Every now and then I run into someone who, upon finding out that I am a literacy researcher, patiently explains to me that with computers and the Internet, books will soon be things of the past and teaching reading will be about as valuable as teaching cursive. One of the Christian high schools in my area has recently considered whether to shut down the library and replace it with a media center.

Are they right? Should we brace for an illiterate culture with chaos and anarchy stemming from a misguided attempt to supplant words with images? Should we hunker down like modern-day medieval monks and vainly try to preserve written texts for some future post-apocalyptic generation that might need them? Should we embrace the coming of the age of image, throw out all our books, and begin making pictograph versions of the Bible? Should we explore the possibilities of multimodal communication (and maybe work on a graphic novel version of the Bible)? And what sort of texts (if any) should we teach?

Or to put it another way, in the age of the image, why should Christians care about reading?

If we go back to article 2 of the Belgic Confession, we remember that God gives us two types of revelation—general revelation and special revelation. The term “special revelation” refers to the Bible, the inspired word of God that we claim as Holy Scripture. God might have given us the Bible in lots of forms, but he chose to give us words arranged in sentences, arranged in episodes, arranged in books, grouped together into a single magnificent narrative. So Christians do not have the option of saying “I don’t read much.” Our clearest way of understanding God comes in the form of a book. And any adaptation that we do of that book—such as making it into a movie or a graphic novel—requires us to make interpretive decisions that by their nature direct us toward the views of those doing the adaptation.

You might point out that all this proves is that we ought to read the Bible. So perhaps religion classes in Christian schools ought to use the Bible, but there is no reason for another other class to study any other book. Websites might do as well, or movies, or whatever. Why do we privilege the book so much?

I would argue that our need to discover God through the Bible has other implications. First, we are told in Hebrews 11: 1 that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (rsv). We believe in a God we cannot see. Our faith depends on being able to believe in that which we cannot see. That requires something basic to reading, the ability to imagine. If that word makes you think I am suggesting the God is imaginary, maybe you would be more comfortable with the term coined by John Schultz, “seeing-in-the-mind.” When we read an ordinary book, if we are good readers, we are constantly transforming the marks on the page into images in our minds. This is true whether the book gives us concrete images through description, such as Plato’s analogy of the cave, or C. S. Lewis’s description of the Narnian wood that Lucy stumbles into, but also true if we are reading about more abstract concepts, such as the economic notion of supply and demand. Reading develops our ability to believe in that which we cannot see with our eyes.

But there is another way we come to understand God. The term “general revelation” refers to the way God is revealed in creation. The cycle of death and rebirth in the seasons echoes the death and rebirth of Christ. We see the power of the Creator in the thunderstorm and the hurricane, but also his benevolence and love in harvest time. As recorded in Luke 19:37–40:

When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen:

“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!”

“I tell you,” he replied, “If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

When we talk about general revelation, we also include the imitative creative works done by God’s human children, such as creating buildings, paintings, sculpture, music, drama, photography, sport, movies, dance, scholarship, and cooking. General revelation also includes books. Because of the notion of common grace, we understand that even God’s children who do not know God can still have insight into the way God’s world works, and that if we read with discernment; we can discover things about him through what we read. Of course, we can also discover God in lots of other ways; as Christians, we might legitimately ally ourselves with any number of positions—image ascendant, word superior, or multimodal. But the earlier point about special revelation argues that there are particular advantages for a Christian in learning to read. In addition, we have available in book form the struggles of humans to understand creation and how to best live in it going back many centuries. There is value in students continuing to wrestle with that which is contained in traditional text-only books.

Several decades ago, the world of educational research was undergoing an important shift. In the wake of perceived deficiencies in the literacy rate in the United States, there was renewed effort in secondary schools to improve each student’s ability to read by requiring that reading skills be taught in all subjects. This was mainly accomplished by teaching education students an array of generic methods to teach reading—all with fascinating acronyms like KWL, DRTA, CRITICS, and others. But soon researchers noticed that in addition to the pushback from educators in different subject areas arguing that teaching reading was the English teacher’s job, these new methods did not always improve reading comprehension within those subject areas.

Tim and Cindy Shanahan, Bruce VanSledright, Elizabeth Moje, Tamara Jetton, and others began to look closely at this problem. Shanahan and Shanahan began doing interviews with experts in various disciplines in which those experts were asked to read a professional article or book and then describe what they were thinking as they read. They contrasted these interviews with similar interviews of novices reading in the same field. They began to discover that different disciplines do not only engage different subject matter, but they actually read, think, and approach problems very differently.

Let me give you a simplified idea of what these experts learned.

Historians tend to focus a great deal on understanding concepts within particular chronological and geographic contexts; they look for ways to corroborate accounts of particular events. They not only seek information from primary sources, but also seek to understand the reasons why a particular primary source might view a particular event in a particular way. They approach problem solving by starting with the answer to a problem, then working backwards to figure out what the questions are.

Mathematicians view reading within their discipline as engaging in puzzle solving. They usually read actively, with pencil and paper, and try out equations as they go. They want to know whether solutions apply to every possible situation.

Scientists use the scientific method as both a structure to understand what they read, and as a test to consider whether what they read has validity.

Although Physical Education is often mistakenly thought of an academic discipline that does not involve reading, athletes must learn to read the field. Before you roll your eyes and suggest that this hardly counts are reading, consider the complexity of what is involved. Each member of one team must watch the patterns the other team is constantly forming, moving, and breaking up. Each member must instantly analyze those patterns for weaknesses and determine how he or she can position him or herself to take advantages of those weaknesses. Physical Education students must also read rulebooks and health reports (and be able to sort the solid research from that influenced by lobby groups); all of this requires them to understand complex and contextually situated vocabulary.

Artists read to find questions rather than answers. They look for problems that are complex and unsolvable. When they read about art, they are often doing so not only to see how artists in the past have addressed both technical and philosophical problems, but to look for method and idea combinations that have not yet been tried but might contribute to a grand conversation.

In Music, students must learn to read an entirely different language, that of musical notation. Music students must also learn to read the conductor and their fellow musicians when playing in an ensemble. And any time that they are reading about a given piece of music, they must be able to contextualize that piece of music in terms of history, the biography of the composer, and where the piece fits in the larger sweep of musical movements.

English teachers read to discover what ideas and questions run underneath the story, but they also read to become lost in the world of the book, and to figure out how to help their students experience that world as well.

Now obviously I haven’t included all of the disciplines, but I am guessing that those from other disciplines who are reading this might be thinking about how their discipline reads and thinks differently. In fact, one problem with the generalizations that I have given you so far is that they do not accurately represent the range of styles of reading within disciplines. My overall point here is that each discipline can teach students a different way to read and, by extension, to think.

And this brings us to how we can understand liberal arts education. Those who argue that a liberal arts education is not relevant in today’s specialized world are missing several points.

First, our primary goal in educating students is not the content of the disciplines (though it is certainly a strong secondary goal). Our primary goal in each discipline is to learn a particular way of thinking. We need to remember this when there are regular reports about the top ten high-paying jobs, or the top twenty growing jobs in the future. The question is not so much about whether our particular course of study prepares someone to be an assistant to the X-ray technician or a medical insurance claims adjuster, but whether the skills we are teaching students help them to read and understand the world, and how those skills transfer to jobs such as the ones mentioned above.

Second, if students can learn several patterns of thinking through reading in the disciplines, we can teach them to see differences and similarities between them. What students are learning in their Art Design class about the power of an anomaly in a grid layout may have applications to what they are learning in a Literature class about Flannery O’Connor’s use of socially dissonant characters. And it may be that the strategic thinking taught in a Physical Education class can help explain the context of international relations covered in a Political Science class.

Third, when one has learned to contrast patterns, new patterns may be easier to discern. So reading in the disciplines ought to be the most transferrable type of education possible. We sometimes hear that because the job market is so volatile and technological advances are so unpredictable, formal education is becoming irrelevant. But if we teach our students to read so that they learn to recognize systems and patterns of symbols and teach them the problem-solving skills of several different ways of thinking, they will be able to make the shift between these patterns on their own.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, learning different ways of reading the world help us understand different ways that God reveals himself to us. When I walk through Trinity’s campus with a biologist, I am struck by how he seems to actually be able to read the ecosystems around us—pointing out what birds and animals and plants are doing in accordance with a specific season. An artist friend of mine sees systems of visual organization everywhere he goes. Now, of course, no one reads the world through only one set of lenses, but we can learn from the way different people read God’s creation, and maybe we can learn to read that way too.

We also bring our different ways of reading to bear on the Bible. In fact, I think many of the disputes that Christians have with each other concerning what the Bible says stem not from the fact that they do not read the Bible, but rather that they view that Bible through one very narrow set of reading lenses. Students who have been educated in the liberal arts ought to read the Bible with the imagination they learned from English classes, with the knowledge of the interconnectedness of God’s creation they learned from the Sciences, with their concern for economic, political, and social justice that they learned in Social Studies, and with the strength of faith and hermeneutical understanding from their Bible classes. If we can see the Bible in this way, we understand that God is speaking to us on many different levels in many different ways, not just in one narrow “literal” level. This does not make God wishy-washy or relativistic, but rather beautifully unified and consistent.

If this makes sense in terms of your school, you might consider these questions:

First, how can we make clear that in our Christian schools students learn to read God’s world and word, and that in so doing we prepare them for the totality of their calling in terms of career, citizenship, being a member of a church, member of a local and a global community, and so on?

Second, how can we apprentice students into the way our discipline reads, both in terms of texts and seeing patterns in the world? And what can we do to make clear to them what it is they are learning?

Third, as we approach our curriculum, how can we be mindful that the content we teach is primarily a way for students to learn to think about larger concepts and not the sole focus of learning?

Fourth, how can we encourage each other as teachers that we all need to read deeply in our disciplines and dig into interesting journal articles and books so that we can do more than keep up with surface developments, but challenge ourselves about the larger important questions?

As teachers and as people of the word, we should certainly be talking about what we should read and how we should read. We should be talking about how we respond to what we read. We should be considering the ways we agree and disagree with what we read. We should keep our libraries, fill our classrooms with books, and have a good supply of them on our e-readers and tablets as well. The one thing I think Christians never need to waste time debating is whether to read.

We are a people of the word. Of course we read.