Bible-Shaped Teaching

Shortt

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630877675
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Bible can and should be an environment in which we live and move and have our being, an environment in which we are shaped by God in different and interrelated ways. As with aspects of our physical environment, we may have never noticed many elements of this spiritual environment before or may have only the vaguest sense of their influence. While we may be more familiar with certain elements, we may not realize the full extent of their influence or be too preoccupied to see how they relate to form the larger whole of how we are shaped. This book looks one-by-one at several ways in which the Bible's environment influences us as people and, in particular, shapes our beliefs, attitudes, and practices as teachers in the classroom. It is concerned with helping readers to be, at one and the same time, faithful to our common calling as educators and faithful to the Scriptures as Christians.

1

Life-Long and Life-Wide

This book is written mainly for teachers but I am starting with a personal story from my early life and from a setting quite different from that of the classroom. I do this to show that the process of being shaped by the Bible is both life-long and life-wide.

Memories, Memories

I had been looking forward to this moment but now I hesitated. There, on a Dublin street outside an Italian restaurant, I paused briefly, knowing that what was to come would stimulate many memories and cause me to reflect on some of the changes that the years have brought.

Then I entered the restaurant. Most of the tables were empty so I was able to choose where I wanted to sit. Yes, this was the spot. This was where I had sat at my desk as a young man of seventeen when I started work in this very room in this very building, then the Irish headquarters of an international insurance company.

I ordered my meal and waited for it to come, memories flooding my mind. Nearly five decades had slipped into history since this young country boy, new to city life, had struggled to cope with the demands of work in a busy office where, it seemed, the phones never stopped ringing . . . and everybody else seemed so confident and knowing.

The main course arrived and I ate it slowly. People’s names and faces came back with startling clarity. I looked around and remembered where their desks had been. There by the window sat James, my immediate superior, so quiet and patient. Patrick was a teenager like me; he had started work a few weeks before me but he was long accustomed to city life and seemed so self-assured. Bill was a big man whose desk was over to my right and, it has to be said, he was something of a bully. Anne had a very sharp tongue and would say some very unkind things with a sweet smile.

Tom was a smartly dressed man, an energetic person with reddish cheeks and always a smiling face. He was universally liked and related easily to everybody. Perhaps that was why he was the one who was charged by his colleagues to try to persuade me to join the trade union. In spite of his persuasiveness, I steadfastly refused to do this throughout the three years that I worked in that office building and even though (or, at least, so I was told) every other worker there was a member of the union.

Why the Lonely Stand?

Why did I take this lonely stand? If you had asked me then, I think I would have said that it was because I was a Christian and that becoming a member of the union would conflict with my faith.

To satisfy Tom (and my own inner questions), I had gone along to a union meeting. There were workers there from all the insurance companies in the city and they had hired a large meeting hall for the occasion. As it happened, it was a meeting hall owned by the YMCA and rented to the union for this meeting. A few months previously, at an after-church gathering for young people in the same hall, I had given my life to Jesus Christ. However, the atmosphere on this occasion was very different—no hymns and songs, no testimonies, no preacher, but instead a series of speakers who were all very negative in their denunciation of their employers and quite crude in their language. I observed . . . and I decided that this was not where a follower of Jesus Christ should be.

If you had pressed me further on the matter, I would probably have said that the Bible teaches that we should not be yoked together with unbelievers (2 Cor 6:14). I was determined to follow Christ and to be shaped by the Bible, and I was convinced that what the Bible taught applied to everything I was and did—not only to my life in church and in fellowship with other Christians.

Looking back from nearly half a century later, I still think that my concern was a godly one. I continue to be entirely convinced that it is right to seek to give the Bible a central place among all the influences that shape us and make us what we are and are becoming. However, I also think that in refusing to join the union I was not really being guided and shaped by the Bible as completely as I thought I was at the time. I was probably being shaped more by the influence of the self-employed Irish farmers among whom I had grown up, independent and self-made people who regarded trade union activity as the source of many of the problems with the country at the time. I was being shaped by a culture that saw people in authority as those who should always be respected and obeyed, and it seemingly did not occur to me that managers and company shareholders are, like the workers they employ, sinful beings and that they do not always hold their employees’ best interests as a high priority.

In my reading of the Bible, I was failing to notice that the Lord Jesus, who I was rightly taking as the model for my living in the world, was one who kept company with the disreputable, the friend of sinners. I was insufficiently aware of the biblical concern for justice and fairness. I was not being sufficiently shaped by the biblical metaphors of salt and light that encourage us to be a transforming and illuminating influence in the world.

The Bible for All of Life

I have told this story because I believe that being shaped by the Bible is both life-long and life-wide. It is life-long in that it is important for us at every stage of life. I was a teenager who probably thought he had all the answers, but I was only just beginning. Years later, I am about to share with you some of what I’ve been learning since, both within the classroom and outside it, about how the Bible shapes us. However, in doing so I am very aware that I have so much more to learn, so much more to apply in my life and work.

Becoming Bible-shaped is also life-wide in that it is important in every kind of activity and in every context in which we find ourselves. This is a book written primarily for those who teach, and I shall seek to show in the chapters that follow how, in a variety of ways, the Bible shapes us as teachers. But not only as teachers, for I believe that these varied ways are relevant to us in whatever calling God puts us—healthcare, city planning, cab driving, advertising, IT project management, work in the arts or media, farming, and, yes, auto insurance . . . as well as school teaching. The Bible tells us that whatever we do, we are working for the Lord and it is him that we are serving (Col 3:23–24). Christian ministry is not confined to preaching, evangelism, and activity within the local church fellowship! We serve him wherever we are and wherever we work and we should be shaped by the Bible in and for all these contexts of our Christian service.

In this book we will be looking at different ways in which the Bible shapes us. (I should mention that here and throughout the book I am really talking about how God reveals himself and shapes us through the Bible.) The Bible comes to us in the form of a story and this has deep significance for how it may shape us. Bible metaphors have their place. So do the statements that the Bible makes and the principles that are expressed in or derived from these statements. The Bible provides us with models for our living.

How we expect the Bible to shape us depends on what kind of book we take it to be. So we will begin with this question: what kind of book is the Bible?

2

What Is the Bible Like?

What kind of book is the Bible? We use a range of metaphors to help us to understand what it is and how it affects our lives. At least one comes directly from the Bible and others are derived from what it says about itself.

What Kind of Light?

Psalm 119 has the line, “Your Word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path” (v. 105). What kind of image comes to your mind as you read these words? Where are you in this mental picture? What are you doing? What kind of lamp is giving you light?

For my part, I am a young boy again on my parents’ farm in rural Ireland in the 1950s. It is a dark moonless winter night and I am going out to the outhouse behind our house. I am carrying a lantern that gives enough light to see where I am walking but not much besides. No electricity on our farm in those days! The wind is blowing in the trees, unidentified sounds are coming at me from every direction, and I am desperately hoping that the flickering flame in the lantern will not be extinguished before I can get back to the warmth and safety of the living room.

The light the psalmist was talking about was surely more like that lantern than the bright streetlights of our modern cities. It would give enough illumination to see where we are putting our feet but not enough to see far into the distance on the way before us. An old hymn written nearly two hundred years ago by John Henry Newman has the same idea in its opening verse:

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’ encircling gloom, lead thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead thou me on!

Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.

Is this how you think about the Bible and the role it should play in your daily life? A light that shows you the next few steps but not the whole way ahead? Or do you think of a bright city light that banishes the darkness in all directions? The former is surely more true to the context of Psalm 119 than the latter.

Some Other Popular Images

Another very influential metaphor derived from the Bible is that of the foundations of a building. A popular hymn applies it to the Bible itself in describing it as being like a “firm foundation” for the “saints of the Lord.” In similar ways, Christians often talk of “biblical foundations” and see the Bible as that upon which we seek to build our lives. The image is probably less common in the Bible than it is in our talk and, where it is used in the Bible, it seems to refer more to the person of Jesus Christ as the foundation or cornerstone than to the Bible or what it says.

Rather than a light or a foundation, we sometimes see the Bible as being like a roadmap or a satellite navigation system for a journey, or an instruction handbook for the maintenance and use of a piece of equipment. Viewing the Bible like this makes it essentially a source of information that we need. It is a common image according to which the Bible tells us what we need to know, and not just for the next step or the next day...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Life-Long and Life-Wide
• Chapter 2: What Is the Bible Like?
• Chapter 3: The Power of the Narrative
• Chapter 4: Living and Teaching in the Big Story
• Chapter 5: Metaphors We Live and Teach By
• Chapter 6: Biblical Models for Our Teaching
• Chapter 7: Biblical Principles for Our Teaching
• Chapter 8: The Bible and the Content of Our Teaching
• Chapter 9: Living Letters in the Classroom
• Chapter 10: Getting It All Together
• Bibliography