This post is about what my church will do next for its Bible study. I
was going to do a series, but I've decided not to do so, unless you can
count two posts as a series!
As I said
yesterday, one curriculum that we were looking at was essentially an
apologetic for the Bible: an attempt to defend the Bible's
divine-inspiration from detractors. My problem with that is
that I don't think that one can prove the Bible's divine-inspiration.
Not only can evidence be interpreted in a multitude of ways, but how
would one even prove that God inspired a document? You'd first have to
prove that there's a God!
Dr. Daniel Wallace appears in the documentary, and I ordered one of his books
because I'd like to consider his arguments and perhaps blog through
them. But I'd prefer to do that in the privacy of my own home rather
than in a group. In terms of Bible study groups, I don't like
to be beaten over the head with apologetics, but rather I prefer to
encounter the Bible in its beauty. I feel that I have more free will in
the latter case, for I am given the latitude to respond to the Bible in
light of the beauty of its message, rather than being forced to accept
the Bible because someone presented an argument that I can't refute at
the moment. When I encounter apologetics, my mind races to
find ways to refute the argument in an attempt to preserve my freedom,
or I can find myself sighing Al Gore-like or rolling my eyes. I don't
want to be like that in my Bible study group, and so I'd prefer to
tackle apologetics in my own personal reading----where I have the
latitude to learn and grow as I wish, and to accept or reject what I
want without group pressure. (That's not to say that the group
pressures me or anyone else, but I'm the sort of person who likes to fit
in and so I nod my head and agree in Bible study groups. I'm not sure
what I'd do if I encountered in a group something with which I
fundamentally disagree, especially since I'm hesitant for other
Christians to see my skeptic-side.)
Someone
else in the group didn't want to do this particular study. It's not so
much because she's a skeptic like me----though she does ask plenty of
excellent questions. Rather, it's because she already accepts
the Bible, and she's more interested in learning about what the Bible
says and how it can help her to live a good life than she is in hearing
defenses for the Bible's authority. Even if she and I differ in our worldview, we find common ground on what we're looking for in Bible study curricula.
Another
curriculum we were looking at concerned Jesus. The description asked
if Jesus was merely a man, or was more than that. I feared that this,
too, would put me into a situation in which I'd find myself sighing and
rolling my eyes. I appreciate that the documentaries interview biblical
scholars and refer to primary sources from the New Testament period,
but I feared that this particular curriculum would uncritically assume
that Jesus is God and would not be sensitive to the complexity of
Christology in the New Testament. I was one time in a group in
which we were reading the Gospel of Luke, and many of us simply assumed
that Jesus went around proclaiming himself to be God. Well, maybe there
were times when he arguably did so, but I don't think that this was
always obvious or was a salient element of his message, or that all of
the New Testament assumes the doctrines that were later enshrined as
Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy. In my opinion, things were
messier than that, and that's one reason that the New Testament is
interesting to study. We didn't discuss this curriculum much, but we
decided to do something else.
We also
considered a study on Isaiah 53. The title assumed that Isaiah 53 was a
prophecy about Jesus. When I said that Jewish people have a different
interpretation, my pastor said, to my surprise, that the study also
looks at Jewish interpretations! Perhaps this particular
curriculum would be interesting, as long as it seeks to find something
edifying in Jewish interpretations rather than arguing that they're
wrong because they fail to see that Isaiah 53 is about Jesus.
Perhaps that's what the curriculum does. Personally, though, I'm not
comfortable with a study that focuses on how the Old Testament points to
Christ, for I don't think it's obvious that it does. We discussed this
study a little, but we decided on something else.
We're
going to study Romans. I was afraid that the study on Romans 1 would
really harp on homosexuality, but I watched the first episode of the
documentary online and I saw that it didn't even mention that particular
issue, focusing instead on idolatry. Well, that offends my pluralistic
sensibilities, but I can at least deal with that. On homosexuality,
it's not that I have problems hearing people express a belief that
homosexuality is wrong. I'm just uncomfortable when the issue is run
into the ground----when there is no attempt to understand the
perspective of homosexuals, when a political agenda is promoted, when
homosexuals are demonized, etc. But, even if the topic were to come up
in the group, it would only be one session, then we'd move on to the
rest of Romans, which has a lot of edifying teachings.