After presenting a webinar on “Reclaiming the Bible for Progressive Christians” for the Progressive Christian Network of Victoria recently, I was asked a few additional questions by email. Those questions and my responses to them may be of wider interest.
As you questioned why anyone should want a Bible for a child it can be assumed you are not recommending biblical content for children.
My question concerned why anyone would want to give a Bible to a child, which is not quite the same thing as ensuring that children have some familiarity with the key biblical stories and characters. We want them to have some basic biblical literacy, but the Bible is an adult book and represents rather complex hermeneutical challenges when used in a very different culture far removed by time and geography from its origins.
As a parallel, we can assume that people such as Jesus were familiar with the stories from the Hebrew Bible (not least because the names of his siblings are all drawn from the Torah, suggesting a family with some knowledge of and commitment to the story). Yet people such as Jesus and his family were most likely illiterate and—since they were not in the social elite—would not have had the resources to acquire and study a copy of the Torah.
This is a tough nut to crack, as Christian educators know very well. Simplified versions of key biblical texts are surely part of the spiritual repertoire of children within a family that practises its faith. But encouraging children to read the Bible itself, seems (to me) to be rather inappropriate. Of course we can also use art, drama and music to convey the essential <?> biblical content without expecting kids to read a Bible.
And who reads a book these days, in any case?
Surely the move to digital texts will impact how everyone engages with the Bible? (But that is a different topic.)
You were commendatory about the Lectionary because it removed selection of preaching focus from a worship leader in favour of the presented content of the lectionary. The question is: Why privilege 20 to 30 year old writings (with many assumptions peculiar in light of science and modern thought generally) above a well informed and qualified contemporary worship leader?
I am simply not as negative towards the lectionary, in any of its forms, as you seem to be.
We are not reading the lectionary, we are using the lectionary as a map to read selected portions of the Bible week by week in the gathered assembly of the faithful. I would not describe the RCL as “20 to 30 years old writings” (in fact it is more like 50 years old now), as everyone uses some filtering system. Not even the most fundamentalist preacher reads the whole of the Bible from Genesis through to Revelation week after week. Everyone makes selections. The RCL is reliable ecumenical example. For me, ecuemncial is always better than denominational, and denominational is always better than individual minister.
I am not so sure that we have that many “well-informed and qualified contemporary worship leaders” around these days. Your comments possibly reflect a UCA context, but Anglicans and Catholics tend to follow the order for the Eucharist with the CL/RCL readings. The art of leading people in worship, for me, is not creating new content but using traditional content creatively in the quest for spiritual wisdom. In the liturgical tradition of the Great Church, a lectionary is simply part of the liturgical landscape. I realise that is a different universe from what used to be called the Free Churches, let alone the wannabe megachurch startups.
Maybe your disinclination for any lectionary other than the pastor’s personal choice of texts, ultimately stems from a Methodist culture where neither Prayer Book nor Lectionary were highly valued? For me as an Anglican, I listen to the Church and I am happy to be guided in my menu of Bible readings by a lectionary. I prefer the RCL to the one-year cycle of BCP, but there has always been a system for reading the Bible. Even in the 1C, the synagogues seem to have had a lectionary of sorts as they read the Torah in 50+ portions and related those readings with a set of passages from the Prophets. Our oldest existing Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, is already marked up into portions for readings. That is a lectionary, in effect.
For me the spiritual hierarchy is: Church > Prayer Book > Lectionary.
I receive the lectionary as a gift from the church and as an invitation to listen to more of Scripture each week than I may otherwise have chosen to do.
Continuing that question: What parts of the ancient biblical writings are sufficiently relevant to living today to feature as basic to being Christian? As church leaders have to make decisions about what to offer for the education of adolescents and adults, what are the priority parts of the Bible you recommend for church study/exploration programs?
I think is an impossible question to answer.
All of Scripture is basic for Christianity, but various parts of Scripture are more relevant to different people and communities across time and in various contexts. What matters more to me is how we read the ancient texts, not which ancient text we should read. I suggest that we need to read them all, and engage with critical minds in every case. We are not looking for information, but for wisdom. That can be derived from a ghastly biblical passage just as much as from a beautiful passage.
If there is to be a canon within the canon, which is more or else what your question implies, then for me it is the Gospel, and the Synoptic Gospels in particular. Most weeks my preaching is centred on the Gospel passage, with the OT and Epistles being viewed through the lens of Jesus. Occasionally I will focus on a non-Gospel reading, but I usually bringing it into some relationship with the wisdom of Jesus that we know from the Gospels.
There are some biblical passages I would never read in worship and others that I can use only with an explicit disclaimer. Again, what is suitable for use in worship may be different from what is suitable for a Bible study group where we have more time to engage with the hermeneutical process, and that is different again from what we may do in a Biblical Studies class within the University.
I hope these comments are helpful. They are not so much “answers” to questions, as—with hindsight—they seem more like reflections on the difference between the culture of the historic liturgical tradition and the Free Church tradition.
Thanks Greg,
Our congregations sort themselves very markedly on the ways in which they overtly or covertly read or hear the Bible. In a study group this becomes most obvious and can be difficult to negotiate without causing damage or hurt.
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