Teach the Bible as Literature?
Date: March 29, 2007
Time: 5:42am est

Ever since I had the pleasure of meeting Time magazine religion editor David Van Biema two years ago, I've made a special effort not to miss his stories. Once again this week, he has authored Time 's cover story: Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public School (But very, very carefully).

It's a catchy title, and-true to my expectations-the piece was very thoughtful (a welcome sign that in re-designing Time , the publishers have not entirely forfeited gravitas for glitz).

In his essay, Van Biema explores the growing phenomenon of Bible-as-literature school curricula-carefully designed and taught so as to pass constitutional muster and avoid legal challenges. Why might it make sense for the Bible to be taught (as literature) in our public school systems? The central thesis that Van Biema explores (and clearly endorses) is that "knowledge [of the Bible] is essential to being a full-fledged, well-rounded citizen." Why essential? Because the Bible has so profoundly influenced the thought that shaped our founding, and continues to imbue in crucial ways our American democratic experiment. Van Biema explores its influence in ideas, rhetoric, literature and pop culture, from John Winthrop's "shining city on a hill" (from the Gospel according to St. Matthew) to Keanu Reeve's portrayal of the Christ-figure Neo in "The Matrix."

The deeper idea here seems to be that future generations of Americans should be educated on, and have some formal exposure to, the full range of elements that had a lasting, substantial and positive influence on the shaping of that civilization we call the United States of America . Among such elements, we undeniably recognize the Bible and Christianity.

For many of us, Van Biema's assertion should ring a bell. It's an assertion close to the heart and mind of Pope Benedict who recently, at a Congress organized by the Commission of Episcopal Conferences of the European Community,restated his dismay over the European Union's continued refusal to formally recognize in its Constitution Europe's own Christian roots:

.[W]e cannot think of building a truly European "home for all" when the very identity of its peoples is obscured. First and foremost, this identity is historical, cultural, and moral, and only secondarily geographic, economic or political. It is an identity composed of universally held values which Christianity has helped in forging, and which has merited for Christianity not merely a historical role, but a foundational one. . Should we not all be amazed that the Europe of today, while on the one hand seeking to establish itself as a community of values, seems on the other hand to be ever more bent on contesting the very existence of universal and absolute values? Does not this astonishing form of "apostasy" from itself, even more fundamentally than apostasy from God, necessarily lead Europe to question its own identity?

In Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, the Pontiff-at the time, Cardinal Ratzinger-saw in this loss of historical memory a bad omen for the future of European culture:

Accordingly, the refusal to refer to God in the Constitution is not the expression of a tolerance that wishes to protect the non-theistic religions and the dignity of atheist and agnostics; rather, it is the expression of a consciousness that would like to see God eradicated once and for all from the public life of humanity and shut up in the subjective sphere of cultural residues from the past. In reality, this means that we have need of roots if we are to survive and that we must not lose sight of God if we do not want human dignity to disappear.

This might suggest to us that the teaching of the Bible-albeit as "great literature"-in our public school system, might be a healthy safeguard against the loss of historical memory, that memory which is essential to safe-guarding human dignity. The knowledge of our roots, where we have come from, what our forebears have accomplished and-perhaps even more important- suffered , is indispensable for the continued survival of our experiment in ordered freedom: from the Bill of Rights to the Declaration on Human Rights, from Dred Scott to the Holocaust, from the Bible to Brave New World .

Does teaching the Bible as great literature concede too much to a worldview which conceives of every account of reality as merely one among many potentially valid, yet inescapably subjective, explanations of the world? Would this not seem to reduce the "Book" to being considered just "one narrative among many"? Perhaps, in the minds of some.

But here the saving grace is that we judge narratives on their own merits. For those of us who happen to believe that the Bible holds out something of preeminent value to all comers, we should have no reason to fear its presentation as great literature-those of us, that is, who believe that the Bible is, and will continue to be, the greatest (and truest and most compelling) story ever told.

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