In the dystopian vision of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, books are burned by the state to control its citizen’s imaginations. One character even doubts whether any Bible survives, let alone the few other books. Bradbury imagines that those resisting this intellectual repression memorize large chunks of literature to preserve human knowledge, some memorizing whole books of the Bible. When people encounter Bradbury – or hear about my own interest in memorization – they usually have one of two responses. One response is “That’s nice, but memorization isn’t that important for us to do.” The other is “That’s cool, but I could never do that.” Both are deeply wrong. Widespread memorization is not only one critical need of the contemporary church, but both history and science have shown the remarkable capacity of humans to memorize at levels that our present culture imagines to be impossible.
First of all, memorization is critical to human flourishing, especially Christian flourishing. Psalm 1 says of the blessed man, “His delight is in the law of the LORD, and on His law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2). To the modern understanding, this might bring to mind a man who sits at his desk morning and night reading his personal bible, but such an image would be inconceivable to the psalmist. In the psalmist’s world, most would be held back from this modern ideal by illiteracy, and even those who could read would not have a personal copy. Rather, these words on which the blessed man meditates unceasingly are portions of Scripture already stored within his mind. The psalmist elaborates on this, saying, “I have stored up Your word in my heart, that I might not sin against You” (Psalm 119:11). Remarkably, the reason cited for this memorization, this “storing up” of God’s word, is that the psalmist “might not sin;” very reminiscent of the blessed man walking uprightly in Psalm 1.
The Bible is clear: memorization of God’s word leads to sanctification. This is not to discount entirely the benefit of personal Bibles, which have indeed greatly blessed the Church. Yet one consequence of literacy is a forgetfulness that believes it remembers. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Plato envisions a conversation with the god Thamus and Theuth, the god of writing. Theuth advocates for writing, saying it “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories.” But Thamus replies that it will not, “for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” In reality, there should be more of an Aristotelian “golden mean.” Writing is a great invention, but it should not be relied on so that memorization is forgotten.
In my own case when reading the Bible, too often I am like the man described by James, who “looks at himself [in a mirror] and goes away and at once forgets what he was like” (James 1:24). Memorization, in contrast, stores up God’s word in your heart. Scripture can become part of you, ever present, convicting and encouraging “day and night.” Imagine what your relationship with God could be like, if God were always speaking to you through the Scriptures written on your mind. Imagine what the Church would be like, if every saint had great storehouses of God-breathed treasure in their hearts!
But the second objection still has not been answered. If memorization is impossible, a list of its benefits will only discourage, like Tantalus with the apple forever out of reach. One article from the Christian satire site “The Babylon Bee” titled “Man Who Can Quote ‘Princess Bride’ At Will Struggling To Remember Single Bible Verse” shows the frustration of the modern Christian with the whole idea of memorization. “I’ll just Google what a verse says if I really need to reference it,” the man says. The joy of storing God’s word in the heart has now been reduced to a chore or deemed unnecessary. Plato’s prophecy has come true. But the article comedically shows how achievable memorization is. The man might think he can’t memorize, but he has an entire movie stored in his heart, word for word. So how did we get here?
The Church has undermined memorization. On accident, of course. How many of the Bible verses you memorized for a Snickers bar can you still recall? Bite-sized Bible memory verses actually implicitly teach several destructive lessons. Sure, they don’t teach good contextual reading. But they also imply that you can’t easily memorize more than two or three verses. If you’re encouraged to memorize all of Romans, the implication is you can memorize all of Romans. But if you’re only asked to memorize John 3:16 and John 1:1, you begin to believe that’s all you can memorize. This leads to a settled belief in Christians today of their own mental incompetence. Yet the opposite is true. Memorization is a very natural human endeavor. Aside from the blessed man of Psalm 1, many other Christians throughout history practiced memorization regularly. Some, like Aquinas, memorized the entire Bible, and others memorized only several books. For example, under Charlemagne’s education model, children would memorize the entire psalter!
Memory verses both hurt confidence in memorizing and teach terrible memory skills, while memorizing extended passages increases confidence and helps the mind retain more Scripture easily. As mentioned before, a man can almost accidentally memorize a whole movie without much effort, while memorizing Bible verses feels like pulling teeth. The Bee article writer seems to assume that this is simply a failure of will; that the man with a movie “stored in his heart” has not really tried to memorize Scripture. While this is a part of the issue, memorizing isolated, short Bible verses is extraordinarily difficult to do because it goes against the natural flow of the mind. If I repeat a verse several times to memorize it, my brain learns not only the line, but the hard ending of that verse. My brain begins to believe that the end of John’s opening verse “the word was with God” is also the end of the passage. Tacking on an additional verse becomes significantly more difficult. Retaining even just twenty separate verses becomes even more difficult, because the brain needs twenty starting points in its conscious memory. In contrast, retaining a chapter with twenty verses in it becomes significantly easier because only a short line needs to be held in conscious memory, while the rest resides in unconscious memory. Memorizing longer chunks of Scripture becomes more efficient and aids the memory process better than shorter sections do.
I have over three hours of poetry and Scripture memorized. But I still think I’m a pretty average person. I’ve ingested microplastics and had my brain melted by the internet about as much as the next guy, so my memory certainly isn’t aided by any innate superhuman ability. Yet in the last two years, I’ve gone from struggling to memorize a fourteen-line sonnet for weeks to memorizing from fourteen to thirty lines per day. Memory isn’t so much a container as it is a muscle. I’ve trained and strengthened it to hold more than I thought possible, and you have that ability too. You can experience the blessing of having God’s word stored in your own heart, and the spiritual benefits that come with it.
All you need is a little exercise.
