Page 225 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 215
and positively fostered heresy. The close connection between Bible-reading and
heretical belief has often been observed by historians (for example, Dickens,
1964 and Thomson, 1965). Just why this should have been the case is less than
clear without reference to modern media research. This shows that people tend to
read, understand and recall elements within a communication selectively, in
ways that accord with their prior disposition (see, for example, Cooper and
Jahoda, 1947; Hovland, Janis and Kelley, 1953; Klapper, 1966). The widely
different responses to the Bible, expressed in different forms of heresy, can be
partly explained by the divergent traditions of late medieval and early modern
Europe. To see the Bible as ‘producing’ heresy is somewhat misleading: rather,
exposure to the Bible caused prior differences within Christendom, reflecting the
different social backgrounds, national traditions and religious orientations of the
new Bible public, to be expressed in the form of divergent religious
interpretations. Thus, the dissemination of the Bible did not so much create
differences within the Catholic Church as cause them to be expressed in the form
of differences over doctrine.
Other contingent factors probably reinforced the schismatic impact of
vernacular Bibles. Centuries of exegetical analysis and interpretation had
produced Catholic doctrines lacking a clear scriptural basis. The Bible is an
inherently equivocal text which lends itself to very different interpretations based
upon an apparently literal understanding of different parts of it. The failure of the
ecclesiastical authorities to prepare the ground adequately for the reception of the
Bible also limited their ability to defuse its divisive impact. While the research of
historians like Heath (1969) and Elton (1975) clearly calls into question
traditional conceptions of a ‘corrupt’ preReformation Church, there can be no
doubt that inadequate, if improved, clerical training and the continuing ritualistic
formalism of the late medieval Church prevented effective ecclesiastical
supervision of lay responses to the Bible.
The causes of the rise of Protestantism are exceedingly complex, and are only
partly to do with religion. But, at one level at least, Protestantism can be viewed
as a synthesis of the different disruptive tendencies set in motion by a new
technique of mass communication. Protestantism was a movement that was
inspired, in part, by access to an alternative source of religious doctrine, the
Bible, mediated through print, that competed with hierarchically mediated
orthodoxy; it took the form of a fundamentalist reconstruction of Christian
dogma based on a literal interpretation of the scriptures; it was a book-centred
definition of religious experience that rejected many of the pre-literate, ritualistic
forms of religious communication and the central intermediary role of the
Catholic priesthood; it was a revolt against papal sovereignty, which the printed
word had helped to foster by contributing to the decline of the papacy’s prestige
and ideological ascendancy; and, in some ways, Protestantism was also the
expression of a growing secularism and nationalism that the growth of a lay
scribal and print culture had helped to promote.