It's the end of the semester at IWU--time for me to take stock of my teaching once again. What's in a Bible course aimed to train ministers, what is it supposed to accomplish? Even more significant, days are coming to evaluate curricula. What's in a Bible Curriculum meant to prepare ministers, what is it supposed to accomplish? I'm thinking both undergraduate and graduate.
Here's my list, trying to go from most essential to more tangential. My assumption is that the list is pretty much the same whether you're thinking of a Christian Ministries undergraduate or an MDiv.
1. An IWU Bible curriculum, rooted in Wesleyanism, should foster and develop a sacramental relationship between the student and the Scriptures.
We should not be a people that preaches sermons where the Bible is conspicuously absent. The Bible is the crucible of our lives, the playground where we play, the battlefield where we fight. A curriculum will involve the Bible as object, but it must leave the student with the Bible as place par excellence to hear God's voice.
2. A good Bible curriculum should equip the minister to teach, preach, and counsel from Scripture. This requires the high skill of moving from text to life with integrity.
In my opinion, subordinate skills required to do this with integrity and excellence include:
a. a vibrant relationship with God the Holy Spirit
b. a thorough knowledge of the canons of Christian theology and ethics
c. the ability to distinguish between the original meaning and other meanings
d. skill at integrating individual Scriptures together
e. the ability to distingish between our time and their times
3. A good Bible curriculum should leave a future minister with a high level knowledge of the content of Scripture, including both knowledge of original meaning options and any meanings inherited by broader Christendom and the Wesleyan tradition in particular.
4. Of lesser importance is an acquaintance with contemporary issues relating to Scripture. These include knowing where to go when someone asks you about everything from the Da Vinci Code to some scholarly trend.
What is missing from this list? What do you think the priorities are for a Bible curriculum as regards someone going into ministry of one sort or another?
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6 comments:
One of my goals in every class I teach is that the students will leave with a positive disposition towards the subject matter. In other words, they like it. I suppose this comes under your #1, but a bit more low-flying. I would hope that someone who takes an upper-level course on the Gospel of John, for instance, would for the rest of her life like John's Gospel and be inclined to pour over it the rest of her life.
A good word, and as you know, more appropriate than most might think for a Bible course.
I would attribute the frequent tedium of Bible courses to things like
1. an overplay of method
2. an overplay of the text as object rather than subject/sacrament, including approaches that only deconstruct without reconstructing.
Any additions or subtractions?
Great List!
I've had two kinds of Bible courses:
Some of my Bible courses were like a postmortem...the Bible was a dead piece of literature laid out on the examination table and the teacher was preoccupied with some method of performing the autopsy. These classes felt more like a National Geographic special or a history course than interaction with the living God's means of Grace
The other Bible classes I had were transformational experiences where we met God in the pages of Scripture-a sacrament as you say. In these classes the Holy Spirit made the Bible a powerful mean of grace that transformed lives and we came away hungry to teach a Sunday school class ourselves to lead others into this transformational experience.
This second kind of class was better for me.
Ken,
This post of yours articulated the epitome of a successful in a Bible class. Its not mrerly a content-heavy class that ends with an exam on one's short-term memory skills. Rather, its a sacramental love of the scriptures whoich is wondrously created by a professor bringing a student face-to-face with the Living Word of God. Thanks.
I may cut-and-paste it directly into all my future syllabi.
I love your list, especially number one. Biggest problem with our sermons, exegesis, theology, lives: we don't know the Bible well enough.
Find it strange that I haven't commented in a while? I got sucked into using google reader, which is great if you keep with it, but can seem cumbersome when you have 37 Schenck posts to read! Oops. Sorry.
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