For well over twenty years now, Christian leaders have been lamenting
the loss of general biblical literacy in America. No doubt you have
read some of the same dire statistics that I have. Study after study
demonstrates how nearly everyone in our land owns a Bible (more than
one, in fact) but few ever take the time to read it, much less study it
closely. Indeed, while the Exploring Religious America Survey
of 2002 reports that over 84 percent of Americans consider the Bible to
be "very" or "somewhat important" in helping them make decisions in
life, recent Gallup polls tell us that only half can name even one of
the four Gospels, only a third are able to identify the individual who
delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and most aren't even able to identify
Genesis as the Bible's opening text.
Upon hearing these
figures (and many more are readily available), some among us may be
tempted to seek odd solace in the recognition that our culture is
increasingly post-Christian. Perhaps these general population studies
are misplaced in holding secular people to Christian standards. Much to
our embarrassment, however, it has become increasingly clear that the
situation is really no better among confessing Christians, even those
who claim to hold the Bible in high regard. Again, numerous studies are
available for those seeking further reason to be depressed. In a 2004
Gallup study of over one thousand American teens, nearly 60 percent of
those who self-identified as evangelical were not able to correctly
identify Cain as the one who said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" and over
half could not identify either "Blessed are the poor in spirit" as a
quote from the Sermon on the Mount or "the road to Damascus" as the
place where Saul/Paul's blinding vision occurred. In each of these
questions, evangelical teens fared only slightly better than their
non-evangelical counterparts.
These numbers serve to underscore
the now widespread recognition that the Bible continues to hold pride of
place as "America's favorite unopened text" (to borrow David Gibson's
wonderful phrase), even among many Christians. As a professor of New
Testament studies at Seattle Pacific University, I know this reality
only too well. I often begin my survey of the Christian Scriptures
course by asking students to take a short biblical literacy quiz,
including questions of the sort mentioned above. The vast majority of my
students--around 95 percent of them--are Christians, and half of them
typically report that they currently attend nondenominational
evangelical churches. Yet the class as a whole consistently averages a
score of just over 50 percent, a failing grade. In the most recent
survey, only half were able to identify which biblical book begins with
the line, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God." Barely more than half knew where to turn in the
Bible to read about the first Passover. Most revealing in my mind is the
fact that my students are generally unable to sequence major
stories and events from the biblical metanarrative. Only 23 percent were
able to order four key events from Israel's history (Israelites enter
the promised land; David is made king; Israel is divided in two; and the
people of Judah go into exile), and only 32 percent were able to
sequence four similarly important events from the New Testament (Jesus
was baptized; Peter denies Jesus; the Spirit descends at Pentecost; and
John has a vision on the island of Patmos). These students may know
isolated Bible trivia (84 percent knew, for instance, that Jesus was
born in Bethlehem), but their struggle to locate key stories, and their
general inability to place those stories in the Bible's larger plotline,
betrays a serious lack of intimacy with the text--even though a
full 86 percent of them identified the Bible as their primary source
for knowledge about God and faith. Continue at David R. Nienhuis
