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Originally posted by Mamacita:
I agree with cliffdweller. The Flood story is terrifying. It's not all cute animals and rainbows. Also on the list of scary stories, I would never tell young children the story of the binding of Isaac. When I would read to my kids from a children's bible, I would always skip that one.

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Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
But, if you decide not to use a Biblical narrative because it's "unscientific" then you end up with nothing at all. No resurrection, no miracles, no myth. And, while you're at it you should probably skip Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the Narnia Chronicles as well.

If you tell someone the story of Jonah and they think you are saying that there actually was a big fish which swallowed him for three days then I agree there is probably an issue with gullibility. But, it's not Christians who are being gullible but the person you are talking to. Most people are very aware that literature contains fantastical elements that are not real, and will not expect the fish to be any more real than a balroch or Hogwarts.

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Originally posted by Evangeline:
I think the people we are speaking to our not biblically literate (and why should they be?) and they have no idea how to make sense of the different genres in the bible-that's rather my point.

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So I'm not choosing NOT to use a biblical narrative because it's unscientific I"m choosing not to use particular biblical narratives because it is too difficult for people to understand them in context given the constraints of this particular context.

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I rather think the fairy tales (the real ones, the grim/Grimm type) serve something of the same purpose. They allow kids to confront (at a distance) the kinds of darkness they are going to meet face-to-face in their lives and have to cope with. Which is why I prefer Grimm to Disney, which is basically anathema in my house. At least the princess crap, certainly. (Why yes, I had a discussion with my son about some of the more gruesome medieval fairytales just last week. He ate them up, of course. Kids. Bloody-minded little monsters.)

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Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
If you're concerned with comprehensibility then it would seem that you need to question whether it's appropriate to read the Bible at all - because every Biblical narrative is difficult to understand. [/QB]

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
A lot depends on what you emphasize and when. I told these stories to my son much younger than I think most of you would, but the emphasis was always on the brighter aspects of the stories, knowing full well that we were going to get deeper and deeper into the darker stuff as he grew.

And I never did trust anybody else's words for telling these stories (for example, a paraphrased Bible storybook), because I didn't trust them to handle it appropriately for the particular child I was dealing with. Different kids have different fears, concerns, and weak spots.

It occurs to me that as adults, maybe all (or almost all) we see IS the dark aspects of these stories. And that's not right of us either, anymore than it's right to look only at the brightness. Abraham & Isaac is the story of a father who loved his son dearly, and a son who trusted and loved his father, and a God who brought them through a hopeless situation--just as much as it is the story of a freaking scary divine demand that looked both unreasonable and unjust. Noah etc. is the story of how God rescued a family and many animals from death just as surely as it is the story of how many other people and animals died in divine judgement. And the exodus is the story of God delivering a nation of slaves to freedom, just as much as it is the story of another nation left bereaved.

If I'm telling these stories to very young children, I'm going to focus on the bright stuff. If I'm working with older children, I'm going to accent that stuff but also start exploring the other stuff, mainly by asking starter questions and letting them go as far as they want to at that point ("How do you think Isaac felt? What about his Dad? Does God always make sense, do you think? What do you do when you're scared and don't understand what's happening?" etc. etc.)

The open-ended questions along with validation of their feelings ("Yeah, that part creeped me out too, I don't understand it" etc.) has worked really well for me with the children I've taught down through the years. It says "It's okay to have questions and worries about the Bible, and you don't have to stifle that." My students come away with growing confidence in their ability to dig into the Bible and wrestle with it--not just the pretty parts, but also the dark parts.

Teaching this way also says we believe that the Bible is incredibly valuable in spite of the difficult parts, even sometimes because of the difficult parts, and we should never give up questioning and trying to understand. Because all truth is from God, and if we're staring into darkness at the moment, we can still trust God to hold on to us and to lead us into light in the end.

And that's a foundation principle we all need, not just when dealing with troubling Bible stories but when dealing with troubling life. Because shutting the Bible and turning away from its challenges doesn't mean we get to be forever happy and skip all the horrible "Why, why, why, God?" issues. Instead it just means we will face those issues for the first time directly, full strength, when they hit us in the face in our own lives, without the preparation and strength the Bible stories can offer.

My child is going to face the question we all face--the "Why would God allow/demand this loss and horror?" question. I can't spare him from that, it happens in every life. Knowing that, I'd rather have him start dealing with it at one remove in the context of Bible story, with Abraham and Isaac--than have him first confront it when his beloved aunt gets ovarian cancer, or his third-grade classmate dies in a helicopter crash, or his mother miscarries the little brother or sister he had hoped for. Those occasions came, all right; but because of Abraham & Isaac (and Noah, and Pharaoh's son,...) he wasn't facing the agony of "Why?" as a complete neophyte. And he had the hope those stories offer (particularly the Christ-hope) to backstop him when he hit the same issue in his own life.

I don't censor or avoid anything in the Bible any longer, since my son hit confirmation age (about 13-14 for us). He's been learning all along how to look at the dark stuff, step by step and line by line. He is aware of some of the worst things that human being can do to one another. But he is also aware of what God is doing to redeem and draw us back to himself. And now the foundation is laid, and I'm glad of it. If I disappear tomorrow (God forbid) he has a strong foundation for dealing with both good and evil, and a strong faith in God to see him through. And that came primarily out of the Bible.

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Originally posted by cliffdweller:
I totally agree with your approach for older kids-- after about age 6 when they are developing analytical reasoning. ... Which is why I can't agree with your approach of focusing on the "bright side" with younger kids. I'm sure it worked with your own kids, brought up in a home with parents who I'm guessing are regularly discussing these topics at the dinner table, have heard mom & dad struggling with the hard realities of faith in real terms since their infancy. But not all of our kids grow up in that sort of environment, and not all of them are going to be around a year, two years, or three years from now when we want to explore the text more deeply.

My concern about presenting the "bright side" of the Noah story or the Isaac story or the Joshua story is the way it blinds them to the more troubling aspects-- not just now when they're too young to understand them, but later-- much later, even-- when they're adults and able to handle a mature discussion, but are so blind to it, so used to seeing the Noah story as solely about happy cute animals trotting into an ark under a happy non-gay rainbow, that they can't see the bodies floating in the rising sea or hear the cries of the dying sinners. I don't want to teach something to a 3 year old I'm going to have to work that hard to unteach when they're 7 or 10-- or 20. IMHO, it's better to skip these stories with preschoolers (pre-analytic thought) the same way we'd skip some stories that might be on the news this week.

Once they've developed the ability to think analytically, then I think a fuller, more thoughtful approach is great-- exactly like what you've outlined.

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Originally posted by cliffdweller:
In contrast, some of my much older college students who were raised in conservative churches will have trouble actually reading a biblical text-- any text-- without reading into it what they think it should say. Sometimes to a ridiculous degree. You ask, "what does it say?" and you'll get "Jesus died for our sins" or "God loves you"-- even when the text is an OT story about two men walking down a road. And the scary thing is that otherwise reasonably literate adults can't even see that they're doing that. The actual words on the page just wash right over them.

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I fear (or hope, don't know which possibility is most appalling!) that what's really going on is the real-life version of the joke about the children's sermon, where the pastor asks "What's fluffy, eats nuts, and lives up in a tree?" and the kid says, "It sounds like a squirrel, but because this is church, it must be Jesus."

I suspect the problem with the adults you mention isn't so much that they can't read Bible texts and interpret them correctly, but that they can't read at all. Seriously.

I taught college freshmen for some years (eighteen and nineteen-year-olds) and it was amazing to see the disconnect between the printed words on the page and what came out of their mouths when asked to discuss it. Something went very wrong in their education. They kept handing me what they thought was an erudite, literary answer to the discussion question, and all the time I was thinking "What the fuck? What does that even MEAN?"

Clearly all the material for their answer had come out of the immediate environment alone--It's Monday, and I'm in freshman lit, and that's my teacher, so the answer must be "It's talking about alienation in today's modern society." When we had been reading (say) Donne's "To His Mistress, Upon Going to Bed." Sometimes I just had to say loudly "It's SEX, people" and then give them 5 minutes to re-read the poem with the new and surprising data they'd somehow failed to pick up.

Which is all to say, I'd like to hear the same adults explicating another text (say, Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty ) before deciding the problem lies with their biblical understanding.

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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Cliffdweller, it sounds like I didn't manage to explain myself adequately. With a preschooler I'm not going to get into questions about precisely how much of any given story is to be taken as nonfiction, as fairytale, as myth, or whatever. I don't think they distinguish categories very well at that age. But they do love story.

I would simply tell the Bible story, as I might tell any story, and avoid highlighting the grim issues lurking in the background that are so obvious to us adults. Because those exist in pretty much any story worth the reading, biblical or not...

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
You're certainly right that people who fail to think on their own (and are not forced to think by pesky teachers later in life) will probably go on remembering the 3-year-old version of any story they're told, not just the biblical ones. But I don't think that's sufficient reason to deny them any contact with Bible stories now.

Either you (and the church) will see them again as teens/adults, or you won't. If you do, that's the right time to be sifting through the darker implications--and if they balk as you reframe the stories, well, that's the universal plight of teachers everywhere. (I don't WANNA think!) If you DON'T see them again, and they never learn to think more carefully than a 3-year-old, they will at least have that much of their cultural heritage in the back of their heads.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:

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Originally posted by cliffdweller:
In contrast, some of my much older college students who were raised in conservative churches will have trouble actually reading a biblical text-- any text-- without reading into it what they think it should say. Sometimes to a ridiculous degree. You ask, "what does it say?" and you'll get "Jesus died for our sins" or "God loves you"-- even when the text is an OT story about two men walking down a road. And the scary thing is that otherwise reasonably literate adults can't even see that they're doing that. The actual words on the page just wash right over them.

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I fear (or hope, don't know which possibility is most appalling!) that what's really going on is the real-life version of the joke about the children's sermon, where the pastor asks "What's fluffy, eats nuts, and lives up in a tree?" and the kid says, "It sounds like a squirrel, but because this is church, it must be Jesus."

I suspect the problem with the adults you mention isn't so much that they can't read Bible texts and interpret them correctly, but that they can't read at all. Seriously.

I taught college freshmen for some years (eighteen and nineteen-year-olds) and it was amazing to see the disconnect between the printed words on the page and what came out of their mouths when asked to discuss it. Something went very wrong in their education. They kept handing me what they thought was an erudite, literary answer to the discussion question, and all the time I was thinking "What the fuck? What does that even MEAN?"

...Which is all to say, I'd like to hear the same adults explicating another text (say, Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty ) before deciding the problem lies with their biblical understanding.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
[I fear (or hope, don't know which possibility is most appalling!) that what's really going on is the real-life version of the joke about the children's sermon, where the pastor asks "What's fluffy, eats nuts, and lives up in a tree?" and the kid says, "It sounds like a squirrel, but because this is church, it must be Jesus."

I suspect the problem with the adults you mention isn't so much that they can't read Bible texts and interpret them correctly, but that they can't read at all. Seriously.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
I think y'all are over-thinking this from the point of view of educated individuals and have forgotten what it's like to be kids. The gory bits of the OT have become a problem for me in adulthood; they never were in my childhood.

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Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
I think y'all are over-thinking this from the point of view of educated individuals and have forgotten what it's like to be kids. The gory bits of the OT have become a problem for me in adulthood; they never were in my childhood.

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As nine year-olds in Bible Class we just loved the story of Jael stabbing Sisera with the tent peg!

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Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:
As nine year-olds in Bible Class we just loved the story of Jael stabbing Sisera with the tent peg!

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Don't piss off girls when you're out camping.

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Originally posted by cliffdweller:

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Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
I think y'all are over-thinking this from the point of view of educated individuals and have forgotten what it's like to be kids. The gory bits of the OT have become a problem for me in adulthood; they never were in my childhood.

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As nine year-olds in Bible Class we just loved the story of Jael stabbing Sisera with the tent peg!

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Sure, every boy and a lot of girls love the gore. See
the Lego Bible for examples.. Good fun.

But that isn't really what I'm talking about. It's not really the gore I'm objecting to, it's the bad theology that arises when you teach a theologically complex, nuanced story like Noah and the Ark before they are developmentally ready to wrestle with issues of judgment, theodicy, suffering, etc. Again, once they move into analytical reasoning (age 6-9) yes, bring it on and teach them to question and wrestle with the word. But before then, teaching them a sanitized version usually leads to dismissing the whole later on.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:

IMNSHO, to refuse to tell children Bible stories (and fairytales, and Greek myths) is to deprive them of their cultural heritage. It makes it that much harder to appreciate anything from high school lit to jokes on the street if you have no acquaintance with Noah, with Adam and Eve, with the crossing of the Red Sea, and so on. I've tried to teach college lit to students who barely recognized Adam and Eve (I know, I gave them a basic knowledge test at the beginning of the course). We spent WAY too much of our limited class time for one (secular!) short story explaining why continual references to dust and clay were references to general human frailty via the story of Adam. I shouldn't have to retell the whole Adam and Eve thing in a Catholic university, surely?

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
When I was in college (knights were bold, then) they had a Bible in Literature class, in which all these basics were gone through as a prelude to English Lit.

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Originally posted by cliffdweller:

But that isn't really what I'm talking about. It's not really the gore I'm objecting to, it's the bad theology that arises when you teach a theologically complex, nuanced story like Noah and the Ark before they are developmentally ready to wrestle with issues of judgment, theodicy, suffering, etc. Again, once they move into analytical reasoning (age 6-9) yes, bring it on and teach them to question and wrestle with the word. But before then, teaching them a sanitized version usually leads to dismissing the whole later on. [/QB]

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