The Georgia Board of Education is preparing to allow the Bible to be taught in public schools, with the book itself as the primary text for the class. As usual, most people are divided over the issue.
It’s hard to read Western literature without at least a small grasp on the Bible. Greek poetry, philosophy and drama help, too. Oh, and a little Norse mythology for good measure.
It’s not a new notion. Mrs. Farthing, my twelfth grade English teacher, had us read the Gospel of Mark, so we could understand Christianity and the character who is, whether we like it or not, pivotal in Western culture. If she was trying to proselytize us, it didn’t show. Our conversations about the Jesus of Mark were pretty freewheeling. One girl characterized him as an egomaniac. Some kids gasped. Mrs. Farthing smiled. I can only hope the instructors in Georgia and elsewhere can be as beneficent.
The other day I overheard a couple people talking about this very issue. One woman said, “It’s OK to teach the Bible in schools as long as they teach it as fiction.” Her friend pointed out that millions of Americans see the Bible not as fiction, but as the “ipsima verba”, the actual words of God. You can imagine the argument that followed.
I wondered, sipping coffee, why the Bible is asked to fit into such simplistic modernist reductions. Doesn’t “Either/Or” beg the question?
And then I thought, “Do people ask if Caesar’s ‘Gallic Wars’ is fiction or non-fiction? Do we enquire into the historicity of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’?” Maybe now you’re wondering which one the Bible is more like, “Gallic Wars” of “Gulliver’s Travels”. But that only misses the point.
That dichotomy of classifying literature as fiction or non-fiction, true or false, real or imaginary, reminded me of something that reading the Bible has taught me. It’s nothing the Bible lays out as doctrine, or dogma, or even detail. It’s caught, out of the corner of the eye, as it were. It has something to do with how ancient people wrote, edited, and originally read the Bible.
Their world doesn’t appear to have been an “either/or” affair. The book of Genesis, for instance, has two very different creation stories, side by side, without apology or even comment. Other books present differing accounts of the same events – different numbers, players, locations – without embarrassment. There are four gospels in the Christian Scriptures, again varying in detail, with no effort at harmonization. And, apparently, no one cared.
I think the words of Jesus from the Book of Luke, recently co-opted for current political need, illustrate this well: “Whoever is not for me is against me, and whoever does not gather scatters.” But Luke wasn’t an either/or modernist. He also has room for, “Whoever is not against us is with us.” Jesus wasn’t an either/or, either.
Personally, I am guardedly glad that students are being given the opportunity to read the Bible, not devotionally or as religious instruction, not as fact or fiction, but as the multiferous collection of story, poetry, rant and chant that it is.