This is the time of year when students at Christian colleges begin to study the Bible. I've taught biblical studies for twenty-five years at the college level, and I've observed over the years that many times students come into their classes with unrealistic expectations. What should you expect in a college course on the Bible? If you want an answer to that question, this is for you.
Studying the Bible as an academic discipline is different from anything else you've experienced, because almost certainly you've never thought of studying the Bible academically. Churches and youth groups almost never do it. For them, reading the Bible is all about experiencing God. Not that that's an unworthy goal: it's probably the most worthy goal ever, but it's not something that can be taught in a college classroom, nor should it. On the other hand, your prior academic experiences probably won’t have prepared you for it, because it's very rare for people to have courses on the Bible in high school — and even where such courses are taught they aren’t at college level. Academic Bible study in college, for almost everyone, is a totally new thing for which they’re totally unprepared.
It's going to spin you around, throw you for a loop, turn you on your head. A lot of what you thought you knew about the Bible is going to turn out to be wrong. The reason for this isn’t that you’ve been deliberately deceived by your church or by the general culture, it’s that the Bible is really, really complicated. To be an expert you have to learn three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek); three thousand years of middle eastern history in detail; lots of geography; and basic sociology, philosophy, and theology. And that’s just to begin with. Not many adults know all this, so how could they teach it to their high school students?
If your professor is good, he or she will be able to help you understand the incredible complexity of the text and begin to enter it. You probably won’t get much of the fun, campy activities that characterize youth groups and sunday school classes. You’ll probably feel emotionally troubled as often as you feel comforted. A good rule of thumb is that it should feel like work, not like entertainment. Remember that it is a college-level academic class, and accept that any approach presenting the Bible as something easily experienced and understood is not giving you good information. Studying the Bible is hard work, but worth the effort.
The other thing you should be ready for is the spiritual challenge. If you’re taking a Bible class then chances are good that you’ve got some sort of religious background that predisposes you to read the Bible in a particular way. But the fact is that there will be people in your class who read it differently, and one of those people will almost certainly be your professor (more on this in a bit). This ends up being very difficult for a lot of students. If you’re disposed to defend your heritage, you may feel that others are attacking your beliefs. If you’re more of a critic of how you were brought up, you can feel like you were betrayed by those who taught you things that proved to be false or incomplete. I’ve known many people for whom questioning their previous religious understandings led inexorably to a rejection of all faith.
That does happen, and it’s admitted by every honest teacher. But you should know that there are very few Bible professors — at least, none whom I know, and I know quite a few at both church-based and secular institutions — who are trying to derail your faith. Indeed, most of us are people of faith ourselves. What we all care about is that you encounter the biblical text honestly and with increasing sophistication. Don’t assume that, just because our take on biblical passages is different from ones you’ve heard before, we must therefore be satanic, morally bankrupt, and wrong. We know the languages, we’ve studied the texts, we know the history. We probably have good reasons for what we say. People can go through life ignoring those who know more than they do, but they do so to their own peril.
At the end of a semester of college-level Bible study, you’ll almost certainly feel much less knowledgable than when you started. That’s because when you begin the class you have very little idea of how complex the subject is. At the end of it you have a better understanding of how much you don’t know. Believe me: I’ve been studying the Bible full-time for thirty years, and I’m acutely aware of ignorance in many areas! That’s the adventure of learning. You never get to the end of it. So get out your pens and pencils, put on your reading glasses, and work hard. You’re in for the ride of your life!
