Dr. R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, commented today on Robert Darnton’s New York Times Book Review article, “The Library in the New Age”, which appears in the June 12, 2008, issue.

An excerpt from Robert Darnton, speaking of Google’s worthy but tip-of-the-iceberg book project:

Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don’t think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital re-positories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don’t count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns.

An excerpt from Dr. Mohler:

Professor Darnton’s approach is very helpful — especially for those of us who bear the stewardship of libraries and institutions of higher learning. The future will be digital (or whatever replaces digital media), but the future will also need the library. The library will remain as a citadel, where books need no batteries and reading requires no Bluetooth or wireless technology. The spirit of scholarship will always be most at home among books, and the soul committed to learning will always find nourishment in the library.

On a related note, Microsoft has suspended progress on it’s Live Search Academic counterpart to Google Books and Google Scholar. Read about it here. Has Microsoft given up on search? This would indeed explain why they attempted to buy Yahoo!, but would also leave Google as the only mass-digitizer of library content. Once again, libraries will no doubt need to pick up the pieces and bring order to the mess.

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I have a vested interest in the future of libraries and will understandably rage against the dying of their light. My interest is both professional and personal, and though the professional literature says I should be concerned that my bibliographic responsibility and bibliophilic personality may soon be at odds, and though part of me laments this reportedly dubious future with an increasingly sentimental sigh, I am made more willing to see the centrality of bindings and casings go somewhat peacefully into that good night because of an even greater affection and purpose. The unique experience of encountering true eloquence in words and true elegance in print, though regrettably irreplaceable, is not the reason why I am a seminary librarian.

Kenneth Kantzer, in a 1983 Christianity Today article, recounted his perspective on the role of a library in preparation for ministry:

I began my own advanced study for the ministry when I graduated from college in the 1930’s. I sought an accredited school committed to a consistent biblical theology, with a scholarly faculty, a large library, and a disciplined intellectual atmosphere. I couldn’t find any. The nonevangelical schools had great libraries, strong scholarly faculties, and impressive reputations as accredited centers of learning. The evangelical schools had no libraries to speak of, unknown faculty (J. Gresham Machen, the last evangelical scholar, had just died), and no tradition of high scholarship. (”Documenting the Dramatic Shift in Seminaries from Liberal to Conservative,” CT 2/4/83)

Access to a large library caused Kantzer, at least in part, to choose Harvard over an evangelical institution for his Ph.D. studies. Other options did exist. Just not any with large libraries.

Today, it would appear that quite a few evangelical seminaries have libraries that measure up well. As R. Albert Mohler points out, books are more affordable today than at any point in history. This glut of available print has enabled seminaries to build formidable libraries — and just in time for the digital age. I read at least an article per week about the dubious future of academic libraries and the varying theories on how to help your library survive. Serial subscriptions in academic libraries have been on the decline for years because of their digital availability and rising print costs. This availability renders the content more ubiquitous (or, at least, access to that content) and payment is often a bit more budget-friendly. This is just one example of the modern change and evolution of information delivery in libraries.

Modes of information delivery change and evolve. They always have. These changes in the means of information propagation are always accompanied by significant cultural progressions as well, though the order of these two is often debatable (see Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word). The point is that we are in one of those times. That may be unfortunate for libraries (time will tell), but it is not necessarily bad for the reason why I became a librarian.

Would Kantzer have chosen Harvard today? Perhaps. But not if the tipping point is access to information in the form of a sizable library like he faced over a half-century ago, and neither will future Kantzers in the next half-century since the information formerly housed in physical silos will be more ubiquitously available digitally. The challenge of academic research during Kantzer’s time was the scarcity of information. Reference services were needed by students to help identify, locate, and access necessary works. Today, however, the challenge of academic research is the glut of information, not the lack of it. Reference services are needed in order to help navigate this glut to identify what is truly helpful and necessary. This is a marvelous problem — and one which will likely relieve evangelical seminaries from keeping up with the Harvard Joneses.

I did not become a seminary librarian in order to introduce pastors-in-training to books. I became a librarian in order to be a part of something much larger. The experience of losing yourself in a library of books is indeed marvelous (remember William of Baskerville’s lingering experience in the abbey library?), but the experience of losing yourself in order to gain Christ is of infinitely greater worth. If the library prophets are right and the coming generation will know less of libraries but have greater access to information, then seminaries — though filled with book-lovers — stand to gain the most. As the amount of available information increases with the ease of access to that information, more pastors will find a seminary theological education a viable option for them. Investing truth in those who will invest in others also is the calling of ministry, and the present revolution means that services such as our library’s new digital repository may help advance the purpose of the seminary and push resources, services, and training out into the lives of those desiring to be equipped for the work of ministry.

As for the library? I do hope we are not yet reading the library’s elegy and that the library’s remarkable ability to withstand the “forces of change and the power of princes” will indeed prevail, but as Matthew Battles rightly points out,

From age to age, libraries grow and change, flourish and disappear, blossom and contract–and yet through them all we’re chasing after Alexandria, seeking a respite on Parnassus, haunted by the myths of knowledge and of wholeness that books spawn when massed in their millions. The divine irony that Borges discovered while groping his way through the stacks strikes the sighted librarian just as powerfully: preserving themselves, the books elude us.

But to borrow from both Dylan Thomas and Umberto Eco, I will rage against the dying the light before we hold the empty name of yesterday’s rose. All the more, however, should I borrow from our Lord himself: “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:30, ESV)

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G. K. Chesterton’s fantastical works of fiction such as his extensive use of fairies, according to Alison Milbank at the University of Nottingham, had an apparently large influence on J. R. R. Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings. Alison argues that Chesterton’s attempts at using fiction to cause his readers to engage the real world in new ways resulted in Tolkien’s appropriation of a thoroughly fictional world — so fictional, in fact, it takes on a sense or reality — in order to engender a theology that is both practical and artistic. They both openly and intentionally created a fictional tradition of sorts in order to render a theological purpose more accessible, and in so doing foster relationships between people and God. She writes in Chesterton and Tolkien As Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (London/New York: T and T Clark, 2007):

If Chesterton and Tolkien are theologians, as the title of this book claims, it is because they offer a theology of art as practice. Practical Theology as it is taught in seminaries and theological colleges in very often the taking of theological ideas and realizing them in practical activity, or reflecting upon experience with theological tools. …As a gift it likewise cements social relations and draws attention to the exchanges between people, and with the sacred. (p. 166)

Much no doubt remains to be said both in response to Milbanks’s appraisal of Chesterton and Tolkien. On the same cart of new books to be added to our library, however, was another treatment of fictional traditions: The Invention of Sacred Tradition, Lewis and Hammer, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2007. From the introduction:

In the domain of religion, we find an analogous situation, where historically verifiable traditions coexist with recent innovations whose origins are spuriously projected back into time.

Among these recent innovations which have invented traditions for themselves and which are given chapters in this book are Scientology, Castenada’s don Juan, Mormonism, Sun Myung Moon, Rosicrucianism, and Zoroastrianism. As it typical of much contemporary scholarship, however, they also attribute a false tradition to the New Testament due to supposed authorial “inauthenticities,” and thereby label most the New Testament to be forgeries (as well as the Pentateuch).

The combination of these two books in my thoughts did make for an interesting contrast, though. One looks at Chesterton’s and Tolkien’s fictional traditions as a positive source of good theology, traditions so fantastical and metaphorical that their place in both literary and theological history is certain. The other looks at the fictional traditions of Scientology, Mormonism, and the like as dubious sources which are not bases for truth. The combination raises a good discussion about how and when to appeal to tradition as a source — whether that tradition is real, fictional for instructive and artful purposes, or just plain fictional and delusive.

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We’re hurled at rocket speed down a rabbit hole of action and suspense. Run, Dick, Run! See Spot Run! Run and Jump! Run, Run, Run! Run, Jump, Run! Even the most agile adrenaline jockeys will find it hard to maintain the pace. The authors ask us to confront the terrifying question: Who Is It? Just when one can bear no more, they wisely divert with the chick lit hijinks of “Something Pretty,” but any returned sense of safety is just a will-of-the-wisp as one is again forced to ask the horrible: ”Where Is Sally?” Do you really want to know?

From Blogging For A Good Book, a blog of the Williamsburg Regional Library in Virginia, in a gelastically funny review of this classic of children’s books that everyone my age remembers reading.

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The interplay of these four doctrines–sola scriptura, the priesthood of believers, preparation for grace, and sanctification–inspired a passion for preaching, writing, and reading in colonial New England. But though these doctrines involved the individual soul, the culture of evangelical literacy was nurtured in corporate institutions, including the family, the church, the town, and the colony, all of which blended public and private in a special New England way. New Englanders understood social life through the concept of covenant, a contract of mutuality and reciprocity. … The way New Englanders organized their families, communities, and institutional lives would have a profound impact on the growth of the culture of evangelical literacy.

From David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 17-18. Read the abstract in the Commonplaces Library.

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