cwakelee:
With a gentle tour through the history of Europe at the time of the Reformation. Until the creation of the printing press, in which the Catholic
Johann Gutenberg participated in the fifteenth century, the century before the emergence of Luther onto the world stage, books were very expensive and not widely available to the common person. Since the ordinary person didn’t have much access to books, he didn’t have a lot of need for reading. This wasn’t a nefarious Church plot; it was simply the way of life during the time period in question. Once printing made books far more accessible, literacy rates correspondingly rose.
Luther’s proposition that the Bible should be read by everyone from the humblest milkmaid to the noblest monarch would have been scoffed at a mere hundred years before his birth. This wasn’t because knowledge of the Bible was dismissed as unimportant, but because
reading was dismissed as generally unnecessary for the common man. Ordinary Christians learned the Christian religion, including the Bible, not by reading, but by being taught through catechesis. Churches, for example, were filled with artwork that depicted scenes from the Bible and were considered “the poor man’s catechesis.”
Once Luther and the Reformers came along, a new concern arose: The Reformers insisted that the meaning of the Bible was plain to anyone who cracked the spine of a Bible and scanned the text. That this was untrue became apparent with the proliferation of Protestant sects arguing with each other over the Bible’s meaning. To solve that problem, the Church
did not forbid laypeople to read the Bible, but more clearly defined the Church’s role in defining for Christians the meaning of disputed texts.
Recommended reading:
Ten Thousand Chickens for One Thousand Bibles by Jimmy Akin
Where We Got the Bible by Henry G. Graham
