Category: Pedagogy

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Can a religious studies class be a philosophy class?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my ideal list of classes for high school freshmen (see “If I could select the courses high school freshmen take”). More precisely, I wrote about the classes that I wish students at the school where I teach had to take. One key idea is that we would offer a class that helps students think deeply about what it means to live a good life, what human flourishing looks like, and how we should treat ourselves and others. I don’t have interest in teaching something preachy. The goal is to help our students learn to think about these types of things, important as they are. But it must be done in a way that encourages them to take ownership of the questions and what they might mean for their futures.

Now, I won’t say that my idea has the green light just yet. But we are having important discussions. Something like what I pondered could become a reality as early as next year, at least with a soft launch. I’m busy outlining this potential class while reading everything that I can to help me prepare the lessons I would teach if we decide to move forward with my proposal.

The class as I’m outing it is basically a philosophy class. The tentative title is “Philosophy of Human Flourishing” which takes its inspiration from “The Human Flourishing Program” at Harvard University. Today, I mentioned the possibility of this class to some of my students. You see, I have two rituals to start each class: (1) a “Song of the Day” that ties into the lesson and (2) a “Question of the Day” that sometimes is connected but at other times can be contextual (e.g. “favorite Halloween candy?” near Halloween) or frivolous (e.g. “what’s your favorite fruit?”). Today, for my “Religion in Global Context” students, I asked, “What’s one ‘big question’ that you would like to have answered some day?” They shared some excellent questions (e.g. “Is there a God?”; “What’s true success?”). This is why I told them about the possible class we may offer. Some students seemed quite excited. A couple of seniors in the class expressed disappointment that they’ll graduate before it’s offered (not that they’ll be graduated but that we didn’t offer it earlier).

Then one student asked a good question, one I’ve been asking myself: “And this is a religion credit?” He didn’t say it in a negative way. He sounded excited that such a class would count toward his religious studies requirement if he chose to take it next year. But it’s a question that I need to answer, whether it’s asked positively or negatively. Can a philosophy course be a religious studies course?

Let me provide a couple of reasons why my answer is “yes”.

(1) Paul Tillich’s definition of religion.
(2) Religion asks us to consider how we should live.

The Protestant Christian theologian Paul Tillich, wrote in his book Theology of Culture, pp. 7-8:

“Religion, in the most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern.”

A philosophy of “the good life” or of “human flourishing” (A) is about ultimate concern as well, both in how we live for ourselves and how we live for others, and (B) religious answers can be explored philosophically. By this second statement I mean this: a religious answer doesn’t need to be mindlessly considered or submitted to because it’s “revelation” (if such a concept applies to a particular religious claim). All religious answers come from humans. Yes, the approach is often different when we come at things religiously rather than philosophically but that doesn’t mean that we can’t consider from a philosophical vantage point what religions claim. Religion exists, in part, because people have had questions about our existence. If Siddhartha Gautama thought that our primary problem was dukkha, i.e. “suffering” or “disease” or “dissatisfaction” we don’t have to dismiss his diagnosis just because it has been understood religiously. In fact, we don’t have to dismiss his prescription for healing, namely his Four Noble Truth and his Noble Eightfold Path, either.

Philosophy is a mindset that requires us to be reasonable, logical, open, critical in the best way. It asks us to question the traditions we’ve inherited not to ignore them. This means that even as a class is structured around asking students to think reasonably and critically and to be logical and sound in their arguments, not appealing to divine revelation or tradition as an easy escape from tough questions about how we should live, we can include the insights of the world’s great traditions and some of the most prominent minds like Jesus of Nazareth and the Prophet Muhammad. If they had opinions on how to live, and those opinions have shaped humanity, then we should consider them! Religion can be mixed throughout a philosophy-first course so that students are thinking about religious matters especially when ethics, morals, and values are involved.

This doesn’t depart from how we’ve taught religion at my school. Even in classes that are primarily “religious studies” there’s no side-stepping the rigorous demands of studying religion in an academic setting. For this reason, the dichotomy between religion and philosophy, at least when considered through a Tillichian definition, appears to be a methodological difference at best, and a false dichotomy at worst.

A final word on this from the perspective of someone teaching in an Episcopal school. The reason-revelation divide isn’t a strong one in my context. All texts, traditions, etc., that claim the status of “revelation” are engaged with “reason”. Anglicanism has the three-legged stool of (1) the Bible; (2) Tradition; and (3) Reason. Wesleyanism added a fourth: (4) Experience. Now, I’m aware that for many Anglicans and Wesleyans, these legs aren’t equal. The Bible and Tradition take precedent. But there’s an argument to be made that they’re equal because they’re mutually interdependent. The Bible contains reasoning about which we must reason. Tradition contains reasoning about which we must reason.

Episcopal schools face a unique double challenge. First, they serve as private religious schools that promote academics, scholarship, reason, science, and the Enlightenment values in a market where many religious schools don’t. Second, they serve as private religious schools in an increasingly—for better or worse—secular society. In all likelihood, the Episcopal Church must be prepared to represent an increasingly minority position both culturally, as the denomination shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, but also ideologically, as less and less space is made for those who value the benefits of a secular society, and who share a commitment to many Enlightenment ideals regarding rationality, science, and technology, but who remain drawn to religion/spirituality and what it offers us. Our culture is sometimes pulled between extremes like exclusivist Christian Nationalism on one side and religiously disaffiliated, even anti-religious, secularism on the other side. For those who don’t want to give up their Christianity, or maybe I should say their religiosity, but who also embrace what it means to be a modern person, what survives of the Episcopal Church will (hopefully) carve out this small space that will be an essential space for many. It must be a space that embraces pluralism and openness but also welcomes people to discuss, think, and practice spirituality and value-formation. For this reason, I don’t see a contradiction between offering a class that counts toward one’s religious studies in a private religious school that happens to be heavy on philosophy and that introduces and explores religious concepts from a philosophical perspective. It’s what I’ve been doing for over eight years now!

(Of course, there’s nothing that says we can’t reframe the requirement as “Religion and Philosophy” which would be something you might see in many Catholic schools where theology and philosophy have been in dialogue from the beginning; where Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest and most influential thinker within Catholicism, was shaped by Aristotle as much as he was the Bible and Catholic Tradition.)

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Asking good questions while reading…and while living

I’ve mentioned this in a blog post years ago (see “How I teach hermeneutics to my students”) but it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently, so I’m writing about it again. In graduate school, I had a professor named Gary Tuck. In one of my first classes, he had us get in groups during the week where we’d read the beginning of the Book of Genesis—the first couple of chapters if my memory serves me correctly—and we had to come up with a long list of questions. (My memory tells me one hundred of them but that may be a mistake. It may have been fifty? I can’t recall precisely.) It seemed peculiar at the time but once we were done, I realized why he had us do it. We were forced to just ask questions. This meant that we were forced to read the text closely. We were forced to cultivate an awareness of our ignorance rather than just seeking answers. We were forced to revisit a text that many of us thought we knew. Our questions showed us that great texts can be visited time and time again with each visit delivering something new, something fresh for us to see.

I’ve duplicated this exercise for several years now. I ask my questions to put on different “lenses” asking historical, sociological, literary, and theological/philosophical questions as they read smaller excerpts. It’s a tough ask. Simultaneously, I can see it wear out some students while enlivening others. The students who enjoy it must sense what’s happening, much like I did after I followed Dr. Tuck’s instructions. The students who don’t understand the value of the exercise often do later. I’ll read their reflections when they tell me about something important, something paradigm shifting they learned in my class (see “An assessment that I’m glad I gave [and how it relates to what I’ve been saying about biblical studies]”), and it’s almost always hermeneutics or even metacriticism. It’s almost always about how they used to approach the Bible and how they do it differently now. It’s rarely a random observation from the Bible but instead a discussion of their presuppositions and paradigms. When it is about something specific in the Bible, lurking in the background is a hermeneutical shift that allowed them to ask good questions about messianism or Markan Christology or something of the sort.

The other day, as I walked students through the Second Creation Narrative of the Book of Genesis, I had a student ask a brilliant question. In this story, “the Lord God” doesn’t want humans to have the knowledge of good and evil though he places a tree the fruit of which can provide them with this knowledge in their utopian, paradise garden and he gives them a commandment to not eat from it. They eat from it. There are consequences (some say curses) upon all the characters involved: the man, the woman, the snake. One student asked, “If the humans don’t know what’s good and evil, how could they understand that it was wrong to disobey a commandment.”

There may be a good exegetical answer for a question like this (though Hebrew Narrative is notorious for leaving massive plot holes, maybe intentionally) but I’m less excited about the possibility of providing answers to their questions than I am that they ask questions like this in the first place. Whether or not they read the Bible as adults is a secondary concern. In a sense, whether they’re all avid readers (which I would hope for them but I’m a realist) is secondary. It’s the openness. It’s the curiosity. It’s the posture toward a text and in a sense, all the world can be a text. If we ask good questions, we’re on our way to living a good life. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in a letter once (see Maria Popover’s “Live the Questions: Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Doubt as a Stabilizing Force” for a deeper exploration):

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I love this mentality toward reading, thinking, and living. I think it’s freeing. I hope my students don’t learn to ask questions thinking that I’m restricting an exercise like this one to reading the Bible. I hope that it’s a paradigm shift that shapes how they live their lives!

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Some inspiring reasons to read the Bible

In my last post (see “Some uninspiring reasons to read the Bible”), I outlined four reasons for reading the Bible that used to inspire me but that no longer do: (1) reading the Bible as an inerrant/infallible text; (2) reading the Bible as a source of doctrinal proof texts; (3) reading the Bible from an “originalist” perspective because it shows the “original intent and goals of Christianity” that should be pursued to this day; and (4) for professional development purposes. So, if these approaches that used to matter to me are inspiring no longer, what does inspire me?

The Bible as a tool for thinking about history
Much of the Bible is mythology. I don’t say that pejoratively. Myth teaches us truths. It teaches us about ourselves. But it doesn’t stand up to the rigorous demands of critical historical research, or our modern scientific method, etc. That being said, it can teach us a few things about history: (A) it does preserve some historical data; (B) it tells us about the historical roots of Judaism and Christianity; (C) it shows us that the world isn’t static; (D) it reminds us that if history doesn’t trouble you, then what you’re experiencing is propaganda.

Regarding (A), archaeologists and historians have used the Bible to help them discover and understand the past. I’m thinking about say some of the developments in the Kingdom of Judah during the reign of King Hezekiah. Or how the New Testament when paired with the writings of the historian Josephus give us most of our access to first-century Galilee and Judea. So, the Bible does have historical value, even if other major sections of the Bible, like the Exodus, or Jesus’ resurrection, are inaccessible through the tools used by historians.

Regarding (B), both Judaism and Christianity take and have taken inspiration/guidance from the collection called the Tanakh or Old Testament and Christianity has been inspired/guided by the New Testament. These aren’t the only sources of inspiration/guidance for these religions but they are prominent ones. If we want to understand the roots of these religions, the Bible’s presentation of history is valuable and if we consider how to Bible has been used in these religions, a.k.a. its “reception history,” then the Bible’s continued value helps us understand these religions, whether from the inside or the outside.

Regarding (C), an exercise that I’ll have my student do in a couple of week is a comparison between 2 Samuel 24:1-25 and I Chronicles 21:1-30. Both of these texts are about how King David took a census that upset Israel’s God leading to a plague on the people. 2 Samuel is believed by most scholars to have been written in the 6th century BCE whereas 1 Chronicles can be placed in 4th century BCE. In 2 Samuel, it’s Israel’s God that provokes King David to take the census and then judges David and the people for David’s sin. This is an uncomfortable depiction of divinity: God as both tempter and judge. In 1 Chronicles, a character known as satan (an “accuser” or an “attacker”) is the one who provokes David to disobedience. 1 Chronicles’s theology removes God from being directly responsible for human evil/disobedience which is a vision of God that better aligns with the theologies we find in most forms of Judaism and Christianity today. This exercise shows students that history preserves the evolution of theology because humans visions about “God” are continually changing and in some sense, this provides readers of the Bible with an impetus to continue in this tradition of rethinking what we mean when we say “God”. History and the history of our religions isn’t static.

Regarding (D), the Bible can be troubling. My students find themselves wrestling with God’s command to flood the earth; or the Akeda where Abraham seems willing to sacrifice Isaac to his god; or King David’s violence and sexual abuse. As if politicians in Oklahoma and Texas have their way, the Bible will be taught as uncomplicated history! But again (and I don’t know the original source of this very accurate quote), if what you learn about history isn’t complicated and doesn’t make you a bit uncomfortable, then what you’re learning is not history but propaganda. And to be fair, the Bible is full of propaganda: just look at how the Davidic line is presented in Chronicles compared to Samuel.

The Bible as a tool for thinking about literature
The Bible is excellent literature. This is what brings me back to it time and time again at this stage in my life. Have you ever read the Book of Job? The wisdom of the Book of Ecclesiastes? This stuff is brilliant. The characters are simple (e.g. we don’t see their thought lives or motivations) and yet somehow extremely complicated (maybe because we are responsible, as readers, for providing them with thought lives and motivation).

I doubt many English high school teachers expect their students to return time and time again 1984, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Catcher in the Rye. Instead, these books are used to try to install a love of literature, reading, fictional worlds, narrative, etc. The Bible can be taught the same way. And with this in mind, it relieves me of some of the disappointments I mentioned in the last post, namely knowing that many of my students won’t read the Bible as adults. Most of them will engage the Bible through the filter of a pastor or a priest, maybe through the bubble-wrapped presentation of a devotional, but rarely from the challenging, in-depth perspectives that I try to acquaint them with.

The Bible as a tool for thinking about philosophy and theology
While I’m quite uncomfortable with using the Bible to create normative, constructive, prescriptive theology, especially because the God of the Bible is far to anthropomorphized for my taste, I think the Bible can remain provocative for our thoughts about God. Retiring to the Book of Job: I don’t think the author intended for his readers to come to the conclusion that human suffering can be the result of the Creator God having a petty wager with an angelic being. Instead, there are two message that I find probably: (1) the Creator’s world is full of suffering, pain, death, chaos, and you, dear human, are no freer from this reality than a whale, or an elephant, or a dog, all of which derive from the same creative power as we humans do; (2) most attempts to come up with a satisfying theodicy will be comical, at best, and harmful, at worst, just as the “God-Satan bet” at the beginning, or Job’s friends theologies throughout, show us.

Furthermore, the Bible can help us think philosophically. I’m reading Plato’s The Republic again right now. And while I get there are differences, I do think that just as this book can provoke us to think philosophically, especially regarding ethics and politics, so can biblical books like the Books of Daniel and Esther, for example. In fact, juxtaposing Daniel and Esther can be very helpful as both books appear to be Jewish texts written under Greek rule that look back on previous Persian (and to a lesser extent, Babylonian) rule. Daniel’s message is much like deontological ethics: stay true to your convictions no matter if it leads you to a fiery furnace or a lion’s den. (And maybe you’ll be divinely delivered but you do your duty even if no deliverance comes.) Whereas Esther’s message (at least in the original Hebrew version) leaves Esther making pragmatic decisions for her survival and the survival of her people with no expectation of divine deliverance no absolute fidelity to her ancestral laws and customs if those laws and customs leave her and her people vulnerable to extinction. A reader doesn’t need to share the theology of Daniel or Esther to wonder whether deontological ethics or consequentialist ethics are more valuable in the long run. These are philosophical questions that these biblical books can help us consider.

The Bible as a tool liturgical reflection
Finally, I admit this: the Bible is a book better preached than taught, sometimes. (This can be abused though.) It’s a book that’s better read prayerfully, whether individually or communally, than it is scholastically. It’s a book that’s better suited to get us thinking about the divine than it is telling us what to think about the divine. It’s better read like we read poetry than touches us than it is science, history, law, etc.

Maybe I say this because I’ve been around the Episcopal Church for nearly a decade and this view of the Bible sits well in the tradition that is unified not so much around a shared creed as around the type of practiced Christianity advocated by the Book of Common Prayer. Reading the Bible as a wisdom text, or as resource for meditation, makes sense to me. This means reading it openly, non-dogmatically, and in the vernacular of many younger people, spiritually but not religiously (a dichotomy that I don’t think holds when critically evaluated but a “feeling” that I understand).

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Welcome Generation Alpha?

I realized that this year will be the first year (I think) that I start teaching students who are classified as “Generation Alpha,” according to people who categorize this sort of thing. For example, the “social analyst and demographer” Mark McCrindle organizes Generation Alpha between the years 2010-2024. The logic behind these years is as follows:

“Generational definitions are most useful when they span a set age range and so allow meaningful comparisons across generations. That is why the generations today each span 15 years with Generation Y (Millennials) born from 1980 to 1994; Generation Z from 1995 to 2009 and Generation Alpha from 2010 to 2024. And so it follows that Generation Beta will be born from 2025 to 2039.”

This sort of thing is pretty subjective. In her book Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future, Jean Twenge offers a more concrete reason for arguing that “Generation Alpha” shouldn’t begin with 2010 but instead 2012. Twenge called “Generation Alpha” “Polars” because they’re born into an era of extreme political polarization. I like Twenge’s name better but also I liked “iGen” better than “Gen Z” and yet it’s clear that “Gen Z” is the more popular label. Anyway, for Twenge, “Gen Alpha/Polars” begins at 2012 because of the following reasons (from pp. 451-452):

  1. Technology: “smartphone ownership crossed 50% in the U.S. between the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013”.
  2. Black Lives Matter: “founded in 2013”; “gained widespread support before the first Polars entered kindergarten”.
  3. COVID: one of the youngest groups to remember the global pandemic as Twenge argues “the time before March 2020 will be only vaguely remembered by those under age 7 at the time”.

I appreciate Twenge’s taxonomy because it provides a rationale like this one. That doesn’t mean “generations” can be found in nature. They’re social constructs of a weaker variety, for sure. But they’re helpful for understand trends and cultural transitions. That being said, they’re fragile. In many ways, when I was younger I shared in the optimism that was characteristic of the mid-2000s Millennial but as I’ve aged I’ve hardened in many ways that might place me among stereotypical Gen X’ers. I was born in 1982, so depending on who you ask, I’m one of the first Millennials. (Twenge marks 1980 as the start for Millennials.) But when I meet people born in the early to middle 90s, I have sometimes felt like there’s no way we’re from the same generational cohort. Often, I relate closer to the slightly older than me Gen X folk in my circles. So, let’s continue to embrace the subjectivity while respecting the effort made by people like Twenge, who organize generations around important methodological markers like major changes in technology (e.g. TV; home appliances; AC; birth control; computers; the Internet; social media) and to a lesser extent, major events (e.g. AIDS epidemic; 9/11; the Great Recession; COVID-19 pandemic).

Maybe I’m teaching Gen Z for a couple more years. Either way, if the sociologists who study this topic are right that in marking generational divisions along lines of about every 15 years or so, then we’re about the experience some transitions in the classroom. As Twenge writes, “generational differences are based on averages,” like how much time someone spends on the Internet or a social media app. Those changes are real and it’s best to be on the look out for whatever is coming next (e.g. the AI revolution?) if we want to be prepared to educate tomorrow’s children.

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Movies that I show in my classes: The Prince of Egypt (1998)

In my class, “Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures,” the second movie that I show is The Prince of Egypt (1998). As I said in my post introducing this series on the movies that I show in my classes, I’ll provide brief commentary on the following: (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.

1. Why I show The Prince of Egypt (1998)

    The Prince of Egypt is an excellent movie. Full stop. I’ve seen it dozens of times over the past two and a half decades and enjoy it still. The soundtrack is amazing for 90s children (Whitney Houston, Maria Carey, Boys 2 Men) and the voice acting cast is stacked (Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Sandra Bullock, Steve Martin, Patrick Stewart, Martin Short, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum). It tells one of the most important stories of the Hebrew Bible in a memorable way. Honestly, what part of the Hebrew Bible is better known in broader, popular culture than the Exodus narrative? And how much credit should we give this animated film for the probability that it’s the Moses-story.

    After reading through the wonderful, but heavy narratives of the Book of Genesis (Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebekah; Jacob, Rachel, Lead, Bilhah, and Zilpah; the Twelve Sons of Israel, especially Joseph), this film provides a little break in what can be a demanding stretch of the semester, especially for students who aren’t used to doing this much reading!

    2. The strengths of The Prince of Egypt

      As I noted above, it makes the Exodus-narrative memorable. I tell my students that I need them to remember at least three names into adulthood: Abraham, Moses, and David. This helps cement Moses in their memory.

      Related, it’s designed so that the main outline of events is easy to track. Just reading Exodus 1-19 doesn’t guarantee this.

      It’s fun. I know few people who dislike the movie. Sometimes my students dislike it, but they’re teenagers, so the odds are that I’ll have some who dislike it from a demographic that often dislikes a lot of things!

      Even though the video sounds negative (“The Most Successful Animated Failure Ever Made”), I recommend the below video because it shows how excellent a movie The Prince of Egypt was for its time and is even now:

      3. The weaknesses of The Prince of Egypt

      I ask my students to reflect on how the movie relates to the biblical narrative. One question I want them to consider is whether “cartooning” events like the plagues, especially the death of the first born, undermines the story itself. Some students feel that it does. In a sense, this can be turned into a strength as it provides an opportunity for my students to think about the media they consume, especially when it’s religious and/or mythological in nature.

      Some students dislike the singing and dancing when paired with such a serious story. There have been years when I’ve shown Exodus: Gods and Kings instead. That movies avoids the childishness of The Prince of Egypt though it has its own problems. (For example, everyone is white, which is weird for a narrative set in 2nd millennia BCE Egypt. Another is how it tries to naturalize the miracles of Exodus, even presenting Moses as a leading a form of guerrilla warfare. So, there’s aspects of either movie that will trouble any given viewer.)

      As always, biblical films rewrite the Bible a bit. The decision to make Moses and Rameses brothers and to make “Pharaoh” into “Pharaoh Ramses” specifically is, well, a decision. Any time students watch biblical movies, they’re bound to intertwine the movie’s version with the Bible’s version in their memories. This leads to a different discussion that I won’t take up here: does this matter? Is the literal narrative of the Bible what students need to know or is the received cultural narrative that originates in the Bible as important?

      This being said, if you’re going to be critical of The Prince of Egypt, at least be entertaining about it…like this video!

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      Movies that I show in my classes: Noah (2014)

      In my class, “Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures,” the first movie that I show is Noah (2014). As I said in my post introducing this series on the movies that I show in my classes, I’ll provide brief commentary on the following: (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.

      1. Why I show Noah (2014)

        During the first few weeks of this class, I introduce my students to the difference between reading the Bible in a classroom setting like ours and what they may have experienced in a church or synagogue setting, or during personal or family devotionals. Unit 1, “How We Read the Bible” doesn’t try to establish a universal, objective approach to reading the Bible but I do tell students that we’ll be wearing a few different “lenses”: those of historians, literary critics, sociologists, philosophers, and theologians. In other words, I try to familiarize them with the different “academic” approaches to the Bible. Usually, students are a bit confused still about these different approaches as we end this unit but the goal is to familiarize them with how we’ll be reading. The next three units practice these approaches, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. For students who take “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures,” the work continues and often I see that most students have gained a “hands on” understanding of how academic approaches to the Bible differ from what they’ve experienced at home or in religious communities.

        The content that I use to help them practice different approaches to reading is the First and Second Creation Narratives found in Genesis 1-2 and the narratives found in Genesis 3-4 where the humans interact with their environment and their Creator. During this unit, I introduce the concepts of “canonical” and “non-canonical” literature and I have them read from a historian’s perspective (considering the historicity, ahistoricity, and mythology of the passage); a literary critic’s perspective (structure, context, setting, characters, etc.); a sociologist’s perspective (gender relations, family structure, humans and their environment, attitudes toward violence, etc.); and the perspectives of philosopher’s and theologian’s (what messages do we find? what presumptions are in the text? what’s being claimed and assumed? what is this text saying about concepts like “God” and “humanity” and “animals” and “the world”?).

        To wrap up the unit, students read the entire Flood Narrative of Genesis 6-9. Then we watch Noah to see how Darren Aronofsky has read and re-imagined this text both in itself, in dialogue with non-canonical traditions, and in hermeneutically merging the ancient and modern horizons of this narrative and our own collective, modern narrative(s).

        2. The strengths of Noah

        First, Aronofsky helps students see how the narrative “gaps” in Genesis 6-9 have invited interpreters to “fill in” what’s missing. When I have them focus on the literary aspects of the Hebrew Bible, I point out how little we are told about what’s happening in the background, or the internal, psychological states of the characters. This gives the Hebrew Bible life. What’s Noah thinking when he goes about building an ark as all of his fellow humans prepare to experience an omnicide? Only the interpreters can fill in those details because they narrator provides us with nothing but silence.

        Second, I find that this visuals help many students understand the “ancientness” of this story. In a sense, Aronofsky makes Noah and company look very modern. The weapon technology is creative, to say the least. So is the clothing. But it still feels like an ancient, pre-historic world and the movie feels like mythology which helps students realize, consciously or unconsciously, that we’re not dealing with stories that align with modern historiography. Adjacently, elements of ancient patriarchy, ideas and values around reproduction, religion and mysticism, attitudes toward violence, etc., are different from our own, which corresponds to the sociological lens I ask my students to consider.

        Third, Aronofsky is familiar with Jewish tradition and non-canonical material. For example, there are places in this story that aren’t from Genesis 6-9 but are from Genesis. The Akedah tradition where Abraham is ready to sacrifice Isaac is imported back into the Noah story for creative reasons but also theologically rich ones as the Torah itself can be read as juxtaposing Noah, Abraham, and Moses when it comes to divine judgment and their response to it. Additionally, “the Watchers” are a somewhat silly, kind of “Transformers” inspired presentation of material from the Enochian tradition. This helps teach students about reception history and how interpretation of the Bible is never from “nowhere” but always from a point of view. The canon influences how we interpret material in the canon but non-canonical traditions, whether the Book of Enoch, the Protevangelium of James (with regard to the subsequent semester’s content), or even just denominational traditions, also shape our interpretation.

        Fourth, Aronofsky modernizes the message of Genesis 6-9 so that it speaks to a few contemporary concerns. First, those who have watched Noah become aware that in many ways, this movie is about human degradation of our environment. The “descendants of Cain” plummet the earth. They’re greedy. The environment is destroyed wherever they go. Meanwhile, the “descendants of Seth,” which is limited to Noah, his wife, and his sons, care for the earth, use only what’s needed, and practice a vegan diet. I point out to my students that Aronofsky isn’t just parroting the Bible’s story: he’s using an ancient story of environmental destruction and the “judgment” that follows to ask about our own rising waters (i.e. climate change) and how we humans are bringing about our own judgment—one that impacts us but also non-human animals and all the life on our planet. This corresponds to the philosophical and theological lens that I ask my students to consider.

        3. The weaknesses of Noah

        As always, students often conflate the movies that I show with the texts themselves. I’ll catch in later assignments times when students talk about what happened in the Book of Genesis but they’re describing what happed in Noah. For better or worse, “Noah” is the movie’s Noah who experiences a psychotic break and tries to kill his own grandkids, rather than the vague, 2-D Noah of Genesis 6-9. I try to prevent this by having them read Genesis 6-9 while listing 25 observations about the text that they juxtapose to the movie when we’re done but the influence of visual art is strong!

        The Transformers quality keeps their attention but when I ask students if they picked up on Aronofsky’s environmental message, very, very few ever have. Once I make it evident, they see it, but they don’t see it as the descendants of Cain storm the Ark while fighting against the Watchers!

        Some may be concerned that the movie departs too far from the Bible’s source material. Other than what I mentioned above about how students conflate the two, I think every sermon, every week, in every church and synagogue does this with the Bible and the Bible would be boring, dead, and meaningless if people didn’t expand on its content interpretively. But I do know that it is a very creative interpretation and this can offend some and confuse others.

        Obviously, something can be said for all these ancient people being English speaking white folk. I think this is less problematic with a mythological, prehistorical movie like Noah than it was with the other 2014 biblical epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings that is set in Egypt in the middle of the second millennia BCE. But I do recognize how it can create a subconscious assumption that the Bible is about white people when in fact it very much isn’t!

        Overall, the strengths outweigh the weaknesses. Noah starts conversations about the Bible and it keeps my student’s attention. They have strong emotional responses both in favor of and against how it interacts with the Bible’s materials, which I see as a good thing either way. It gets them thinking and doing their own interpretive work!

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          The movies that I show in my classes

          Movies are a teacher’s friend. They give you a reprieve from lecturing. They shrink the amount of time that you have to invest in lesson planning. They provide visuals for students to help them better understand what you’ve been trying to teach. They act as helpful summaries of previous material. I could say more.

          I want to write a few short posts explaining why I’ve chosen the movies that I’ve chosen for my classes. It should be noted, I teach high school, so I’m limited in what I can show. Some of those limits are self-limits because I don’t want to have to address certain concerns or skip past controversial sections. For example, Life of Brian is a film that I would like to show in my “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures” class but it has enough controversial content that I’ve decided it’s not worth it. I do show a couple of “R” rated movies so my students have to have parental consent forms signed but they’re not the type of “R” rated movies that upset parents. Here are the movies that I’ll discuss over a series of future posts:

          “Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures”

          1. Noah (2014)
          2. The Prince of Egypt (1998)

          Also, I supplement my lessons with the first five episodes of the miniseries The Bible.

          “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures”

          1. The Star (2017) or The Young Messiah (2016)
          2. Mary Magdalene (2018)

          Also, I supplement my lessons with the second five episodes of the miniseries The Bible.

          “Religion in Global Context”

          1. Free Guy (2021)
          2. Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
          3. An American Pickle (2020)

          “Religion in the United States”

          1. Malcolm X (1992)
          2. Cesar Chavez (2014)
          3. The Apostle (1997)

          When I write my posts, I’ll explain (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.

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          Belief beyond propositions

          A couple of months ago, I wrote about how Carl Schleicher’s painting Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud works as a visual analogy for how I read the Bible as someone who (1) is committed to the methodologies associated with various academic approaches to the Bible who (2) happens to identify as a Christian as well (see “Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud and Reading the Gospels”). In that post, I stated that I want to “share one of two examples I use for students who wonder how I remain Christian while reading the Bible critically”. That post provides my first example, as I talked about Schleicher’s painting. In this post, I want to talk about the second example that I provide.

          In the Gospel of John, there’s a scene that strikes me every time I read it. In John 20:3-10, we read the following:

          3 Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4 The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7 and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed, 9 for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to their homes.

          Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb. She tells the male disciples. Peter runs to the tomb with that mysterious, unnamed “other disciples” who is known as “the disciple Jesus loved” in other passages. That disciple looks in the tomb and sees the wrappings from Jesus’ body. Simon Peter enters the tomb, seeing the same thing. Then that other disciple entered the tomb. When I read this passage with my students, I stop after v. 8: “Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in and he saw and believed…” Then I ask them, “What did he believe?” They respond, “That he had resurrected from the dead.” I tell them that this is a reasonable answer but then I continue with v. 9, “for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

          Many commentators talk about how this idealized disciple believed in the resurrection. They present this disciple, “the Beloved Disciple,” as the one who believes without seeing (contra Thomas in 20:26-29). That may be accurate but I think it needs to be qualified. As Lidija Novakovic writes about v. 9 in John 11-21: A Handbook on the Greek Text:

          The main problem, however, is that this clause describes a situation that is not yet characterized by the proper understanding of scripture, which forms the basis of the resurrection faith. This verse thus stands in tension with v. 8, which seems to claim that the Beloved Disciple believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. If, however, ἐπίστευσεν in v. 8 refers to incomplete resurrection faith because it is based on seeing rather than hearing, the explanation in v. 9 becomes intelligible if it describes a fully developed resurrection faith that can only be derived from the correct interpretation of scripture. This tension with v. 8, however, is thereby not completely resolved because the implied subjects of the γὰρ clause are both the Beloved Disciple and Peter, whereas the subject of v. 8 is only the former.

          I don’t think you can avoid the reality that the narrator tells us that the Beloved Disciple believed and “did not understand” along with Peter. If he believed that Jesus had been resurrected, he didn’t quite understand what it was that he was believing. He wasn’t believing a mere proposition like “and the third day he rose again” as we see the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. When I read that the Beloved Disciple “saw and believed” (καὶ εἶδεν καὶ ἐπίστευσεν), I think there’s more to it. I think he believed in Jesus. Yes, maybe he had some foggy concept like “Jesus has risen” but if we’re to take v. 9 seriously, it’s not a fleshed out belief.

          Honestly, akin to what I said about my own Christianity being more comfortable with Good Friday and Holy Saturday than Easter Sunday (see “A Žižekian Good Friday”), this captures my state during this Easter season. I believe…but I don’t know, nor do I understand. We see something similar in Matthew 28:16-18: “

          16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.

          Likewise, in Luke 24:41a, the disciples are described this way:

          41 Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering…

          Worshipping while doubting. Feeling joy while disbelieving. Believing but not understanding. These are the narratives that Christians have inherited about the people who are reported to have seen the resurrected Jesus.

          Because of this, I see no contradiction in applying the critical tools of scholarship, of questioning the texts we’re studying, and all the while maintaining a rootedness in Christianity. I see no contradiction in feeling agnostic while believing, or even atheistic at times, while believing. Are there days when my studying leads me to think, “I’m a fool and this is my mythology”? Yes. Are there other days when I think, “My mythology gives me life”? Yes. Is this contradictory? Probably but it’s a tension I’m willing to accept. I can’t find it within me to abandon the traditions that have given me hope and a language for expressing that hope. I can’t pretend that I don’t live in 2024 which is a universe away from the world of the first-century. And I don’t think we have to choose, contrary to fundamentalist thinking pulling us one way or the other. I think we can rest in the tension, sometimes quite comfortably.

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          An assessment that I’m glad I gave (and how it relates to what I’ve been saying about biblical studies)

          As the past quarter drew to a close, I introduced a new assessment to my students: a “Quarterly Writing Assessment”. I asked them to write a short response (ten sentences minimum) to a prompt that in summary asks them to tell me one thing they’ve learned that has changed their perspective/shifted their paradigm; one thing that would be missing from their education if they hadn’t taken my class.

          For my own psychology, I’m glad I gave this assessment. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether students are really learning anything. How much are they memorizing for a quiz or test? How much are they turning your required work into passing busy work? Will it stick?

          As I’ve been grading these assignments, I’m heartened. My “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures” students have been telling me about how they’ve come to recognize the Bible’s internal diversity; how interpretive paradigms have shifted over time; how it’s ok if someone else interprets the Bible differently; how “messianism” as a concept has shifted how they look at Jesus as “Christ”; how the differences between the Gospels has influenced who they understand Jesus to be; why Mark’s Jesus is so secretive about his identity and John’s Jesus is so loud about it; how Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and in his parables have them pondering why Jesus favored the oppressed and marginalized.

          My “Religion in Global Context” students have told me that they understand why studying religion is important; how religious illiteracy has negative consequences; how they’ve realized that not all religions look alike; how they’ve realized that there’s no single way to define “religion”; how they’ve learned a bit about Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam; how they’ve been introduced to questions about reality and metaphysics through Indian philosophical categories (e.g. Brahman, Atman, karma, samsara, moksha, dharma) in ways that have them rethinking what they understand to be “real”.

          My “Religion in the United States” students have told me how they learned about the diversity of Christianities in the original Thirteen Colonies and adjacently how diverse Christianity is; how the Founding Father’s views of Christianity weren’t monolithic; how some Founding Fathers (e.g. Samuel Adams; John Jay; John Witherspoon) may receive approval from confessional/creedal Christians today while others (George Washington; John Adams; Thomas Jefferson) are more complicated; the importance of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment; the role of the Supreme Court and IRS in shaping how Americans view “religion” and how religion is practiced here; the nature of Indigenous American religion.

          As I read what my students wrote, I felt like each class was indispensable to their education. It made me proud of what our catalog offers. The funny thing is this: I think we need a class on ethics and I think we need a class introducing philosophical thinking. Since students have to take only 2 semesters of religion to graduate, I don’t know where these classes fit or if they do fit at all. I do know that as frustrated as I may be at times when it comes to teaching religion in a world where STEM is squeezing the humanities to death, I don’t doubt for a second that our society needs what our humanities classes have to offer.

          I want to return to my biblical studies students because I’ve been writing a lot about those classes the past few days. First, I mentioned that I’m faced with an existential crisis when teaching this class. I’m teaching the sacred texts of a dying institution in America: the Bible of the Christian Church. I’m aware that many of my students, presuming trajectories hold, won’t be reading their Bibles as adults and likely many won’t be part of any Church.

          This led to me reflect on how critical approaches to the Bible play a part in demystifying the Bible but also this act results in the eventual demise of biblical studies. As more and more people see the Bible as another human creation (and the Church as a human institution), fewer of them will be interested in it. Eventually, this will impact the future of biblical studies, shrinking our ranks, leading to the closure of our programs and our presses, because I’m confident that many biblical scholars entered biblical studies in order to have religious questions answered. The irony is that in our effort to dismantle dangerous forms of biblicism, we’re simultaneously depleting our “farm system” (to use a baseball term) because biblicist cultures give rise to future biblical scholars (or so I presume until empirical data proving otherwise is shown to me).

          Finally, I argued that critical approaches to the Bible remain the right approach, even knowing the consequences, because at this time and place (21st century United States), if we fail to help students deconstruct biblicist views of the Bible then biblicist views of the Bible will remain the default interpretation of the Bible. This isn’t to say that people will read the Bible accepting its authority through a biblicist paradigm alone. Many will reject the Bible outright presuming that the line that biblicist draw in the sand (read it as the inerrant “Word of God” or leave “the Church’s Bible” alone) is a real line that one either crosses or doesn’t. In other words, I think there’s a necessary gamble. If we want contemporary young people to mature into adults who show interest in the Bible as “wisdom literature” with which they can wrestle in a life-giving way—even non-Christians, just as I, a Christian, wrestle with the Vedas and Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Quran, etc.—then we must show that the black-and-white paradigm of biblicism is a false dichotomy. If we want them to approach the Bible as a source for creative theological thinking, they must realize the Bible is a conversation-starter, not a conversation-ender.

          Do I wish we could skip past the deconstruction of biblicism in order to help students read the Bible wisely? Yes. Do I think we can do this without risking the effects of residual biblicism remaining with our students? No. I don’t see how we can lead students to a mature understanding of the Bible without dispelling the mythologies of our culture. If you doubt what I’m saying, go to Barnes & Noble. Walk through the section related to the Bible and to Christianity. Recognize that this is the dominant understanding of what the Bible is and what Christianity represents. Realize that many adherents to Christianity and readers of the Bible think the selection at Barnes & Noble is normative; recognize that many who reject Christianity and the Bible agree. This shouldn’t be. It doesn’t have to be. At least I hope it doesn’t have to be.

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          The Fading Bible of Dying Churches

          This week, I was talking to a clergy friend. I mentioned to them that over the past few years I’ve faced an existential crisis. When I teach my biblical studies courses, I have acute sense that I’m introducing my students to an increasingly irrelevant cultural artifact. I don’t feel this way when I teach my theory of religion course, “Religion in Global Context”. I don’t feel this way when I teach my course “Religion in the United States”. But when I teach my introductions to the Bible, something feels strange.

          Image: “Old Bibles” from Henry Hartley’s blog

          Sometimes it’s the subtle emotional and mental tug of war that I must do with my student’s attention. Sometimes it feels like they’re just not interested. And while I know that some “edu-influencers” out there might suggest that the problem lies in my pedagogy, I reject that notion. I know I’m an engaging and creative teacher. I know that I’m good at keeping student’s attention, even in an age where TikTok, Snapchat, and other forms of social media, along with the constant demand of the smartphones in their pockets (which is where they’re at, even if school policy says otherwise), compete with me. When “Religion in Global Context” and “Religion in the United States” students are asked to stick with me as we wade into some deep concepts, they’re usually willing to trust me. They appear willing and eager to learn.

          This is true of more than 50% of my biblical studies students as well. I don’t want to be dramatic. I don’t want to paint a picture of classes filled with disengaged teens. That’s not the case at all. But when I do struggle to keep them with me, when I do struggle to hold their attention, when I do receive the occasional, sharp and targeted question, “Why do I have to learn this? Why does this matter?” it’s always when teaching the Bible.

          My clergy friend faces something similar. They’re working in the world of mainline Christianity. If you haven’t paid attention, while Christianity’s influence is fading in the United States, the mainline leads the way. My friend is working on the ship as it sinks. This doesn’t mean that the work they’re doing is irrelevant but it can be hard to know that you’re providing end-of-life care for an institution you love. For example, the political scientist Ryan Burge told Tripp Fuller on a recent episode of “Homebrewed Christianity” that 52% of PC (USA) ministers are retired. That’s a dead-man-walking denomination. The Episcopal Church, for whom I work indirectly, is “dead” by 2040 (or 2050?), which doesn’t mean that there actually will be zero Episcopalians in a decade and a half…but there won’t be many.

          (This change has been coming for a long time. I’ve been listening to “Emerged: An Oral History of the Emerging Church Movement” created Tripp Fuller and Tony Jones. It reminds me of why I was interested in the “emerging church” in my 20s. I knew then that the choice was between a dying church or a remade one. John Piper’s “Farewell Rob Bell” tweet may as well have said “farewell Millennials and Gen Z”. I tried to make it work in evangelicalism once I saw the emerging movement fading as quickly as it had risen, but I couldn’t do it.)

          As someone who works with adolescents, I see the decline in religiosity before many others see it, which in the United States means mostly a decline in established Christianity. Ryan Burge shared some statistics recently on the decline in church attendance among high school seniors from 1995-2022, and it’s a steep drop! In 1995, only 15% of high school seniors said that they never attend church. It’s 30% now. In 1995, 32% attended weekly. It’s 22% now. Secularization has won the day, for better or worse. Returning to Burge’s research, Gen Z is 48-49% atheist/agnostic/non-affiliated. Now, about 31% of Gen Z are “Nones,” or non-affiliated. They may be “spiritual but not religious” (see Burge’s graphic below) so this doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned ideas about “god” or “the afterlife” completely; it means they’re not accepting wholesale packaged doctrine. It means they’re not interested in doing what I did as a kid: spending two or three days a week at a local church.

          I’ve created my biblical studies course with this in mind. I don’t presume biblical literacy from my students. My classes are academic in nature but I begin with the basics (“Genesis 1:1 means book-chapter-verse” level basics). I try to provide space for personal engagement without being confessional. While I work for a school affiliated with the Episcopal Church, we accept students from a wide-variety of religious traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Jewish, Muslim—I’ve taught them all. And many students from these traditions have taken my classes on the Bible. Often, they seem to be more engaged than my Christian students. As the old saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt”. The other private Christian schools in the greater San Antonio area are confessional in nature. Many of these schools wouldn’t admit students who come from non-Christian families. I’m confident that in those mostly Catholic and Evangelical settings, engagement with the Bible is stronger but that’s because I was raised and became an adult within these biblicist subcultures, so I know what role the Bible plays. This doesn’t mean that I think the Bible is taken more seriously in those contexts. It can be a bit of a good luck charm; it can be studied through the lens of apologetics where you begin with the answer and work back to the question. But it’s more important to those students because of biblicism than it is to most of my students who better represent the generational trends we see nationally.

          There’s panic because of this cultural paradigm shift. Gallup reports that fewer Americans see the Bible as the literal “Word of God”. Christianity Today reports, many Americans have stopped reading their Bibles. Organizations like “The Gospel Coalition” that are built on biblicism speak of a “Bible Literacy Crisis!” The pope of the SBC, Al Mohler, wrote about this “scandal” several years ago. As important as the Bible has been within American culture, “the time they are a-changin” as Bob Dylan sings. I don’t think a reversal of trends is in the forecast though.

          As our society becomes more culturally secular, and more pluralistic, I wonder what it means to teach the Bible to high school students, even from the perspective that I teach it. (And yes, I can hear some say that maybe I need to shift to a more confessional, more theological approach…but I can’t do that in good faith nor does it make practical sense when most of my Christian students are Roman Catholic and I’m not. It wouldn’t solve anything.) My field of study has been dying. There are fewer jobs in academic biblical studies. The Annual Report of the Society of Biblical Studies shows that while there are more members than there were in 2000, we have likely peaked and I’m skeptical that we’ll see a rebound (see the graphic below from the Annual Report). I’ve encouraged fellow members of SBL to consider teaching high school but I know that this likely doesn’t mean teaching the Bible but rather teaching history or social studies using the skills your education gave you.

          In my eight years as a high school teacher, I’ve encouraged many students to minor in religion; I’ve hoped that more would major in it (since I see religious studies and philosophy as very employable majors). But I’ve encouraged only one student to consider theological/biblical studies and that’s because they were interested in being both clergy and an academic. I suppose that they could survive with two skis but not with one! I can’t encourage working for only a dying church or only a dying field of academics but maybe they can piece the two together for good life working for both?

          When I teach my students to question how people use the word “religion,” or about comparative religion, or about how the Supreme Court interprets the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, or about how Mormonism and Pentecostalism arose in the American context, I sense the immediate relevancy. When I teach them about the Bible, there are moments—moments when I read their reflections and see them truly wrestling with the nature of the Bible, and how it’s read, and how it’s been interpreted, and how it’s been applied—that I see they’re learning something and that they’re critically thinking which is my goal as an educator. But as I’ve been saying, there’s the lingering sense that I’m teaching them something they’ll never revisit in adulthood. Why? Because they won’t be reading the Bible and they may not be attending church anymore. Is this good or bad for the future of our society? I don’t know. Has Bible reading and church attendance made Americans better people, better neighbors? Does secularism lead to healthier societies or more sickly ones? I don’t know. But I do know we’re in the middle of a massive cultural shift—one that’s been going on since before I was born in 1982—and we’re just beginning to see what this shift means but not clearly enough to truly know what a future of biblical illiteracy and American secularism entails.

          (Final note: yes, Christian Nationalism has been loud. But it appears most Americans reject it or are skeptical of it. This doesn’t mean that the Christian Nationalist philosophy can’t win the day but that’s a different discussion altogether. And I would choose most forms of secularism over Christian Nationalism all day, every day.)