Revised Objectives

By the end of the Bible Minor, students should be able to:

1. Identify and recall basic biblical content and theological vocabulary, categories, and concepts.
2. Study and apply the Scriptures using the essential skills of biblical interpretation.
3. Analyze personal, cultural, and global issues by applying basic theological skills.
4. Critique competing narratives of the world theologically and charitably.
5. Develop Christian wisdom to pursue theologically informed redemptive action in the world.
6. Formulate an integrative and holistic approach to the life of discipleship that displays (embodies!?) faithfulness to Scripture.

Current Shape of Minor Objectives

Here are the objectives as they currently stand. Beat them up, make suggestions, etc.

By the end of the Bible Minor, each student should be able to:

1. Identify and recall basic theological vocabulary, categories, and concepts.
2. Examine and relate biblical content using the essential skills of biblical interpretation.
3. Analyze personal, cultural, and global issues by applying basic theological skills, including vocabulary, categories, and concepts.
4. Propose solutions to personal, cultural, and global challenges while pursuing theologically informed redemptive action in the world.
5. Critique theologically competing narratives of the world.
6. Formulate an integrative approach to the life of discipleship that displays adherence to key biblical principles.

Aaron's Email

The following is an email from Aaron on the importance of historical theology:

Bible minor committee guys,

 

Pardon me for briefly crashing the party.  Tim sent out the link to the Bible Minor blog a couple of weeks ago to everyone in the department, so I took that as an invitation to offer some feedback.  I was going to post this on the blog but couldn't figure out how to start a new post.  Thus the email. 

 

In reflecting on the objectives for the Bible minor, and on future program revisions for majors (insofar as the Bible minor serves as something of a core set of courses for our majors), I want to offer a practical case for why historical theology is necessary.  Below are five reasons. 

 

Our students, both our majors and non-majors in the Bible minor, need a basic grasp of Christian theological history, not just systematic and biblical theology.  Christian theological history is not only a discipline-specific requirement for those who may be pursuing graduate level education.  It is a practical, "real-world," relevant requirement for all students for the following reasons:

1.       Our goal is for students to be able to read and apply Scripture well.  In order to achieve that goal, students must be able to identify the theological voices that inform how they read Scripture.   Their (and our) interpretations of Scripture are shaped by patterns of thought and interpretation that are themselves historically shaped by a number of factors, both good and bad.  Students need to be able to trace the development of their theological contexts in order to be able to hear Scripture well, rather than letting unexamined and unidentified theological voices overpower Scripture itself. 

2.       There is much to be valued from our evangelical heritage, and instruction in historical theology can help our students properly value their tradition.  However, our students also need to see how historical developments have shaped in negative ways their evangelical approach to Scripture and theology.  For example, our students tend to embrace a pervasive anti-intellectualism when it comes to theology that can be largely traced to the conjunction of Revivalism and frontier Christianity.  Our students need to be able to recognize the great value of the Revivalist tradition, while recognizing that its anti-intellectualism is an aberration in the long trajectory of historic Christianity. 

3.       Related to #2 above, we want our students to wisely engage contemporary issues.  However, our students’ pervasive anti-intellectualism presents a major obstacle to their ability to wisely integrate Scripture and theological reflection with those contemporary issues.  Furthermore, an essential task of wisely engaging contemporary issues is being able to frame the issues in the context of those issues’ historical development, and the historical development of Christian theological reflection on those issues.   Put differently, very few contemporary issues are truly new issues.  Christians have long reflected on war, wealth, human identity, medicine, the arts, technology, etc., and students must be able to situate contemporary responses to issues in the context of Christianity’s past reflections in order to help our students see how their own cultural blind spots may distort their interaction with Scripture on the issue, and the central tension points of the issue. 

4.       Denominational affiliations are losing their formative power over the lives of students.  Irrespective of whether this is a positive or negative development, it results in students having a wider exposure to different Christian traditions than they might have otherwise.  In order to help them navigate those ‘invisible’ traditions they need to be able to place those traditions in the context of the wider historical Christian trajectory.  Furthermore, they need to be able to place their own denominational tradition (if they have one) on the map of historical Christianity in order to be able to constructively (as well as critically) engage other traditions. 

5.       Finally, a basic grasp of the historical development of Christian theology is necessary for our students to engage global Christianity.  They need to see that from the beginning Christianity was global, with voices from Africa (e.g., Augustine), from the Middle East (e.g., John Chrysostom), as well as from Europe and western Asia.  Furthermore, there are voices in global Christianity that are not heard by Western Christians, for example various Eastern modes of Christianity (e.g., Syriac and Coptic).   Being aware of the basic historical development of the multiple voices of historic Christianity is necessary to help our students situate both their own North American Christianity, and their engagement with contemporary expressions of global Christianity in, for example, Latin America, Africa, and eastern Asia.  Situating global Christianity in the context of its historic development will help our students see that North American and Western European Christianity, while an important voice, is still one voice among many in the global Christian conversation.  Recognizing that North American and Western European Christianity is one voice among many provides the context both for critical engagement with this western tradition, as well as constructive appropriation and valuation of what is true and good about North American and Western European Christianity.  

C. S. Lewis on good reading habits

"There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about "isms" and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.
This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.
Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o'clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity ("mere Christianity" as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."

C. S. Lewis, "Introduction" to Athanasius' On The Incarnation