The Bible and Education: Ways of Construing the Relationship
By Rod Dreher
Rawlings School of Divinity
CLED 720: Biblical & Theological Foundations of Education
Genevieve Hamer
July 9, 2022
The Bible as educational content
First, an obvious way in which the Bible comes into relationship with education is when it
becomes an object of study. In ways ranging from programmes of theological education
through Bible classes to study of scriptural themes in English literature, the Bible regularly
shows up as part of the curriculum in various educational settings. In certain curriculum
materials designed for Christian school settings, biblical texts can even be found as a regular
accompaniment to worksheets dealing with, say, mathematics or grammar.
While this is one of the most familiar ways in which the Bible impinges upon education, it
leads to a restatement rather than a resolution of the question before us. The juxtaposition of
Bible texts with other material does not necessarily imply an educational process which has
been made in any significant sense ‘biblical’. Although the presence of biblical texts as part of
the curriculum does signal that some kind of value is placed on those texts, and the educational
results may well be very valuable, the simple insertion of such texts into teaching materials is
quite compatible with a doctrine of the autonomy of education in relation to the Bible. Insects
are also a common element of educational content, and I suppose that the committed
entomologist could design materials liberally sprinkled with pictures of our six-legged friends,
but it hardly follows that insects have authoritatively shaped education.
In fact, at a more sophisticated level, the argument has been advanced that when the Bible
becomes part of the content of education, then it passes into the jurisdiction of the educator
and the learner. It is claimed that the educational use of a biblical text is not the same as the
use of that text in the church context, and that the hermeneutic of the believing community
should not hold sway in the classroom where the central concern should be what the learner
can gain from the text to further his or her learning. If a biblical text fires a learner’s imagination
and leads to a piece of creative writing which would be regarded as entirely heretical by the
believing community, this could nevertheless, on this view, represent a highly successful
educational outcome.8 In this way also, then, the presence of the Bible as educational content is
quite compatible with a rejection of the idea that the Bible should shape educational
processes.9 I consider such a rejection to be a mistake, but anyone who is uncomfortable with it
is still left not only with the task of defining the relationship between educational and
devotional uses of the Bible, but also with the question of what a biblical use of the Bible as
educational content would look like. If we wish to draw those biblical texts used in educational
contexts into a further meaningful relationship with the rest of our educational content, then
from this angle too we are faced with the task of establishing that relationship. In both of these
ways, we arrive in effect at a restatement of the original question.
‘Incarnational’ emphases
A second approach focuses on the life and character of the educator or the educating
community as mediating between the Bible and the educational context. The focus here is not
so much on a distinctive process of applying the Bible as on a particular idea of the scope of
such applications, one which focuses on personal transformation. Put simply, parents, teachers
and learners read the Bible, and hear it preached and are thereby changed in ways which are
relevant to the relationships and processes of the educational setting. One version of this
emphasis is common in popular evangelical writing on education, which emphasises that
qualities such as patience, humility and love may be fostered specifically through meditation on
Scripture and will in turn shape the character of educational exchanges.10 The strengths of such
an emphasis should be clear, though its potential defects are also reasonably straightforward to
identify. It has become commonplace to berate forms of pietism which reduce response to the
gospel to matters of individual character, forms which can cheerfully co-exist with obliviousness
with regard to ideological influences on educational content or method. Here again there may
be little intrinsic resistance to a view of educational theories and practices as autonomous in
relation to Scripture.11
Such criticisms may often be justified, although anyone concerned for children’s well-being
will surely regard them as a call for something more, rather than a rejection of the importance
of the educator’s character qualities. One way of deepening this approach is to inquire into the
relationship between particular qualities of character and the structuring of educational
processes. Mark Schwehn has argued for a connection between spiritual virtues such as justice
and humility and the nature of learning, pointing out that lack of humility, for instance, can
block our ability to learn from a demanding text. Of interest here is his comment that ‘to teach
these virtues means first to exemplify them, second to order life in the classroom … in such a
way that their exercise is seen and felt as an essential aspect of inquiry’.12 This extension of
focus beyond exemplification to the structuring of learning moves a virtues-oriented approach
beyond the kind of ethical add-on criticised above. Inasmuch as there is an attempt to relate
the ethical teachings of the Bible to an understanding of learning processes, we can also see
here continuity between an incarnational emphasis and more belief-oriented approaches
discussed in the next section.
Schwehn also emphasises that these virtues grow out of particular communal contexts,
highlighting the fact that an incarnational way of relating the Bible to education need not be
thought of in individualistic terms. The basic idea here is that the focus of attention is not upon
working out the connections between particular biblical texts and doctrines and educational
practices, but rather upon a particular quality of life which is fostered by interaction with the
Scriptures and which impacts the practice of education. This may be extended beyond an
emphasis on the virtues of an individual to include the basic ethos of a community.13
