Reading Out Loud

Some of you may remember a book I commented on some months ago, The Divine Voice, but Stephen H. Webb, a prof at Wabash College. He mired in a lot of detail about half way through the book, so I set it down, until now. He is too fond of Karl Barth for my comfort zone (though he doesn't totally agree with Barth - and for those interested, this acoustemology is something related to but slightly different from Barth's view of inspiration), but I'm still trying to understand what Webb is saying in many places.

Nevertheless, he has some really thought provoking ideas that we need to think about and great practical material, especially on reading God's word aloud as a necessary part of Christian life and community. My summarization of his thesis may be a bit crude and simplistic, but he is saying that because God has made us to be most sensually influenced by sound (over sight), we will never understand and absorb the fullness of God's word unless we hear it audibly. You do not have the foundational context for his words that I will copy, but I think he makes a good point when he writes: "Among evangelicals and fundamentalists, the doctrine of infallible inspiration can be used to silence the sound of the Bible when it pictures God as having inscribed words on the printed page like the carved tablets Moses received on Mt. Sinai. This makes the Bible something to be looked at an revered as a sacred object rather than something to be performed and heard. As a result the doctrine of infallibile inspiration can turn the Bible into a dry and lifeless text of abstract propositions. This does not mean the doctrine of divine inspiration is without truth or value. Properly construed, it can highlight the ways it [reading aloud] can highlight the ways in which God uses human writers as resonators of the divine voice."

He goes on to discuss the joy of public reading (and makes the point that for centuries libraries were very noisy places - intentionally so as one person would read aloud to many). In Webb's practical helps section, he is not advocating people going overboard with drama, but he is calling all of us to be better Bible readers. I think we need to see that joy restored - we need to become better out loud Bible readers. We are working on this in our home during family worship, and I can say that the harder I work at it, the more fun reading the Bible becomes. Probably the best place for all of us to start is in our own personal reading. Webb rightly argues that we will be forced to wrestle more with the meaning of the text if we read it aloud to ourselves. This action is not just another jazzy variation to spice up our devotions but causes us to hear more clearly God's word by taking it in as he has primarily designed us to receive it - remember that faith comes by...hearing - and there may be more to it physiologically than we normally consider.