Gutenberg's Crime

How printing the Bible killed Christianity
Text: Matthew 5:33-48

When I was six or eight years old, my father gave me some advice that I’ve carried with me all my life. He told me to face my problems squarely and leverage my assets to address them. It is advice I always try to live by.

Now you might be thinking that this is pretty sophisticated advice to be giving an eight-year-old. And, if the truth be known, those weren’t his exact words. You see, we were “working” on our house and I had located a couple boards and a nail. I sat with the boards beside me and held the nail with my left hand and reached across with my right to hammer it into the wood. Without much progress. While passing by, my father looked down at me, chuckled a little, and said “Boy, put your butt behind you.”

It took several years for exactly what he meant in the larger context to soak in. In fact, it was several years after his death. But I’ve sure gotten a lot out of that advice since I understood it.

In fact, a few weeks ago my daughter and I were working on my wife’s new rental property installing baseboards. I was nailing them in place and she was using a nail set to sink the nails into the wood so they could be caulked and painted. I told her all about my father’s advice and what it meant. Her response was “That would be most ergonomically efficient.” Lesson: Don’t wait until your kids are teens to pass on your advice on life.

Isn’t it amazing how as we grow and mature we understand things differently? In fact that is the purpose of the scriptures that we read this morning. In each of these passages, Jesus is correcting, interpreting and advancing the understanding of things that had been said or written before. In fact, he is re-writing Hebrew scripture.

I am still amazed at the number of people willing to pull one verse out of the Bible and create a new church based on it. This is not a new problem. In 1968 when the Evangelical United Brethren and the Methodists united, the only difference that I could find between the two was whether you said debts or trespasses in the Lord’s Prayer. When I first delivered this talk here three years ago, the big item hitting the news was whether homosexuals should be ordained and appointed ministers in the United Methodist Church, or elected Bishop in the Episcopal Church. Arab and American alike, rush to their favorite verses and justify war in Iraq or bombing of subways. And all the controversy begins to hone in on the issue of whether this old book (or one of another religion) is the infallible Word of God.

I’ve begun to wonder what it would have been like had Jesus chosen to remain a carpenter instead of choosing fishermen as his disciples. I’d like to tell a story about Jesus as if He and the disciples were building a house. It is a sort of first century Habitat for Humanity.

Andrew and Thaddeus are over here hauling back and forth with a big bucksaw to cut the beams to the right length. Thomas is measuring the beams for cutting, and then after they are cut he’s re-measuring them to see if they really came out the length that he marked. Judas is paying a supplier for lumber and siding, and taking a kickback under the table. Matthew is counseling the new home-owners on the tax benefits of using recycled stone for the flooring. And up at the highest point of the house, Jesus is positioning the rooster beam (that’s the main ridge beam in a cottage where the roosters were allowed to perch) with none other than Peter, James, and John, while the other 5 disciples are hauling on ropes to hold it in position.

And Jesus saith “Let us nail the beam to the post.” And Peter leapeth out to the edge of the scaffolding with his hammer and saith, “Yea, Lord, I shall do it.”

So, there we have Peter hanging out over the edge of the scaffold, holding the nail in place with one hand while he reaches across himself with the other to try and tap the nail into the wood. The first nail he hits on the edge and it goes flying off the roof, narrowly missing putting Bartholomew’s eye out. The second he swings mightily at, and it bends. The third he cautiously tap-tap-taps and it edges slowly into the wood.

By this time, it’s getting hot. The guys holding the ropes are about to give out. James and John are having a hard time keeping from laughing as they hold the beam in place. And finally

Jesus calleth out to Peter, “Putteth thy butt behind thee, Peter!”

Everything goes suddenly quiet. Peter looks up. Jesus repositions him.

Peter swingeth the hammer and Behold! The nail sinketh into the wood.

And an awed hush falls on the worksite. Jesus looks around as they all look adoringly up at him, shrugs his shoulders and says, “Don’t tell anybody I said that.” Of course the disciples looked at each other in wonder

for they kneweth not what these things meant until after the resurrection.

In retrospect, after the amazing Easter events, the disciples came to understand the meaning of what Jesus said in a broader context. Peter used it as an illustration in a sermon as a lesson in focusing on the disciple’s mission in the world. It was good to be able to understand meanings of common things in the larger context of life.

Then Mark came along and wrote the story down as Peter related it, not including the sermon, because his was, after all the story of Jesus, not of Peter.

Then Luke came along and interviewed Phillip who was holding one of the ropes and was looking up at the scene from the ground. He saw Jesus and Peter surrounded by a corona against the background of the sun. He saw Jesus touch Peter and Peter was reshaped and reformed at the touch and the beam was set with a single stroke.

Matthew copied the story from Mark word for word. However, he added the words,

and this was done to fulfill the prophecy of Habakkuk: The stones of the wall will cry out, and the beams of the woodwork will echo it.

John, who was there, didn’t consider the event important enough to record, as it wasn’t himself holding the nail. Besides it was a bit embarrassing. He reformed the intent, however, in stating

Put Israel behind thee and turn thy face to the salvation of the Gentiles.

When Paul wrote to the church at Neomiacin, he had heard the story related by another evangelist in one of his churches. He wrote,

“What then? Are we to think one might have his butt in front of him? No, rather we know that no one who puts his physical parts before all else shall have a share of the kingdom, which is not of the body, but of the spirit.”

Then he concluded with those most memorable words:

“Don’t think about your butt lest you, too, perish in the abomination of the flesh.”

There were other writers as well. Some that came much later and tried to pull the threads together in a coherent whole. The Gospel of Nicodemus, for example, explained that the admonition only applied to Peter because of a specific physical malady that he had at the time and never suffered from again. The Gospel of Thomas explained that the term referred to the portion of the beam that was seated in the groove of the rafters. But these writings were cast aside as apocryphal at the Council of Nicea in the 4th century where the other books were canonized. And then, a thousand years later, a fellow by the name of Johann von Gutenberg got hold of a copy of the Holy Canon and printed it. And soon there was a copy in every hotel room in the world. Including Finland where I saw one last week.

That’s how it would have happened.

Except that then, five hundred years later, a ministerial candidate who was about to be ordained looked in a mirror before the ordination and said. “Does this robe make my butt look big?” And it split the church because they ordained a woman who was thinking about her butt and the Bible said that was an abomination.

Of course, Jesus chose fishermen as disciples, not carpenters, and as far as I know there is no recorded instance of his ever having mentioned Peter’s butt. He gave him instructions like casting his net on the other side, and becoming a fisher of men.

And men at the Council of Nicea chose the books containing those stories to be canonized as the final, reliable, and unchanging word of God. And Gutenberg printed it. And that killed Christianity. In fact, I might go so far as to say that it killed God for most people, but I couldn’t put that in the sermon title.

Why was this so damaging? Because it is the nature of all living things to grow and change. And in the canonized and printed scriptures we have declared God eternal, all-knowing, imperishable, final, and immutable. In other words, not living, not growing, not learning—but an unchanging statue of god, an idol: dead.

Okay, let’s lighten up a little bit. Do I really think Gutenberg caused the death of Christianity? No, of course not. But, I am a bit of a print historian. In my office, you will find samples of pages printed over the centuries, including a reproduction of a page from the Gutenberg Bible that I acquired at the Gutenberg museum in Mainz, Germany and which I’ve brought with me today. I even have a digitized version of the entire Smithsonian copy of the Gutenberg Bible on CD-ROM. It is wonderful to look at.

And I have to use a minute of my time with you to say that my own book is in print as of this week. Two colleagues of mine and I have bound our 2005 National Novel Writing Month books into an anthology and are giving them to people who donate to the cause of building libraries in Viet Nam. I’d like to spend my entire 20 minutes telling you about that project and our writing plans, and to encourage you to visit my website, starting November 1 for the new serialization of my NaNoWriMo book this year, Security & Exchange. Instead, just pick up one of the flyers that I’ve brought along or talk to me after the service.

So, as I study print history, I have to recognize the ill effects of printing as well as its vast benefits. It should come as no surprise that the first printed book introduced into nearly every Western and African society was the Bible. I exclude Asia because it had printing of its own books long before the Bible. Nor should it be a mystery to us that in nearly every instance, these first books introduced into a culture were often viewed as supernatural and even magical. It is, after all, the Word of God.

Printed words—because they are in print—are assumed by those who read them to be authoritative—and the Bible even more so. Maybe most of the western and African societies have gotten past the point of thinking of the Bible as a magic book, but I would guess that even a majority of the people in this room treat it with a kind of respect that could almost be considered superstitious by a completely neutral observer.

This week and running through the first of January, there was a special exhibit in Seattle of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Pacific Science Center. These are scrolls found in 1947 near the ancient ruin of Qumran. They have been closely guarded in various vaults since that day. There are probably only a couple of hundred scholars in the world today who could truly make sense of these scholars and only a couple of score who have actually been given access. So it is natural that over the past 50 years a great deal of mythology has grown up around what people speculate might have been in them.

But it makes no difference. When put up against a solitary handwritten text that is two thousand years old, the King James Version of the Bible would win every time. People would naturally doubt the meaning of any discovery that contradicted any word of that venerable old text, because that version has been in print without change for three hundred years. Millions of copies exist. It would be millions to one in any dispute over translation or meaning.

So it is no wonder that nearly every day, I read of or hear or hear of an evangelist or sect leader or cultist or church member, who declares that he has read God’s Word and understands God’s eternal damnation of a person, an act, a group of people, or a whole society for some particular sin called out in the Bible—or the Torah—or the Koran. This is not a phenomenon unique to Christendom.

It really takes no new revelations or even new interpretations of holy writ to garner a following. It only takes the fear that the dissenter might be in opposition to the printed, absolute, and final word of God. That is enough to keep the faithful in line and to keep them fired with holy passion—usually involving hatred of some kind.

If Christianity is dead, it died of fear: Fear that God might change. Fear that the rules we live by might not be absolute. Fear that God is always on the brink of revealing something new about herself, and that we, like the people of all the Biblical stories, might not be able to recognize God walking among us; revealing herself to us. How can we tell the difference between a God that grows and changes, and the mere ramblings of a self-appointed prophet trying to make sense out of things he does not understand? (That, by the way, is a not-so-veiled reference to me.)

Is the Bible a good book? Yes. Does it contain the truth? As far as I know, yes. Should we study it? Yes. Is it the final arbiter of every decision of faith and practice that comes into your life? I won’t answer that. You’ll have to answer it for yourself, if you can.

What I will say, however, is that I believe in a God who is living, growing, and learning. Who may know all that is known, but not all that there is to know. I believe in a God who is revealed in different ways to different people at different times.

I do not believe in a one-size-fits-all, polyester, unisex god that is immutable: unchanged and unchanging. Nor do I believe it is my place to judge others by that ancient book. It is my job simply to squarely face my life and apply my assets to living it fully.

In other words: To put my butt behind me.