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.”
No doubt that the author cares deeply about the spiritual health of those around them and desires that JBU students remain in the faith. Their solution, however, betrays a profound misunderstanding of educational pedagogy and the nature of the statistics they cite.
Figuring out ways to nurture learning is difficult, especially when the topic at hand may have little to do with the chosen major of most students. They take these classes because they are required and may be unlikely to do so otherwise. Despite this, teachers must still work to ensure a basic level of engagement with the topic. Tests and quizzes are useful tools that encourage students to learn a minimal amount of material. They allow the teacher to see where they might need to double down on widely misunderstood topics and hold students to a measurable standard of excellence. Unless students have an internal drive to succeed, they will not rise to the occasion without these kinds of external motivators. They are inseparable from learning itself, including theological understanding. But must these classes be hard? In short, yes. Theology is hard, and if one desires a good understanding of Scripture, it takes deep study and time. God’s Word is for simpleton and scholar, with material that can be extremely difficult to interpret or effortless to understand. I should know; I’m an upper-level Theology student. I do not expect anyone outside my major to achieve the same standards to which I am held, but if this theological material is as essential as the author claims, an easy class would be misleading to those required to partake. We all must be confronted with the hard questions of our faith at some point, and there is almost no better time than college.
Regarding those new to the faith, some with whom I have spoken suggest that JBU offer a summary class of the Christian faith. This is a kind suggestion, but I’m not convinced it would be any more helpful. It may produce feelings of separation more so than the current curriculum, and from a practitioner’s standpoint, there are great benefits to classes with people of varying knowledge levels.
It is clear from the data that young people are not leaving the church because of difficult teaching. In fact, Pew Research notes that between 2007 and 2014, Evangelical Protestants (generally associated with more conservative theology/politics) saw the lowest decline in membership percentage wise, and a gain in absolute numbers (between 2 and 5 million). Mainline Protestants (generally associated with more liberal theology/politics) saw the largest decline in both percentage and absolute numbers (between 3
and 7.3 million). In other words, churches with stricter membership standards and
countercultural theology are suffering from the exodus less than churches that don’t challenge
their members.
There is, of course, a great deal more to the story of why people, young and old, leave and join churches, but suffice to say, they join and stay in denominations that have a robust worldview and a serious view of Scripture. Christianity as a whole cannot but be helped if our higher education, denominational or otherwise, presents us as more than simple platitudes and undefined slogans. This starts in our required Bible classes, showing every student that while theology is complicated, diving into that theology does offer better answers and more lasting joy.
Photo courtesy of Priscilla Du Preez at Unsplash