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Jay Leno knew he had the perfect comedy routine. Roving through the audience of his late-night talk show, Leno asked people how much they knew about the Bible. "Name one of the Ten Commandments," he asked. A hand went up: "God helps those who help themselves?" Leno went on: "Name one of the apostles." No answer. But when he asked his audience to name the four Beatles, the names "George, Paul, John, and Ringo" flew from the crowd.

Last year I was listening to a speech on the radio given by a candidate for governor in Nevada. He wanted to propose a new tax on the gambling industry but did not want to give the impression that he was against Nevada's most powerful and lucrative industry. Appealing to biblical authority, he announced: "I want to be like King David in the Bible. He didn't kill Goliath, he just hurt him a little."

Obviously, we live in a postbiblical era where general knowledge of the Bible cannot be assumed. As a book, the Bible has been removed from the reading lists of students so that they can barely recognize metaphors from great novels written before 1950. A professor from the University of Wisconsin told me about speaking to a seminar of highly motivated, intellectually keen students who did not recognize literary references to "Jonah" or "the prodigal son." She was forced to "decode" these cryptic images so that the students could see the underlying themes of the books they analyzed.

We may lament the neglect of the Bible in popular culture and secular education, but we can understand it. But what about the church? What about the evangelical church? If it is true that biblical illiteracy is commonplace in secular culture at large, there is ample evidence that points to similar trends in our churches.

For the last four years, the Bible and theology department at Wheaton College in Illinois has studied the biblical and theological literacy of incoming freshmen. These students are intellectually ambitious and spiritually passionate. They represent almost every Protestant denomination and every state in the country. Most come from strong evangelical churches and possess a long history of personal devotion and Christian involvement (regular church attendance, youth groups, camps, missions, etc.). They use the Bible regularly—but curiously, few genuinely know its stories.

The Bible has become a springboard for personal piety and meditation, not a book to be read. These students very likely know that David killed Goliath, but they don't know why he did it or that Goliath was a Philistine or who the Philistines were.

When asked to complete a test in which a series of biblical events must be placed in order, our students returned surprising results. One-third of the freshmen could not put the following in order: Abraham, the Old Testament prophets, the death of Christ, and Pentecost. Half could not sequence: Moses in Egypt, Isaac's birth, Saul's death, and Judah's exile. One-third could not identify Matthew as an apostle from a list of New Testament names. When asked to locate the biblical book supplying a given story, one-third could not find Paul's travels in Acts, half did not know that the Christmas story was in Matthew or that the Passover story was in Exodus.

This presents a formidable problem for anyone wishing to understand the spiritual thought-world of the New Testament. Each of the New Testament writers was steeped in the biblical stories of the Old Testament, and they all employed allusions to these stories in order to convey deeper meaning to their message. Students who cannot identify Samuel or David with ease (much less understand the deeper nuances in their stories in the Old Testament) are at a loss to understand the New Testament.

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August 9 1999, Vol. 43, No. 9