Apparently, I’m saying the same comments as Chris Gillespie.

Seriously I sympathize with what you are writing. The historical argument is something I make routinely. But in this case you are wrong to make it.

First, historically speaking, the Mass/Liturgy was offered multiple times per day, and so the laity had much more opportunity to hear the proclaimed Word of God, not just on Sundays.

Second, we don’t deal in hypotheticals nor make arguments from silence. God didn’t tell us in Scripture to wear shoes either. We do have cheap, easy and free access to Scripture and so my main point remains: you call yourself Christian, but neglect the Word of life sitting mere feet from you day after day.

For the great majority of Christians in most ages of the Church, their only exposure to the Word of God has necessarily been the readings in the public liturgy on Sundays and other holy days. This is because many, if not most, Christians were illiterate, and even among the literate most Christians could not afford to own a copy of the Scriptures until after the invention of the printing press and the development of book publishing for the masses. And yet Christ died for the poor and the unlettered as well as for those with the wealth, leisure, and education necessary for the private reading of the Scriptures.

The truth is that for lay Christians in general, the public liturgical reading of Scripture, the preaching of the Gospel, and the administration of the sacraments are among the essentials of the Christian life; but the private reading of Scripture is ancillary. If that were not so, teaching the illiterate to read would have always been among the first tasks of Christian missionaries. Indeed, one might expect to have a clear Scriptural instruction to that effect and/or to see accounts of the Apostles doing just that in Acts.

But neither Scripture nor the history of Christian missions indicates that teaching people to read so that they would be able to read the Bible has ever been of first importance. That is not to say that those of us who are literate ought not to read the Bible. But to treat private reading of the Bible as a matter of first importance, the neglect of which puts our salvation at risk, is a mistake.

Amen on the original post too! As Piepkorn observed, Law/gospel is *A* Lutheran hermeneutic, not the only one…