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Evangelicals like their sermons tidy and their Bible studies messy. The typical evangelical sermon takes a text and tells the congregation what to believe and how to live.

But Bible studies, those family-room gatherings with six to eight people discussing a passage from an assortment of translations, are untidy times when authorial intent rarely intrudes and free association reigns supreme. That's not the way it's supposed to be, perhaps, but that's the way it is.

Bill Moyers, journalist and former Southern Baptist pastor, has now dressed up that untidy Bible study group for public television. This month, pbs stations across the nation have begun broadcasting a ten-part series of discussions of the stories of Genesis, discussions that could happen in any living room if you had access to the nation's most respected (and notorious) religion scholars, theologians, and novelists.

Moyers invited evangelicals, liberal Christians, Muslims, Jews, and even a few nonbelievers to engage the meaning of the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, the Call of Abraham, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, and so forth. He had hoped to include some fundamentalists, he told ct, but the ones he talked to seemed so eager to defend their doctrine of Scripture that they couldn't focus on the meaning of the stories.

Those whom Moyers rated as evangelicals, however, were able to pitch right into the discussions. Three of them had Fuller Theological Seminary connections (ethicist Lew Smedes, New Testament professor Marianne Meye Thompson, and former Fuller faculty member-former Eastern College president—current World Vision board chair—current Presbyterian pastor Roberta Hestenes). The one non-Fuller evangelical was Eugene Rivers, pastor of the Azusa Christian Community in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood and fellow of the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School.

The nonevangelicals included scholars evangelicals love to read, such as Columbia Theological Seminary's Old Testament expert Walter Brueggemann, and tendentious liberals that evangelicals love to hate, such as Union Theological Seminary's Phyllis Trible, Princeton University's neognostic Elaine Pagels, and History of God author Karen Armstrong.

What kind of learning and enlightenment can take place in such an atmosphere?

Interreligious dialogue today is usually predicated on respect for each other's ideas—meaning no exclusive truth claims, no hegemonic rhetoric (as the phrase goes in some academic circles today), no insistence that my interpretation is better than yours, but mere respectful listening with occasional nods of appreciation. That kind of dialogue is perhaps useful in marriage counseling, but its presuppositions run counter to the grain of classic Christianity, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. These historic Christian families agree that there is a truth about everything, and that all opinions are not created equal. So what good can come from dialoguing in the modern manner about the meaning of the Genesis stories?

That question is answered in the discussions themselves, as common ground is discovered and allies emerge in unexpected places. Smedes said he was amazed at the wonderful definition of grace made by Islamic legal scholar Azizah al-Hibri. "The relationship with God is not a relationship with an all-powerful patriarch, but with Someone Who loves us and has mercy upon us and talks to us," she said. "Every single chapter in the Qur'an begins with the words: 'God is all-merciful.' "

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October 28 1996, Vol. 40, No. 12