"The Scandal of Biblical Illiteracy: It’s Our Problem"
Re-posted with permission from www.albertmohler.com
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| Photo Credit: https://spu.edu/depts/uc/response/spring2k7/ |
"We will not believe
more than we know, and we will not live higher than our beliefs.
While America’s
evangelical Christians are rightly concerned about the secular worldview’s
rejection of biblical Christianity, we ought to give some urgent attention to a
problem much closer to home-biblical illiteracy in the church. This scandalous problem is our own, and it’s
up to us to fix it.
Researchers George
Gallup and Jim Castelli put the problem squarely: “Americans revere the
Bible-but, by and large, they don’t read it.
And because they don’t read it, they have become a nation of biblical
illiterates.” How bad is it? Researchers tell us that it’s worse than most
could imagine.
Fewer than half of all
adults can name the four gospels. Many
Christians cannot identify more than two or three of the disciples. According to data from the Barna Research
Group, 60 percent of Americans can’t name even five of the Ten Commandments. “No wonder people break the Ten Commandments
all the time. They don’t know what they
are,” said George Barna, president of the firm.
The bottom line? “Increasingly,
America is biblically illiterate.”
Multiple surveys reveal
the problem in stark terms. According to
82 percent of Americans, “God helps those who help themselves,” is a Bible
verse. Those identified as born-again
Christians did better-by one percent. A
majority of adults think the bible teaches that the most important purpose in
life is taking care of one’s family.
Some of the statistics
are enough to perplex even those aware of the problem. A Barna poll indicated that at least 12
percent of adults believe the Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Another survey of graduating high school
seniors revealed that over 50 percent thought that Sodom and Gomorrah were
husband and wife. A considerable number
of respondents to one poll indicated that the Sermon on the Mount was preached
by Billy Graham. We are in big trouble.
Secularized Americans
should not be expected to be knowledgeable about the Bible. As the nation’s civic conversation is
stripped of all biblical references and content, Americans increasingly live in
a Scripture-free public space. Confusion
and ignorance of the Bible’s content should be assumed in post-Christian
America.
The larger scandal is
biblical ignorance among Christians.
Choose whichever statistic or survey you like, the general pattern is
the same. America’s Christians know less
and less about the Bible. It shows.
How can a generation be
biblically shaped in its understanding of human sexuality when it believes
Sodom and Gomorrah to be a married couple?
No wonder Christians show a growing tendency to compromise on the issue
of homosexuality. Many who identify
themselves as Christians are similarly confused about the Gospel itself. An individual who believes that “God helps
those who help themselves: will find salvation by grace and justification by
faith to be alien concepts.
Christians who lack biblical knowledge are the products of churches that marginalize biblical knowledge. Bible teaching now often accounts for only a diminishing fraction of the local congregation’s time and attention. The move to small group ministry has certainly increased opportunities for fellowship, but many of these groups never get beyond superficial Bible study.
Youth ministries are
asked to fix problems, provide entertainment, and keep kids busy. How many local-church youth programs actually
produce substantial Bible knowledge in young people?
Even the pulpit has
been sidelined in many congregations.
Preaching has taken a back seat to other concerns in corporate
worship. The centrality of biblical
preaching to the formation of disciples is lost, and Christian ignorance leads
to Christian indolence and worse.
This really is our
problem, and it is up to this generation of Christians to reverse course. Recovery starts at home. Parents are to be the first and most
important educators of their own children, diligently teaching them the Word of
God. [See Deuteronomy 6:4-9.] Parents
cannot franchise their responsibility to the congregation, no matter how
faithful and biblical it may be. God
assigned parents this non-negotiable responsibility, and children must see
their Christian parents as teachers and fellow students of God’s Word.
Churches must recover
the centrality and urgency of biblical teaching and preaching, and refuse to
sideline the teaching ministry of the preacher.
Pastors and churches too busy-or too distracted-to make biblical
knowledge a central aim of ministry will produce believers who simply do not
know enough to be faithful disciples.
We will not believe
more than we know, and we will not live higher than our beliefs. The many fronts of Christian compromise in
this generation can be directly traced to biblical illiteracy in the pews and
the absence of biblical preaching and teaching in our homes and churches.
This generation must
get deadly serious about the problem of biblical illiteracy, or a frighteningly
large number of Americans-Christians included-will go on thinking that Sodom
and Gomorrah lived happily ever after."
