Monday, January 25, 2016

What do students today know/believe about the Bible?

If you had to guess, would you assume that today’s students know more or less of the Bible than students in previous generations? While you’re thinking about that, would you assume that students are becoming more or less “liberal” in their orientation towards scripture?

I think that most people would probably assume that students don’t know the Bible nearly as well as they used to “back in my day” (whenever that was) and when they do think about scripture (which is not nearly enough) they are becoming alarmingly liberal.

On the surface of it, this wouldn’t be a bad assumption. There is a sort of entropy where cultures will gradually drift over time towards innovation and “progressivism” and away from older traditions, authorities, and assumptions unless there is some force exerted to temporarily stem the tide – a revival, a revolution, a crisis, or just plain nostalgia. To observe a drift away from traditional understandings or even concern for the Bible may alarm us, but it shouldn’t surprise us. And anecdotally it certainly seems as if we don’t read, love, obey, or just plain know the Bible nearly as much as we used to.

But what I have observed at least in our tiny little corner of the world doesn’t really support that narrative. Ozark Christian College has been giving a standardized test from the Association of Biblical Higher Education on Bible knowledge to incoming students for over 45 years. The average score for men over that time has been just over 40 percent. The average score for women is about the same – just under 39 percent. What is remarkable (at least to me) is that the score for incoming students has remained relatively unchanged over those years. Not one time did the scores go over 50 percent, and only two years were over 45 percent. In 1969 (the first year I have records) the average score for men and women was 36 percent. In the most recent year, the average score was 39.8 percent. You could argue from these scores that Bible knowledge has always been inadequate, but you can’t argue that students know less today than they used to.

What about orientations towards scripture? Our society is undoubtedly more liberal than it was even 10 years ago on any number of different, specific issues. It’s naïve to think that somehow our students have been immune to these changes. Before I go any further, let me add this disclaimer. I am on most things what you would call a pretty conservative person. But if liberals are guilty of idealism when it comes to the future (which they are), conservatives are certainly guilty of idealism about the past. Many of the beliefs, assumptions, and practices of our idyllic past needed to be called into account and changed (and changed sometimes because frankly we were getting scripture exactly wrong). There are occasions when progress and change should be embraced. My point is that not every innovation should be automatically cursed with the imprecation of LIBERAL. In fact, both sides should just chill on the name calling in general.

But back to my point. Are students changing their basic orientation to scripture? I have less data to draw on here, but from what little data I have, the answer seems to be no. Scot McKnight published a quiz some years ago designed to measure a person’s interpretive assumptions about scripture. It asks questions like: The commands in the Old Testament to destroy a village including women and children are: 1) Justifiable judgment against sinful, pagan, immoral peoples. 2) God’s ways in the days of the Judges: they are primitive words but people’s understanding as divine words for that day. 3) A barbaric form of war in a primitive society and I wish they weren’t in the Bible. A person’s score on this quiz will show where they fall on a spectrum from conservative to moderate to progressive. I’ve been giving this quiz for about five years in my third year biblical interpretation class. I use it as a way to talk to the students about the hidden assumptions that they make while interpreting scripture. These are mostly sophomores and juniors who are ministry majors. Since they are ministry majors you would expect them to be more committed to scripture than average. But as upperclassmen, you would also expect them to be a little more reflective and critical than the average freshman. I didn’t keep the averages from the first couple of years, but my past three years of classes have all averaged exactly 54.6 on the quiz. That is remarkable consistency. McKnight says that this score places you squarely in the “moderate” category and closer to conservative than progressive. In other words, not only do my students’ scores not seem to be changing, they are also remaining solidly moderate in their orientation towards scripture.


I know that this is a very thin slice of evidence. I could be totally wrong about larger trends in the church or in the culture. But as far as my students are concerned – students coming from mostly a churched background and demonstrating a desire for some kind of vocational ministry – they seem to know as little about scripture as their parents and grandparents, and despite the movement of culture in a more liberal direction, they have generally remained committed to the authority of scripture.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

The Dogmatism of Calvin

Frank Viola has posted on his blog a list of shocking beliefs held by John Calvin. You can read the entire entry here. It is a very damning list. Calvin's issues were manifold: a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship of the old covenant and the new, an overwhelmingly and surprisingly graceless religion (for a guy who talked so much of grace, there was precious little grace in praxis), and the establishment of a new, Protestant and arguably more despotic Christendom in Geneva. A list like this serves as a healthy reminder for Protestants of all stripes (Reformed or not) that we should be careful about whom we idealize in our popular imagination. This also serves as a cautionary tale that we have never really done the whole "Christian nation" thing very well.

Monday, September 8, 2014

What Twitter can teach us about synoptic harmonization

Sometimes I read an uber-skeptic challenging the credibility of the gospels because of differences in wording from one gospel to another. This is especially true in the gospels where one writer will have Jesus saying one thing and another gospel writer will have Jesus saying something similar yet different in some (usually minor) way. Does this mean that the gospels are untrustworthy? Does this mean that the Bible is in error and therefore uninspired? Is the sky really falling on any sort of conservative evangelical understanding of the nature of scripture? Such skepticism is neither healthy nor fair. Most of the time these small differences will be explained in one of two ways. First of all it is highly likely that Jesus repeated himself numerous times over the course of a three-year ministry. Just think about a politician on the campaign trail. Even in our highly electronic age, he will typically repeat the same talking points over and over with slight variations each time. Why would we expect anything different from Jesus in an oral culture with no communication technology? Secondly, it is reasonable to expect some stylistic and even content differences among the gospel writers even if they were reporting on the exact same event. Recent studies on the nature of oral transmission have essentially proven this point over and over again. But before you call into question the reliability of ancient sources for such discrepancies, I think that you will find that even in modern reporting we find these variations. I submit to you the following example from Twitter sent to me by a student following a recent Notre Dame dump truck job on the University of Michigan. (!!!!) All of these sources were quoting the exact same interview but with slight variations. The one thing that no one would ever question however was that ND did in fact kick Michigan's butt.

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Thursday, August 28, 2014

So...um, heresy. Amen?


This is what passes as the gospel at the largest church in North America. And it is. So distinctly. North American. I'm not sure that any additional commentary is needed. The video condemns itself.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Augustine on Scientific Knowledge

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens...and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn...If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Augustine in On the Literal Meaning of Genesis

in John C. Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 31.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Dietary Taboos



So, tell me again about how crazy the ancients were with all of their dietary taboos. And we silly moderns mock those silly Hebrews for hunting for leaven in their homes.