Computer issues the last couple of weeks...sorry for the delay...Ellie :
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv1677860961 #yiv1677860961templateBody .yiv1677860961mcnTextContent, #yiv1677860961 #yiv1677860961templateBody .yiv1677860961mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv1677860961 #yiv1677860961templateFooter .yiv1677860961mcnTextContent, #yiv1677860961 #yiv1677860961templateFooter .yiv1677860961mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } Should we even bother with it at all ...?
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How much should we teach
our children about the Bible?
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| Essay by Cindy Wang Brandt
October 10, 2019 The Bible is one of the most dangerous texts in human history.
Some of the most egregious acts in civilization find their justification in Scripture, from genocide to slavery to deadly homophobia. History proves that the Bible, read with nefarious hermeneutics, in the hands of powerful figures can cause catastrophe. Perhaps this is why many of us are nervous about how to approach the Bible with children and teens. The stakes feel high, like handing a loaded gun to a toddler. If you have any dose of humility about our limitations with engaging the text, you know this is a weighty task.
How much should we teach our children about the Bible?
What stories should we highlight? Avoid?
When and what developmental stage do we introduce historical context? Genre? Translation?
What hermeneutical lens do we give them? In what community?
Should we even bother with it at all if the Bible isn’t a children’s book?
I think a lot of us wrestle with these questions because of our own discomfort with the Holy Text. Fundamentalists have no problems teaching the Bible to their kids, they happily institute Bible memorization routines at home and endorse sword drills at Sunday School. When you believe the Bible is written by a puppeteering God moving the hands of biblical authors to write down literal facts, you don’t teach the Bible to children with nuance.
But for those of us who desire a deeper conversation on the truth and authority of the Bible, we need clarity on our own relationship with it to help guide our children. When it comes to the Bible, just like in all other areas of faith and parenting, the best course of action isn’t to hand neat packages of certain answers to them, but to strive for as much honesty as we can. This builds trust and gives our children permission to respond with equal measure of authenticity, not only in their relationship to you but their own faith journey.
The reality is that we all land on different points along a spectrum when it comes to the amount of meaning and authority and impact we ascribe to the Bible. The Bible as we know it today was birthed by a group of believers who agreed together to confer and submit the ultimate authority to a particular set of books, thereby canonizing it.
To use a parenting metaphor, when a person adopts a child, how true is it that the child is now that person’s child? It is as true as the level of reverence one ascribes to the adoption laws of the land, as well as the amount of meaning they give to any rituals of adoption.
The Bible may not contain literal facts of say, when the earth was formed or historical genealogies, but it is as true as it can be for a mother to claim a non-biological child as her own.
As much as the Bible has the capacity to harm, it can also have the capacity to heal and to do good. The text is a “living word,” because the person and the community they are situated in, are living human beings who engage in the task of interpretation. One of the things I have learned from the rich traditions of liberation theologies is that the text can be used to set people free. Feminist readings of the Bible reveal the work of women invisibilized by the text, and empower women to “take back” the text for their own thriving. Childist readings do the same for children.
What liberation theologies teach us is that when traditionally marginalized voices join in the task of interpreting Scripture, it opens the text up to revealing biases against oppressed people groups, it gives us permission to tell biblical stories in subversive ways, and it has the tremendous power to upset the status quo, resulting in better theology, more just societies, and a more fulfilling personal transformation.
When we consider how to “teach” the Bible to children, the foremost question we should be asking is: are we inviting children, a people group whose personhood and human rights have only been recognized by the United Nations as recently as 1989, into the hermeneutical task? Are communities of faith willing to boldly give children as much power as they need when it comes to approaching the Bible?
This means making ample space for children to interrogate the text, not only in curious inquisition about the details of the stories, but to pronounce judgments of it. It’s nothing short of gaslighting to tell a child they cannot say “the Bible is wrong,” should they point out some of the blatantly violent acts of biblical characters, including God.
Including children in the hermeneutical task also means allowing them to re-tell traditional stories in ways that benefit them instead of the many ways the Bible brutalizes children. The near sacrifice of Isaac is a classic text of terror against children—that a father would treat his son the way Abraham treated Isaac is abusive and requires condemnation or a subversive re-telling.
A dialogue with a ten-year-old with their mother went like this, according to an epigraph of the book, “The Children of Israel,”
“Mom, asked the ten-year-old, “can anyone write a Bible?”
“Hmmm…that’s an interesting question. Why do you ask?”
“Because I have some important things to say about God, and I think I’d like to write a Bible.”
“Well, I suppose you could write one. The real question would be, would other people want to read it?”
“Why wouldn’t they want to read it? I know a lot about God and the way people ought to treat each other.”
“Do you think your perspective on these things would be significantly different from that of the Bible we read in church?”
“Mom, really! Just how many ten-year-olds do you think helped write that?”
If we are wanting the Bible to be authoritative in any measure for our children, we better ensure they play an equal part in the task of interpretation. In fact, given children’s position of vulnerability in the world, we would do well to afford them even more access and power in order to tip a scale heavily weighted against them.
Having established that we are willing to invite children into full engagement with the text, the question remains how we initiate that process.
The three main factors to take into consideration is:
- The child’s temperament,
- The parents in establishment of the family’s values,
- The various communities the child inhabits.
A child’s temperament would indicate their particular desires for exploration of faith and the texts and traditions that shape the faith. This would help determine how much and how early you want to introduce the Bible to them. It would also help the parent discern whether to introduce images and stories that may be violent. I know many people, myself included, who were traumatized by images of the crucifixion because it was exposed to us at too tender of an age. I think children have remarkable resilience for gritty stories, and we certainly should strive to be as honest as possible about hard topics like death, sacrifice, and evil. But the way we introduce these topics require sensitivity to children’s anxieties, always offering tools to provide security and belonging in addition to tackling hard issues. Protect and guide our children into the world of Scripture, as you would in gentle leadership of their other experiences of life.
How early and how often you want to incorporate Scripture into your family life depends on the parents’ relationship with the Bible. If it is part of your everyday routine or weekly/seasonal ritual, or drives your personal values as well as your hopes for your family’s values, then I imagine the Bible would very early on become part of the conversations you have with your child. As I referenced in the introduction, often we are fearful of exposing children to such a complicated text because of our own spiritual baggage of witnessing the damage it can inflict if not treated carefully. But fear is only one of many factors we consult in making parenting decisions. To keep our children from participating in something that means a lot to us feels unnatural and unnecessary.
However, sharing faith and Scripture is simply that. It is offering the children an invitation to your priorities without any coercion that it needs to be theirs. It’s fair and just to maintain a posture of both inclusion and autonomy in our family relationships. Claim however much value you ascribe to the Bible and share it honestly with your child, always with the addendum that they can grow into their own relationship with it.
Lastly, our children operate in multiple spheres of life, increasingly so as they grow and move outward beyond your family unit. And because the Bible is read in conjunction with the community we inhabit, it’s good to remember that our children will engage with the text from the influences of more than one community.
This means we can teach our children one way of reading the Bible, with lots of permission to argue with the text as I suggest, and they may go out and see a billboard proof-texting a verse threatening people to hell, and that too becomes part of our children’s hermeneutical lens. They may hear a story told a certain way at the Baptist VBS, and hear a whole other interpretation from their atheist teacher from school.
To me, that’s generally a good thing, because multiplicity of interpretations provide somewhat of a check and balance to one dogmatic way, the danger of a single story, as author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns. But it requires us to be aware and intentional about curating our children’s worlds. For example, I would be reticent to send my child to an interpretive community that does not allow them to question the Bible, or I would be sure to counter balance it with extra time and space to deconstruct that violation of their autonomy. Most importantly, I would want to give them the tools I have at my disposal to engage critically themselves as they begin to operate in the various arenas of their influence.
Before I conclude this article, I’d be remiss to not address people/parents who have experienced personal trauma by Scripture. I think of LGBTQ folks who have been “clobbered” by a handful of verses to extensive harm. There are many ways (& many books!) to establish a loving relationship with your children and open them up to a world of critical thinking and engagement with the world, you certainly do not need to pick up the instrument of your trauma. I hope that one day, according to your healing timeline, you’ll be able to share even this painful story of your encounter with Scripture with your children so they may know of the dark ways Scripture is wielded for harm, as well as appreciating the many ways you are breaking the cycle of your past pain for their flourishing.
Because if there is one thing I hope to impart to my own children about the Bible, it’s that nothing written on paper ever matters more than living human stories. ~ Cindy Wang Brandt
Read online here
About the Author
Cindy Wang Brandt is a progressive Christian writer, but she has not always identified as progressive. In fact, she grew up conservative evangelical and was a career missionary for 5 and a half years. Cindy's experienced a radical faith shift and writes often about how that shapes who she is today. Along the way, she became a parent. Trying to navigate parenting when your faith has and is evolving has been complicated—but nobody ever said parenting is easy. However, she is convinced that one of the best ways we can make an impact in the world is to invest in the slow, unseen labor of cultivating values of hospitality, creativity, equality, social justice, and deep spirituality in the next generation. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Tom
One of the reasons I wanted to reread his book was to see if I could get a different viewpoint on being a Christian within the “church.” I am still flummoxed as to why Bishop Spong is a Christian. He appears to be more of a humanist (non-capitalized).
Why is the Bible sacred? It’s like a compendium of authors writing over a thousand years. And, yes, they all seem to be writing about a supernatural entity. But that’s because the only early writers tended to be either state actors or religious leaders.
The other reason I read the book was that I started out as a Billy Graham=born-again Presbyterian, moved into atheism, then pantheism, and recently back as an atheist. I am still searching. No one has the answers. If someone could assist me in explaining rationally what makes Bishop Spong a Christian, I would be very grateful.
A: By Rev. Gretta Vosper
Dear Tom, I understand your confusion around Bishop Spong’s claim to be a Christian and hope that I can help you lay the quandary aside.
You see, I am a Christian, too. But I’m also an atheist. And I have been an atheist for most of my life, though I didn’t claim the term until several years ago. Few, these days, would be comfortable hearing me identify as a Christian, and I don’t do it publicly very often. They believe there needs to be a defining line: you’re this or you’re that; you cannot be both.
But Jack and I refuse that line. I grew up in the church, too, though my belief system developed far more loosely than either yours or Jack’s. My Christian upbringing was decidedly in the camp yours would have dismissed or maligned as unChristian or heretical. My Sunday School curriculum taught me that God was love and Jesus was this cool guy who taught us that we needed to love one another. As a teenager, I delighted in the psychedelic “Live Love” stickers and adorned my school binders with them. When I entered theological college as an adult, I was relieved when my studies provided the foundations over which my beliefs had already been floating: the Bible was a collection of stories which, as you’ve noted in your question, were written by many different people over millennia; God was a concept we needed to wrestle with as we formulated our own truths; and Jesus was a man who lived a long time ago and taught us some challenging and interesting things, but wasn’t perfect. None of us are.
The stories of Christianity, indeed the stories of all religions, are woven and wrapped around human truths; it isn’t the other way ‘round, as many religions continue to proclaim. Awe and wonder, conviction and repentance, gratitude and appreciation, sorrow, lament, and need: all these are human truths and human realities. Over the course of our history, in every corner of the world, we’ve sought solace and encouragement, meaning and destiny. We’ve done it through the tools our religions have handed us, simply because they were there for that use.
Jack and I know those tools inside and out; Jack much more intimately and comprehensively than I. We see the world through the templates of Christianity. We engage with it through the roots of our faith. While my congregation no longer celebrates Palm Sunday or Easter, we live the Biblical story that was woven of the truths and metaphors that reside at the heart of human existence: the dreams we have and the elation we know when we achieve them; the desolation of rejection and betrayal when they crash against the violence of reality; and the gift that it is, for each one of us, when we pick up the thread of someone else’s broken dream – an end to violence against women; the forgiveness of crippling national debt; the fight for the future of our planet – and carry it forward. These are basic themes of the human journey; Christianity got them right when they wove the story of persecution, passion, death, and resurrection. The stories bring us back to face and accept those truths in our own lives.
Jack’s world is informed, as is mine, by those stories. For decades now, he has looked beneath them and worked to untangle the threads that have held them together. And at the end of his work, he has, every time, grasped the one thread that was worthy of you and me and humanity and lifted it up, offering it to us to hold and use as we will. He calls himself a Christian because he lives his life through the stories to which his life was and remains bound. I am so grateful for his efforts there and for the gift and permission he has given to me to do so as well. ~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
Read and share online here
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of the Bible, Part IV:
The Story of the Yahwist Document
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
April 9, 2008
Thus far in this series on the origins of the Bible, my efforts have been directed toward how the Torah, which contains the oldest material found in the Bible, came into being. The Torah, also called “The Law” and “The Books of Moses,” is the Jewish name for the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Their creation in the world of literature did not happen the way many people today seem to think. No one, including Moses, simply sat down and started writing. In fact, the Torah was written over a period of about 500 years by a series of authors. Many of the stories told in this part of the Bible were a combination of myths, folk tales and political propaganda with only the slightest bit, if any, of actual historical memory. The opening biblical stories from Adam and Eve through the flood have absolutely no connection with history, despite the fact that some of the world’s more foolish people still try to locate the Noah’s ark on Mt Ararat. The first shred of history appears in the Abraham story and it is slight indeed. If a person named Abraham lived at all it would have been about 900 years or 45 generations prior to the writing of the Abraham story in the book of Genesis. Moses, the greatest hero in the Jewish story, lived about 300 years or 15 generations before the Moses narratives in were written in Exodus and as many as 700 years before the Moses stories that appear in Deuteronomy.
This means that most of these biblical accounts are not history at all, at least not in any technical sense, but are rather interpretive folk lore. That needs to be said again and again. Even after constant repetition it is hard to make this truth heard, since most people have grown up in the power of 2000 years of literalization that continues to affect our reasoning today. In this column, I want to trace in more detail the beginning of what is called “The Yahwist Document” that scholars today designate as the oldest part of the Torah and thus the oldest part of the biblical story. Writing history, which is what the Torah purported to be, is an activity that normally starts only when a nation has become established and secure enough to begin to look at itself with some objectivity. While the Jews were fleeing Egypt, journeying through the wilderness, or invading and conquering the land of the Canaanites, there was little time or interest in transforming its experienced history into a written narrative. It is also important to note that in the ancient world, one who could write was first of all rare, a skill possessed in the tenth century BCE in the Middle East by less than one tenth of one percent of the entire population. Thus the one who wrote this first part of the Torah can be accurately presumed to have been high in either government or ecclesiastical circles. Writing also required considerable wealth, or at least access to wealth, since both parchment and ink were very expensive. We can assume, therefore, that both education and wealth were the marks of this original author of biblical material. Inevitably, such a person would reflect the attitudes and biases of the ruling classes which he represented. I use the word “he” not to be insensitive, but to recognize the fact that in this period of history the privileges of education and status had simply not yet been conferred upon women. The Yahwist Document got its name from the fact that this narrative referred to God by the name Yahweh (YHWH), the name it claimed had been revealed to Moses at the “burning bush.” Those letters in Hebrew were in some way identified with the verb “to be” and it was translated in the book of Exodus to mean, “I am that I am.” Since the verb “to be” is the foundation verb of any language, it seemed to be a fitting name for the deity who was regarded as the foundation of the tribe’s identity. When this strand of material is lifted out of the Torah and separated from the later strands, its historical setting becomes immediately visible. The Jewish nation has been established. Saul, the first king, a member of the tribe of Benjamin, had been unable to secure his throne. The narrative describes Saul as a melancholy, depressed man, who could not unite the various tribes of Israel. When all of Saul’s sons, save for a crippled child, were killed along with the King in a battle against the Philistines at Mt. Giboa, his throne was claimed by his military captain, a man named David. It is David who is the clear hero of this Yahwist writer. David was portrayed as chosen by God and anointed by the prophet Samuel to be king of the Jews at a very early age, indeed while still a shepherd boy keeping the flocks of his father Jesse. Heroic tales had obviously gathered around him in the memory of the people as tends to happen to a popular leader. It was said of the young David that he had killed a lion, a bear and finally that he had killed Goliath, a Philistine. When David moved to claim the throne for himself, the Yahwist writer suggests that he immediately instituted a series of political moves to solidify that claim and to win popular support. He ordered a national time for mourning the deaths of King Saul and his sons, punished anyone who appeared to take pleasure in Saul’s demise and made plans to conquer the city of the Jebusites, called Jerusalem, to make it his new capital. If he was going to unite the disparate tribes of Israel into a single political entity he needed a neutral city as a symbol of that new unity into which he intended to call the people of his nation. These tactics appeared to work. With his power at home firmly established, David began to expand his realm with a series of military victories. In the final test for a monarch, David completed a forty year reign and then was able to pass his throne on to his son Solomon, thus establishing the continuity of his nation in a continuing royal family. Among his last acts according to this narrative was to delegate to his son Solomon the task of building the Temple in Jerusalem, which would make that city not just the political, but also the spiritual capital of the Jewish people. With these three institutions now established, the throne of David, the city of Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon that was finished in the first decade of King Solomon’s rule, the time was right for someone to set this nation into the stream of history by telling their national story. That was the setting in which a court historian, perhaps a member of the royal family, perhaps a priest associated with the Temple, or perhaps someone who was both, was commissioned, probably by the king, to write the history of this Hebrew nation. This is how the first strand of that material, which would later be called “Sacred Scripture,” came into being. The date was some time around the year 950 BCE. Solomon had been on the throne for about a decade. The Jewish people had become wealthy because tribute money from David’s conquests was now flowing into Jerusalem. This part of the Middle East was at peace. The Temple, thought to be God’s earthly dwelling place, was complete and the life of the nation was widely believed to be resting safely in the arms of its two protectors, God and the King. This was the time to write the story of their origins. So the work of the Yahwist writer was begun. When his story was complete, the image of Israel as God’s chosen people was secure. It was buttressed by the claims made in this narrative. They were basically three: God had chosen the House of David, and thus the tribe of Judah, to rule over the chosen people, the will of God was expressed through the Temple in which God lived as a protective presence, and the high priest specifically and the Temple priesthood in general were alone designated to order the religious life of the nation as the sign of God’s continuous blessing. As soon as this narrative was complete, it began to be read as part of the liturgy of the people gathered in the Temple for worship, as is the destiny of all sacred scripture. In that process this narrative with its power claims achieved the status of being “God’s revealed truth.” This idea was certainly encouraged by the priesthood, who were well served as the aura of sanctity began to grow around these words. It also served the interests of the royal family since what came to be called “God’s Word” affirmed their divine right to rule. The role of Jerusalem in the national life of the Jews as a symbol of the people’s unity was established. In this manner the vested interests of each of Jerusalem’s power centers were solidified. The Jewish people, so recently a loose knit confederation ruled by local judges and worshiping at shrines located in Hebron, Beersheba and Bethel, now found unity in a new federation that was being imposed on them as nothing less than an expression of the will of God. In a world in which there was no division between Church and State (i.e. religion and politics), this first text to become part of the scriptures of the people was in fact a very political document. By tracing the Jewish story from creation to the call of Abraham, this narrative had gone from the universal beginning of human history to the dawn of their own national history. By relating the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph this narrative established, as both legitimate and moral, the Jewish claim to the land that they had in fact conquered. By incorporating the ancient shrines of Hebron, Beersheba and Bethel into their story they identified the religious traditions of the past with a new center in Jerusalem, which was their ultimate and grander successor. By telling the story of the noble history of the Jews prior to falling into slavery in Egypt, this narrative rebuilt their national reputation. It was political propaganda at its best, a powerful and effective attempt to define what it meant to be a Jew, a member of the “Chosen People.” What would happen, however, if and when the Jewish nation was ever to be divided in civil war? Such a rebellion would have to be against the scriptures as well as against the Temple and the King. That was destined to occur sometime after 920 and the death of Solomon. That was when the second strand of material that composes the Torah today came into being. To that story, I will turn when this series continues. ~ John Shelby Spong |
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