Talk about the Method

When I teach Sunday School classes, as I often do, there is nothing more likely to lull people to sleep than a discussion of hermeneutics.  I get a great deal of attention talking about history.  People are very interested as I explore some different interpretations of a particular Biblical passage and where and when those interpretations have been used.  But when I get down to the details of how one discovers the meaning(s) of an ancient text such as the Bible, things tend to slow down.

In my view, most Sunday School materials are shallow and repetitive.  I know that the Adult Bible Study series which is used in many United Methodist churches is often good for one pass, though it hardly gets me excited.  But I know people who have been going through cycles of that material over and over again for decades, and are no deeper into scripture now than they were when they started.

One major problem, in my view, is that the material is always generic, which is not really the fault of those who produce it.  There’s an entire system that is being fed.  If you are going to produce Sunday School materials for a few million people, you can’t go into depth for those who have been studying it for years, while still covering the basics for beginners.  With the costs of publication and delivery, one could hardly provide an entire denomination with graded materials, not to mention the war that would erupt over who was more advanced.

But there is a solution, I think, and it would have to start with church leadership determined to find and use teachers in the church.  There are materials available for Bible study, including a number of good study Bibles, such as the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, that serve as starting points for someone who is perhaps not a rank amateur, but still needs a hand up.  One can supplement such materials from an abundance that is available on the internet.  Of course, one needs to take the time to consider the quality and accuracy of such material as well.

But for those of us who do have some sort of advanced training in Biblical studies, I think there is a very important role.  We need to talk about our method, about how we came to whatever results we are teaching.  What resources did we use?  What disciplines?  What theology informed our task and why?  How can an individual evaluate such work?

Too often the expert, or even the quasi-expert, comes into a classroom and feeds the students his or her conclusions.  Often this can be quite entertaining, and may even appear quite educational to the listeners.  But if someone doesn’t tear the veil off the process and display some of the nuts and bolts (wow, mixed metaphor, eh?) then one feeds a church culture in which the proper way to study the Bible is to get an expert to talk to you about it.

As we all know, or should, experts can disagree.  I always enjoy talking about the search for the historical Jesus, and the wide variety of views on it and responses to it.  I have found two things with every group of Christian lay people with whom I have discussed this.  First, they don’t know about the variety of views.  Very often they have read one popular book and concluded that was the scholarly consensus.  Second, they have never looked at the method used by that particular scholar or by others.  As a result, they are simply looking for the next person to tell them what the experts think about the historical Jesus.  And of course, the experts have many opinions.

So I would suggest that while it may be less interesting, teaching how to study the Bible, and how to discuss Bible study methods and disciplines, is the most constructive contribution most of us can make.  Of course, many of us must respond to the audience.  If they want a lecture on history and archeology, you can’t give them a study of context, outlining, or form criticism.

Or perhaps you could bring at least a little of that into the lecture, discussing how a passage has been misapplied to history, and what errors in the approach to the text  contributed to that misunderstanding.

It takes some creativity, but it can be done.  I’ll have to work on doing the task while boring the audience a bit less!