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The Craft of Christ's Imperfect Tailors
By Milton J. Coalter, Jr.

"Once knowledge becomes habitual, one can act to recall its content, without constantly referring to recorded sources previously read. A 'studied response' in ministry takes on new meaning when viewed in the light of the medieval scholar's concern to create an internal book of memory. Knowledge derived from reading and study, but stored in a constantly ruminating memory, presents the promising potential of rapid, yet thoughtful, responses to spontaneous occasions for ministry and service."

A good year before I took on the vocational cowl of a librarian, a "keeper of the books," I was rudely introduced to a question that we would all do well to consider. It was 1981, and I was starting my first year of teaching at North Carolina State University. Because the religious studies faculty was limited, we stretched our expertise over a wide-ranging introductory curriculum in religion. In my case, the stretch was a course on world religions.

The unsuspecting students who enrolled in my class were a motley bunch, except for one prominent characteristic: These young scholars had never in their wildest fantasies imagined religion to be a proper subject for their major. Therefore, their purpose in taking the course was quite narrow. They hoped to get one more graduation requirement under their belts through a course that, at least from its title, promised a speedy tour through some exotic wanderings of the human soul.

One student stands out in my memory. He was remarkable, not so much for his academic prowess or his intellectual curiosity, but because of a question that he regularly put to me whenever I passed around a handout or resorted to the blackboard. His question never varied, as he asked, "How much of this do we have to remember?"

In 1981, 1 was far too young and inexperienced to be anything but frustrated and offended by this North Carolina Philistine. However, ten more years in the academic community have allowed me to make peace with his memory and to hear in his query a profound question for much that is taught in the church and its seminaries.

Milton J. Coalter, Jr. is Library Director at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is, along with John Mulder and Louis Weeks, the editor of the multi-volume series The Presbyterian Presence, and he is the author of Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder (1986).

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I

"How much of this do we have to remember?" is a particularly pertinent question today because we live in an age of enormous informational reserves and wondrous, instantaneous transmission. We have accumulated information as never before. We have organized that information as never before. We can reference this information as never before, and we can transmit it in ways never before imagined.

This should be a time when librarians revel in our good fortune, positioned as we are in the right place at the right time on the intersection where the public meets an ever-expanding galaxy of recorded knowledge. I certainly could bathe in the raptures of this beatific moment in bibliographic history, were it not for one nagging experience. Those who frequent libraries know that there is no more innocuous, yet potentially lethal, question than this: "I am interested in such-and-such topic. Can you help me find some information on it?"

This innocent petition is a potent stimulant on the dormant synapses of a librarian's brain. Before the unsuspecting patron has time to unsheathe a ballpoint pen, the librarian energetically presents a list of resources that could gag the most industrious intellect.

Librarians will tell you, though, that this type of exchange generates the exact opposite reaction in library patrons. In case after case, a fast-spreading glaze overshadows the patron's eyes, signaling the onset of a full mental paralysis. This troubling condition is the result of information overload. Although not yet formally recognized by the American Psychological Association, this disease has long been acknowledged in the oral tradition of librarians as a disease of the mind, perhaps not unique to modern times but certainly mutated into a more virulent form in the hothouse conditions of the present communication age.

There is no sure antidote, although, in typical American fashion, Time magazine recently reported that researchers are working feverishly on drugs that will forestall information overload by turbocharging the brain with tiny "smart pills." This drug-induced smartness will, it is hoped, allow the psyche to process ever greater quantities of information without intellectual brownouts.¹

Librarians, conservative by nature, have addressed this mental meltdown with traditional remedies. We have, for example, expanded the number, the scope, and the availability of indexes and bibliographies in order to map the exponentially expanding universe of information in print, on magnetic tape, and in computer memory. Consequently, the first step to knowledge is no longer the information source itself but rather the reference sources to that information.

This meteoric rise of reference sources-or, in bookish terms, the proliferation of non-book books of lists, of bibliographies, and of abbreviated encyclopedic articles-marks not only a significant shift in

¹ "Ultra Think Fast," Time 132 (June 8,1992), p. 80.

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the pathway to knowledge, but also, and perhaps more important, a dramatic change in the function of recorded information.

II

In her intriguing The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Mary Carruthers of the University of Illinois reminds us of an obvious, but now largely ignored, fact: Writing was not created to replace the human memory. Script-on stone, cylinder seal, scroll, codex, illuminated manuscript, and even printed page-was developed as a mnemonic device, as an aid to the memory, not as a replacement for it.²

Although medieval scholastic education has the reputation of fostering rote learning through memorization, Carruthers notes that, in the Middle Ages, both memory and memorization carried quite different valences from those that we normally associate with them.³ Scholars have assumed that pre-modern Western societies valued the memory only because books and communal libraries were not readily available. But simple recall was only a small part of the rationale for the extensive memory training demanded in medieval universities. Even where books were plentiful and readily accessible, pre-modern educators instructed their students in techniques for memorizing texts because a separation of memory and learning was incomprehensible to them. It was only through the memory that the recorded knowledge of human experience became the real personal knowledge and experience of the reader.⁴

Literacy, at its best, during the Middle Ages had both a digestive and an ethical character, and the two functions were intimately linked in reading. "Merely running one's eyes over the written pages" was "not reading at all [in the medieval sense]," according to Carruthers, "for the writing must be transferred into memory, from graphemes on parchment or papyrus or paper to images written in one's brain by emotion and sense."⁵

Medieval Christians took the experience of Ezekiel eating the scroll of God's prophecy quite literally as a model for their own task in reading Scripture and sacred history.⁶ Indeed, the monastic practice of oral reading while the community ate together was not an instance of medieval time efficiency. It grew, instead, out of the conviction that digesting food and reading texts were fraternal twins. One late rule for women in religious communities explains this connection between eating, the digesting of nutrients into the body, and reading, the

² Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
³ Ibid., p. 1.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.' p. 10.
⁶ Ezek. 2:1-3:3.

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digestion of wisdom in the mind: "While the body is fattened with food, the mind should be filled with reading."⁷

Similarly, reading silently and in private was not unknown in the Middle Ages, but the Evelyn Wood method of speed-reading without mouthing the words would not have been favored by medieval scholars. They commonly murmured or mouthed the words of a text as they read and even as they copied manuscripts, in order to aid the memory in absorbing and turning over the text. The medieval scriptorium was a rather noisy place and so, perhaps, should be the modern theological library.⁸

The ultimate goal of reading, in the Middle Ages, was not to skim a text for the surface cream of truth but rather to ruminate over its content "like a cow chewing its cud, or a bee making honey from the nectar of flowers."⁹ As Gregory the Great observed:

We ought to transform what we read into our very selves, so that when our mind is stirred by what it hears, our life may concur by practicing what has been heard.¹⁰

For this reason, reading in the medieval view consisted of two steps. The first step, lectio, essentially involved exegeting a text by applying the lessons of grammar, rhetoric, and history. But this carving up the text was only a preliminary stage to the deeper work of meditatio, the nourishing act of imbibing, absorbing, and ruminating over the meaning and message of the text.¹¹

Meditation could only be accomplished with the aid of the memory because reading and learning from the text were acts not simply of the eyes but, more deeply, of the soul. Meditatio had an internal functionan internalizing function-and it was accomplished only when a text had been imprinted in the memory.¹²

This internalizing purpose for reading made committing a text to memory an ethical matter in the medieval mind. Hugh of Saint Victor once described wisdom and prudence as an ark of three stories that " one builds board by board in one's memory." Each story or level in this ship of faith corresponded to a new stage of moral instruction, starting with the "correct," moving on to the "useful," and culminating in the "habitual." Carruthers paraphrases Hugh's description of this process:

I am in the first story of the ark when I begin to love to meditate (that is, memorize) Scripture, and my thoughts freely and often consider thereby the virtues of the saints, the works of God, all things pertaining to moral life or to the exercise of the mind. I can then say that my knowledge is correct, but it is not yet useful, for of what use is knowledge hidden away and inactive? But if I not only know but act in a way that is good and useful, so that the virtues I have learned to admire in others I make my

⁷ Carruthers, p. 166.
⁸ Ibid., p. 164.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 165.
¹² Ibid.

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own ... by disciplining myself to conform at least outwardly to right living, then I can say that the understanding of my heart is useful, and I will then ascend to the second story. When the virtue I display in works is mine internally as well, when my goodness is completely habitual ... and necessary to me, then I ascend to the third story, when knowledge and virtue become essential parts of me ...."¹³

III

The medieval ideal of literacy was not just the ability to read recorded wisdom but to make that knowledge habitual in life. Once knowledge becomes habitual, one can act to recall its content, without constantly referring to recorded sources previously read. A "studied response" in ministry takes on new meaning when viewed in the light of the medieval scholar's concern to create an internal book of memory. Knowledge derived from reading and study, but stored in a constantly ruminating memory, presents the promising potential of rapid, yet thoughtful, responses to spontaneous occasions for ministry and service.

In contrast to the medieval adoration of the human memory, modern culture has become profoundly dependent on documents of all sorts. The proliferation and ready availability of printed and otherwise recorded human experience, plus the rise of the reference source to chart those resources, are but two signs of this fundamental change. The benefits of this shift in modern life should not be discounted. But one less-than-attractive side effect has been what might succinctly be called our "reference syndrome." This manifests itself in a radical devaluation of memorizing any more than what is immediately required and in a dependence upon recorded media as our memory rather than as an aid to memory.

Memorization, even in the church, has fallen out of fashion in our era. To mention only the most obvious examples, we seldom expect children, much less adults, to recall passages of Scripture from memory, and although we pay lip service to the church's confessions as the faithful community's understanding of God across history, the church's confessions have become little more than fodder for church bulletins. They are offered up there only in pieces, as liturgical sound bites for congregations to sight read on a Sunday morning in symbolic solidarity.

The omnipresence of recorded theology, biblical interpretation, and Christian insight has led many of us to assume that this written wisdom need not be fully digested into our memories, since it can easily be retrieved in "hard copy" whenever the need arises. But our reliance on the recorded carcass of Christian experience, instead of digesting it by way of memory, has potentially debilitating consequences for a community of memory and translation like the church.

Several years ago, the phrase, "community of memory," came into vogue in academic circles as an alternative label for religious traditions. I did not like the phrase at first, partly because memory carried

¹³ Ibid., pp. 162-163.

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for me the modern pejorative meaning: a lack of creativity, a form of rote learning, and an insensitivity to the many layers of interpretation each sacred text or religious tradition requires. Beyond this reservation, I objected to "community of memory" because it did not square with the dynamic mission of translation that lay, as I saw it, at the heart of Christian discipleship. "Community of memory" suggested that the Christian communion is slavishly attached to its past. It invoked the image of a church preoccupied with fondly remembering what it has been, rather than translating its divine commission for a new day.

I was wrong. We are a community of memory, but the usefulness of our memory is quite different from what I first imagined. Missiologist Lamin Sanneh of Yale Divinity School noted recently that Christian disciples, from the very first, threw themselves into translating the Word into the vernacular of other cultures:

Christianity has no single revealed language [in contrast to a religious tradition like Islam], and historical experience traces this fact to the Pentecost ... when believers testified of God in their own native tongues (Acts 2:6,8,11).¹⁴

The primal urge of early Christianity was to transpose God's Word into different social venues.

Sanneh further remarks that the initial experiment at translation focused on Hellenizing Christianity. This allowed the gospel to be understood by a larger gentile culture. But the success of this effort almost spelled its defeat. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, this first translation became normative, and all subsequent translations were never allowed the same freedom to transpose the gospel into new forms and practices appropriate to their different locales and languages.¹⁵

The urge to translate Christianity, however, could not be extinguished entirely, and Sanneh notes that it is this innate passion to transpose the gospel into new social keys that is the source and the glory of Christianity's spread over the many linguistic and cultural walls that separate human societies.¹⁶

The impulse to translate not only Scripture but also theological symbols, practices of piety, and mission service into new cultural clothing inevitably introduces a dynamic self-criticism into the heart of the Christian witness. It is this self-criticism embedded within the incessant process of Christian translation that makes our memory especially important.¹⁷

Each reclothing of the gospel into new speech and service has been both revealing and imperfect. We must remember that the all-too-human Christian tailors of the gospel's translations have worked with

¹⁴ Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989), pp. 214-215.
¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 50-84,214-216.
¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ Ibid.

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finite tools for communicating infinite realities. The result has been as one might expect. Each new set of clothes fashioned for the Word has flattered certain features of the gospel's truth, but, at the same time, imperfections have been introduced into each translation that cloud the revelation.

In fact, the continuous variations of Christian tailoring of the gospel's cultural dress for different social climates and intellectual terrains teaches much like the parable of the wicked steward from Luke's Gospel.¹⁸ Here we find a parable that instructs through, of all things, a wicked steward. The main character can in no way be mistaken for an exemplar of virtues. Flawed like other humans-indeed, contemptible in comparison to most-this steward's actions still manage to teach us the urgency of preparing ourselves a place in divine favor with every resource that we have available.

It is certainly ironic that this valuable lesson should be conveyed through the impure actions of a wicked manager. But the teaching method here is not unique. The Old Testament teaches as much about God's steadfast love through its recurrent accounts of the chosen people rebelling against God as it does by its equally plentiful examples of human faithfulness.

The gospel narratives instruct us in discipleship not only through their numerous instances of trusting followers but also by their tales of a thick-headed generation who misunderstood, distrusted, and eventually crucified God's only begotten on a cross.

In similar fashion, the church's many translations of Christ's good news into different languages and forms for piety and service instruct as much through their imperfections as by their transparent revelations of God's word to a broken creation.

IV

It is for this very reason that we must commit to memory the varied fashions of speech, symbol, and service by which Christians have translated God's grace to different peoples, places, and periods. The benefits of such a memory are many:

It is by meditating on these fashions in our memory that we learn to distinguish the varied fabrics of symbolic cloth in which God has been clothed for human understanding.

It is by comparing these fashions in our memory that we not only discover the classic lines of gospel witness but we also uncover imperfections that particular translators wove deep into the fabric of their renditions of God's Word.

It is also by juxtaposing these fashions over against the translations of Christ in our own time and place that we recognize features in the gospel message that are little-known, ignored, or outright concealed by the garb in which our own local community of faith has robed Christ.

¹⁸ Luke 16:1-9.

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And, perhaps most important of all, it is by storing in our memory these fashions (and the techniques by which they were made) that we apprentice ourselves for our own calling. That calling is to tailor future re-presentations of God's justice, mercy, and care to new days and changing situations. This tacit knowledge of the craft of Christian translation must be embedded in our memory, since calls for personal translations of our faith seldom come with prior notice.

I regularly read the journal Books and Religion, which, until its recent demise, carried mainly reviews of recent books in religious studies. But, occasionally, it included some surprises, like one essay by Deborah Griffin Bly. Bly, then an associate editor for Books and Religion, formerly had worked as a salesperson in a religious bookstore.¹⁹ She recalls an unexpected encounter as she approached the entrance to her bookshop one morning. There, at the door, was a Hasidic Jew, waiting for the store to open. Very politely, he asked if he could come in, and although it was at least forty-five minutes before she normally unlocked the front door, she ushered him in.²⁰

Once in, Bly prepared the store for the day's work and then turned to her early-bird customer. As she tells the story, she asked, " 'Would you like any help?' In gentle, accented English he said, 'Yes, I want to know about Jesus.' "²¹

Bly quickly led the man upstairs, where she showed him her collection of titles on Christianity. She pulled out works by E. P. Sanders, Rudolf Bultmann, and Joachim Jeremias, as well as Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus. But she recalls,

After I showed him all the books we had about the historical Jesus and all the scholarly histories of Christianity, I started to go downstairs, but he called me back. No [he said], I want to know about Jesus the Messiah. Don't show me any more books-you tell me what you believe."²²

In utter honesty, Bly records her startled response in this way: "My Episcopal soul shivered."²³ I must interrupt her statement to note my guess that the name of any one of the seven sister mainstream Protestant denominations could be substituted for the word "Episcopal" here. Nevertheless, Bly, being Episcopalian, recalled,

My Episcopal soul shivered. I gulped, and told him. I told him everything I could think of ... as much as I could sputter out in my confusion, in the dark.²⁴

Unlike Deborah Bly, most of us do not have many encounters where the personal call for knowledge of our faith is so obvious and direct. But, our opportunities to express the faith do often come at unanticipated

¹⁹ Deborah Griffin Bly, "Go Tallit on the Mountain," Books and Religion 19 (Spring, 1992), p. 3.
²⁰ Ibid.
²¹ Ibid.
²² Ibid.
²³ Ibid.
²⁴ Ibid.

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moments. More often than not, they come when we do not have ready at hand our books or lecture notes of set theological dress patterns by which former seamstresses of the theological word interpreted Jesus Christ.

At such times, we are called to speak and serve without warning-to speak and serve from the depths of our souls, without hesitation and without formal preparation-to speak and serve as the Holy Spirit leads.

In order to respond appropriately to our times and to answer faithfully for God, our souls must indeed be sensitive to the Spirit's touch when called to witness. But we can respond more nimbly to the Spirit's leading if our soul is well apprenticed by our memory to the centuries of Christian tailoring human language, symbol, and action for the reclothing of Christ that the same Spirit has overseen throughout the years.

Such memories are acquired in only two ways. One method is personal practice, trial and error. Each of us can try out the different linguistic and symbolic materials for human communication in order to rediscover their peculiar properties of revelation and disinformation. We can, likewise, personally recreate the varied sewing techniques that former theological tailors took centuries to develop.

But, the possible permutations of fashion are too numerous, the span of our life too brief, and the church's need for new Christian tailors too pressing to afford us or the Christian community the luxury of this method alone.

It is here that theological libraries and educators provide a necessary shortcut to the essential apprenticeship in sewing the Word that is required of all God's disciples. Libraries provide the raw material for this apprenticeship in two ways. First, they offer the recorded memory of past and present, imperfect, sometimes even wicked, gospel tailors. And, second, they supply recorded reflection on the times in which we live and the future into which we are living.

Theological faculties, pastors, and teachers in congregations likewise serve by helping fellow disciples discern the lingo, lifestyles, sensitivities, and blind spots of our contemporary cultures and our anticipated future. At the same time, they introduce us to the unique features and imperfections of bolts of symbolic cloth-some formed out of words, others formed of service; some long used, and others more recently developed by the church to express its experience with its God.

All these agents of instruction are assembled in the church and in its theological seminaries not for book learning. Instead, they are gathered to facilitate our common apprenticeship in the wondrous craft of God's imperfect tailors-a craft that must be transmitted to each new generation so that the always less-than-perfect robe that Christian witness has sewn for Christ might more faithfully be refashioned the next time and place that opportunity permits.

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V

To return to the young North Carolina Philistine who set me to spinning this tale, his question was, How much of this do we have to remember? My answer is this: We must set to memory as much as our memory can absorb, as much as our memory can digest, because of our common mission. That mission is to refashion the old, old story of God's gracious love at a moment's notice for peoples and times as varied as the gospel's grace is wide. For such intricate work, our memory must be well apprenticed to the taxing craft of Christ's imperfect tailors of translation so that our minds, our mouths, and our limbs can create new renditions of the seamless robe of revelation that God first wove, Jesus wore, and the Holy Spirit preserves even still.