On the Loss of Attention and What the Bible Is For: Reflections on Teaching Romans Spring 2019

When I began teaching at LeTourneau University ten years ago I made it a practice to ask my students if they had ever studied a book of the New Testament in depth--that is, front to back, attending to the overall shape of the book, wrestling with the major themes and big ideas. Ten years ago about seventy-five percent raised their hands. In the past four years that percentage has rapidly decreased. This semester in my course on Paul's Letter to the Romans only 2 out of 24 students said that they had ever studied a book of the Bible (let alone the New Testament) in depth. Ten years ago, I could assume that most people were fairly familiar with the main content of Romans, at least the bits about justification by faith. This year, only one person had ever read Romans in its entirety. We have come a long way from our Protestant roots!

One explanation for this decline could be that the kind of students we are presently recruiting to LeTourneau are different than the kind of students who studied with us ten years ago. But this does not seem to be the case for my Romans class. Almost every student in the class professed to be a committed Christian, and some were Christian Ministry majors.

As I have reflected on this, my sense is that we are beginning to experience some of the disruptive consequences of the smart phone, the internet, and social media. For instance, very few students these days have a paper copy of the Bible that they can mark up and treasure as an artifact in and of itself.  Additionally, all information, including Bible content, is treated differently these days. With search engines and information stored on the cloud, the Bible is not something that we study and wrestle with, but rather something that we mine for data when we need answers to our questions. In general, we are not looking to conform our lives to the way in which the Scriptures narrate real reality; rather, Scripture is looked to as a source from which we can extract statements that affirm what we already know to be true.

Along with this paradigm shift regarding how our students view information (and the Bible) comes the rapid disintegration of attention. Many students have lost the capacity to give sustained attention to reading; following an argument or the flow of a thought that takes one or two chapters to develop is nearly impossible for many. It is not that they are unwilling; they are unable--it is not a skill that they have ever learned prior to coming to my class.

This is not their fault. They have been unintentionally formed in this way. This is the first generation that has spent almost all of their reading life online, with their phones. This is our new reality. And I now have a greater appreciation for the classes that we offer at LeTourneau like Romans, where we teach them how to attend to the sustained argument of an author; these classes are not only helpful for their spiritual formation but also for the quality of their lives as the move forward.

One further point I should make. While giving sustained, 15-week attention to one text was very challenging for most students, in the end they enjoyed it and wanted more. They tasted and saw what they have been missing.

So moving forward, I am committed to going ad fontes--back to the primary sources. In my classes, students will be engaging more with the biblical texts themselves than with what scholars and commentators say about those texts. There is a lose in this approach, no doubt; but we can no longer assume that our students have learned to give adequate attention to these life-changing texts that insightful scholars have commented on.