Modernity worships factuality. It reduces life to facts. Mystery and wonder are relegated to "entertainment". Moderns know "the price of everything and the value of nothing" (as Oscar Wilde2 said).
No wonder, then if the Bible is important it must be full of facts, or if it must be dethroned then it must be full of errors! This is the student's approach to the Bible, examine, test and discuss it's facticity. How different the reader! Julia quotes James Joyce3:
[in reading novels,] we walk through ourselves meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.Readers of the Bible "walk through themselves" and in doing so not only meet themselves, but also meet God. What we need is more readers and less students of the Bible. For all students meet is information. But there's the paradox, our profession produces Bible students
Dare we, dare I, adapt the way we teach so that we may be less good at developing biblical scholars, but better at producing Bible readers?
This post is an expansion of a comment I left on Julia's blog.
1. In "Le texte biblique et le contexte africain" Revue Zaïroise Théologie Protestante II, 1988, 11-17, I argued that "conservative and "liberal" approaches to the Bible "la trahissent au nom de l'histoire" [betray the Bible in the name of history].
2. Wilde, Oscar, and Joseph Bristow. The picture of Dorian Gray. Oxford University Press, 2006, 42. (Bristow notes that Wilde adapted this pithy saying in Lady Windemere's Fan two years later, so he was perhaps as fond of it as later generations have been ;)
3. James Joyce, Ulysses. The Modern Library Edition. New York: Random House, 1934, p. 210
Labels: bible, bible.reading, biblical.studies, literature
¶ 7:02 AM
[to Del.icio.us]
As I get ready to start a new semester of teaching Introduction to Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, I'm thinking about how the learning can help people be better readers rather than "students" in the way you describe. How can the focus shift from skills and competencies to helping folks learn things that aid in appreciation and recognition?
By 
Julia M. O'Brien, at
September 2, 2009 12:38 AM
I posted my reply to this post and some of the comments on Jim West's blog in a new post: Commenting on the Comments. http://juliamobrien.net
By Julia M. O'Brien, at
September 2, 2009 3:39 AM
Julia, I think skills and competencies are important, it is just that we focus on the wrong set. But (I think) worse than the "learning outcomes" are the "content" I include in class time and the assessments I use. Largely inherited from the past these elements of the course direct too much attention to history and/or ideology and too little to the literary working of the texts.
I have recently taught in two loci that in different ways put pressure on me to teach like that:
- in a denominational college (of a conservative Protestant family of churches) pressure from students interested in "defending" the Bible
- in a "secular" university pressure from colleagues to avoid anything that smacks too much of a religious approach
between the two reading oneself in reading the text seems to get left as casualty by the wayside.
By 
Tim, at
September 2, 2009 6:00 AM
Tim, I share your hunch that we spend too much time on "content" in the classroom. A lot of stuff I've been reading lately suggests that content is actually delivered better on-line than in person. What face-face interaction is best for is discussion and interaction. But, at the same time, I find that fewer and fewer students know the basic content of biblical stories and often aren't able to get that by their own reading of this often difficult text.
By Julia M. O'Brien, at
September 2, 2009 12:52 PM
Oh, yes, I agree, content is easy to deliver, on the web, in a textbook... that's why increasingly I relegate "content" to outside the classroom and test it's acquisition using simple online computer-marked quizzes. That way we can try to develop higher order skills and understanding in slass time :)
By Tim, at
September 6, 2009 7:03 AM
