Bible Study sans Bible

I started to write this blog entry in a very sarcastic tone, but I assume that it is the Holy Spirit that is working to cause me to repent of this attitude. However, I must say that I am deeply troubled by the implications of the article Inhabiting the Biblical Narrative: How I Learned to Stop Doing Bible Studies and Start Loving the Bible Again by Tony Jones, on the Youth Specialties website. In reading some other stuff by Tony, it is clear that he has been deeply influenced by postmodernism, which I am deeply at odds with, but I also can see that he doesn't write as a know-it-all who has all the answers. Tony has a great love for and wants to impact the lives of students with the gospel and he wrestles with how to do this in a postmodern context. In this article Tony makes it clear that he is on a journey and he welcomes the conversation and is willing to learn. It is clear that he is a man of integrity and humility and a man from whom there is much I could learn. So, though I disagree with his ideas this in no way should be read as an attack on his character.

Having said that, the article I am referencing above is his story that basically advocates Bible study without the Bible. I am sure that Tony would argue that the truth of Scripture is being communicated, but I would contend it is not, and this is deeply troubling.

At one point Tony had a conversation with some teenagers about what they wanted to study in a small group and they said that they wanted to study the Bible. They wanted to know the Bible better, but Tony reminded them of his experience with students and serious Bible study. Usually, some don't do the reading, some only do part of it and then you get resentment between the doers and non-doers. Also, many felt like failures after attempting to read through the Bible in a year. His experience is not uncommon with youth ministers, I might add. Upon further questioning he found this:

They wanted to know the Bible better, but they didn't want to read the Bible to get there. And they sure didn't want to fail at reading the Bible again.

He goes on to say:

As I went away, I was confronted with a quandary: how could I best make the truth and reality of God's story available to these soon-to-be seniors? How could I get them into it? To answer these questions, I had to ask myself, what gets me into God's story? (I'm of the philosophy that what you're teaching is more intriguing to kids if you really love it yourself.)

He goes on to describe his own journeys in Bible study and the things he learned in seminary, where you learn the languages, the exegetical skills, how to read commentaries and things like that and compares studying the Bible with these things to becoming a scientist in a lab coat. In such a case, the Bible becomes very sterile. He is right about that. My favorite professor at my very conservative seminary said that in seminary you go from being an advocate for your faith to being a student of your faith. This is good, but it can be dangerous. When you become a student, you can treat your faith like a doctor treats a cadaver - a thing to be dissected an analyzed. Many a student gains a wonderful understanding of Christology and loses Christ in the process. So, Tony is right on about this potential danger and he gives some good thoughts on the way we misuse the Bible through out of context proof texting.

But in my mind, and I say this with all due respect to Tony, the cure he offers is worse than the disease. He wanted his students to "inhabit the Biblical narrative" and to do this he wanted to avoid using a Bible with verse references and "crinkly pages." I understand the part about avoiding the verse numbers - they are not part of the text and they give one the impression that individual verses can be interpreted on their own, apart from their context. This often causes many problems in Bible study. Although I think they are helpful handles upon which to memorize and refer, they are not essential. I don't know what he meant by "crinkly pages," I can only speculate that they didn't want one of the old traditional Bibles that everyone uses, but something more up to date. In the end they decided to use The Book of God by Walter Wangerin as their text. Wangerin himself says "this is not the Bible." Using this, they were able to cover the Bible stories from Abraham to Jesus in Wangerin's novelized format in a few months. They also interacted with the text in numerous ways.

As we talked about Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, we were focused on his role as father, because that's where Wangerin places the focus in his retelling. But then someone passed around a painting by Peter Paul Reubens in which the spotlight is focused on the unblemished alabaster torso of a young boy. Immediately the conversation shifted to Isaac's point of view.

We listened to Donny Osmond sing a track from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and the students were taken with how closely the words followed the biblical text.

We watched clips from The Ten Commandments (my Cecil B. DeMille inspired visualization of Moses) and The Prince of Egypt (the students' Disney-inspired version).

We listened to "Samson and Delilah" by the Grateful Dead.

We studied a beautiful painting by Pieter Breugal of Jacob wrestling the angel.

We read a recent ruling written by a judge who quoted King Solomon.

And probably the funniest moment was when someone brought in a poem from the Internet that imagined Jacob, Rachel, and Leah on The Jerry Springer Show. (Think about it for a minute!)

The bottom line is that they learned about the Bible without ever reading the Bible.

This is akin to learning mathematics without looking at numbers. It is akin to learning chemistry without learning the periodic table, to learning astronomy without ever looking at the stars, to learning how to play football without ever strapping on set of pads and taking the field.

We're getting to the point where people will be asking why read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John when you can listen to George, Paul, Ringo and John? Instead of John at the Jordan River we have Jacob on Jerry Springer. Calvin and Carson are boring commentators on Scripture, especially when you've got Disney and DeMille. A good Mormon boy like Donny Osmond seems to have more to say about Joseph than Keil and Deilitzch.

I'm of course being facetious - I don't expect teenagers to read Carson, Calvin, Keil or Deilitzch, but I do expect them to be able to read Moses, and David and Solomon and Isaiah and Matthew and Mark and Luke and John and Paul.

My concern with all of the "postmodern" or "emerging" church leaders I hear and read is that they are astute in their criticisms of modernity, but as I mentioned before, the cures they propose are worse than the disease. What I am hearing and reading (and please prove me wrong, I'll be glad to confess to being wrong on this one) is a gradual stepping away from reliance on the Scriptures. I have just begun reading Stories of Emergence, and one of the leaders in the movement describes a real turning point in his life. He went on some kind of a retreat where he was guided by Brennan Manning where Brennan told him that to connect with God he needed to get away and get alone with God, away from all the things that distracted him, including his Bible. That sounded so sincere and so profound, but the fact is that this person was in effect being told that the Bible was a hindrance to getting in touch with God.

I realize that there are those who will accuse me of the fictional sin of "bibliolatry." I don't think the postmodern/emergent folks would word it that way. My understanding is that they would probably agree that we have an infallible Scripture but that we are fallible interpreters of Scripture. Some may even argue that words like "infallible" are a reflection of an unbiblical modernistic worldview. I'm only speculating and am willing to be corrected on this also.

But most Christians throughout history have recognized that the Bible is infallible and we are not. Even someone like R. C. Sproul says that the best theologian is only 80% correct on his best day. The Reformation tradition, which I love, has a slogan - semper reformans, semper reformanda - "always reformed, always reforming." At least this one slice of the Christian tradition has this self-correcting mechanism built in and I believe that even those churches that aren't in the reformed tradition would agree with the spirit of this slogan. The greater part of the church has always taught that the word of God is infallible and man's opinions are fallible, so the greater part of the church has always been willing to re-examine its doctrinal formulations and propositional statements.

The new postmodern/emergent tradition is trying to continue this "always reforming" tradition, but with one major difference. Whereas the reformers were always willing to re-examine their beliefs in light of Scripture, the postmodern/emergent folks urge us to re-examine our beliefs in light of our own experience or in light of the spirit of the current age. Hence, if reading and studying the Bible itself doesn't fit in with the current cultural climate, no biggie, we'll dispense with it and watch movies and let Donny Osmond and the Grateful Dead be our teachers.

Postmodern Christians insist they are doing something new, they aren't modernists, they aren't seeker sensitive and they sure aren't liberals. But what they share in common with all is the idea that the Christian faith must be re-imaged in light of modern philosophies and cultures. The biblical picture is that we must re-image modern philosophy and culture in light of the Bible. I realize that many postmodern/emergent leaders will accuse many of us of reading the Bible through a modernistic lens with too much emphasis on propositions and statements. They say we need to return to the "narrative theology" which is supposed to be more purely Biblical. But this is a red herring. Read through the New Testament and see how Jesus tells parables (narrative) and then interprets them (proposition). Paul does similar things. Propositional theology and narrative theology are not at odds.

The article I am critiquing illustrates my point. In trying to "inhabit the Biblical narrative" they inhabited a narrative that didn't involve the Bible.

Again, this is not a personal attack on Tony, or any of the postmodern/emergent folks and I apologize up front for any intemperate language. But I do believe this is a serious issue - in a well meaning and sincere attempt to communicate the gospel, I fear our postmodern/emergent friends are giving us a Christian faith without a Bible. If we give up the Bible, we give up the faith.

Comments

[Jeremy Pierce]

Small point: 'reformans' is a present participle and 'reformandum' is a gerundive, so it would be "always reforming, always being reformed".

[Karen Marie Knapp]

It seems that we're going back to the Tradition. For the vast majority of Christians throughout history, the Bible was _not_ the sole source of faith, and it was not something one read, necessarily --- it was something one _heard_, proclaimed from the ambo or pulpit and told to children on the laps of their grandparents, and _saw_, in the icons and statues and stained glass windows, and in the lives of one's neighbors who lived the Faith in one's midst. Not the Bible, but the Church, was the pillar and bulwark of the Truth. Not that one couldn't read it --- there was a precious copy in every church building for anyone to come and read, usually chained to the sanctuary railing so it wouldn't be stolen, since it would cost several year's salary to replace.

It is sad that teens would be so disconnected from, not only the Scriptures, but literacy in general, but it gives me some hope that the truths of our faith are still getting passed on to the next generation of believers. Christianity is not dependent on the ability (or willingness) to read and never has been.

karen marie

[David]

Karen,
In one respect I'll have to grant your point - that throughout history most folks didn't have access to a Bible or couldn't read, so that Christianity was not dependent on one's ability to read. However, as a protestant, you can probably guess that I will argue that there was a corresponding degradation of the church when the faith was being passed on through icons, statues and stained glass windows. Regardless of whether or not one can read, faith still came by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. It was the very Word of God that had to be heard to incite faith, not the visual depictions of Biblical stories. I would contend that Christianity flourished where Biblical exposition flourished. True, people might not have been able to read the words of Scripture but faith was produced when they heard the words of Scripture themselves, and heard them expounded. I would argue that this is a sign of decline in the church when we seek to inculcate faith in our youth without using the very words of Scripture. If man lives by every word that comes out of the mouth of God, why don't we want to give them the true food of the Word of God.
Thanks for interacting with me on this.
David

[Sozo]

It seems to me that what Tony is advocating is just an expression of the relativism that is rampant in our society. Well, maybe not that bad. He does admit that there is an overall narrative which is true.

But like you, I'm a little confused on *how they know* they're learning about the Bible. I think it's fine to look at works of art, read poems, etc. and speculate about certain things. But in the end you have to admit that speculation is all it is. If you do not have a objective standard to compare it to, then it just becomes about "what it means to me" - and that's postmodernism.

Now, I do sympathize with his point about proof-texting and not knowing how a verse fits into a passage. Or how a passage fits into the overall story of redemption found throughout scripture. But simply skipping over the basics of good interpretation is not the answer.

[King of Fools]

Excellent post. Not only was your content dead-on, but your humble presentation should makes your argument palatable to most readers.

Working with kids, it is so tempting to water things down because you think they can't handle the Word or are not interested in it. Doing it is a huge mistake though, because you become no different than any other social club competing for the attention of your audience.

[Anthony]

If we have the word read to us or read it ourselves, it's still the word of God. If we have the word shown to us, it is always someone's interpretation of the word. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Disney's version of Egypt, Cecil B's 10 Commandments and even Mel's Passion, but they weren't the word of God, they were someone else's vision of the word. It's God's word that convicts us, teaches us, and judges us. When Paul told Timothy to 'study to show thyself approved' he was talking about God's word, not man's self-made references to the word. When we drift away from the word as our compass we will inevitably lose our way. When Israel stopped teaching the law, they drifted away from God and into idolatry. When they found the law and taught it, they returned to God. Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it.

[Jerry McClellan]

All I can think to say is that there is a reason the word of God was written down eventually and passed down until today. There is a reason that the bible is considered to be the oldest and most reliable of ancient, historical texts. This is no coincidence.

I am a firm believer that the word of God in written form needs to be the springboard by which we gain a solid understanding of the will and nature of God.