A writer might think that what s/he writes is important and worthy; s/he might think it will secure them a name after they have departed this mortal coil. This has obviously happened for the writers that are studied in school or college, but then only for the ‘literature’ that is written. But clearly these are a hallowed few compared to the many writers that publish and whose fate it is to be forgotten. It is not as if this is not known:
“For of the wise man as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten” (Ecc 2:16 RSV).
When it comes to religious writing, the prospects of remembrance are even more remote; when it comes to academic biblical writing, the best that can be expected is a mention in some footnotes that are not followed-up. The proof of this is all the unknown names today in the footnotes of the academic commentaries of the Victorian age.
The lesson seems to be that if a person thinks they have written something, let them know this: they have written nothing much in particular, for “if any one imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know” (1 Cor 8:2 RSV).
An angry young person might rail against the system; it is less likely that an older person will do so, for as Alec Guinness says in Lawrence of Arabia,
“it is the virtue of young men to fight wars, but of old men to make peace”.
Writing is a medium that people use to ‘change the system’ and these days the Internet is the place for what would have been tracts, pamphlets, and leaflets in former generations. You can be reasonably sure that very few people today have read the ‘controversy literature’ of a division in the community that happened, say, in the nineteenth century.
Those writers no doubt thought that what they were writing at the time was important and should be read, but it was of the moment, and it has passed into the archives of fastidious private collectors of religious memorabilia, hardly ever now to be read.
The ephemeral nature of writing can be seen everywhere today and more so on the Internet where websites come and then go; where a forum discussion is archived and difficult to retrieve; where scrolling down a thread through four days of posts is too much bother; and where downloaded PDFs are skimmed and then filed away to be forgotten on a hard disc.
The volume of information coming at anyone today from the Internet makes this an inevitable result. If the academics of yesteryear become obscure footnotes after a university career, their books eventually consigned to the off-site storage facilities of libraries, the Internet bloggers of today see their ‘important’ posts pass into oblivion within days, digital files resting under a forgotten date and time stamp in a directory never to be read.
It may sound like a counsel of despair, but this is not an epitaph for writing; just recognition that the important work of building the ecclesia takes place in person and with people, rather than in our magazines, books or on the Internet. Such writing is nothing more than an instrument to be used if it has value, but the Word of God lives and abides forever.
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