Chapter 1: Gutenberg’s Bible

This week, we start a journey through selected historical events that have moved Christians away from community and toward individuality. We start by looking at the invention of the printing press.

Before Johannes Gutenberg began printing Bibles in AD 1455, Christians were dependent upon the church to supply God’s Word to their ears. It’s the faithful preaching of key Protestant pastors and the growing availability of printed Bibles that are credited for the long-term success of the Reformation. For the first time, people had personal access to God’s written Word. They could see it with their own eyes at their own convenience. They could ask questions about it, study it, and find their own answers. Not everyone had a Bible at first, but as other printing presses came online and distribution increased, so did the ability for Christians to read it for themselves and make up their own minds about theological subjects, the Christian life, and the gospel.

In hindsight, this is exactly what was needed given the years of theological abuse conducted by the Roman Catholic Church, which had failed to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and had kept the people subjugated and ignorant. “The Roman Catholic Church would never recover the cultural dominance it had once enjoyed. Gutenberg, a faithful Catholic, never foresaw that his invention would cripple the church he loved.”[1] The printing press made it possible for individual Christians to hear a Word from God without the intrusion of an abusive church hierarchy. Of course, this was a magnificent and needed thing. It resulted in the wonderful Protestant Reformation without which many of us would still be far from the Lord.

For the first time, it was possible to be independent of the church if someone had reason to be, although that independence didn’t develop quickly. Even after printed Bibles were widely distributed among lay people, their agrarian lifestyle meant that farming communities still valued public meetings in schoolhouses and churches. Up until the nineteenth century, reading had still been a communal affair. Groups of people would gather to hear a reader publicly read a book, a letter, or a newspaper.[2] Agricultural villages settled by a network of dependent traders and generations of families who had never known anything but their land and their local people, looked to each other for knowledge and learning. Community consensus was vital. And a community based on interpersonal relationships prevented individualistic autonomy. Without relationships a person could literally die.

Since the societal connections and goods-trading practices of the local community spilled over into the life of the church, spiritual independence didn’t come about simply because of technological advancement. The printing press didn’t create selfish autonomy in the church. Rather, autonomy in the church was spurred on by the growing prideful autonomy of secular culture that influenced the church over the next five hundred years. Having said that, the printing press did make individual Bible-reading—and therefore a growing individualism—possible. A very good thing made a bad thing more feasible. The printing press made it possible for the autonomy ball to keep rolling.[3] Its momentum would not be seen in its totality until the twentieth century.

Next week, we’ll discuss the impact of religious television on the modern Christian.

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[1] Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing, 2011), 43.

[2] Elizabeth Drescher, Tweet If You [Love] Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2011), 64.

[3] Marshall McLuhan traces the societal changes that took place as books were introduced to communities, providing text portability, personal individuality, and independence in The Gutenberg Galaxy; The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 206–22.