I read with interest the latest cover story of Time Magazine on “Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public School.” On the whole, it’s a very sensible article and it argues that many public schools should offer courses on biblical literacy, on account of the Bible’s formative influence on western civilization and because of the role it continues to play in contemporary politics.

David Van Biema, the article’s author and the senior religion writer for Time, visited a public school where a Bible course was being taught as part of the regular curriculum. He was encouraged to find that the teacher did a good job of presenting a religiously “neutral” position or “secular teaching” on the Bible. His point is that when teaching the Bible “neutrally” in public school we do our children an invaluable service: we inform them about a book without knowledge of which they could hardly be considered educated and we do it neutrally so as not to indoctrinate them or cross the constitutional lines separating church and state.

Biema says there is an upsurge of interest in teaching the Bible this way in public schools. It will certainly be interesting to watch this trend unfold. They do predict – surely correctly – that mistakes will be made, court cases will ensue, etc. But in the end he thinks it’ll be worth it. And I agree, with a few qualifications.

First I should say that the notion that a “secular teaching” on anything, much less an explicitly religious text, is religiously “neutral,” is a bit old-fashioned. There are certain “canons” or fundamental commitments of “secular reason” which make presumptions about reality, what counts for “truth,” and so on, that have quite religious implications, and therefore are not “neutral.” So just to clarify, however this shakes out, it won’t be “neutral.” That shouldn’t surprise anyone, but we should be aware of what we’re doing and the education must go on.

But I do think there is an approach that is more workable than most of the options presented by Biema. On the one hand, he notes the approach of the two leading curricula for teaching the Bible in public schools both have some potential problems with crossing constitutional lines. One, for instance, “still devotes 18 lines to the blatantly unscientific notion that the earth is only 6,000 years old.” So, on the other hand, Biema’s own approach seems to want all “unscientific” notions excised from the explanations of the Bible stories. And he goes on to say that proper teaching of the Bible in public schools must address “the Bible’s harmful as well as helpful uses.”

I can sympathize with Biema’s comments. On the creation issue, I’m not a “young earth” person and if the curriculum advocates that position, it’s inappropriate. And on the question of the “harmful and helpful uses” of the Bible, there are certainly both, and history gives us limitless examples of each. But Biema’s comments here set up a paradigm that would likely lead to a major and unnecessary clash of ideologies.

The problem I see beneath the surface of Biema’s approach is the problem with much contemporary education – it proposes an enormously prescriptive pedagogy and does so unawares. On the “helpful uses” question, for instance, who gets to decide? Clearly this isn’t neutral. When we make the “harmful/helpful” distinction in uses of the Bible or any topic we’re teaching, we do so because we’re making judgments about what’s appropriate and trying to produce a particular kind of person. And then we measure the subject matter, in this case the Bible, against that prescriptive criteria. So the question is, who gets to decide what are the appropriate uses of the Bible?

Normally in these cases, what’s considered “helpful” is something consistent with the faith of secular humanism – dismissing the distinctive truth claims of any of the major world religions and ending up with a kind of non-specific moralism that everyone can feel pretty good about. (I’m not against teaching moral principles in schools, but I am against filtering sacred texts down to such principles.)

And on the question of the “unscientific” stories of the Bible, well, this is a complicated topic but let’s just say the resurrection of Jesus is probably more “blatantly unscientific” than six-day creation. And while I would never expect teaching that claims “neutrality” to favor such an idea, which is the most central of all Christian teachings, I wouldn’t think such teaching would campaign against it either.

So here’s my modest proposal for a better approach: teach the Bible as literature, with sensitivity to literary context and the “history of reception” of this literature, i.e. hit the highlights of the major narrative framework of the Bible and the dominant trends in the history of biblical interpretation in western civilization. The whole thing should be “multi-perspectival”: views about the original literary intention of, say, the creation story of Genesis, and three or four representative ways the story has been “received” in the history of interpretation. This approach would be as descriptive as possible – making them familiar with the actual content of the Bible and the significant trends in interpretation – ancient, medieval, and modern. The question isn’t “do the first chapters of Genesis teach six-day creation?” but “how have these chapters been understood in western civilization, including (but not necessarily limited) to those who have accepted them as sacred writing?”

The point is that many folks, even those who favor a ‘secular’ teaching of the Bible in public schools, are still operating in a mold where the Bible in the secular teacher’s hands is a book that is making truth claims in the classroom, claims which must be vetted through the assumptions of scientific naturalism and lowest-common-denominator ethics. And while any sacred text could be said to be making certain truth claims implicitly whenever it is read, in the public schoolroom it is taught as we would teach any enormously influential body of literature produced over hundreds of years and interpreted in a whole variety of ways.

Biema may be assuming that the Bible in the classroom is still the Bible of the religious right, and no doubt there is some justification for this fear. But if we are too afraid of that possibility as we develop a better approach, we’ll end up with a secular humanist Bible, which isn’t any more “neutral.” While no method we choose will be neutral, a more literary-historical approach would serve public school students much better, and it would introduce them to Bible content and some significant ways it has shaped our civilization. And because it would at least attempt to set the truth claims and prescriptive applications off to the side, it might even make for a better run in the courts.