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Digital technology shapes our imaginations, with a particularly strong impact on our literary imaginations. The medium of online communication changes not only how we read but also why we read. It influences our understanding of texts and alters the meaning-making process. The current state of our technological world also affects our literary preferences, often leading us to favor summaries over long-form texts and abridged versions over originals. We’re increasingly inclined to choose more accessible copies over original versions, whether we’re reading Homer, Shakespeare, St. Paul, or Colleen Hoover. Consequently, digital technology challenges the concept of literacy in general, and Biblical literacy in particular.

This trend began long before the advent of ChatGPT, a tool seemingly capable of generating detailed summaries and abridged versions of any literary work. Even before artificial intelligence could produce personalized summaries in seconds, Google search could direct readers to resources like SparkNotes, CliffsNotes, or LitCharts. Our digital tools are filled with summaries—equivalents of SparkNotes exist not just for books and Bibles, but also for news stories, movies, concerts, and plays. Whether these summaries appear as “tl;dr” headlines in emails, bullet point summaries at the top of Axios articles, or entries in Google’s “Knowledge Panel,” the architecture of the web is designed to deliver what’s immediately relevant as efficiently as possible.

As with any technology, we shape our tools before they shape us - or so Marshall McLuhan’s followers would argue. The preference for brevity is certainly one way that technology shapes us. Another crucial downstream impact of the internet’s architecture that we have come to focus most on what is applicable, relevant, and actionable: in art, literature, and faith. We choose brevity over beauty. We prioritize immediacy of impact over immersion within a narrative. “BookTok” trends on social media not because of a widespread love of literature, but because of a preference for watching a 30 second summary over reading a 300 page novel. 

Much has been decried regarding the impact of digital technology on our focus and attention. And yet I wonder if the impact on our attention is not so much in our capacity to focus - but in where we direct our focus. it's not that we can’t focus on the stories of the Bible in a digital age. It’s that we would prefer to read a summary. This informational architecture has considerable significance for today’s church leader. It’s not that we won’t crack the spine of Leviticus or Luke, but that we would rather take away the main points via a clear recap. It’s not that we won’t contemplate literary structures or historical context - it’s that we expect practical uses for the present. Given the choice, most of us will choose skimming simple summaries over parsing ancient texts. Instead of discerning how ancient texts in their entirety might be calling out to us, we would rather have a bulleted and bracketed recap of how specific passages instruct us in the here and now. 

This new form of literary imagination represents a form of scriptural strip-mining, where the faithful seek to extricate individual passages for immediate use, rather than slowly contemplating what a text has meant, is meaning, and will come to mean. It’s not so much that we will “proof-text” more regularly in a digital age, isolating individual passages to validate or theological or even political viewpoints. Rather, it’s that we will fragment the scriptures in a way that conceals the fullness of meaning. 

The Bible, after all, is a collection of books that defies summary and resists easy answers over what is applicable. As a compilation of law and narrative, poetry and myth, biography and parable, it resists the rapid categorization that structures today’s airport paperback. Church leaders, then, must ask the questions of what it means to be biblically literate in a digital age. And to answer this question, one must first be able to define how the digital age is shaping our literary imagination. It is only then that we can adequately teach the Bible to today’s reader: fostering a comfort with its many genres, its plurality of meaning. 

To teach the Bible today is not to make our congregants into Biblical studies scholars with an encyclopedic knowledge of its contents. Instead, it is to teach a different way of reading than what our culture is comfortable with. We must teach communities to discern meaning rather than find immediate impact. We must teach the faithful to interpret narrative and to be mindful of literary structure - rather than to look for “key takeaways.” We must teach congregations to wade through ambiguity, irony, and parallelism, instead of extracting a simple summary. 

Our task, as teachers of the Word, is not to build expertise in what the text says, but to teach a way of reading and interpretation that is starkly different from all other literature. At a practical level, this might involve reading the entirety of a book of the Bible, or at least an entire chapter, and slowly discerning the bigger picture. This might involve the practice of lectio divina, a contemplative practice of immersion within the text. It will certainly involve educating our communities about how technology modulates meaning-making, changing what it means to read these ancient texts. Biblical literacy in a digital age may be less about teaching a text - and more about teaching a way of reading that text that feels foreign, and yet is eminently faithful.