Several years ago I taught a series of Bible survey classes at my local church. In order to gauge the baseline knowledge of the students, I began the course with a written test consisting of twenty Bible questions and twenty corresponding U.S. history questions. For example, one of the Bible questions - "What is the longest river in Palestine?" - was matched with this question: "What is the longest river in America?". In like manner, "Who wrote the book of Acts?" was paired with "Who wrote the Gettysburg Address?".
In the area of American history, the class made an average score of 78% on the twenty questions. Performance on the Biblical part, however, was not as impressive. The average score was 48%. (Yes, less than half the Bible questions were answered correctly!)
Since I had intentionally chosen test questions that required only a rudimentary level of knowledge, such a failing grade exposed the Biblical illiteracy of the class. It was also evidence, telling indeed, of the failure of my church and denomination to educate its members about the Bible. This was my church's Sunday night crowd, the most faithful and supposedly the most Biblically literate from our membership. Sunday school teachers, deacons, and missions leaders were among the members. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, school teachers, bankers, and engineers were in the class. These people had somehow managed to attend church class after church class, to participate in worship service after worship service, and to hear sermon after sermon over decades of their lives without real learning taking place. I shuddered to think how much less the semi-faithful of our church knew in comparison.
Unfortunately, what I experienced with that church class is not an isolated or local incident. In fact, this depressing trend plagues every church group and denomination today. Just ask the astute editors of the Oxford Annotated Bible for their assessment:
The Bible belongs to the whole world as no other book does. Parts or the whole of it are available in more than a thousand languages. Christians everywhere pay lip service to it as the supreme authority for their faith. Phrases from its pages have become current speech, and allusions to its stories are widely understood. Yet few people are familiar with it as a whole, and acquaintance for the most part is limited to a small selection of passages.
Bruce Barton, in The Book Nobody Knows, calls Biblical ignorance a "strange phenomenon":
Here is a book, or more properly, a collection of books, which is beyond comparison the world's bestseller. New novels grip the public fancy for a few weeks or months and then disappear, but the Bible stands continually at the top of the list... Nearly every home has at least one copy. Millions of copies are given as birthday, graduation, and Christmas gifts. It is a book that everybody buys and concerning which almost everybody is ready to engage in debate at the drop of a hat. Yet how many read it? How many know what it really contains?
If a third opinion is necessary, let religion professor L.D. Johnson offer his analysis:
There is reason to believe that we praise the Bible a good deal more than we study it. Misinformation about the Bible and ignorance of its nature and teachings are more the rule than the exception. Many who faithfully avow that the Bible supplies God's answer to every human problem would be hard put to tell where or how the answers may be found. Tests of students beginning college courses in Bible have consistently shown up the depressingly poor job of Bible teaching we have been doing in the churches.
The real victim of this tragedy is Christian discipleship. How can we fully apply something we don't know? How can we follow God's direction when we can't recall His Word to us relayed in the Bible? How can we serve the Christ of the New Testament to the maximum when our Biblical knowledge of Him is but a minimum? The answer is, "We cannot!" For sure, Christian discipleship is possible without such knowledge, but all too often it is predictably shallow and too easily uprooted by life's insults. In contrast, Christian commitment that has sufficient depth to weather the storms is rooted in a thorough knowledge of the Bible. It is not a chance occurrence but comes to those who hunger and thirst for it, who are willing to diligently seek God in the scriptures so that they may ultimately find Him in their hearts.
The Bible is worth knowing but is not well-known. In a nutshell, this is the problem the Church faces and must address today. Next week, we will look at possible solutions.
NEXT WEEK
Part 10 - Bible Study (the solution)
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