“Dumbing Down” is an expression you hear in the media. It refers to TV programmes or magazine and newspaper articles that present their content in a simple rather than a complex way, cutting out detail, the use of complex ideas, and instead using graphics, illustrations, pictures, photographs, video and sound-bites. Such media presentation looses the deeper analysis in favour of the surface treatment.
The apostle Peter observed that in Paul’s letters there were things hard to understand (2 Pet 3:16) which implies that Paul did not “dumb down”. If an inspired apostle wrote difficult things, it is certain that the OT scriptures also contain difficult material, pre-eminently the Prophets. What is more, the presence of such difficult material tells us something about what we should do in our reading and writing. We should not expect things to be simple, and neither should we always write what is simple. We should endeavour to write about the difficult and move forward our understanding of scripture and doctrine.
There is a reason why scripture contains difficult material. God appears to have included such material for his children down the ages, and we might ask and object by saying: Why do this, we don’t want difficult holy writings? On the other hand, we might just ignore those parts of the Word that are difficult or just read over them in a superficial way. We may not “put the time in” to engage what is difficult preferring the quicker fix that is the surface. We are deceiving ourselves in such behaviour, saying, in effect, that we do not want what is difficult if it means too much effort. We might choose to fill our spiritual time with the easier things of speaking (and its correlate – listening) and singing, but this may well miss the lesson that the Word presents us, namely, that we need to spend our time in spiritual thinking. It is perhaps ironic that among the four ings of speaking, listening, singing and thinking that we neglect the thinking.
If we are to put the time into spiritual thinking, then one course of action in this endeavour is to seek out and collect Christadelphian writing from the older magazines which tended to go deeper in its treatment of topics.
What is a Bible Student?