Challenges With Oral, Written, and Digital Knowledge
Humans, especially in the Western world, very much prize knowledge: its acquisition, its exercise, and its advancement and development.
Our relationship with knowledge, however, is fraught with many problems. We are finite, created beings; thus, there is only so much we can know and understand (cf. Isaiah 55:8-9). We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23): our faculties for knowledge have been thus corrupted. Such corruption is manifest in the reasoning and exercise of knowledge as well as in our ability to retain knowledge. In our corruption we are prone to misremember, consciously and unconsciously, promoting and advancing what is truly error in our limitations or with nefarious motivations.
We would like to imagine our brains as supercomputers, able to process memories and knowledge and to retain them for instantaneous recall when needed. Yet such is not how God has designed the human brain, nor is it how the human brain, in its current corruption, functions. Various aspects of memories are stored in different parts of the brain; it would seem every recall of our memory is in its own way a refabrication of what we are remembering. This function is by necessity, and in many ways, preservation: if we could remember every sense impression we ever received, we would get lost in details and not remember anything substantive; furthermore, we have plenty of memories we do best to forget or remember in a different light on account of the trauma we have experienced.
And yet all these factors mean our memory is not as reliable as we imagine it to be. The way we understand what has happened in our lives is not infallible, let alone the way we understand what has happened to others or the state of the knowledge we have thought we have obtained.
All such things reflect the challenges of life in a society in which knowledge is primarily maintained in oral transmission. It is not as if information cannot be transmitted throughout generations by means of oral transmission; but the information communicated by oral transmission will often go through various changes, often unintentionally and unconsciously, and all while the transmitters of oral knowledge insist they tell the same story. Furthermore, oral knowledge endures only as long as the information is transmitted: plague, pestilence, and/or violence can easily lead to the extinguishing of information about a given people or culture. Such is why we continue to categorize the past in terms of “historical” and “pre-historical” periods: there is only so much we can know about a culture or a people who have not preserved written records or have not communicated to others who have written it down.
For various reasons people began to develop systems by which thoughts and words could be recorded through signs on various media and could be preserved for later retrieval by the writers themselves or by those of a later time. The first of these seem to originate 6000 or so years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt and endure to this day.
The strength of written knowledge is the creation of a fixed standard which can be maintained and referred to over time. Humans can memorize information and retain it well as long as they have a written standard to which they can make reference. Today we have far greater understanding about many aspects of ancient life in cultures which wrote down such information.
Yet written knowledge comes with its own set of challenges as recognized even in antiquity. In many respects the whole point of written knowledge is to replace “knowing something” with “knowing where to learn about something”: it fosters a “card catalog” approach to knowledge, in which the thing itself is less known but we know where to go to learn about it. Such a challenge was not entirely foreign to primarily oral cultures; we can consider how many Israelites would have made an appeal to a prophet or one trained in the Torah to figure out information about how to serve God as opposed to themselves knowing how to thus serve. But it is a challenge exacerbated by written knowledge. In terms of the Christian faith we must always insist on not just knowing about Scripture, or knowing where to find things in Scripture, but the actual knowing of Scripture, to allow the Word of God to be within a person (e.g. 2 Peter 3:18). No one has ever been transformed by God in Christ through the Spirit merely by knowing where to learn; they must actually learn the thing itself and be transformed by it.
Written knowledge is also only as good as the writings are preserved, and such was a major difficulty in the world before the printing press. Wet clay can be re-formed and thus writing on it can be erased; papyrus and paper easily decay or fall apart. We are aware of all kinds of written works which are no longer extant, most likely lost in the ravages of time; we are probably ignorant of far more. Just because something is written down does not make it true: plenty of people have written things to distort or manipulate intentionally, and far more have written with the best of intentions but ultimately in ways which did not maintain full integrity. Many arguments and disputes about doctrines in Christianity were generated or made worse by the existence of “pseudepigraphal” works, in which someone later wrote in the name of a famous ancestor, and people in later generations accepted the “pseudepigraphal” works as authentic, and drew conclusions. And even if something is written and true, errors intentional and unintentional can creep in through the copying process. Furthermore, all written language, by necessity, is interpretive: we all have to interpret what the signs written actually mean. We have some written documents from the past which we cannot read because we have not deciphered the writing system. Many English Bible translations will frequently note how “the Hebrew is uncertain” in many passages: many words in the Hebrew Bible show up once or only a few times and we do not have strong confidence in their specific likeness in English because what those terms originally meant have not been handed down. Even when we have written words well preserved through the copying process and a decent understanding of the original language, no two languages have exact equivalence in terms and thoughts; the multiplicity of Bible translations testify to the various layers of understanding which we can obtain from the text. Interpretation and application of texts also are places in which we can easily distort the original purpose of the author.
From the beginning of writing until the modern age the great barrier for people has been one of access. Written knowledge is only valuable if you know how to read and write and you have access to sources of written knowledge. Such access was often jealously guarded as the prerogative of the literate elite. As Christians we do well to remember how challenging access to the knowledge of the Scriptures proved for the first 1500 years of Christianity: only a few could read, and even then, to read would require texts available to read. Therefore, most Christians who have ever lived most likely did not read much or any of the Scriptures. Their experience with the Scriptures was mediated by those who read it and explained it to them (cf. 1 Timothy 4:13). We can find many benefits to our personal study of Scripture, and we do well to come to understand God’s purposes in Christ better through our study of Scripture; nevertheless, we never have a right to assume the only way a person can be a Christian is by means of studying the Scriptures, and should be on the lookout for how the reading and studying of Scripture can itself prove idolatrous. Far too many have confused the Author of Scripture with the Scriptures themselves; far too many have confused learning about God in Christ with the actual practices of following God in Christ.
Current generations are living through the third great revolution in knowledge: the prevalence of digital knowledge. By means of computers and the Internet the challenge of access is significantly reduced. We have instant access to a wealth of knowledge beyond anything any individual can well understand. Information is now everywhere.
The great challenge of digital knowledge involves trust. We can all easily and quickly search for information: but how can we know the information is any good? Search engines are monetized to direct you to the sources of information which pay the search engines money to that end. On almost every issue and matter we will easily find highly contradictory explanations and understandings of almost anything and everything. “I found it on the Internet” as a source is now a running joke.
Digital knowledge, therefore, is only as good as the integrity of those who post it; and our understanding of digital knowledge must be well informed with critical perspectives watching out for confirmation bias. Digital knowledge is simultaneously expansive and siloed: you can learn just about anything on the Internet, but you can also find specific and epistemically closed communities on the Internet. Such is how many people have “done their research” and believe certain things very strongly, even though others have also “done their research,” believe in certain things very strongly, and have come to radically different conclusions. With digital knowledge we must cultivate healthy self-skepticism in our critical thinking, subjecting what we want to believe and the claims of those who we deem are like us to the same critical standard to which we subject that which we do not want to believe and the claims of those we deem are not like us.
Thus no form of knowledge is a panacea; challenges persist regardless of how we know things and seek to retain knowledge. We cannot dismiss the existence of the challenges, nor can we despair of knowing anything because of the challenges. Instead we do well to navigate the challenges with the wisdom expressed by God in Christ through the Spirit and focus primarily on that which leads to greater trust in God in Christ so we are living more consistently with the witness of what God has accomplished in Christ through His Spirit!
Ethan R. Longhenry
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