Why Learn about
the Bible?
Unitarian Universalist Church in Loudoun
Sunday, October 14, 2001
The Revered Betty Jo Middleton
Our older children’s class this year is field testing a new program, Learning about the Bible. Why do we want our children to learn about the Bible? Why might we want to learn more about it ourselves?
The story Glenda told the children this morning is midrash from a book called Does God Have a Big Toe? Midrash is part of the Jewish tradition, where stories are told about the stories in the Bible. Christian tradition has leaned more toward allegory, as in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When the children do art work or role playing to re-tell the Bible story, they are doing creative midrash. We don’t usually tell them that’s what we’re doing, but we will sometime this year.
So much of Western culture has grown out of the Jewish and Christian tradition, that to be ignorant of the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian Bible is to lack an understanding of much of what is said and written in that culture. Michael Macrone’s lively book Brush Up Your Bible! is described on the cover as “an informative and entertaining guide to understanding the most famous words, phrases and stories of the Old and New Testament.” It lists more than 400 phrases commonly heard among us, even in the year 2001.
Some of them are:
Tree of Knowledge.
Flesh of my flesh.
Dust to dust.
Am I my brother’s keeper?
Land of Nod.
40 days and 40 nights.
Keys to the Kingdom.
Signs of the Times.
And there are more.
Are you “mad from too much learning?” See the book of Acts. Got “feet of clay, or a “thorn in your side.” Try Daniel 2:33 for the feet of clay, Numbers 33 to find out about the thorn. Know any “stiff-necked people”? Maybe they’re just being Biblical.
Many Unitarian Universalists, come outers from Judaism or traditional Christianity, are so steeped in Biblical lore that we don’t even think about where we got it. I attended Methodist Sunday School from the time I was a small child, and from the time I was about 10 I attended services as well. You pick up a lot of Bible that way! When I was very young, my family had Bible reading and prayer together every evening, although at some point this practice fell by the wayside. (I think that’s Biblical, too, isn’t it? To fall by the wayside…)
Now my parents were not sanctimonious about the Bible and we were not taught that it was to be taken literally. My father was raised half-Catholic, half-free thinker but had an interest in religion that led him to study scripture. My mother was the Protestant who had been brought up reading the Bible. But both my parents delighted in the song about “things that you’re liable to read in the Bible” from Porgy and Bess. You know the one I mean? I think the title is “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
My own children grew up in a congregation where, for quite some time, virtually no Biblical material was used in the religious education program. I think they were short-changed, because if you don’t get Bible at church or home, you won’t get much. We did go through a time at home where I read Bible stories with them, but kind of half-heartedly. My favorite book for that purpose was Bible Stories You Can’t Forget, No Matter How Hard You Try—I guess it was my parents’ influence! I’ll never forget the illustration for the story of Joseph being sold into slavery by his older brother; the camels in the caravan were dripping with goods to be sold, including toasters, electric irons, and so on. [I don’t know if one of them was Max, Glenda.]
My daughter, who grew up to be a religion major, recalls that we also let her attend Baptist summer Vacation Bible School, which made her really curious about the Bible. When she learned the topic of my sermon today, she said, “Why they should learn about the Bible? because it’s cool! It’s interesting; it’s history, and it’s full of great stories.” And, she added, “you can’t really understand the world we live in if you don’t know about the Bible.” I hope that our children downstairs are finding that learning about the Bible can be “cool” and that they will gain understanding of the world in which they live. This phone coversation made me wish, and not for the first time, that I had a ghost writer for my sermon.
We are using very few Bible stories for our younger children, although we will tell them the Christmas story. They just aren’t ready for the Bible until they have developed a bit of a sense of time and history.
There was a time when the Bible was read daily in our public schools, so many kids were exposed to it there. Happily our schools are now more secular, despite the efforts of many on the right. But this means that, although they may learn the myths of the Greeks and Romans, the myths of the northern Europeans, and the myths of the Native Americans and other Earth Centered people, they will not learn about the Jewish and Christian mythology which is so influential in our daily lives. They will hear references to it, of course, as it’s hard to avoid that!
English and American literature abound in Biblical references; often the titles of works are scriptural, giving the Biblically literate reader a hint about the theme and content and a richness of context. Some examples found on a few random bookshelves: Skin of Our Teeth, East of Eden, Inherit the Wind, Parting the Waters, The Other Side of Jordan…
The
Bible plays a large role in our folk and pop culture, as well. The song “Turn, Turn, Turn” is based
on that most famous passage from the book of Ecclesiastes: “For
everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: A time
to be born, a time to die, A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is
planted.”
“Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home…” and
“Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land…”
It is said that the early Universalists in New England arrived at their theological position by reading the Bible carefully. Most of us require some study aids! Biblical criticism has taken many approaches: historical, archaeological, form, literary, redactic, and so on. We can learn much about this interesting library of books by reading works that use the different approaches.
Historical and archaeological research continue to give us new insights. “Literary criticism deals with units of the Bible, and with the historical settings in which the writings occurred” and focuses on the various documents and their probably sources. “Form criticism deals with an earlier preliterary form of the story.”[Literary Criticism of the Old Testament.] For a long time the New Testament, or Christian scriptures, were considered so straight-forward (except maybe the book of Revelations) that these writings were not subject to the intense scrutiny and criticism as the Old Testament, or Hebrew Scriptures.
That has changed.
Redaction criticism, according to Norman Perrin, is “the discipline concerned with theological motivation of an author as it is revealed in the collection, arragmeent, editing and modification of of traditional material or the creation of new forms within the traditions of early Christianity.”
Long before the field of “higher criticism” was formed, Thomas Jefferson had his own approach to the Bible; he created one by cutting and pasting the words of Jesus which he (Jefferson) believed to be authentic. In an article in the Post last summer, Richard N. Ostling says, “It must have been a peculiar sight: The author of the Declaration of Independence, seated in his Monticello mansion, cutting the Bible into pieces” and goes on to mention the reissuance of The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, by publisher Beacon Press, of the Unitarian Universalist Association. The same article quotes Nathan O. Hatch, a historian and provost of the University of Notre Dame as saying he thinks “aspects of Jefferson’s attitude were widely shared by Christians in the early decades of the American republic.”
Biblical criticism has mostly been done by scholars working in theological seminaries, many of which are connected to particular denominations and where it has not always been easy to strongly counter beliefs held by the faithful of that group.
In recent years the Jesus Seminar, a group of Biblical scholars, all of whom can read the Bible in one or more of its original tongues, has been at work. They read and study and debate and then vote on what they think Jesus actually said. They color code the results, showing the words of Jesus in red, pink, blue or black, depending on how likely they think it is that Jesus actually said those words.
In addition to their books, they offer traveling workshops, some of which are held in Unitarian Universalist churches. One will be offered at the Silver Spring church later this church year. Westar Institute is the name of their group, and Polebridge Press their publisher. I have two of their books here today: The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? And The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do? They have published a religious education curriculum Kingdom of Equals, created by Cheryl Gibbs Binkley and Jane McKeel of our Arlington church. This is not the curriculum we are using, as it is for a more closely graded group of older children.
Alter and Kermode’s The Literary Guide to the Bible notes that “most educated modern readers” know of the Bible’s “central importance in the history of the culture they have inherited” but it is also “a miscellany of documents containing ancient stories, poems, laws, prophecies, which most of us cannot even read in the original languages.” They note that if we are English speakers we “probably know [it] best …in an English that was already archaic when the King James…Version was published in 1611, and may now often seem distant and exotic.” It also seems poetic and literary, something like Shakespeare. Many people who read the Bible religiously will not consider any other version.
One of the points we want to make with our children is that there is no one fixed authoritative version, and that all of those which come into our hands are translations, sometimes several times removed. Selection and editing have been done in every case, although it is not ordinarily color-coded.
As a historical document, the Old Testament gives us a backdrop for insight about some of the long-standing enmities in the Middle East. The news these days is giving us a crash course in Western Religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Muslims have called these three faiths “People of the Book” because all find the stories of the origins of their faiths in the Bible, and all revere it.
Of course Islam has a further revelation in the Koran. Most Jews, Christians, and Unitarian Universalists don’t have much background in study of the Koran. Maybe that will change as people of good will work together for greater understanding of each other and of all peoples.
For many, the Bible is a source of great inspiration, of comfort, of healing and hope. Even if some of us do not find it to be so, perhaps our children will, having been introduced to it while young.
If I have encouraged you toward learning more about the Bible, I hope you will “press toward the mark,” “fight the good fight,” read “the writing on the wall,” “put your house in order,” pour some old wine in your new wineglasses, “break bread” and Brush Up on Your Bible! From “alpha to omega.”
And if your children are learning more than you are, “spare the rod,” “treat them with tender mercies and loving-kindness.” Be not “the blind leading the blind,” for “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”