Catechesis and Christian Recitation: Teaching the Old Testament in a Digital Age

The Old Testament in a Secular Age

To suggest that the church struggles to teach the Old Testament is not to say anything new. The proper Christian understanding of Israel's scriptures has been debated since the time of the New Testament itself; ⁵ nevertheless, the church broadly agrees that the Old Testament is a vital and constituent part of our two-testament Scripture, what John Webster elegantly calls God's “regenerative self-communication.” ⁶ Although it includes what Paul alternately calls, “the law” (Gal 3:6), “the letter” (2 Cor 3:6), and “the ministry of death” (2 Cor 3:7), it also, again in Pauline terms, “bear[s] witness to … the righteousness of God through faith” (Rom 3:21–22), what he elsewhere calls “the promise” (Gal 3:17). ⁷ This dual inheritance of both law and gospel within the Old Testament has not always been clearly seen and has been long debated. ⁸ The second century saw intense debates about the law, esp. with Jews both inside and outside the church. ⁹ Ultimately, while still exploring the inherent Jewishness of Christianity (e.g., Epiphanius of Salamis’ Panarion), ¹⁰ the church allowed a fairly large degree of Jewish expression within it. Both John Chrysostom and Thomas Aquinas, for example, did not forbid Christians from seeking moral insight or an understanding of God from Israel's scriptures, but only from obeying Israelite ceremonial law. ¹¹ While, then, the Christian reception of the Old Testament as Scripture has been marked by struggle and nuance, I take the ongoing authority of the Old Testament to speak to the church as Christian Scripture as a settled matter.

Despite this consensus, today's believers are under increasing cultural pressures to ignore the Old Testament. I do not mean that they ignore the Old Testament altogether. Many still treasure the parts they think they remember. However, therein lies the grammar of our current context, what they think they remember is still at some distance from what the text actually says. Pressure to ignore the Old Testament is, therefore, sometimes intentional (e.g., because of its perceived ugliness), unintentional (e.g., because it is simply unreinforced), or both (e.g., intentionally ignoring a text that is uglier in memory than it is on the page).

Today's uncatechized Christians are not completely hostile to the Old Testament; instead, whatever they imagine in their minds when they think of the words “Old Testament” is likely more of a mix. On the one hand, they might find it beautiful, during a wedding, to hear of the time of “man's innocence” in Eden, or maybe, watching The Prince of Egypt, they feel genuine awe and wonder, “Did God really perform those wonders?” At a funeral, hearing “the Lord is my shepherd” probably still feels right and good, and they might think there is no better way to stir a nation during a State of the Union address than to quote Isaiah's call to be “repairer[s] of the breach” (58:12)? ¹² On the other hand, whenever they hear “Old Testament,” they are just as likely to feel a descending fog of horrid, Iron-age sexism, homophobia, slavery, and religiously sanctioned genocide. On the whole, they are unlikely to be able to shake the feeling that the world is better now than it was back then, in spite of the Old Testament rather than because of it. The shadow of the sins of imperial Christendom still loom large, and these failures in compassionate, active righteousness to the sinful, the weak, the poor, and the marginalized are perceived to be the baggage of the Old Testament; that is, the Old Testament was awful to such people, and that's why the church was, too.

This very mixed view of the Old Testament is a problem for anyone wanting to commend the God of Christian Scripture. Even inside the church, even for catechumens, the resulting opinion is probably a lot like their view of the rest of history: some of it might be nice to think about, but overall, you wouldn’t want to live there. Better just to focus on Jesus.

Oftentimes, such a “focus on Jesus” is, in fact, just a focus on the self, on what Jesus has done for me. Rather than receiving Jesus according to the Old Testament terms in which he is consistently revealed in the New, ¹³ modern believers subconsciously filter what they think of him through a pre-existing moral position that focuses exclusively on culturally preconceived ideas of human flourishing, ones that place the locus of moral decision making within the individual and this earthly life rather than within divine control of all things.

As philosopher Charles Taylor points out in his book, A Secular Age, focusing on human flourishing is, at root, a Christian idea. Over time, however, as modern westerners have unintentionally adopted a “closed world system” that separates us from belief in God's active influence in our day-to-day lives and encloses us in what he calls “the Immanent Frame,” ¹⁴ its incumbent “modern moral order”—the “ordering of society for mutual benefit (‘economy’)” ¹⁵ —has come to dominate, not just influence, Christian experience. Taylor states:

One central constituent of Christian revelation is that God not only wills our good, a good which includes human flourishing, but was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure this, in the becoming human and suffering of his son. Now [however] this constituent element came to be read in such a way that it more and more excluded sacrifice and divinely ordained suffering. ¹⁶

This explanation makes good sense of the current reticence we see toward the Old Testament today. To wit, because divine wrath is assumed to be contrary to divine love and the Old Testament has repeated, vivid descriptions of divine wrath, then why read it? Rather than submit one's worldview and moral presuppositions to ancient and verified Scripture, the individualist and procrustean bed of “the immanent frame” pressures modern Christians to hack its Old Testament limbs off. They become functionally, if not avowedly, neo-Marcionite. ¹⁸

A Telling Example and the Trouble With Narrative

In 2018, a good example of current attitudes toward the Old Testament came into the church's public eye. A famous pastor in my region, some of whose parishioners have been students in my classes, encouraged those under his care to “unhitch” their faith from the Old Testament and to “not obey the Ten Commandments because they aren’t your commandments.” ¹⁹

What stands out from this sermon and corresponds to Taylor's thesis is the emotional and personal motivation for it: At the beginning and end of his sermon, the pastor explains that many people he knows are in danger of losing, or have already lost, their faith because of the Old Testament. The combined effect of having been told that the Bible is “all true” and yet the Old Testament being “violent … [and] disturbing … [and] just offend[ing] all of our modern senses” means believers should not give up their faith in Jesus, but should instead follow the lead of the apostles in Acts 15 and leave the “worldview, values system, and regulations” of the Jewish scriptures behind. The Old Testament is, indeed, “divinely inspired,” he claims, but its “historicity,” “miracles,” and “creation myth” are not “all true.” They are just an account of “God the Founder playing by the rules of the kingdoms of this world to establish a kingdom not of this world.” The Jewish scriptures, he insists, were just “the back story for the main story,” “a means to that end.” ²⁰

Afterward, this pastor was rightly critiqued for his neo-Marcionism. ²¹ To be clear, he was not wrong for reading the Old Testament as, what David Steinmetz calls, a “sprawling, ramshackle narrative of events,” which only on a second reading in light of Christ reveals “a complex and intelligible narrative.” ²² The fault is in what kind of intelligible “second narrative” is being told. ²³ What distinguishes Irenaeus and Tertullian from the Gnostics and Marcion is precisely the way in which they read with the Old Testament rather than against it and not as a “back story” but as the story, “guided unerringly by the secret hand of its [divine] author.” ²⁴ In their view, the New Testament is, in fact, not “the main story” but “the concluding chapter” of a single, two-testament one. ²⁵ For these Church Fathers and the New Testament writers themselves, it was the similarity, not the difference, of the story of Christ to the Old Testament that compelled them to see Jesus as the “persuasive disclosure of what [Israel's] story was about all along.” ²⁶ Far from “unhitching” themselves from the Old Testament, they plumbed its depths and kept retelling Israel's story in light of Christ. ²⁷ The problem, then, with current neo-Marcionism is not with the Old Testament itself, but with catechesis about it, and especially with its sense of narrative.

To be sure, the metanarrative of God's triune self-disclosure is essential, but the Bible cannot and should not be reduced to such a metanarrative, as others like this pastor inadvertently do. As Hans Frei laid out in his landmark work, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, modern readers of the Old Testament are now downstream of some powerful presuppositions. ²⁸ They especially have a hard time not seeing the text as a mere historical record of past events, with a side of prophetic and poetic commentary. Given the choice between keeping “biblical history” (with its apparent gruesomeness) or “salvation history” (with its apparent grace), many feel pressured to choose “salvation history.”

As if to illustrate the point, as I was writing this, one of my teenage sons asked me about 2 Kings 2. His question was telling: “Did God really send bears down on some boys for mocking Elisha? Seems pretty harsh.” Without knowing it, his assumption is that the Bible is telling an individual moral lesson about not “being mean,” to which Elisha and God have clearly over-reacted. Unwittingly “subtracted” from his approach is the sense (a) that the books of Kings are telling a story about the nation of Israel, ²⁹ (b) that the “young men” are symptoms of that nation, (c) that the places Elisha visits before and after are telling the reader essential aspects about him, and (d) that the specific numbers of she-bears and victims in the incident might have intratextual significance within the book. In my reply, I encouraged him to think of the Bible “as theological literature first, then history.” ³⁰ Whether that's the right response or not, the goal of finding low-level introductory ways of helping beginning-level Bible readers keep the biblical text and its theological referent together, despite their instinct to see only historical “events as they happened” is important pushback against the immanent frame.

Much has been done in biblical and theological studies to recover this unity, especially in narrative theology and the recovery of typological and allegorical reading of biblical narrative. ³¹ However, as Katherine Sonderegger has recently pointed out in the pages of this journal, this recent focus on narrative has also tended to eclipse large, important sections of the Old Testament, esp. biblical law. If such eclipsing is resulting in a partial, unintentional neo-Marcionism in academic theology, we cannot be surprised when it is happening with catechumens. We need an active recovery of reading the Old Testament's law, oracles, sayings, and writings—not just its stories—as Christian Scripture. ³² The words of Scripture themselves are inspired, not our narratival abstractions. We must re-focus our attention on them, even in such a distracted age, ³³ when attentive reading of anything at all has become so rare.

Spirit, Scripture, and Catechesis

As we make the turn toward thinking about catechesis, we may be more worried than we ought to be about the future of the Old Testament because we, too, are caught in the immanent frame and must be reminded that God is not only present but active through His Spirit, sating the thirst of a secularized culture that indeed feels the subtraction of transcendence from the world. ³⁴ Into this context, God is, by His Spirit, still speaking through the Old Testament itself, through the Word of God written.

In other words, a good pneumatology is essential to thinking clearly about the Old Testament and what the church does through the ministry of catechesis. No matter what catechesis technically consists of from church to church, it is always a present act. In the economy of God, catechesis is an activity of the Spirit, who has not only animated creaturely life on earth but now sanctifies that life (cf. Ps 104:30; also, Ps 19:4). Unlike other creatures who inherit and exhibit God's wisdom through wordless mimicry (cf. Ps 104:24), human sanctification requires catechesis, instruction by holy words.

These words are not mere aphorisms. The Holy Spirit has sanctified the biblical texts to be for us holy instruction; the Spirit, in so doing, inspired the Scriptures, including the Old Testament, and has also illuminated readers and hearers today to understand what we ought. Scholars can only come to the Bible as Holy Scripture if they are, by the Spirit, “in Christ” (e.g., Rom 8:9–11). ³⁵ This reminder is perhaps especially true of the Old Testament, to which no Gentile has any cause to turn were it not for Christ. It is only because the Spirit through the New Testament itself points to the Old Testament that we who are in Christ look there as well. ³⁶ It has been the fatal error of many a biblical scholar to come to the Old Testament as though it were just another historical text ³⁷ or somehow only “leading up” to Christ, rather than remembering that it was the Spirit in Paul who led him to write in Romans 15:4 about the Old Testament, “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction [i.e., our catechesis!], that through the encouragement of Scriptures we might have hope.” ³⁸ All in all, God the Holy Spirit has animated life, is sanctifying that life, has sanctified and inspired His holy word, is illuminating us, and is instructing us. In scripturally focused catechesis, it is the Spirit who is on the move. ³⁹

In my opinion, we are better off trusting in the Spirit's past and ongoing work of the sanctification of all creation, in which the very words of Scripture were already shaped and through which they play a vital, ongoing role. The catechesis of Israel was the Spirit's work, in and through His words in the minds, hearts, and mouths of His people. As John Webster says,

Talk of the biblical texts as Holy Scripture thus indicates a two-fold conviction about their place in divine revelation. First, because they are sanctified, the texts themselves are not simply ‘natural’ entities, to be defined and interpreted as exhaustively as such. They are fields of the Spirit's activity in the publication of the knowledge of God. Second, because sanctification does not diminish creatureliness, the texts’ place in the divine economy does not entail their withdrawal from the realm of human processes. It is as—not despite—the creaturely realities that they are used to serve God… Sanctification can thus properly be extended to the processes of the production of the text—not simply authorship (as, so often, in older theories of the production of the text) but also the complex histories of pre-literary and literary tradition, redaction, and compilation [as well as post-history processes of canonization]. ⁴⁰

The Word in the Mouth

By way of answering that question, I want to draw our attention to Joshua 1:8. The story begins where Deuteronomy ended. “Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant” is told directly by YHWH, “Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the people of Israel” (vv. 1–2). He must have greatly feared the task because he is exhorted by God four times in the same chapter with the same words with which Moses had exhorted him just a few chapters before: “Be strong and courageous” (Deut 31:7, 23; Josh 1:6–7, 9).

This exhortation must have some connection to the recitation of the written words of Moses because each mention of the phrase is clustered close to (a) an act of writing or (b) a description of the book that contains that writing. In Deuteronomy 31, Moses exhorts Joshua to “be strong and courageous” and then immediately turns to the task of recording all that he has said, giving it then to the Levites so that it can be kept for the occasion of its public recitation at a gathering every seventh year at Sukkot, the Feast of Booths (Deut 31:7–12). Similarly, at the end of that same chapter, after Moses tells Joshua again, “Be strong and courageous,” the verses following declare, “When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book to the very end, Moses commanded the Levites … [to] ‘Take this Book of the Law and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant… Assemble to me all the elders of your tribes and your officers, that I may speak these words in their ears” (Deut 31:23–28). Finally, YHWH tells Joshua to be strong and courageous in vv. 6–7 and 9, and in the middle, in verse 8, we again hear about the written words of Moses, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.”

There are three things we should note about this passage: (1) in each instance, there is a consistent expectation that oral words and written words go together, for example, (a) Moses writes the book of the law so that it can be read and (b) before he can let it be deposited with the ark, ⁴¹ he calls the leaders together to “speak these words in their ears,” (c) Joshua is given a book, not so he can read it quietly but so that it will “not depart from [his] mouth.” (2) In each instance, the words are corrective and powerful; they are clearly implied to be the source of strength and courage and effective in guaranteeing that Joshua and the people receive the gift of rest in the land. (3) In each case, there is a pattern of authority to the word of the YHWH being re-enacted among the people, wherein the people assemble to speak and hear, not just for the good of the speaker but for the good of all; a similar pattern also appears in equally authoritative situations elsewhere in Israel's scriptures (e.g., Num 11:16–17, 24–25 and Neh 9, esp. vv. 3, 38). ⁴²

Arguably, this scene and pattern in the Old Testament sets the foundational requirements for later gatherings in the synagogue and in the church (e.g., Luke 4; 1 Cor 14). Scripture is Scripture because it is the only text that can be gathered around and read with the authority of the Spirit over the congregation. ⁴³ And yet, one key aspect, specifically in Joshua 1:8 is often practiced throughout the Old Testament but no longer among us.

That aspect is the constant presence of the divine word in Joshua's mouth so that he can “meditate on it day and night.” The Hebrew word here for “meditate” is הגה. Interestingly, it is found most often in the Psalms (e.g., Ps 63:6; 77:12; 143:5), which, given its role as a book of collective proclamation, seems to again connect the private and public role of words in Israel's life. The most famous use of הגה is in Psalm 1:2, where the righteous one “meditates” just like Joshua, “day and night.” The word can also mean “growl” (Isa 34:1) or “moan” (esp. like a dove, Isa 38:14; 59:11). Whereas we might think of “meditate” as something quiet and internal, the Hebrew suggests it is always an oral phenomenon. Sometimes, it is translated as “mutter,” as is the implication in Psalm 2:1, when the nations mutter their plots and plans against YHWH. ⁴⁴

Old Testament often speaks of muttering, meditating, and reciting the words and teachings inspired by God, but it can be easy to miss because it never consistently uses just one word. However, passages, like (a) Deut 6:6–7, which commands that the words that YHWH gives “shall be on your heart” and you shall “talk of them” with your children everywhere one goes or (b) Proverbs 3:1–3's injunctions to one's child to “not forget my teaching … inscribe [the love and faithfulness they describe] on the tablet of your heart” (cf. Prov 7:1–3) are peppered throughout Israel's scriptures. ⁴⁵ The portrait that begins to emerge is one where catechesis is at the center of communal life. ⁴⁶ Indeed, if we expand our frame to include not just moments of instruction at home but any activity where there is authoritative writing and recitation of inspired words, one suddenly begins to realize that there is hardly a portion of Israel's scriptures that escapes this creative nexus of writing down the proclamation of God's word and the subsequent oral recitation of that written word among the people of God. ⁴⁷ Scripture then—at least as it is depicted within the Old Testament—is what the Jewish community has long called it: Miqra.

Old Testament as Miqra: Recitation as Catechesis

The term, Miqra, derives from the Hebrew word קרא, meaning “call” or “gather,” and it is often associated with the public reading of Scripture. It has other meanings as well, which helpfully connect the public practice to private meditation. As Martin Jan Mulder puts it,

Mikra primarily denotes the correct reading of the sacred words, as they have been handed down to us through the activities of numerous writers and copyists… Mikra (מקרא) further means the way in which the sacred text has always been and ought to be recited … and understood by those who have been closely connected with the texts. ⁴⁸

The centrality of this practice of (a) becoming familiar with Scripture, (b) putting it within one's mouth, (c) muttering it and meditating on it in order to practice it, and finally (d) reciting it to be received by the community is perhaps more obvious in Islam where the title, Qur’an, literally means “recitation.” Indeed, in Islam, recitation as an oral practice is much more important to lay Muslims than it is in most western churches. Where Christians tend to have one person read out loud in a church during services, Muslims are encouraged to read and recite the Qur’an out loud on their own; they compete for who can recite the whole Qur’an best by heart.

Islam's origin within Arab culture often preserves practices closer to the Hebrew ones of the Old Testament than our contemporary churches do. For example, a practice of family recitation similar to that which we discussed already appears in a picturesque way in the Qur’an, Sura [Q Al-Muzzammil] 73:20, where it says, “Recite then as much of the Koran as may be easy to you. God knoweth that there be some among you sick while others travel through the earth and others do battle in his cause. Recite therefore as much as may be easy.” ⁴⁹ In the context of this Sura (cf. 73:1–8), the setting implied is nightfall, a family unit gathered together, and each person reclining after the meal is invited to recite as much as they can remember.

What else is this habit of daily, familial recitation from memory other than catechesis? To be sure, it is not catechesis as “threshold,” for example, for baptism or confirmation, where one is meant to be examined to find out if one knows enough to be considered for full membership. However, it is the kind of catechesis which leads up to such a threshold and continues on after it. Younger ones learn to say simple sayings, but they can also be immersed in longer, more complicated texts. Older people get to explore and practice new recitations. Taken together, we can say that the Old Testament expects us to practice the regular recitation of Scripture in our households.

Catechesis and the Book of Common Prayer

If you were asked to recite as much of the Bible as you could, which passages could you say? How many of them would be from the Old Testament? For those catechized by the 1662 or the 1928 Books of Common Prayer (which follow the medieval pattern), the answer is clear: Along with the Apostles’ Creed, you would be able to recite the Lord's Prayer from the New Testament and the Ten Commandments, word for word, from the Old. ⁵⁰ It seems clear to me that this is a great beginning to Old Testament catechesis and need never just be an end of it.

Those raised in confirmation classes that led them through a series of written questions and responses likely received kind, cheerful guidance, with many theological and ethical questions answered. Being asked piercing questions like, “What is the chief end of man?” and reciting the answer, “Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever” ⁵¹ has a profound orienting effect on the catechumen. But it may also fall short of increasing our affection for the Scriptures from which those questions and answers are themselves derived. To put it bluntly, knowing at that one should enjoy God forever because Psalm 73:25–28 says so is, in the end, a very different experience than encountering the Spirit through Scripture's poetry:

Whom have I in heaven but you?

We need not pit these two models of catechesis (i.e., question and answer versus recitation) against each other, but we need to begin with Scripture in our mouths, ruminate on it in our minds, and speak it again from our hearts. Indeed, I believe in this now more than ever. In an age of information, where conquering and using ideas rather than receiving the transformation of the soul is the order of the day, Christians should take up anew the Old Testament practice of writing Holy Scripture on the tablets of our hearts and not letting God's words depart from our mouths.

Recitation and Old Testament Reading in a Secular Age

If we did take up the practice anew, let us briefly consider what would happen to our secularized catechumens who are likely to be reticent of, if not repulsed by, the Old Testament. Should they accept an invitation to memorize and recite Scripture, esp. beyond the Ten Commandments, they would gradually become more familiar with the very words of the Old Testament. By speaking and listening, they would inhabit these texts—both the ones in which they delighted and ones they feared—learning the peculiar customs and language of the Hebrew Bible. ⁵² Moreover, those who recite will notice not just what is said but what is not said, which is especially important with the Old Testament's most difficult verses. As Jerome Creach advises in his excellent monograph, Violence in Scripture, “In addition to the broad structures of the canon that help frame difficult passages, many passages that seem to promote violence have within them self-correcting features that actually counter the violence they seem to first allow.” ⁵³ I have certainly found this to be true for myself. In the Flood story, the Conquest stories of Joshua, or 1 Samuel 15, for example, the concerns of each have become for me discrete concerns that overlap with one another (e.g., herem in the latter two; the divine response to violence in all three); however, they cannot be understood with broad brushstroke assumptions about what is supposedly said and supposedly meant. Only by spending time chewing and meditating on these texts can each passage eventually present its key word or phrase that not only relieves the conscience of the reader but enlivens the soul. ⁵⁴

Oftentimes, our first readings are too superficial. We are thinking about plot or character, when in point of fact the Old Testament is thinking about the nation, all humanity, God, or the earth. As Ellen Davis suggests, “When we think we have reached the point of zero-edification [in our reading], then that perception indicates that we are not reading deeply enough; we have not probed the layers of the text with sufficient care.” ⁵⁵ I propose that including memorization and recitation in our catechesis may very well help catechumens in the current, secular age to learn to read more carefully and in so doing be reconciled to both (a) this glorious old compendium of Scripture and (b) its God.

The Old Testament as Miqra: Recitation and Canon

The final way in which we can see “Old Testament as Miqra” as helpful to present-day catechesis is derived from its close connection to the Old Testament's own process of textual and canonical formation. For many who come to the Old Testament, its internal structure is opaque or confusing. The church's recognition of the status of both the Old Greek and Masoretic Hebrew texts of the Old Testament as divinely inspired (following Augustine) ⁵⁶ sets up a confusing array of possible suborders (i.e., collections of books within the Testament). Most of the recent scholarly attention to this has been on the formation of the Hebrew canon, especially how it became first “Law and Prophets” then “the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings” (or Tanakh). What has emerged is a convincing understanding of a multiphased editorial process by which not only were individual books re-shaped and extended in relation to one another, but it appears the individual canonical sections of Law and Prophets were edited in order to inter-relate. ⁵⁷ A similar process is widely regarded for the formation of the Pentateuch. ⁵⁸ While many students have heard at some point about the Documentary Hypothesis theory, what many don’t know is how far the pendulum has swung away from it in recent historical-critical scholarship. ⁵⁹ Instead, a traditio-historical theory has more often taken its place, in which the idea of large pentateuchal documents being woven together by a single redactor has been replaced by an ongoing, interweaving redactional process of Priestly and non-Priestly materials.

Although the results of such scholarship can be illuminating at an individual textual level, what I find more interesting is how someone who is already thinking of the Old Testament as Miqra, as recited text, may be helped in understanding the relative value of these intrabiblical variations and allusions. ⁶⁰

Let us consider an obvious example: Anyone beginning to memorize the Ten Commandments will need to find out which version of them they are meant to memorize, the one from Exodus 20 or the one from Deuteronomy 5. Although there are only marginal textual and theological variations between them, anyone who knows the story of the Ten Commandments will notice that they were only given once from Mount Sinai. (Or, as a more precise reciter might recall, was it Mount Horeb?) If one only thinks of the Old Testament as a history book, especially akin to modern histories which are chiefly concerned with “events as they happened,” then finding these variations in the Decalogue may prove disturbing. Can Moses be confused about the very words he heard (or was it saw?) from the very mouth of God? ⁶¹ But someone who knows their own foibles of missing or mixing up words orally when they recite may be more patient about, and inquisitive with, variations they find in the text. This person can consider whether it was Moses misremembering or whether there was some intentional revising of emphasis that occurred, either by him or by others along the way. (One thinks of moments where our own unawareness of actual song lyrics results in words in our minds that we actually like better, even after we know the original!) The discrepancy also generates questions about the relative importance of different words in the text, for example, whether what matters most is that it happened, where it happened, or what kind of place it happened. Recitation helps in finding what is true about any passage, the Bible included. The individual's instincts will also be well-primed to consider how oral tradition and written record might—and in fact do—collide in the pages of Scripture. ⁶² They may even think about how they now are reciting the same Old Testament words that Jesus did, ⁶³ and they may find connections in the New Testament they had heretofore not seen. ⁶⁴

Perhaps most importantly, our imaginary catechumen can be finally persuaded that although there is a persistent narrative element to the Bible—one that testifies to the very missions of the Triune Lord and cannot be removed—the Old Testament did not come together as a result of temporary, inferior “Jewish” ideas or because God was “playing by the rules of the kingdoms of this world.” Once again, the practice of recitation allows for a more reflective posture with more attention to the metaphorical nature of the Old Testament's theological language, metaphors which are both pervasive and essential to the Bible and its message. ⁶⁵ The Old Testament is divinely inspired metaphor, ⁶⁶ full of second meanings, which the Spirit has manifestly revealed in the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Recitation brings those metaphors close, into the heart.

Conclusion: The Old Testament in the Digital Age

With much of what I have presented, I have assumed the same kind of literary culture we have had for the last century or more. However, in the past 10 years, such major shifts have occurred in information technology that I am beginning to wonder if our incoming Digital Culture is more post-literary than literary. By “post-literary,” I mean that we are increasingly becoming a culture that can read but just chooses not to, at least when it's not accompanied by moving pictures. Given that people are constantly distracted and stimulated by something moving in front of them (or their ability to move it), will they be hopelessly lost if you hand them a print Bible to read? More philosophically, will they begin to lose the capacity to be bent to the text—to be shaped by it—and instead insist that the whole world be moved to their liking? If, as Joseph Pieper argues, contemplation is essential for happiness, are we, with our pro-distraction technology, killing our own happiness? ⁶⁷ In order to catechize in this environment, I suggest we turn to a less literate time than our own for help.

In his work, On Catechizing the Uninstructed, Augustine talks about three kinds of “newcomers” he has engaged: the uneducated, the grammarians and rhetoricians, and those educated in the liberal arts. With the last category, the primary task of a catechist is to talk with them about what they have read, to correct any faults, and to encourage them to further reading, making special effort to commend the Bible as conveying an “astonishingly sublime message … in a humble style.” ⁶⁸ These I take to be basically culturally indistinct from those who have come to Bible studies and churches—across the twentieth century and into our own—to consider the arguments they hear. They are still literate.

But, Augustine has things to say about catechizing the grammarians and rhetoricians, too, those who may be closer to today's postliterate catechumens. These, he says, think that they “surpass all others in the art of speaking” and require even more emphatic communication from the catechist than even in dealing with the completely uneducated “illiterate.” ⁶⁹ Augustine suggests they need to be taught humility and to value good character over fine words; however, when it comes to Scripture, Augustine has two specific pieces of advice: (1) “most importantly of all, they should be taught to listen to the divine scriptures” ⁷⁰ and (2) “they should be given firsthand knowledge of the actual usefulness of [contemplating] the hidden meaning [so they can] know that the meaning of words should be more valued than [mere felicity in] the words themselves.” ⁷¹ For Augustine, Scripture was meant to be memorized, recited, and thus contemplated, as a means to forming the soul. As Paul Griffiths has argued, such contemplative reading is, in fact, the essence of “religious reading” (as opposed to “consumerist reading”) because it is a kind of “rereading.” ⁷² “For [religious] readers the ideally read work is the memorized work, and the ideal mode of rereading is by memorial recall.” ⁷³ I believe there is a way forward here, toward Spirit-led meaning and away from mindless freneticism.

In the flurry and fast-paced styling of digital presentations, form and high emotion draw far more attention than substance and calm argument. Digital culture is a busy culture. Words like “slow,” “sabbath,” and “rest” tend to have an attractive quality because they are lacking so completely from the way many people live today. In this environment, Israel's scriptures point to a better way, one where meditating on the “law of the Lord”—slowly and methodically like in Psalm 119's long acrostic—results in that joyful state which is so elusive in our current age: אשׁר or “happiness” (Ps 1:1–2).

For who catechize the “postliterate”—those who do not read long arguments and have short, oral attention spans—perhaps the place to start is to offer up bits and pieces of Scripture, and to teach them to delight in verses and phrases and to begin to write on their hearts with the word of God rather than with pointless memes. Could it be that these small seeds of Scripture could prove weighty enough to sink deep into their hearts, planting themselves into their busy lives, and eventually growing over the cultural clutter? In the end, I commend us all to come together and to speak, to gradually get to know the words of Israel's scriptures more intimately with our mouths, especially the ones our secularized consciences find hard or confusing, and avail ourselves to the slow work of the Spirit, who alone can teach us the words of life (cf. John 14:26).