One of the most common assumptions about pastors throughout church history is that they are men of books\u2014that reading is central to a pastor\u2019s ministry. If you walk into your pastor\u2019s office\u2014he might even call it his \u201cstudy\u201d\u2014it will almost surely be full of books (2 Tim. 4:13).<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
John Foxe (1516\u20131587), an early English Protestant, described the invention of the printing press to the readers of his Acts and Monuments<\/em> and exhorted them, \u201cThat 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.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Of course God didn\u2019t need <\/em>a printer to reform his church. But he was certainly glad to use one. And Foxe\u2019s inability to imagine another way illustrates how central books were to the Reformation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We have 234 catalogs of ministers\u2019 libraries in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. Here are three lessons we ought not neglect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":585,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[312],"class_list":["post-70316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-leadership","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/585"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70316"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70318,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70316\/revisions\/70318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}