Koinonia is a new blog that just launched this week, coauthored by some of the best theologians in the business. Today, an entry by John Walton explores five bad Bible-interpretation mistakes he’s repeatedly seen in children’s curriculum intended to teach kids about the Bible. One example:
Illegitimate extrapolation: The lesson is improperly expanded from a specific situation to all general situations (God helped Moses do a hard thing, so God will help you do a hard thing. But the hard thing Moses was doing was something commanded by God whereas in the lesson the hard thing becomes anything the child wants to achieve)
Here’s the thing: substitute “me” for “child,” and you’ve got the way a lot of Christians approach the Bible. This stuff is mostly written by average people (not theology professors), so it reflects the way many of us think. We’ve grown accustomed to instant gratification (I praised the Lord the day Oceanic Cable added another arrow to the fast-forward speed on the DVR), so we demand instant gratification from the Bible as well. We want quick and easy application that we don’t have to think too hard about.
Read Walton’s five fallacies, and see if any of them are evident in your own approach to Scripture.
A sidenote: children’s Bible curriculum is written (and especially edited) to make life easier on the poor Sunday-school teacher who’s stuck in a classroom for an hour with all these rambunctious kids. I’ve written and published a number of Bible-study lessons for kids and youth. But I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone and wouldn’t even use them myself, because once they made it through the editing process they were very different from what I had originally written. Instead of dumbing down Bible curriculum, maybe we should set higher expectations and offer better training for the people who will be teaching it.