Old and New Books

I was recently asked to make a critical comparison of an older and a newer series of textbooks to be used for teaching Bible in the Christian schools. Some of the observations in that study may interest many Christian parents as well as a few board members who must decide which text-books should be used. The requested study was to deal with the older My Bible Guide series and the newer Revelation-Response textbooks which are being promoted and used in many of our schools (and to deal particularly with the books for grades 4 to 6). The older series of books generally follows the chronological order and sets out to acquaint the student with Bible history. Emphasis falls on teaching the child to know the Bible, its content and message. Efforts are made to apply this content and message in a personal and practical way to the student’s life.

A Shift From “Revelation” to “Response”

The newer books are much more elaborate and colorful. The name “Revelation-Response” may suggest what is immediately apparent throughout the books, an emphasis on “Response”. An introductory sheet in the Grade 4 Teachers’ manual informs us under “Background Information”. Crucial to using the revelation–response model for Scripture study in this curriculum is an unpublished paper written for the NUCS in 1966 by Dr. Dennis Hoekstra . . . On the first page, Dr. Hoekstra states:

The basic position of this paper is that the Bible is not primarily a repository of historical facts to be learned. It is, to be sure, both factual and historical, but its primary nature and purpose is to show that God addresses men and demands a response of faith and obedient action from them.

While we all appreciate t he need for personal and practical application, a need which the older books also recognize, the newer series at many points is so preoccupied with the “Response” that the “Revelation” and its content to which the response is to be made tends to be overshadowed and sometimes virtually drops out of sight. Especially the student books, called significantly “student activity books” are filled with multicolored illustrations, pictures, diagrams, cartoons, suggested games, etc. One teacher who had to work with the books observed that they are “glorified coloring books to keep the children entertained” and that despite all of these ostensible “helps” he had to work up the Biblical content of the course more or less independently if he were going to teach a knowledge of the Bible.

   

An Activist Educational Theory

Although at some points there is indication of careful Bible study and explanation (in introducing some psalms, for example,) the predominating emphasis is on the students’ feelings and activities. They must act out the Bible stories, play the Daniel story (Student, Grade 5, p. 9), write their own proverbs (p. 66) dramatize the Joseph and Mary story (p. 103), stage a one–act play, “Behold the King” (p. 106), “read the temptations . . . in parts, with a narrator, the voice of Jesus and the voice of Satan” (p. 108). At one point after dealing with the Resurrection it is suggested that the teacher play the part of Christ (Teacher, Grade 5, p. 234). In a lesson in the Grade 6 Teachers’ manual a “covenant celebration” is suggested featuring a “covenant cake”, punch for “wine”, crackers for bread, and hot–cross buns. In such a “celebration” carried out with “dignity”, “everyone was relaxed enough for a wonderful time” (p. 16).

On page 16 of the Grade 4 Teachers’ Manual in lesson on “The Bread of Life” it is suggested that one; 

End this lesson with an informal service of bread-breaking and prayer. A bakery in your area may be willing to donate unsliced loaves of bread. If not, purchase or bake them. Each child may break off a piece and then recite the “I am” together. Follow this with a prayer of thanksgiving. Students will eat the bread as a symbol of their acceptance of Christ as their bread of life. The children may make a clay figure expressing trust, belief, or thankfulness. This could be a kneeling figure, praying hands, a loaf of bread or any related idea.

(Is this kind of hap–hazard caricature of the Lord’s Supper to be recommended as a desirable teaching device in a Christian school?) These and many more examples will illustrate the way in which these books (“student activity books”) evidently embody the assumptions of some modern educationists and philosophers that students can “learn only by doing” and whatever they cannot handle and do is meaningless to them.

Getting Away From the Bible

Not only do these books carry such fallacious educational theories to ridiculous extremes. While ostensibly teaching “Bible” their search for interesting and different material sometimes carries them far afield from the Bible, to the neglect of what the Bible does teach. The Grade 4 student Christmas materials devote about 7 pages to Hanukkah, the Jewish festival, which the teachers’ manual admits had nothing to do with Christmas. And the teachers’ manual devotes 21 pages to Hanukkah and Christmas, much of the latter material being preoccupied with traditional religious symbols and decorations so that many of these “helps” divert attention from instead of directing it to the birth of our Lord. Similarly, in Grade 5 Teachers‘ manual “Kingdom Symbols” get 30 pages or 5 weeks of study (pp. 125ff, 165ff), while whole books and prophets such as Daniel and Malachi are each dismissed with a sketchy and inadequate single page or less (Grade 6 Teachers, pp. 46, 49)

Inaccuracies and Errors

The lack of serious concern with the Bible is also revealed in misrepresentations of Bible facts and errors in presentation of Bible teachings. One reads on p. 86 of the Grade 4 Student Activity Book:

DID YOU KNOW that the Jews did not want to have anything to do with the Moabites? The people of Moab were descendants of Lot and his daughters. The Jews thoroughly disliked the Moabites. They would not let the Moabites into their communities. They felt that God’s grace was only for people of their own group. The feeling lasted for ten generations. Imagine it! That’s a strong dislike.

Later on the basis of the above there is a question: So, were the Jews right? Was God’s grace only for people in their own group?

The book cites the Jew’s separation from the Moabites as an extreme example of their obnoxious race prejudice. But what are the biblical facts? God’s law in Deuteronomy 23:3 commanded “An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD: even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD forever.” The tenth generation rule was not an example of Jewish prejudice at all but a commandment of the Lord. The Israelites were only too ready to forget this commandment to God’s people to be separate from their pagan neighbors and when they after the captivity were being religiously overwhelmed by pagan alliances they had to be sternly reminded of the forgotten commandment (Neh. 13:1): “On that day they read in the book of Moses in the audience of the people; and therein was found written that the Ammonite and the Moabite should not come into the congregation of God forever.” The Bible indeed teaches a missionary concern for all peoples, but in the New Testament as well as in the Old it never teaches this as cancelling the warning against being “unequally yoked together with unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:14). The missionary commission was not to be equated, as the book suggests, with the modern anti-discrimination fad.

The books reveal more of such carelessness about Bible teachings and doctrines. Where in the account of Jesus’ temptations are we told that He was tempted “to feed the hungry masses” (Student Manual, grade 5, p. 107)? The “particularism” of the Bible is slighted. “The Old Testament is a covenant between God and the human race” (Student manual, Grade 6, p.8), “between God and humans”, “with humankind” (Teachers, Grade 6, p. 15). One is troubled by a similar fuzziness in such a statement as, “Every Christian – that is, everyone in God’s community – is ‘in Christ’” (Student, Grade 6, p. 60). Of Isaiah we are told in the Grade 6 Teachers’ Manual (p. 40):

The first conclusion Isaiah drew was that the people were unfaithful to Jehovah . . . This conclusion was drawn from observing the people and from what happened in the courts. The worship of the people did not make them God’s chosen people because their worship was not from the heart.

Was Isaiah’s warning to the people concerning their unfaithfulness merely the result of his observing their way of living and drawing his own conclusions? And did they make or unmake themselves “God’s chosen people” by their manner of worship? Here the humanistic approach seems to completely obscure the revelation and action of God which characterized the preaching of God’s prophets.

Such doctrinal carelessness reaches the point of downright “heresy” where in the introduction to all of the teachers’ manuals (p. xxv) we read “Through the incarnation God became a human person.” Apparently the lessons the Christian Church had to learn through the struggles of the 4th Century that Christ was “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God . . . by unity of person” (Athanasian Creed, 35,36), have been quite lost from sight in this preoccupation with the present.

Again, the manual says of the “messianic” psalms that these “are considered by many Christians” to “point to the Messiah” (Grade 5 Teachers, p.66), ignoring the emphatic teaching of our Lord and His apostles that they do point to Him!

Not Designed to Teach the Bible

Even more characteristic of these books than such occasional carelessness and errors is the fact that although they are supposed to be guides to the teaching of the Bible in the Christian schools they do not really set out to do that in any systematic way. They are not planned to introduce the order and organization of the Bible itself, as the older materials do. They also do not try to introduce in any systematic way the teachings or doctrines of the Bible as the traditional “catechism” did (although many newer “Church School” materials do not).

What do they do? They take up, in rather random fashion, a number of “themes” or topics chosen according to the inclinations of those who were planning the course. Accordingly, popular, even “faddish” themes get emphasized; subjects that are not popular in our time are ignored. We are confronted with a very elaborate system of Bible introductions that do not really intend in any orderly way to teach the Bible itself!

The “New Hermeneutics” in Our Christian Schools

All this may at first strike the reader, as it did me, as mystifying. How does it come about that the “Bible” course materials do not really teach or seriously try to teach the Bible? Pondering this curious state of affairs brings one back to the observations made at the beginning about the peculiar concern and emphasis of these “Revelation–Response” books. In them preoccupation with the “Response” tends to obliterate the “Revelation”. And all of this is plainly following the tendency of many modern educators, religious leaders and philosophers to become so preoccupied with the feelings, reactions and experiences of people here and now that they have no concern with anything else. There is really no room for God and His Revelation is such a subjectivistic, humanistic movement.

What we are really seeing in the peculiarities of this newer Bible curriculum is the influence of the Liberal, higher critical subjectivistic, “new hermeneutic”, which is creating so much havoc in our churches, carried over into our Christian schools. That “new interpretation” does not have to work seriously at studying and teaching the Bible because it really doesn’t consider the Bible with its “cultural antiquities”, and many human “weaknesses” and “errors” decisive for our times. Dr. Allan Verhey, for example, in his doctoral thesis maintained that it is finally ones own experience which must determine when and how one must use the Bible (The Use of Scripture in Moral Discourse, pp. 212, 214, 222, 223). Note how perfectly this idea fits in with the overwhelming emphasis on “student activity” and “experiences” in these “Bible” manuals.

The connection between the peculiarities of these books and the liberal, critical views of the Bible held by many theologians is not accidental or only to be inferred. At some points it is clearly indicated. Right after the introductory reference to the speech of Dr. Dennis Hoekstra mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the introduction suggests that while “the Bible is the primary and ultimate source for background reading” “helpful secondary sources that use the revelation-response principle are two books”.

One, by James D. Smart, The Old Testament in Dialogue with Modern Man, plainly embodies the critical approach to the Bible common to the liberals and “neo-orthodox”. It discounts the Bible’s history and doctrine.

The other recommended writer, Wayne R. Rood, shares the same modern critical views, but seeks to derive helpful perspectives from it. Also among the four “theological advisors” listed in the introduction to this series of books one finds names of men who among us hold and defend similar views. Rev. Hugh Koops, former Christian Reformed minister, now professor at New Brunswick Seminary, already in 1970 was giving strong support to the anti-doctrinal, ecumenical “underground church” movement (“A Report and Reaction to Professor Hugh Koop’s Lecture” by L. Vanden Heuvel, Torch and Trumpet, May 1970). Dr. Louis Vos professor of Bible at Calvin College, another of the theological advisors of the series, both in a committee report and at the January meeting of Classis Grand Rapids East vigorously defended Dr. Allan Verhey’s “critical” interpretation of the Bible.

The Needed Reformation

Today many Christian churches, including our own, are fast losing their biblical, and therefore also their doctrinal and moral definitions and often begin to look more and more like what the Lord described as salt that has lost its taste. If they are not to experience the Lord‘s judgment of being discarded (Mt. 5:13) they will have to return, in a movement like that of the Reformation, to God’s Word. Even a limited review of some of the newer materials being used for Bible courses in many of our Christian schools discloses the same distressing departure from the Word of God that we are observing in churches. One speaker at the recent Chicago meeting of the Council on Biblical Inerrancy observed that the Devil seems to concentrate his efforts on misleading church leaders and the institutions in which they are trained. Our Christian schools are properly parental, not parochial, so that they operate separately from the churches. One effect of this arrangement has been that churches, after encouraging their establishment and support, tend to give them little attention. What happens in them is largely left to decisions of a few overworked board members and teachers. A look at some of these newer Bible manuals suggests that, in the words of our Lord, “while men slept”, the “enemy” has been sowing his “tares” also in this “field” (Matt. 13:25). We need to direct some serious taught in our Christian schools. In some research through the earliest records of our Dutch Reformed churches of 400 years ago I was surprised to observe that those early, enormously influential, Reformation churches gave as much attention to securing sound Bible teaching in the schools as they did to getting it in the churches.* If we and our children are not to stumble but to become effective servants of the Lord in our own and coming generations we will have to pray and determine that God’s Word will be our light in the classroom as well as in the pulpit.

*Compare Heidelberg Catechism XXXVIII, “First, that the ministry of the gospel and the schools be maintained.”