Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade patterned its book burning scene after Joseph Goebbel’s encouragement of Germans to incinerate volumes by Freud, Hemingway, Marx, H.G. Wells, and others in 1933.[1] Hitler is the often vilified representation of totalitarian rulers,[2] intent on controlling information. Ray Bradbury’s famous futuristic thriller Fahrenheit 451 had its seed thoughts firmly planted in the horrors of World War II. Authorities send fire trucks to burn books in the classic tale warning against the loss of freedom.[3] Individuals counteract state power by committing books to memory, becoming walking libraries.
George Orwell wrote 1984 with the dread of Nazism also fresh in his mind. Slogans from the book’s dictatorial party included, “Whoever controls the past controls the future. Whoever controls the present controls the past.” O’Brien, maniacal authority-figure in 1984, himself confesses to the need to regulate all cultural accounts and memories.[4] Both Bradbury and Orwell remind us that freedom of thought is tied directly to historical records.
Artillery shells scoring direct hits on the University Library of Bosnia in 1992 destroyed 1.5 million books. American journalist Mark Danner trying to understand the devastation asked the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, himself a published poet, why attack a library? “Only Christian books were burned,” was the horrific reply. “The others were removed.” Dutch investigator of war crimes, Jan Boeles, maintains that “the cultural identity of a population represents its survival in the future. . . . [destroying a library is] the murder of a people’s cultural identity.”[5] Burning books rapes human intellectual heritage.[6]
“This is the first mass book-burning of the 21st century.” So says George Thomas Kurian, editor of a new four-volume Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization to have been published this month by the academic press of Wiley-Blackwell. Kurian continues
The set had been copy-edited, fact-checked, proofread, publisher-approved, printed, bound, and formally launched (to high praise) at the recent American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature conference. But protests from a small group of scholars associated with the project have led the press to postpone publication, recall all copies already distributed, and destroy the existing print run. The scholars’ complaint? The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, they have reportedly argued, is “too Christian.” “They also object to historical references to the persecution and massacres of Christians by Muslims,” Kurian says, “but at the same time want references favorable to Islam.”[7]
It would seem book burning takes many forms. While there are those who intimate Christians are the group most noted for banning books, consider how Christian books are “banned” by not being mentioned in The New York Times Review of Books or politically conservative books are “banned” simply by being ignored by the main stream media. One of my former students, a PhD in a large American university told me recently that animosity toward Christians is growing. “There is an increasing lack of common ground believers have with non-believers.”
Jeremiah 36 records an instructive event showing the age-old antipathy of unbelievers against God’s people. Jehoiakim, confronted by God’s Word, burns the scroll on which The Word is written. In marked contrast to his father, a good king of Judah, Josiah,[8] Jehoiakim and his officials do not show any fear nor do they tear their clothes: a physical act to demonstrate repentance. Indeed, believing he could destroy the authority of the words by fire, Jehoiakim then sought to kill the human messengers of The Word.[9] Like many megalomaniacs before and after him, Jehoiakim’s tyranny is marked by an attempt to eradicate The Word.
Falsification of Christian history has been the mode by which enemies of The Church have attacked her historical record. Of all the religions of the world, only Christianity depends solely on the historical record for verification.[10] For years I have been teaching my students this salient truth statement: “If you begin to question a document’s historicity, then you question its authenticity, and ultimately, its authority.”[11] Since the first century church was established, everything from Gnosticism to “higher criticism” to The Jesus Seminar to The Da Vinci Code has been used by our enemy to attack the historical record of Jesus and His bride. Christians must continue to fight for their historical heritage, The Written Word.[12]
The famed Warburg collection of books—some 80,000 volumes—escaped the reach of Goebbel’s attempts to wipe out free speech by two weeks. The Warburg Institute built on the nucleus to become an important part of the University of London’s some 350,000 volumes today.[13] Salvaging history. Sustaining ideas. Saving words. Free peoples everywhere fight to maintain their beliefs etched in stone, cuneiform, parchment, or paper. The lessons of George Orwell and Ray Bradbury are enlightening. Jeremiah 36 reminds the Christian audience that the maintenance of historical records is imperative for The Church. Luke, considered a consummate historian,[14] concludes:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:1-4, NIV)
Mark shudders at the thought of burning any books. Mark Eckel teaches Old Testament at Crossroads Bible College, Indianapolis, IN.
[1] A brief overview of Nazi terror against dissent is recounted be Nicholas A. Basbanes, 2003, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World. (Harper Collins): 124-26.
[2] There are no discounting totalitarian dictatorships’ attempts to kill intellectuals in their usurpation of a country. China under Mao ZeDong, Russia under Stalin, and Cambodia under Pol Pot, are but a few examples to add with Hitler. “Re-education” was an additional tact taken by Vietnamese Communists, for instance, after the fall of The South.
[3] Ray Bradbury. 1953. Fahrenheit 451. (Ballantine).
[4] George Orwell. 1949, 1992. 1984. (Everyman’s Library): 260.
[5] Basbanes, 133-37.
[6] There are, of course, those instances of libraries destroyed by fire without human ill-will. Leaders of Alexandria, Egypt declared that ships entering its harbor must surrender any books on board. Copied and returned, these new additions were then placed in the city library. One of the largest losses of texts in world history—both in numbers and importance—occurred when the library at Alexandria was consumed by flame c. A. D. 230.
[7] Edward Feser, ‘Too Christian’ for Academia? National Review Online 11 February 2009.
[8] See 2 Kings 22:11-20.
[9] Jeremiah 36:26. I had no thought to continue a discussion about book burning until The Spirit prompted me this morning as I am writing (2 March 09) to discuss in the next article that our adversary not only attacks the written record but those who produce it.
[10] By using the word “solely” I am not discounting the work of The Spirit on lives nor the obvious supernatural intervention in history by The Personal Eternal Creator, Yahweh. Written records, however, are the means by which The Church establishes the authenticity of Jesus: His incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and promised glorification.
[11] I have written a curriculum whose subtitle contains this basic assertion: Mark Eckel, 2001, Timeless Truth: An Apologetic for the Historicity, Authenticity, and Authority of The Bible. (Purposeful Design).
[12] I include here only some of the many books should be noted to confirm historical documentation of Scripture. F. F. Bruce. 1943. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?; Craig Blomberg. 1987. The Historical Reliability of The Gospels; Luke Timothy Johnson. 1996. Paul Barnett. 2005. The Birth of Christianity: The First Twenty Years; The Real Jesus; Philip Jenkins. 2001. Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way; Mark D. Thompson. 2006. A Clear and Present Word: The Clarity of Scripture.
[13] Basbanes, 126-28.
[14] W. M. Ramsey. 1908, n.d. Luke The Physician. (Reprint, James Family Publishing).