I enjoyed my church's Bible study last night. We're going through Margaret Feinberg's Scouting the Divine: Searching for God in Wine, Wool, and Wild Honey.
Something
that I appreciate about Feinberg's curriculum is that its questions are
truly open-ended. For instance, one question in our workbook was
whether we think that Jesus in Matthew 7 was contradicting himself when
he told us not to judge, right before he said that we know whether
prophets are true or false by their fruits. Not surprisingly, most of
the people there did not believe that there was a contradiction. One
lady said that we are to be discerning but not judgmental, and her point
may have been that we should be careful about whom we trust and yet we
shouldn't be condemning people or presuming to know everything about
them.
I wouldn't be surprised if I'd be a little out of place in the group were I to say that Jesus did contradict himself. But
what impressed me was that, as far as I could see (and I have not seen
the Teacher's manual), Margaret Feinberg did not provide us with some
canned attempt to forcefully harmonize the passages. Rather, she let us
come up with an answer. She did not tell us what to think, but she encouraged us to think.
I had a different impression when I went through a Kay Arthur Bible
study, for I felt that I was being told what to think in that case.