deep faith. Too often, we've opted instead to dig random holes throughout the yard so that when the rain comes, we're drinking from a selection of shallow, muddy puddles.

 

[1] Cf. John Behr, “Looking Forward, Reading from the End,” The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity (Oxford Press, forthcoming).