On Biblische Ausbildung, Steve Cook responded to my comments on teaching the Bible with or without theology. Since I have found an Internet cafe in Kiev that is closer to my apartment, I thought I would take this chance to respond.

Steve writes:

In your most recent post, Kevin, it sounds like in your course you propose to bracket discussion of whether we should affirm or deny what the Bible is witnessing to about the suprahistorical. It just seems to me that the study of the Bible begs such a discussion, or at least a little of it. Don’t you think God is laughing out loud if we insist on bracketing this most interesting and obvious discussion, and narrow our scope to the tilt of the letters, smell of the paper, and type of stylus used in the writing?

While I am fascinated by issues of ductus, I don’t completely limit my scope to such mundane matters. But when I say I don’t teach the class from a theological angle, what I mean is that I do not raise theological questions myself. I let the students — or more precisely the text — raise those questions. When they come up in class, I address them. I also encourage students to discuss the questions with me outside of class if they want more in depth discussion.

This is, to a certain extent, what Chris Brady is suggesting at Targuman (if I am reading him correctly). He points out that the students often have different concerns than scholars have. He encourages us to engage the students’ questions, and this is what I do. But the text will only raise questions in the students once they know its content, and the content is where I focus. This allows the students to bring up the issues themselves, which is somehow a more organic approach.

But it seems to me that there are parts of the text that won’t necessarily bring up theological questions in the students. One example is the Deuteronomist’s desacralizing of the killing of animals (necessitated by Dtr’s insistence that sacrifices only be done in Jerusalem). So far, none of my students have come up with any pressing theological issue because of this text. Does this mean I should ignore such passages in the intro classes? If I do, then it seems I am simply flipping through the Bible to find the “important” texts, i.e., those that will raise theological questions. Shouldn’t I instead focus on the shape of the canonical text? Within the canon, desacralization is an important part of Deuteronomy’s program.

Since this topic appears to be one of interest to a number of us in the biblioblogosphere, I wanted to point out an SBL session that I just noticed. It is the SBL Forum Session: Faith in the Classroom (S19-129, 4:00 pm - 6:30 pm, Sunday). This is in addition to the several sections on this topic already pointed out by Chris Brady, including one where he is presenting a paper. Perhaps after listening to all of those papers, those of us who are bibliobloggers should get together for a beer and some face-to-face debate discussion.

N.B. This discussion for me is entirely related to my introductory classes. In upper level courses, I approach theology more directly. But in the intro classes I teach here at LCC, the majority of students (70%-80%) are not Christian or any other faith tradition. They were born in the Soviet period and raised in a post-Soviet context, so many of them see the Bible as unimportant. Part of the reason for my approach is that I don’t want to overwhelm them with theology up front and have them completely reject what the Bible has to say. I think it is even more important for them that I allow the text to raise the issues.

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