Thursday, February 7, 2013

Learning the Bible!

For years I've complained that churches don't teach the Bible.  That seminaries don't effectively teach Bible content!  That endless topical sermons in our churches are contributing to an epidemic of biblical illiteracy in the Christian community.  Here is some good stuff on this topic my Michael Bull.

“Pastor, if the local atheist knows the Bible and understands its basic implications for morality, society, politics, education, economics, history and science better than the people you instruct every week, and most likely he does, you are failing them.”
It seems to me that good Christians go off to Bible college and seminary little suspecting that these institutions are places where they teach you how not to read a book. 
Certainly, an understanding of the original languages and cultures is helpful, but somehow the modern mind takes a book that is far more than the sum of its parts and teaches it as parts. For a start, we don’t read any book like that. If we, as Christians, believe that the Bible has a single author, why would an intelligent, committed and passionate minister of the gospel tell me that Jesus’ crown of thorns has nothing to do with the thorns in Genesis 3? Why? Was it because he was taught that the Bible was written by idiots, or was it because he was taught by idiots? Please note that this man is not an idiot. He, like just about all ministers today, has been trained in a tradition that takes young heads, cuts off their ears and gouges out their eyes. They come out deaf and colorblind. They are not qualified to teach the Bible as it really is.
Read the entire article here.

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