One of the most common assumptions about pastors throughout church history is that they are men of books—that reading is central to a pastor’s ministry. If you walk into your pastor’s office—he might even call it his “study”—it will almost surely be full of books (2 Tim. 4:13).
But it wasn’t always this way. From our perch in 2023, we easily forget how significant the introduction of the printing press was to the history of the church. Prior to its invention, books were rare, usually only owned by wealthy men and women or tucked away in a monastery. Hardly any ordinary Europeans would have owned more than one book prior to 1450.
John Foxe (1516–1587), an early English Protestant, described the invention of the printing press to the readers of his Acts and Monuments and exhorted them, “That Great Antichrist of Rome could never have been suppressed, and, being suppressed, could not have been kept under, except this most excellent science of printing had been maintained.”[1]
Of course God didn’t need a printer to reform his church. But he was certainly glad to use one. And Foxe’s inability to imagine another way illustrates how central books were to the Reformation.
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