Life More Abundantly

This is what Freedom means to me.

Can you see it? Do you know what it is?

It is the uncensored, almost uncensorable, wide open, Information Super Highway! Please stick with me on this one, because it’s not the “depravity at your fingertips” version of the internet I’m talking about.

For most of human history, words have been the property of the elite, distributed sparingly, if at all, to hoi polloi like us. A small group of people – usually religious leaders – determined who received literacy, who had access to literature, and what literature was fit for consumption. Men like John Wycliffe worked to make scripture accessible, but the task was too enormous for one lifetime.

With the Gutenberg Press, reproducing words became an easier task. Thanks to the press, Martin Luther’s theses spread across Europe in a very short time, which would have been isolated to Wittenberg only a generation before. The truths of the reformation, and the ideas of the resulting renaissance were able to reach more people because of the press.

So governments, recognizing the power of words and the ideas they convey, licensed the presses. In order to own a press, you were required to be licensed and only print approved words, “safe” ideas, expedient literature.

Even when the licensing of presses stopped, the presses themselves – large, expensive, increasingly technical machines – became another control on the distribution of words. Now ideas had to be vetted by a publisher for marketability, or pass across an editor’s desk to be deemed worthy of print. While people had increasingly more access to cheap, disposable words, there were still sentinels who stood guard, often over truth in favor of expediency.

The computer made it possible for one man, in the spirit of John Wycliffe to print and distribute his words as quickly and efficiently (sometimes more so) as professional printing houses, but it is the internet that has allowed those men and their ideas to truly find an audience.

True, this freedom has allowed some total crackpots to gain an audience, but it has also allowed the scripture to be available at the touch of a finger in 50 versions and 35 languages. Thanks to the internet, we can read and compare 15 different bible commentaries for free, read men as diverse in both history and belief as Augustine and Brian McLaren in their own words and compare and contrast them to the truths of scripture. With the internet, William Tyndale’s wish that “a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the Scripture than [a reformation era arch-bishop]” is not only possible, it should be the rule.  Providing that we “plow boys” avail ourselves of the treasure at hand.

Now the only sentinel standing guard over our access to truth is our own apathy.

Like all freedoms, it can and has been abused, but the treasure, in my opinion, outweighs the dross.  So this week, the internet is what freedom means to me.