Evaluating the Teaching Significance of Biblical Literature

Abstract

HE common assumption of churchschool teachers that some teaching of the Bible is basic to achievement of character consonant with Jesus' attitudes toward life has of late come under scrutiny again, chiefly for two reasons: (1) the abysmal ignorance of many adults as to both meaning and content of the Bible in spite of past emphasis upon its study, and (2) the seemingly contradictory evidence that such teaching as lies in the Bible, long time asserted to be germane, even necessary, to the achievement of good character, has nevertheless not eventuated in a truly good society nor in a much higher level of conduct among church people than among those outside its sphere of influence. These suggest serious lack of skillful methology in the presentation of the biblical literature, the absence of the assumed values in the literature, and/or its presentation in such terms as not to make its germaneness to present-day life evident in such a degree as to provide guidance in living. Perhaps the primary difficulty stems from the assumption of the value of biblical literature for the guidance of human life without examination into the evidence. The reason for this unexamined assumption has doubtless been the inheritance now through some centuries of the idea of the authority of the Bible. That idea has become for a large section of Protestantism the bulwark of their security as a foil to the Roman Catholic emphasis upon the authority of the church. It is perhaps one of the strangest anomalies of human history that Protestantism which began with a primary emphasis upon the experiential aspect of religious awareness of God by the individual should have very shortly denied its basic tenet, which had its roots both in the prophets of Judaism and in the teaching of Jesus, and have substituted for it an authoritarianism of biblical literature;-in this, making even less appeal to the rationale of human history and the evidence of verifiable living than had Roman Catholicism in its exaltation of the church as authority. The teaching value of the Bible must be predicated upon the patent fact that all literature is but frozen experience, actual deali s of real persons with the world of deity, m n, and events, caught and congealed in the language and thought forms of time when the matters under consideration were written