This is a paper presented at the 2006 SBL. I am negligent in preparing it for a volume on teaching the Bible in a secular context. I thought I would repost it here now in hopes that a few more folks might offer their thoughts and comments that I may incorporate into the final product. There is a wide range of experience out there and I think this would be a much stronger work with your contributions.
“God is Not in this Classroom” or Reading the Bible in a Secular Context
Description: Teaching biblical literature in a secular Liberal Arts environment requires allowing the texts to speak for themselves, so that students might hear what the texts have to say (which may not necessarily be what we want to hear). This is easier said than done since we must attempt to leave religious convictions, traditions, and specific agendas behind. At the same time, we must also recognize that we will not always be able to avoid our own historical context and bias. In light of these challenges and through my eight years experience as a Christian teaching courses in a Jewish Studies program at a secular university I have developed methods (and discarded others) for teaching the Hebrew Bible that include reading the texts critically as literary and historical sources while salting the course with Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other interpretations. The goal is to use the potential handicaps of preconceived ideas and convictions as gateways into the material. God may well be in the classroom and miracles may well occur, but the students know that they have to determine that for themselves.
When I originally proposed this paper, as you can see from the description I intended to share with you how I sprinkled my courses on the Hebrew Bible with readings of various readings of the text. Next semester I will be teaching Genesis, for example, and in that course we will being by reading the biblical text itself and then read Bonhoeffer’s little work on creation. When we get to Noah we will read the Genesis Apocryphon and when we get to the story of Tamar we will look at a feminist reading of the text (and make oblique references to The Red Tent). But I think this approach is fairly self-evident, that by showing students multiple readings of the same or similar text they will begin to see the challenges and promise of reading a text that is so ancient and yet still so relevant to so many. I also realized, as I surveyed the field and looked at the other proposals for today, that this is an approach that many have found useful and I did not want to burden you with my rendition of this theme.
It seems that the sort of strategies most often employed in teaching the Bible in a secular liberal arts context involve teaching the Bible as something, e.g., “The Bible as Literature,” “The Bible as History.” Or we might provide “readings” of the Bible, such as a feminist, liberationist, modern, etc. Please note, this is not a criticism per se, these are legitimate and useful strategies and that I regularly employ, yet each of these methods is an attempt to read the biblical text as something other than it is.
