Sure, literate people can read God's Word for themselves, but that doesn't mean everyone can understand it for themselves. Scripture itself says it contains "things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction" (2 Peter 3:16). Worse, Bible-only theology limits salvation to those who can read. A large percentage of the world is illiterate. Even when the Bible is translated to their language, they can't read it.
The Protestant system has always been salvation for the wealthy, not the poor, because literacy has always been a skill reserved to the wealthy, and unavailable to the great mass of the poor.
While only 12% of the people in the world could read and write in 1820, today the share has reversed: only 14% of the world population, in 2016, remained illiterate.
In 2019, the illiteracy rate among adults aged 15 years and older was 34.7 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa. In South Asia the illiteracy rate was 27.1 percent. Adult illiteracy rate is defined as the percentage of the population ages 15 and older who can not read or write.
Even if literacy is attained, at what level is it attained? How well does someone have to read in order to be considered "literate"? For instance, let us consider the 2012 edition of the PIAAC, or Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. To begin, the study has a title that could not be understood by most of the people it surveyed.
The average American reads at the 7th or 8th grade level.... 4% [of Americans] are nonliterate.... 14% have below-basic literacy levels.... 34% have basic literacy levels. [This means] Half of U.S. adults can't read a book written at the 8th-grade level. ... most cannot identify the link leading to the organization’s phone number from a website with several links, including “contact us” and “FAQ.”
On a reading scale from 1 to 500, the US scores an average of 270, which places it below average on the international comparison chart, but even the highest scoring country, Japan, scores only a 296. That means that even the Japanese, on average, can barely identify relevant information in a two-paragraph essay and interpret a generic chart with 15 items.
So that raises a very important, but generally overlooked, set of questions for Bible-only Protestants. At what grade level is your English-language Bible translated to? Here is an estimate from the biblegateway.com website. The first number is the grade level for which the Bible is generally considered accessible; the number in parentheses is an estimated age at which a reader can fully read and understand it. As you can see, over half the translations cannot be understand by half of Americans:
- Mounce — 12+ (ages 17+)
- KJV — 12+ (ages 17+)
- RSV — 12+ (ages 17+)
- Geneva — 12+ (ages 17+)
- WEB — 12+ (ages 17+)
- NRSV — 11+ (ages 16+)
- NASB — 11+ (ages 16+)
- Amplified — 11+ (ages 16+)
- MEV — 11+ (ages 16+)
- LEB — 11+ (ages 16+)
- ESV — 10+ (ages 15+)
- J.B. Phillips NT — 10+ (ages 15+)
- NABRE — 9+ (ages 14+)
- NIV — 7+ (ages 12+)
- CEB — 7+ (ages 12+)
- NET — 7+ (ages 12+)
- GNT — 7+ (ages 12+)
- ISV — 7+ (ages 12+)
- NKJV — 7+ (ages 12+)
- HCSB — 7+ (ages 12+)
- The Voice — 6+ (ages 11+)
- NLT — 6+ (ages 11+)
- CEV — 5+ (ages 10+)
- GW — 5+ (ages 10+)
- The Message — 4+ (ages 9+)
- Living — 4+ (ages 9+)
- ERV — 4+ (ages 9+)
- NCV — 3+ (ages 7+)
- ICB — 3+ (ages 7+)
- NIrV — 3+ (ages 7+)
Once we get to the lower grade levels, another question arises: is this even really a translation? After all, shouldn't we be reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek, the language of the prophets and apostles? If we aren't reading it in the original languages, are we really reading the Bible at all? If you are willing to say an English translation suffices, then how dumbed down does it have to get before it is no longer truly a Bible at all, but just a summary, a paraphrase, a gloss, instead of the Word of God?
History is filled with Bibles whose translations or printings were not wholly accurate: the Murderer's Bible (left out the "not" in "thou shalt not kill"), the Wife-Beater's Bible, etc. So, if there is one faulty word, let out or added in, is that book no longer the Bible? How much can be paraphrased (because all translations are inherently inexact, and therefore paraphrased - how to correctly translate passages in Isaiah is a great example of this) before the work is no longer a Bible?
Even if you read the books in the original Greek and Hebrew, which books are you reading? There are several ancient versions of Isaiah, for instance. Which is Scripture, and which isn't? Only a rich person with a lot of resources would have the time to both learn the necessary Hebrew (or Greek, for the Septuagint version), much less be able to make an informed choice. And what if he chooses incorrectly? How would a less informed person know that the translation in front of him isn't actually the Bible?
For the liturgical Christian, these questions are interesting, but not threatening. But for the Bible-only Protestant, these questions are downright deadly. Once we admit a third-grade Bible is still a Bible, then how is a sermon delivered by one of the Apostolic Fathers *NOT* also the Bible?
After all, when we translate the Bible to a third-grade level for young readers, aren't we doing EXACTLY the same thing the Apostolic Fathers did in their sermons - translating the difficult language of the Bible to a listening audience who can't read the original? If you admit a third-grade English, Japanese or Russian edition is "the Bible", when all it is REALLY doing is recasting the original Greek and Hebrew into a form third-graders can understand, then how can you deny that every sermon that explains, i.e., recasts a specific Biblical passage into a form an audience can understand, is not also "the Bible"? Where do you draw the line?
When considered this way, all of these sermons ARE the Bible. They are just live translations from the original languages into an age and grade-level appropriate language. The sermons of the Fathers are just as much God's Own Word, the very light of Scripture, as the New Century or the Living Translation Bibles used with children. How can anyone deny that a live translation of Scripture, which we call a sermon or homily, is just as much Scripture as any modern translation is? And if this is true, then when a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox points to a sermon from the Apostolic Fathers, is he not really just pointing to Scripture itself? Do not the Protestants have to accept those same sermons as bearing doctrinal and instructional weight comparable to Scripture?
These are an intensely difficult set of questions for Christians who do not admit the Magisterium.
And these questions are problems precisely because Bible-only theology must always come down to salvation based on wealth and intelligence. The wealthy have the leisure time and the resources available to hone their literacy skills. Given a common subject (the Bible), the intelligent require less time and resources than the stupid to master the same material.
Protestant theology explicitly says you have to know Christ to be saved AND knowledge of Christ comes through Scripture. Protestant theology therefore implies the wealthy and intelligent are more likely to be saved than the poor and stupid. If you are a Bible-only Christian, there is no way to avoid this conclusion. Liturgical Christians don't have this problem. Knowledge of Christ does come through Scripture, of course, but it also comes through the direct contact with sacramental grace. As an Eastern Orthodox, Coptic or Catholic Christian, I don't need to be literate to be saved, I only need to be breathing and receptive to sacramental grace. The differences are clear.
The problem, of course, is that half of the country is unable to understand anything I've just written.
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