Owning a home has forced me to get a construction education. This one principle is unavoidable, all successful building starts from the foundation upward. One does not build the roof before the foundation. The Bible speaks about a firm foundation as it applies to our lives but let’s apply the principle to our understanding of God. How are we to understand God?
The temptation
is to start with religious dogma or descriptions and then seek confirmation
elsewhere. Christianity mostly uses the
New Testament to confirm dogma, Judaism uses the Old Testament and our Muslim
brothers use the Koran, their holy book.
Is not the seeking of confirmation in each case top-down thinking?
Being born
into the Christian faith I will pick on our educational methodology. The Bible is taught in every quarter top
down. Every Sermon, Bible School,
Seminary or Sunday School class starts from a doctrinal premise and then teaches
the student where in the Bible to find confirmation for that premise, often exaggerated
as if it were evidence. After all, the
Bible is God inspired, is it not?
At least one of us believes that this top-down Bible teaching methodology is Bible abuse. The Bible becomes a dead book, intellectualized beyond the understanding of we average Joe’s. I am a dummy, the only good that came from my limited experience with Christian education was that I became familiar with the Bible for the first time. I found the top-down educational method boring yet not understanding why.
Maybe this is why believers have known little besides division for four thousand years and why most churchgoers are biblically ignorant. Once freed from the top down method many years later, the Bible became alive. After all, the Bible is a story book, the story of different people, in different circumstance and what they experienced in their lives God wise, that is not boring. The only downside is that this methodology is not a quick fix.
G. Goslaw
Landers, CA
