Some Comments on Bible Teaching

Anyone who wants to teach the Bible to children can learn from Robert Browning. In “Development,” a little-known poem with a very modern-sounding title, the poet demonstrates the elements of sound learning and teaching through the relationship of a growing and alert son with his perceptive and exemplary father.

The poem begins:

My father was a scholar and knew Greek.

When I was five years old, I asked him once

“What do you read about?”

“The siege of Troy.”

“What is a siege, and what is Troy?”

Father, the story goes, piled up chairs and tables for a town and put his son on top to represent Priam. The cat became Helen, who had been stolen away by cowardly Paris, and her brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus, who were trying to get Helen back again, were represented by the two family dogs. The pony in the stable served for Achilles sulking in his tent, and their page boy became Hector. As Browning puts it, “a huge delight it proved.”

Light From The Languages

Several years later, the father found his son and playmates “playing at Troy’s Siege.” The boy ought to know more about this poem, suggested the father. Why not read the translation by Pope?

So I ran through Pope,

Enjoyed the tale—what history so true?

But, remember, “father was a scholar and knew Greek.” Soon the son had his own Greek primer.

Time passed, I ripened somewhat: one fine day,

“Quite ready for the Iliad, nothing less?

Don’t skip a word, thumb well the Lexicon!”

And so after reading Homer’s Iliad in the original Greek, the son fancied himself an authority on both author and poem. But then, introduced by his father to reading the critics on Homer, he was amazed to learn that certain German investigators, especially Wolf, now had “proved” that there never had been a Troy, nor a Homer, and that no authentic text existed for the poem which he had known and loved since he was five years old! Ought the son, now mature, to censure his father for instilling Homer through all these years?

A Time For All Things

Not at all. On the contrary, the son has nothing but praise for his teacher-father, who allowed him to grow up to cherish this literature and to learn from it not only an exciting story but in due time also basic principles of life and living—

… to loathe, like Peleus’ son,

A lie as Hell’s Gate, love my wedded wife,

Like Hector, and so on with all the rest.

Could he not have learned this directly and much earlier in life from a translation of Aristotle’s Ethics without ever getting involved in a controversial poem? Hardly, says the now gray-haired son in retrospect.

The “Ethics”: ’tis a treatise I find hard

To read aright now that my hair is gray,

And I can manage the original.

At five years old—how ill had fared its leaves!

While this kind of summary can never do justice to the original poem, it nonetheless points up what might be called Browning’s theory of education. If you want a child to read the Greek of Homer, how do you begin? By telling him stories without any explanation or critical comment, by making them live for themselves. You yourself read Greek with pleasure, and this pleasure you communicate with the stories. As he grows older, the child begins to read for himself, and as he “ripens” even further, he tackles the original Greek. Then, and only then, after the facts of the story have been his possession for years, do you introduce him to critical comment. The book on ethics, with its abstract ideas on friendship, honesty, wedded love, and so on, comes last of all.

Does not this procedure seem sensible? Who would answer a five-year-old’s question about Troy by saying: “This is a story, perhaps not actually true, but still interesting, about a town which may or may not have existed, and about people who may never have lived. But as Homer tells it—if indeed Homer ever existed, and if he wrote this poem.…” And so on. What good teacher of Greek would talk like this to a twelve-year-old? The proper time for critically studying the text and for examining the principles of ethics comes soon enough, but hardly during young childhood.

Yet how do many of those who plan Sunday school curriculum materials approach the teaching of the Bible? They regard the stories of the Old Testament as too difficult to “explain” to children, and therefore use very few of them. When such stories are used, they are prefaced with all sorts of apologetic explanations and followed up with careful interpretations. Seldom do children have the opportunity to hear the actual story, get from it what they can, and then go home to act it out—as did one small boy who built his own Jericho with blocks and marched his toys around it.

Comprehension And Experience

Since so many Old Testament stories are considered suspect, we substitute even for very small children such sentences from the Bible as “Even a child is known by his doings” or “He careth for you.” Perhaps first and favorite of all we offer them “God is love,” even though this sentence contains two nouns whose meanings are among the most difficult concepts to explain. Any intelligent adult knows how the comprehension of love, for example, changes with the years. And in trying to understand the two great commandments, the average class of adults wrestles long and hard with the differences between eros, philia, and agape. Yet this difficult word love we use with our beginners not as part of a story, but as an abstract statement of fact.

Someone will say at this point that the lesson material which follows is planned to make the sentence “meaningful” for the child. Yes, sometimes the story of Jesus’ blessing the children is used, for example. Usually, however, the “stories that follow” tell how mother worked hard to make a pretty birthday cake for her daughter, or how two good little boys each gave a quarter to buy a Christmas present for the old man who sells newspapers on the street corner. The “He careth for you” often develops into an extended nature session, in which we decorate the class room with autumn leaves, or cut out large snowflakes to take home to mother, or write on the board the names of all the birds we saw during the week and talk about how they get their food. This, we are told, is “within the comprehension of the child.”

We should hope so! A little later, still well within such a level of comprehension, come stories about how to get along with teachers, what to do when your friend has a prettier dress than yours, how to treat the boy who has the highest (or the lowest) batting average in the Little League, how to “understand” your parents, and so on. For the teen years, typical curriculum materials plunge into discussions about the role of the church, how young people can affect the social conditions around them, how the major ideologies of our day differ, and such matters. Then in a course geared to lower-division college age, the student is asked to explain why he believes in God, what reasons we have to suppose that Moses is or is not a historical character, and what are the major theories about the authorship of the Hexateuch.

The upshot of this kind of planning and teaching is that we now have a generation of parents whose ignorance of the Bible is utterly abysmal. Even more serious is their attitude that it is unnecessary to know much more about the Bible than the Lord’s Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount, a few parables, and perhaps First Corinthians 13 (the one chapter from Paul that so far I have not heard even his severest critics find fault with). By the time Browning’s “son” reached maturity, you remember, he knew the Iliad by heart, knew all the facts about Troy, Homer, and the text of the poem, and was profoundly grateful that he had not been brought up on the Ethics, which he nevertheless came to know also, in due course. By contrast, what do the children subjected to our educational program know about the Bible?

I am not implying that the Iliad and the Bible stand on equal terms; the Bible is infinitely more important than this or any other poem. And I do not believe for a minute that the child who grows up absorbing the stories of the Bible must go through a period of discovering that most of what he learned is not really true. If he thinks and reads and talks with his fellows at all he is bound to come in contact with a great deal of critical material, some of which would do for the Bible what Wolf and his contemporaries did for Homer. But because he is biblically grounded, he should be able to deal intelligently with such theories instead of succumbing to them. Furthermore, in recent years archaeology has done a great deal to uphold the conservative view of inspiration and of the Holy Scriptures.

Techniques Of Teaching

It is interesting that in one respect Browning’s poem definitely bears a nineteenth-century stamp. Although archaeological excavations had proved long before the poem was written (1890) that there was indeed a Troy, the influence of Wolf and his associates seemed to continue nonetheless. Modern scholars are more inclined to accept the historical Homer than were Browning’s contemporaries. “He who knows no history is forever a child,” it has been said. And no one is more childish than he who is unaware of how variable are the winds of criticism and how unnecessary it is to be “carried about with every wind of doctrine.”

The fact that the Bible is true in a different way than Homer, or than any other literature, for that matter, does not therefore alter or lessen the wisdom of Browning’s method of teaching demonstrated in his poem. First, in answer to the child’s question, “What do you read about?” comes the story, told by someone who knows it and loves it. Before anything else, a good teacher of the Bible must read the Bible, understand it, love it. Then follows a rereading of a particular portion, a retelling of the story that recognizes the child’s developing interests and abilities. No one understands the Bible with only one hearing or reading. As long as he lives and thinks and grows, the serious Bible student finds the Bible to be an inexhaustible mine of treasures, a limitless well of water springing up into eternal life, a perpetual source of truth that at the same time is both reassuringly old and unfailingly new. Yet I remember one time when I asked to teach the Old Testament stories to a group of junior highs. A leader in our group told me very kindly that I should be teaching juniors, for they were the ones with a unit on Old Testament heroes! Is a single reading of the Old Testament stories enough for our children? One study course for junior highs which I have seen gives one lesson to the Genesis stories, another to Exodus, and by the third lesson has arrived at the kingship of David! By this type of procedure, when and how are pupils to acquire the line-by-line knowledge of the Bible that they should have? Nature appreciation, recognition of a mother’s unfailing love, and a study of social ills have their place, but surely a thorough knowledge of the Bible should come first.

Neglect Of Biblical Data

One unit of studies which I used with junior highs included a few stories from Exodus. What astonished me was that before these stories were introduced, an entire lesson was given to explaining what we might find in Exodus and how we should interpret it: we should expect to find in it not exact history, but stories, rather, from which we should carefully extract spiritual truth. This material was not reserved for the teacher’s manual but was a full lesson in the pupil’s book. What is more, this “lesson” appeared without a single bit of Scripture on which to base the teaching for that day, to which the pupil might give some thought. When I first asked the pupils in this class who Moses was, one hesitantly suggested that he was the son of Abraham. Then and there I quietly departed from the prescribed unit of studies and instead taught the narrative sections of Exodus with all the energy and skill at my command—omitting entirely the so-called introductory lesson on Exodus!

But the Bible is hard to teach, many people remark. Let me reply that the substitute material offered today in no way solves the problem of the poor teacher. The superintendent of a children’s department told me about two visits to a particular junior class. Each time she found the pupils reading paragraph by paragraph around the room, not from the Bible, but from the supplementary book of stories that accompanied their unit of work. No time was given to Bible references, to the outline of the lesson, nor to any suggested activities. In other words, the lazy teacher, the ineffective, unprepared teacher, will teach poorly no matter what kind of material is put into her hands. If pupils must read aloud around the circle, they would much better be reading from the Bible than from any other book!

Capable teachers of the Bible are hard to find. And not everyone who possesses the first requisite (that the Bible is to him a dear and familiar book) is a gifted teacher. But such a person usually takes seriously the responsibility of teaching, and often succeeds remarkably in communicating his love for the Word he teaches.

A Word For The Parents

Besides speaking to Sunday school teachers and to those who prepare curriculum materials, the Browning poem speaks also to parents. It was the father, after all, not a teacher in public or private school, who instilled in the son his knowledge of the Iliad and his love for it. Upon parents rests the primary responsibility for seeing that their children know and love the Word of God.

Children actually make it easy for us to teach if we possess the necessary knowledge and faith to do so. By asking, “What do you read about?” the son in Browning’s poem, you remember, opened the door to instruction. In Exodus we find these words, “And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? that ye shall say …” (Ex. 12:26, 27). Our children ask endless questions—about the order of Sunday services, the way the altar is arranged, the observance of the Eucharist, and so on. Are we prepared to answer them? And if they see us reading the Bible often enough, they are likely to ask—as did the son in Browning’s poem—“What do you read about?” Properly met, these questions are important stepping-stones to the introduction of further truth and create an atmosphere in which we need not worry greatly about methodology. The path of wisdom and faith for the teacher is to put first knowledge of what the Bible says, not some kind of modern story or some “scholarly” opinion about how to interpret the Bible stories.

In Browning’s poem the son summarizes the wise and thorough teaching method of his father in these words:

… thanks to that instructor sage

My father, who knew better than turn straight

Learning’s full glare on weak-eyed ignorance,

Or, worse yet, leave weak eyes to grow sandblind,

Content with darkness and vacuity.

An appalling amount of “darkness and vacuity” about the Bible is apparent among Christians today. Perhaps we could profit from reexamining our teaching methods in the light of Browning’s poem. We might find that, just as in Jesus’ time, children of this world like Browning’s “father” are wiser in their generation than the children of light!

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