D.A. Carson sat in my study as we awaited the time to go into the church sanctuary for the morning worship service where he would be preaching. “Do you have any illiterate people in your church?” he asked. I told him I knew of several and that my estimation was probably low. He nodded and that was the end of that part of our conversation. We went to the service, and he preached a sermon that a ten year old could understand. A man in our church, not illiterate, but not well educated, approached me and commented after the message, “That was sweet”. And it was. It is a rare gift for a man with the intellect of D.A. Carson to be able to preach in such a way that the uneducated can understand him and benefit from what they heard. There are a great many intellectuals who think they have the ability, but they don’t. Two remarkable things stand out to me regarding Dr. Carson’s question: 1) he cared that illiterate people would be able to understand and benefit from his sermon, and 2) he could preach in a manner they understood and not be giving them a cheaper version of what he would have delivered to a room full of scholars.
49% of adult Canadians cannot read at a basic high school level. https://www.unitedforliteracy.ca/getmedia/44cba824-0daf-4e29-8367-cbb3b4539aba/2022-United-for-Literacy-Adult-Report-EN_.pdf. With numbers that high it must be the case that some of them don’t have a university education, and some of them might be sitting in our churches on a regular basis.
So, about half of the adults in Canada cannot read an adult book. 17% are functionally illiterate. (54% of US residents cannot read at a sixth-grade level. 21% are illiterate. Ah – western values.) My fear is that we have a culture that doesn’t care about this as long as everyone has the opportunity to make a substantial amount of money. The development of the mind is not what is important in our culture. What makes money is. It is a little shocking to me how our culture doesn’t seem to know the difference between education and job training. Financial security is the goal and whatever gets us there is what it values.
There are, no doubt, a great many reasons for the illiteracy rate in one of the richest and most educated countries in the world. But we will not care as long as money is earned, the social agenda is achieved, and we can talk about being one of the most popular countries on the planet. So, we have our illiteracy rate. I tried to find out what the reading level is of the average church goer in Canada, but I failed to find anything. I suspect that the stats are not as dire in the church going community and that should lead us to ask why we do not attract a broader representation of the culture in the neighbourhoods we serve.
There is also the possibility that those in church who cannot read are very skillful at hiding it. Illiterate people are smarter than the rest of us in several ways, the most enviable in my opinion being the ability to remember things since they cannot write them down for later reference. If I don’t write something down it will likely be forgotten; meals and sports events being notable exceptions. The intelligence of illiterate people notwithstanding, literacy is a gift from God and illiteracy is a tool of Satan. Christianity is the religion of the Book and the things the Book tells us regarding the value of the Book should make literacy a top priority for the church. We assume that all can master what is written, we recommend books to be read, pastors quote books they have never read, or cannot read, and we throw around scholarly words and phrases as if we knew what they meant. We know, deep down, that literacy matters. We should remember that we have functionally illiterate people, below high school level of reading, and people who simply don’t read, in our churches every week.
Scholars who teach and write about the deep truths of Scripture are performing an indispensable service for the glory of God and the good of the church. They write textbooks that students and future church leaders will read and hopefully benefit from. From time to time they will write books that they hope ordinary folk will get into. We should be glad that God has gifted them with the ability to delve into the deep things of God.
But quite often, there is a problem with their writing, their podcasts and their ventures into the non-academic world. The problem is not that what they say isn’t true. The problem is that many (most?) scholars who write about crucially important things can’t seem to say them in prose that anyone who does not walk in the intellectual loftiness that scholars inhabit, ever uses or understands. They speak and write in academese and they seem to be ignorant of just how foreign a language it is that they are speaking. It is not the illiterate who don’t read them. It is anyone with less than a Master’s degree.
Ordinary Christian folk do not talk with forty-dollar words and as the stats indicate, they don’t read them either. There are people in the pews who do not read scholarly books, academic books, high school level books, or books. We may fault the education system at this point, or Smart Phones, or gaming, or AI, or any number of mind numbing things that have captured the hearts and minds of modern western civilization. Finding the reasons for the lack or inability of reading is a good thing as long as something is done about it but that is not likely to happen. So, we find ourselves in the unenviable position of needing scholars who have something very important to say which is truly essential for the average Christian to come to grips with, but who cannot say it in any normal speech or writing that non-scholars will bother trying to relate to. They do not seem to be able to speak five words in a known tongue, which, as we know, is what the Apostle Paul would prefer.
This is true even when they think they are dumbing it down for the “common” man. I have read books written by scholars who say that this particular book is written at a “popular” level so that ordinary non-scholars can benefit from the truths of which it speaks. But they are mistaken and I suspect that they have lived in the oxygen starved stratosphere of academia for so long that they do not know that they are not communicating in their writings what they think they are. They’re not communicating at all. They love the God of whom they write and they are truly passionate about the great truths about which they write. But most people will never pick up their books to read them, and for theologians this should be concerning. They are communicating in a vacuum to others who write similarly and for whom the consequences of their writing will only ever go around the circles they inhabit until they have discussed it to death or until the next book is written for them to circulate among themselves. Their “popular” books will be read by students in post secondary institutions because it is required. The result is whole groups of Christian people who will miss out on what the book was about, not because they are stupid or too dull but because no one has ever spoken these great truths in the language which they speak.
Uneducated people are not stupid. But they are not educated, and they do not speak the way that biblical scholars do and which those scholars have not yet learned should not be written if they want to be received well by people who do not read much, if at all. Stupid is as stupid does, and writing something that they claim has necessary teaching for all to embrace and not saying it understandably fits the definition just fine.
I suspect that most scholars know who they are writing for and the hope is that the students and others who do read it will translate it for the masses and benefit the common people in the pew who are faithfully worshipping every Sunday. People who are struggling to maintain a faithful walk with God while trying to survive economically, trying to keep their children from forsaking the faith, keeping their marriages fresh and soul feeding, keeping their time with God at all, and keeping themselves from falling.
God has raised up people in local churches whose job it is to translate the indecipherable verbiage of the scholar into the language of the people. It is pastors, men who are called to preach the word to those who will never read the scholars or even ever hear their names. A pastor should be well read and able to interact with the latest theological developments in the proper understanding of the Scriptures. One reviewer said this about Matthew Barrett’s book “None Greater”: “As a pastor, None Greater has motivated me to be as clear about the majesty and character God as I can in my preaching and teaching ministry. This book has fueled a desire to feed my congregation with a big view of God so that they can better marvel at and trust in him.” (https://www.9marks.org/review/book-review-none-greater-by-matthew-barrett/). This guy gets it. Note that he does not say that that the book has fueled his desire to get the book into the hands of his congregants. The pastor’s job is not (only) to say, “Here my beloved people is a book you should read”. His job is to get into the Scriptures, having read deeply on the subjects contained therein, and preach and teach them so that a fourth grader can comprehend and benefit from his effort. It should be required by churches, not to have a PhD for a pastor necessarily, but a man who can read like one and preach to people who cannot, who loves God and loves people. Every man called to the pastorate should be able to take scholarly submissions and transmit them to their people in a known tongue. A great many pastors like to think of themselves as scholars and yet do not see that their job is to love their people and teach them great mind boggling truths about God in a way that they can understand. Our job is not to impress our people with how much we know. We can do so much better than that. We can do the inestimably valuable work of explaining the Scriptures to our people so understandably that they are better equipped to lead a life of disciplined obedience and worship in a daily awe of the God they have been taught about and whom they have come to deeply love.
We can forgive the scholar for his constant use of Protestant Latin. It is the language he speaks and not many scholars are multi-lingual. We need what they contribute to the theological education of the church. But the language they speak needs to be translated from the books they write and lectures they gives or a lot of people will not advance in their understanding of the great mind-boggling truths contained in the Scriptures and put there in order to be mined out. Unlike the scholar, the pastor is called to be bilingual and absolutely must read the deep theologies that have blessed the church for millennia and give them to others in an understandable manner and tongue. If he does not, he is robbing his people and not preaching the whole council of God. A love for God and people will produce a pastor who wants his church to be stunned by the truths of Scripture and works hard to give it to them.
The need for this is crucially important, for there are also those preachers and pastors who seem to think that ignorance and mindlessness are spiritual gifts. They are part of a dreadful group of people who cannot think critically, are woefully ignorant of what the Scriptures are about and what it says, who give evidence of not reading much at all and can also obtain a pulpit and know how to get a substantially large following. What they preach only coincidentally relates to the teachings of the Scriptures and their drivel is watched, listened to, supported, followed and imbibed. It is, as Steven Colbert might say, Christianish. Its chief characteristics are ignorance, incoherence, worldliness, with a lack of logic that gives a message unrelated to Gospel truth and which gets eagerly swallowed up because it is accompanied by some pseudo-miracle bent on deception or because it can date the second coming or because it makes them feel better about themselves. It is error on steroids and in many cases is heretical. Our hearts should break that there are those among the people we pastor on a weekly basis, who are listening to these purveyors of spiritual nonsense on a regular basis, absorbing the errors they teach, and passing them on to their own children and fellow cell-group participants. I do not know of any solution other than a local church that preaches and teaches 16 ounces to the pound of solid biblical truth on a consistent basis in language and manner that is understood, relevant, Spirit filled, observable, and delivered in love. Let us never make ignorance a desirable quality. God’s people are destroyed from lack of knowledge (Hosea 4:6).
Most pastors are not scholars and we do not pastor many who are. I have nothing but respect for those men who have pastored churches, raised children, maintained a healthy marriage and managed to get their PhD as well. Such skill, intellect, discipline, and commitment, was beyond me. (I also didn’t have the money.) But I can read. I learned a few things in university and seminary, and afterwards strapped myself to my desk to go deeper. I earned near poverty wages in the early years of pastoring and only the Lord knows how much my family sacrificed in a pre-internet age, in order for me to obtain a book. But I have a calling to give my people deep things about our incomprehensible God so that they will bow down and worship in awe and wonder. Did I do it? Very poorly, at best, is my guess. But God uses the things that are not and I pray that what I gave has been used by Him to bless the church. But oh what a treasure we have and what a calling it is to deliver such great things to a hungry people. Let us show them that the great doctrines of the faith are what is needed to thrive as a believer in a non-believing time.
Knowing and loving God are not mere intellectual ventures. But neither are they absent of the use of the mind. And we must never think that loving God with all our mind necessarily means getting a post graduate degree in theology. The former director of the “The Shantymen’s Christian Association”, Art Dixon, was fond of saying that the average farmer of two hundred years ago knew more theology than the average seminarian today. True or not, the point is well taken that the person in the pew should be taught the deep things of God by pastor/teachers who have studied and can communicate.
Pastors must read well and read deeply. If they don’t, they are in the wrong calling. God has gifted a small group of scholars to study hard and expose for us great treasures contained in the Scriptures. He has not gifted many of them to preach. There are not many who can think stratospherically as scholars and also pastor. Pastors are called to transmit mind-boggingly great things to ordinary, sometimes uneducated, sometimes illiterate people so that they can understand them and be equally blown away by the stunning truths about God that are contained in the Scriptures and which God has called them to release. If you are a pastor, release these stunning truths about our great, incomprehensible, triune, loving, God and His Gospel. It will be sweet.
Pastors who are also biblical scholars, need to remember which language they are called to use when writing and hobnobbing with their fellow intellectuals and which one to use when preaching and teaching to ordinary folk who need a clear word from the Lord. They must show them that the true humanity and deity of Christ matters when their son announces he is gay, and the young couple loses a child to cancer, and an eviction notice has been received. Equip them for the theological battles that they enter into everyday when they go to school and to work. Show them that Simplicity has everyday import.
There are uneducated people, illiterate people, simple people in church every week (again, not stupid people) who need a word from the Lord as they wrestle with sin and opposition and doubt and sorrow and mental illness and disease and financial woes, and family discord and many other things. Just like the intellectuals and scholars who are there. That word from Him must come through those who preach and teach, in a known tongue, in ways that all their hearers will know how to apply in their spiritual warfare this week, because they know the great riches of deep truth that is contained in Scripture, even if they do not know the Latin phrase that it goes by or will never read the tome that explains it. Pastors must know their people. They must love their people. And they must give their people sound doctrine in an understanding manner, even if it is only five words.