The Bible and Social Memory
The virtual disappearance of memory as a primary mode of engagement with the Bible is a major change in the role of the Bible in our time. Until the 19th and even early 20th centuries, persons regularly learned major parts of the Bible by heart. Selections from the Psalms, stories and parables from the Gospels, sayings of Jesus, verses from Paul’s letters as well as stories from the Old Testament were learned by heart and recited in prayer, in preaching, public discourse and teaching, and in family devotions. This deep interiorization of the Bible was a major force in the spiritual formation of individuals and communities. The King James translation of the 23rd Psalm arguably has been the most frequently learned and recited piece of literature in the English-speaking world for the last four hundred years: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. . . .” We still know it by heart. But in the 20th century, the memorization of the Bible has markedly declined as an educational and spiritual practice. For liberal, educated Christians the learning of the Scriptures by heart is looked at with intellectual disdain as a practice that only fundamentalists and children do. The purpose of this paper is to outline the major reasons for this change and to introduce the concept of social or communal memory as a framework for the reclamation of the memory of God’s Word in our personal and communal lives.
Memory had a central role in the composition and engagement with the Bible in its original historical context. Because of the scant availability of manuscripts, anything that a person wanted to retain for future use was committed to memory. The primary process of education in both Greek and Jewish schools was the memorization of documents: great speeches and stories from Homer in the Greek schools, sections of the Hebrew Bible, and later the Mishnah and Talmud in Jewish schools.
The books of the Bible were composed to make them easy to learn by heart. The Synoptic Gospels, for example, show abundant evidence of composition for memorization: repeated words, parallelisms, verbal threads linking various stories, and the “echo” effect of the repetition of similar phrases. Building a structure of mnemonic clues that made their compositions memorable was a basic technique for all of the composers of the Bible from the Yahwist and his Genesis creation story to John and his Revelation of the last things.
Furthermore, recent research has established that the Bible was not a text read by individual readers in silence but was a series of compositions performed from memory for audiences. Manuscripts were scant and expensive in the ancient world and few individuals could afford to own manuscripts of the Bible. If you wanted to have the Word of God available, you had to learn it by heart. Furthermore, to read them aloud, even with a manuscript present, you had to know the text by heart. Ancient manuscripts did not have any word divisions or punctuation. The function of the text was, like that of a complicated musical score now, to instantly refresh the memory of the performer. Thus, until the invention of the printing press, memorization was essential for ongoing engagement with the Bible.
The most important reason for the decline of the internalization of the Scriptures has been the mass printing and easy availability of a personal copy of the Bible. The major reason to learn the Bible by heart was to have a personal archive. Mass printing and availability of the Scriptures has made the archival role of memory an anachronism. Why go to all the work of learning something by heart when you can pull out your Bible or now your computer-phone and look it up? Two major reasons have persisted: 1) personal devotion as with the 23rd Psalm. If you want to be able to meditate and pray with the Scriptures, it makes sense to learn a few things by heart. And 2) if you are regularly engaged in discussion, preaching, or debate about matters of biblical faith, it is a good idea to be able to quote individual verses instantly as a support or proof for your point. In conservative circles, this process has been called the “sword drill,” memorization of the Scriptures as basic training for doctrinal battle. Thus, personal devotion/prayer and doctrinal debate have been the two major reasons why people have continued to memorize the Bible. But if you don’t pray with the Bible or cite the Scriptures as proof texts in doctrinal debate or preaching, there is no reason to internalize the Scriptures. For most Christians, the reasons to learn the Bible by heart have disappeared. What stories, Psalms, and verses of the Bible do you have in your memory? For most people, an honest answer would be: “Not much.”
The decline in the engagement of memory with the Bible has been a largely unconscious result of changes in communication technology and practices of personal and communal piety. For many people, the absence of immediate biblical memory is not experienced as a significant loss. The primary function of the biblical text is as a reference book. It is a primary text in which to look up basic information about the history and theology of the various parts of the Bible. For pastors, it is primarily a book to study in preparation for the interpretation of some biblical portion that will be the subject of next week’s worship. That function is served well by the texts and commentaries on the shelves of a personal library and increasingly by the resources on the internet. The decline of detailed memory of the Scriptures does not mean that we have no memory of the Bible. Many Christians have what might be called a general familiarity with the Bible. While the number of verses that they could more or less quote may be few, many are familiar with and able to remember the general content of many stories and sayings from the biblical tradition. This is, however, a marked change from earlier periods in the history of biblical engagement. In as much as we have engaged this issue we have tended to evaluate this as a personal preference and even idiosyncrasy. Some people enjoy antiquarian practices, but most of us just don’t have time to memorize the Bible. And frankly, it really doesn’t matter.
The introduction of the concept of social or collective memory sets the question of memory and engagement with the Bible in a more comprehensive and urgent context. Beginning with the pioneering work of Maurice Halbwachs, a major reexamination of the role of memory is underway. This is a highly complex subject, and I am only going to introduce here one of its foundational concepts. Social or collective memory is the process of constructing the memories that we share in common and that are a major factor in the shaping of human communities. Social memory is those things that we remember together. It is our common mind. Every family has a social memory, the things that they remember together as a family. One of the reasons for the decline of the family as a social unit is that television, popular music, and films have disrupted earlier processes of communal memory. Parents and children remember different things and share few deeply held memories. Every congregation has a social or collective memory that is a major factor in forming the congregation’s identity. A central dimension of the job of a pastor is to identify and shape the social memory of the community. These memories held in common are a major dimension of the community’s life.
One of the primary functions of the Bible has been to shape the social or collective memory of the Christian community through the ages. That collective memory is in a constant state of flux as the process of the reinterpretation of the tradition proceeds in each new generation in response to the new situations that the community faces. But while constantly changing, the social memory of the Christian community has continued to be informed by the stories, songs, and sayings of the Bible. It is a primary source of Christian identity and community.
I remember my good friend, Gam Seng Shea. We were students in the Ph.D. program at Union and took a course together in which we read Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) and Ruth in Hebrew with Prof. James Sanders. Gam had grown up in then Burma, now Myanmar. He was a member of the Karen tribe in the mountains of Burma. Gam and I had nothing in common in our backgrounds. But we discovered that we had a common bond in our shared memories of the Bible and in our work with learning Hebrew. We had a deeply grounded communal memory that was further deepened by our working together on translating Qoheleth and Ruth. The process of internalizing the Scriptures is more than an archival function of storing the texts. It is building the social memory of the community.
The concept of social memory is of particular significance in the context of the growing importance of what is now called performance criticism. Beginning with the SBL research group, The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media, in the early ‘80’s and the Network of Biblical Storytellers that was founded at New York Theological Seminary in 1977, performance criticism and the performance of the Scriptures by heart is the harbinger of a major paradigm shift in biblical interpretation. The study of the original media culture of the Bible has made it clear that historical criticism of the Bible has been based on an anachronistic reading back into the ancient world of the media culture of the 18th–19th century. The ancient world was a predominantly oral culture in which only 3-10% of the population could read. The Bible was performance literature, not a text read in silence by a reader. The Bible as a text read by readers in silence only happened with the mass printing and distribution of the Bible in the 19th century. The entire construction of texts and readers that is a presupposition of virtually all of the commentaries on the Bible is an anachronism. If, therefore, we want to experience the Bible in its original context and in its original medium we need to perform it, to hear it told by someone as part of an audience.
As we have begun to tell the Bible, the role of memory has appeared in a new light. I first began telling stories from Mark in the ‘60’s in classes and to friends at Union. My dissertation, entitled “Mark, the Storyteller” included audiotapes of Mark’s passion-resurrection narrative in Greek and English. The Network of Biblical Storytellers has been telling whole books of the Bible at its annual Festival Gatherings since the mid-‘80’s. I first told Mark as a whole in 1983. David Rhoads, Tracy Radosevic, Whitney Shiner, and Dennis Dewey among others have been telling Mark since that same period. It has become clear from early on that these stories need to be told by heart. In order to hold a contemporary and an ancient audience’s attention for a two to two and a half hour story, it is necessary to have learned it deeply and to introduce all of the dynamics of the emotion of the stories, the interactions between the storyteller and the audience, and the variations in tempo, volume, and tone. Performing a biblical composition reveals dimensions of its impact and meaning for ancient audiences that have previously been unrecognized. In fact, the recognition that the Bible is performance literature requires the reconception of the Bible and its meaning, hence, a new paradigm.
One of those unrecognized elements is the centrality of memory. When one performs the Bible from memory rather than from a text, its meaning changes. The contrast between the character of memorized performances of the Bible and the readings of the texts is immediately apparent. When evaluated as performances, the readings of the Bible in Christian worship are usually boring. A new performance tradition has evolved in the 19th–20th century that is often deadly. This tradition is that the Bible is read in an emotionally detached manner in a speech melody that is close to a monotone. At its best, this performance tradition has a regal, majestic quality that had its origins in the performances of the Bible in the cathedrals of Europe. At its worst, it is virtually meaningless. I have watched congregations listening to the readings of Scripture in this performance tradition. The level of audience engagement in many contexts is the flat line of a heart that has stopped beating.
This is the result of several factors. In contrast to the choir, the organist, and even the preacher, readers of Scripture, including clergy, often do not practice. Often they will mispronounce words and stumble over biblical names. The job of the reader is the vocalization of the words. I have observed congregations in which the reader is asked to read the Scripture ten or fifteen minutes before the beginning of worship. And, of course, we can all read. In this tradition, the role of the Scripture reading is simply a pretext for the sermon.
The contrast between these performances of the Bible and the character of the original performances of biblical compositions is pronounced. The original performances of the Bible were compelling, emotionally animated, and melodically varied. There was far more at stake in the memorization of the Scriptures than archival storage. The original performances of the Bible were the end product of an extensive process of preparation of which memorization was a central dimension.
In order to understand the character of these performances, we may need to distinguish between memorization and internalization. For many people now, memorization is associated with the reduplication of the marks on a page, either music or text. An associated phrase is “rote memorization,” which refers to the mechanical reproduction of a text or composition. However, for both musical and dramatic performance of say Shakespeare, memorization is only the beginning of the preparation for a performance. In order to make music or Shakespeare come alive you have to live into it, identify the emotion and concepts that are present, and find a way to embody the composition. For a biblical text, preparation needs to involve study, prayer, and practice. This is a process of internalization in which the Bible is taken off the page and written on the heart. Indeed, the Shema reflects this process: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and with all of your soul and with all of your strength. Write these words that I am commanding you this day on your heart and recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise” (Deut 6:4-7). That is, the internalization of the words of God is an exercise of love. And the commandment is to practice them by reciting them all the time, day by day, at all times of the day. Thus, memorization and knowing by heart are different processes.
The experience of this difference has led to a liturgical practice I would recommend. For years we in the Network of Biblical Storytellers experimented with telling the Scriptures by heart in worship sporadically, for Christmas and Easter, or maybe even once a month, like communion in many mainline Protestant churches. We would save it for special occasions. Our fear was that people would not want to hear the Scriptures told by heart as a regular practice. Four years ago, a thought came to me as I was preparing to speak at the annual festival gathering of the Network of Biblical Storytellers: Why not tell the Scriptures by heart all the time? We’ve got nothing to lose because they are so regularly boring and deadly dull. I would recommend that the Scriptures, all of them—Psalms, prophecies, letters, stories—be told by heart every week, preferably without a text and lectern, but if necessary, with a text on a lectern. It is possible to always internalize the Scriptures as a preparation for presenting them.
We have been doing this for nearly four years at Grace United Methodist Church in Dayton. It has been a remarkably generative process. We now have nearly thirty people who have told the Scriptures by heart and a regular group of fifteen who have accepted this as a dimension of their ministry and service. We meet once a month to plan the Scriptures two months ahead. At these meetings, we often give people an opportunity to practice the Scripture they are going to tell. And I meet as often as possible with those who are performing the Scriptures on the morning of the worship service for some last minute practice, coaching and support.
When the Scriptures are told by heart in worship, a higher degree of corporate memory is generated than with traditional readings. Those who are learning the Scriptures by heart form a richer and deeper internalization of the Scriptures. And because they are learning them by heart, there is a higher degree of communal memory that is generated in the congregation. This is in part because the telling of the Scriptures by heart creates a higher energy level than traditional readings. People pay attention. The memory of these ancient traditions and events becomes present.
There are a series of recordings of biblical performances on YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/GoTellStory). As you will see, there are many different performances. And people have a wide range of experience in biblical performance. But in every instance there is more vitality and energy created by the interiorization of the Scriptures. A reason to engage the Bible with the processes of personal memory is, therefore, to be able to perform the Bible with greater presence and energy. This in turn deepens and broadens the formation of social memory in the community. The decline in corporate memory is one of the reasons for the decline in the depth and breadth of community formation in Christian churches. One of the reasons churches decline is that the members have little shared social memory of the primary traditions of the religion. That is, congregational formation, personal interiorization of the Scriptures and social memory are closely related. In the absence of personal and social memory of the Bible, the character of community becomes more superficial.
The engagement of the Bible with the dynamics of social memory is both an ancient spiritual discipline and a new frontier for personal and congregational formation. There are resources for this kind of engagement with the Bible at GoTell.org where you will find performance commentaries and helps for anyone who wants to internalize and tell the Gospel story of the weekly common lectionary.
