Discipleship
Changing Forever How You Think
Recovering the lost art of Scripture memorization.
John Wilson | posted 1/26/2011 10:12AM
When was the last time you memorized passages from Scripture? It might have been when you were in eighth grade, preparing for confirmation. Or maybe earlier still, in Sunday school, when you learned the 23rd Psalm. Can't remember when it was? Never mind. It will probably come to you.
Within living memory, as the saying goes, evangelicals unselfconsciously learned Scripture by heart. The value of this practice was taken for granted. Certainly there was a wide range, from back-row pew-sitters who could call on a few salient passages, to silver-tongued preachers who could cite Leviticus and Luke with equal authority. But if, for instance, as a child in the 1950s, you regularly attended Wednesday evening prayer meetings, where the voices of laypeople predominated, you heard Scripture quoted (and misquoted) from memory. And if you listened in, during the Sunday meal after church, when grown-ups who took their faith seriously were discussing—maybe arguing about—theological nuances, perhaps inspired by the morning sermon, you heard Scripture quoted from memory.
What was common 50 years ago has not entirely disappeared, but neither is it common anymore. In part, this change reflects attitudes in the larger culture. We live in a time when memorization is routinely scorned, an attitude summed up in the ubiquitous phrases "rote memory" and "rote learning." Memorizing, we are told, discourages creativity, critical thinking, and conceptual understanding.
This scorn is odd. It doesn't seem to jibe with our everyday experience. After all, training to be a doctor or a lawyer entails memorization—a lot of it. We don't foolishly assume that the creativity of actors or musicians is crushed by the formidable feats of memory their art demands. And why is Peyton Manning such a dazzlingly good quarterback? In part because he spends countless hours in the film room, studying defenses, looking for patterns to memorize, so that—in the midst of the action, with a 290-pound lineman who runs like a cheetah and hits like a sledgehammer bearing down on him—he will make the optimal decision in a split second.
What Manning does when he studies game film, what Helen Mirren does when she learns the lines for her next role, is a special case of what we all do from the time we are born, an ongoing enterprise of memorizing and forgetting, largely conducted without conscious intent or awareness. "Whenever you read a book or have a conversation," the prize-winning science writer George Johnson reminds us—and, we might add, whenever you cross the road, change a diaper, or make love—"the experience causes physical changes in your brain. In a matter of seconds, new circuits are formed, memories that can change forever the way you think about the world."
The impact of most of what we memorize is not so dramatic as to change forever the way we think about the world. But it is real, and its consequences accumulate over time. Hence the choices we make about what to put in our mind are of lasting importance. "Memorization of Scripture," Dallas Willard writes, "is one way of 'taking charge' of the contents of our conscious thoughts, and of the feelings, beliefs, and actions that depend on them."
Spiritual toughnessA few months ago, a strange little book arrived on my desk: Scripture by Heart: Devotional Practices for Memorizing God's Word. I wasn't familiar with the author, Joshua Choonmin Kang, who was described as a pastor and speaker in Los Angeles, the author of more than 30 books in Korean and one previous book in English. This new book, the author said, was first written and published in Korean, after which "I had it rendered into readable English." Hmm.
January 2011, Vol. 55, No. 1
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