Public-School Bible Study: Sectarianism in Disguise?

In 1963, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Bible reading and the use of the Lord’s Prayer in the public schools violated the First Amendment to the Constitution. In delivering the opinion of the court, Mr. Justice Clark explained that “the breach of neutrality that is today a trickling stream may all too soon become a raging torrent and, in the words of Madison, ‘it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.’ ” The particular “breach of neutrality” that had alarmed the members of the court was the daily reading of ten verses from the Bible, followed by the unison recital of the Lord’s Prayer, at Abington Senior High School in Abington, Pennsylvania.

On the basis of this historic decision, probably most of us concluded that the high court had permanently banned the Scriptures from the public-school classrooms. But this is not what has happened, at least not in Pennsylvania. For at present the Bible is being studied in the senior high schools in this state as part of an experimental public-school course in religious literature. The literature studied includes the Old and New Testaments, the Apocryphal writings, the Rabbinic writings, and the Koran. In the 1967–68 academic year, this elective course was tested in thirty-one high schools with 751 students participating. In 1968–69 the project was expanded to include 1,300 pupils in forty-four schools. Looking to the future, David W. Miller, an English adviser for the state’s Department of Public Instruction, reports that the literature course will be made available to public schools throughout the state of Pennsylvania when the necessary volume of teaching materials can be printed.

What does this mean? Should orthodox Christians rejoice now that the Bible is “back” in these public schools? And how is it now possible to study the Scriptures in the schools without committing a “breach of neutrality,” when earlier the Supreme Court ruled that the mere reading of ten Bible verses at the beginning of the school day transgressed the Constitution?

The law under which this course of study was prepared provides that:

Courses in the literature of the Bible and other religious writings may be introduced and studied as regular courses in the literature branch of education by all pupils in the secondary public schools. Such courses shall be elective only and not required of any student [Pennsylvania Central Assembly Act No. 442].

In explaining the course Miller says: “It’s really a discussion course, taught by English teachers and treated as a literature course, like Shakespeare. The teachers are not in a position to explain the meaning of religion, and you can’t take a course like this and impose answers. The pupils come to their own conclusions.”

In other words, the approach to the Bible in this course is assumed to be “objective” and “factual,” without any attempt by the teacher to provide authoritative answers to questions with religious import. The assumption is that teachers, using state-prepared materials, will be able to guide their students in a nonpartisan study of the Bible and other religious literature. The reasoning seems to be that the reading of the Bible at the opening of the school day infringed upon the constitutional rights of unbelievers because it involved the teaching of religion (with the Bible given an implied authority), but that this new course transgresses no one’s right because it is a study about religion (with the Bible having no authority). Mr. Justice Clark, in delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court in 1963, expressed the same point of view:

It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a program of secular education, may not be effected consistent with the First Amendment.

Thus, according to this point of view, the Bible with authority has no place in the schools, but the Bible minus its claims to divine authority is welcome in the classroom.

The orthodox Christian, however, questions whether it is possible for man to be objective in studying the Word of God. He believes that men have pre-theoretical commitments for and against God and his Word and that an attempt to study the Bible apart from its authoritative claims—that is, as a mere fact of literary and historical culture—involves a serious distortion of the nature of Scripture.

But is it not possible that in practice the teachers of this course and the authors of the syllabus have achieved a degree of impartiality? Regrettably, the available evidence is hardly reassuring.

The teachers were required to attend a special summer institute at the Pennsylvania State University and hear lectures by Dr. Luther H. Harshbarger, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University; Dr. Lou Silberman, professor of religious studies, Vanderbilt University; Dr. Karifried Froelich, professor of New Testament and church history, Drew University; Dr. Abdel El-Biali, assistant to the director of the Islamic Center, Washington, D. C.; Dr. Samuel Sandmel, Distinguished Services Professor of Bible and Hellenistic Literature, Hebrew Union College; Dr. Henry Sams, head of the Department of English at Pennsylvania State University; and Mr. Robert Hogan, executive secretary of the National Council of Teachers of English. What makes this list of lecturers revealing is the apparent omission from it of any major exponent of the historic Protestant view of Scripture as expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the other great Protestant creeds. Thus the question arises: Did the teachers who attended the institute hear a scholarly presentation of the orthodox view of Scripture? If not, then there is good reason to conclude that their training for the project was not impartial.

More serious is the point of view expressed in the Student’s Guide to Religious Literature of the West, the syllabus for the course. Although the position taken in the student’s guide is clouded by what Reuben E. Gross, a Jewish writer, has called double-talk “redoubled into quadruple talk,” it is rather clear that the basic interpretation of the Bible is naturalistic. Gross, commenting on what seems to have been an earlier version of the syllabus, states:

Imagine my utter disappointment … when upon reading the text I found merely the old hat of Higher Criticism and an imaginative, free-lance rewriting of Jewish history. This might be pardonable if the course were candidly offered as a critical, anti-religious view of religion [The Jewish Observer, October, 1968, p. 9].

The anti-supernaturalism of the syllabus is to be seen primarily in its substantial dependence upon the documentary hypothesis of Graf-Wellhausen, both for determining the arrangement of the subject matter and for interpreting the text of the Bible. Although the authors acknowledge, upon occasion, the existence of the orthodox view of the inspiration of Scripture, they approach the text from the point of view of the higher critics. Consider, for example, their treatment of Genesis 1:1–3:24. In two comparatively short sentences they state that “some people” disagree with the documentary theory and “believe that only one account of creation is presented in Genesis.” But then three pages are devoted to the exposition of the higher-critical view of Genesis 1–3, and at least six of the nine discussion questions that follow seem to assume the truth of the Graf-Wellhausen theory.

The naturalistic bias of the writers of the syllabus is also evident in the late dating of the Old Testament books and the handling of the origins of the Bible. On the latter point, they blandly tell the student that “the literature you will be reading is an expression of the internal experience of each of these three communities (Jewish, Christian and Islamic).” In the context of this statement there is no hint that Scripture is the objective speech of God delivered by holy men who were moved by the Holy Spirit. Instead we hear only of “the communities which produced the literature”—as though the Bible were the product of human culture and the religious genius of Western man.

It is true that the writers of the student’s guide follow the biblical narrative in presenting God as entering into history and speaking directly to men. But they interpret this divine action in mythical terms. The presence of God virtually equals myth in their thought, as seen in the following quotation:

In the story of the Passover, as in the Joshua story, we become very much aware of the role of God as a central actor. Indeed, the presence of God to the experience of the other actors in the stories is a fundamental understanding in all the classical literature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For this reason it becomes appropriate early in our reading to introduce the role which myth plays in religious thought.

And lest there still be doubt, they subsequently state that “the presence of God in the story as a dominant actor makes the account a myth.…”

Since it would not do to call the Bible a pious fraud, the authors justify their use of “myth” by explaining that they are giving the term a positive meaning and are not referring to “a story that’s not so.” But each of the four possible “positive” meanings of myth they offer is ambiguous enough to include “a story that’s not so,” with the likely result that the uninformed high-school student will conclude that the Bible is made up of half-truths.

In the last century, Archibald Alexander Hodge, the well-known Princeton Seminary theologian, warned that the neutrality of the public-school system is a dangerous myth:

The atheistic doctrine is gaining currency … that an education provided by the common government for the children of diverse religious parties should be entirely emptied of all religious character. The Protestants object to the government schools being used for the purpose of inculcating the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and Romanists object to the use of the Protestant version of the Bible and to the inculcation of the peculiar doctrines of the Protestant churches. The Jews protest against the schools being used to inculcate Christianity in any form, and the atheists protest against any teaching that implies the existence and moral government of God.… If every party in the State has the right of excluding from the public schools whatever he does not believe to be true, then he that believes most must give way to him that believes least, and then he that believes least must give way to him that believes absolutely nothing.… [Popular Lectures on Theological Themes, p. 280].

Thus Hodge foresaw the complete secularization of the public schools and the possibility that they would become “the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of atheism the world has ever seen.” The secondary-school course now being offered in Pennsylvania as a study in the religious literature of the West is one piece of evidence that Hodge’s prophecy may be fulfilled in our time.

No one, of course, would maintain that the Student’s Guide to Religious Literature of the West is openly atheistic. Rather, it is a poorly camouflaged presentation of doctrines that are, in essence, Unitarian and modernistic—a study slanted toward anti-biblical naturalism. We can only fear for the effect of this sectarian teaching on high-school students who think they are being given an objective account of religion in the West.

Among the troublesome questions that must be faced by fair-minded persons are these:

1. Why is reading the Bible without comment at Abington High School a transgression of the First Amendment, but studying it as myth and legend a permissible activity?

2. Were the Pennsylvania legislators aware when they passed Act No. 422 that this law would be used to further sectarian religious interests?

3. Is it possible that the “breach of neutrality” of which Justice Clark warned has now come in a disguised form and threatens to “become a raging torrent”?

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