An Editorial put out by The Threefold Advocate attracted my attention recently. Entitled “Essentials of Spiritual Inaccessibility and other JBU Classes,” the author argued that the difficulty of JBU’s required Bible curriculum was proving detrimental to students’ faith, associating this with young people leaving the church! This is a fairly serious accusation, but the author’s reasoning left something to be desired. The piece began by describing the apparent horrors of test days and assignments in detail, which would make excellent material for a psychological thriller. It abstained from discussing whether this anxiety is true of other JBU classes. I will leave readers to explore the gory details for themselves here, but this dramatization provides the basis for the main claim: excessively difficult Bible classes teach students that “the Bible is too complicated…to understand and is inaccessible to the non-theologically trained reader.” JBU is failing in its mission to “develop the spiritual being” of students at a base level by allowing theological content to be “inaccessible and unattainable,” especially with respect to grading. This leads “many students” to question the faith, which the author associates with the exodus of young people from the church. Christian education (JBU included, presumably) is “turning away and failing a majority of their students” due to a lack of distinction between “academics and spirituality” that “negatively” affects “some students and their faith lives in severe ways.” In order to mitigate against this danger, JBU ought to center these classes on “theological understanding rather than testing and grading.”