Telling God's Story - Chapter 6: Creation and Fall

Chapter 6 is the first chapter in Part 2 of this book. The theme of Part 2 is "Reading the Story for Yourself: The Five Acts of the Bible." In this part of the book Peter Enns introduces the narrative pattern of the Bible.

Basically the Bible's big story has a 3-part structure to it:

1. Creation: the story of creation (Genesis 1-2)
2. Fall: the story of how something goes very wrong (Genesis 3-11)
3. Redemption: the story of what God does through Israel to set it all right again (all the rest of the Bible)

Part 2 of Telling God's Story deals mainly with how the redemption part is fleshed out from Gen. 12-Revelation 22. But in chapter 6 the author looks at what we are meant to understand about God's work in the first 11 chapters of the Bible.

"Right from the very beginning, the Bible is making a point about who God is and how his people are supposed to respond." Keep in mind that Israel was surrounded by nations who worshipped many gods, and they had their creation stories as well. The creation stories of the other nations typically involved conflict among the gods; in other words, creation was the result of violence and conflict.

Genesis 1 is a strong contrast and argument against these other stories. The purpose of the creation story in the Bible is to show that the God of Israel (Yahweh) is the true and good Creator and that Israel was not to fall into the trap of worshiping other gods. This truth of God as Creator is repeated all through the Old Testament, and the Bible continually gives 2 main reasons why Yahweh is to be worshiped: first, He is the Creator of all, and second, He is the Deliverer (from Egypt then from Babylon).
A second theological lesson we get from Genesis 1 is that the creation story shows God making order out of chaos, putting everything into its place. In days 1-3 God brings form out of formlessness; in days 4-6 He makes things to fill the void/emptiness of the form of the first 3 days.

The idea of bringing order out of chaos is very important for our understanding of what's going on in the Old Testament story. "God is setting boundaries: the sea goes here, the land goes there; birds live here, crawling things live there. But the biggest boundary is between God and humans."

The fact that God created humans in His likeness and image shows how special humans are to God. This is in stark contrast to the other ancient creation stories where the gods are fighting and taming the forces of chaos, and they create humans to do all the dirty work or to be slaves to the gods or to entertain them. The true Creator God loves and cares for humans who He has made His representatives on earth.

However, in the story of what we call "the Fall", something very important was lost, and the rest of the Bible tells the lengths God goes to get it back. What was lost was the order that God had brought to the chaos by establishing boundaries. Humans, in eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thereby usurping God's place by taking things into their own hands, attempted to destroy the boundary that distinguishes between God and those He created in His image. This reintroduced chaos into God's order, making humans "agents of chaos...This is the root of human woes: forgetting the place that God has made for us."

Though there are other functions of Gen. 4-11, the main one is to show the spreading effects of chapter 3. We see the general human condition which is marked by chaos...the first crime is committed when Cain murders his brother; the Flood is a "reversal of creation" as God allows chaos to undo the order He established. (Later in Exodus we see this reversal of creation in several of the 10 plagues where creatures and creation cross boundaries that God had established: frogs in homes, darkness overcoming light, etc.) The story of the Tower of Babel is "another attempt to obliterate the line between humanity and God."

Genesis 12 through to the end of Revelation tells us what God did about this.

We'll look next at chapter 7: "Redemption: Abraham and Moses". 

Telling God's Story - Chapter 5: A Final Word

In this post I will give a very brief overview of the first 4 chapters and then one quote from chapter 5, which segues into Part 2 of the book. (Keep in mind that the author has created curriculum that includes material based on his recommendations in this book.)

Part 1 of Telling God's Story is about "How to Teach the Bible". In summary, Peter Enns proposes teaching scripture to children and young people in this way:

• Early and elementary years: make it all about Jesus - who He was, what He did, what He said. This will help establish firmly in your child the truth that the Bible's purpose is to reveal Jesus and will help avoid planting the subliminal message that the Old Testament Bible stories are for children.
• Middle-grade years: teach them the big picture of the Bible; place Jesus, who they have become acquainted with, into the larger context of the whole Scripture. By this stage, the child is well established in who Jesus is and can now begin to understand the world and culture and timeline that Jesus came from and lived in. Learning the stories of the Bible now has a coherence to it since they all pivot around the revelation of Jesus.
• High school years: teach them the ancient settings of the Bible, making them aware of the civilizations in which the Bible was written. Now your child can grapple with the realities of ancient stories and how well the Bible fits the world in which it was written while being unique in its revelation of the one true God in Jesus.

In chapter 5 the author simply gives a word of encouragement to parents, reminding us that we are part of a "wonderful and time-honored tradition" of teaching our children about the true and living God.

"Realize that all we do, including teaching our children about our faith, is ultimately geared toward helping them be adults. This encompasses much more than learning about what is in the Bible. It involves learning what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus in a world that is not supportive of that goal..."

Next we will go to chapter 6, "Creation and Fall", which begins Part 2 ("Reading the Story for Yourself: The Five Acts of the Bible").

Telling God's Story - Chapter 4: Traditional Approaches: Drawbacks and Misunderstandings

The subtitle for chapter four is "How other approaches shortchange the Bible and can lead to misunderstanding".

In this chapter Peter Enns touches on four of the more common approaches used in teaching the Bible to children. He emphasizes that these aren't all bad in themselves but may not be the most effective approaches if we want our children to grasp well what God's purpose and intention is in giving us the Bible. The four methods are the following:

The "Bible Story" Approach
It's common to start teaching children the Bible by telling them Bible stories since these stories have vivid characters and lots of action. Enns feels that although this isn't all bad, it sells the Bible short and "may, at the end of the day, obscure some important aspects of the Bible - especially as children grow older."

One drawback is that they may view these stories simply as "children's stories" and leave them behind as they age, just like they leave other children's stories behind. They can get the idea that the Bible is full of children's stories that don't have meaning for them once they grow up, when the truth is that these stories have deep theological and symbolic meaning. The author gives examples related to the accounts of Genesis 3 (Adam, Eve, and the serpent) and of the flood. In reference to telling children the story of the flood, he says,  
"When we reduce the Flood to a children's story, we lose sight of the connection between the waters that come crashing down upon the earth and those very same waters that God had moved to a safe distance in Genesis 1. Grasping what God does in the Flood and why requires a basic working knowledge of the ancient world, not to mention a basic awareness of the interconnection between this story and various other biblical episodes. All of this is beyond what young children can do...This is why I suggest beginning instead with stories of Jesus."

The "Character Study" Approach
This is a great section in this chapter; I will simply quote a few lines from it with the hope that these quotes will make the author's point clear. Speaking of Bible main characters, Enns points out that they aren't in scripture as models of behavior; in fact, virtually all them in the OT fall far short of moral ideals...

"...the story of Noah and the Flood is hardly about Noah's righteousness, but actually God's. To read it as a story about how good Noah was is to miss the central concern of the story.

"What we really see in these stories is God's faithfulness in sticking with Abraham. This is more God's story than Abraham's...

"If we limit our reading of the Moses story to deriving life lessons from his actions, we diminish the power of the story as a whole. The story...tells us more about God than anything...Moses is ultimately a preview of Christ...If we understand the story of Moses as a part of a bigger story - a story that is about God rather than Moses - the full picture given in the New Testament will take on deeper meaning.

"...David's story is part of a larger story about God. Yes, David was a great king, even if he was imperfect. But his kingship is not the central point of the narrative...David's kingship was a true but imperfect 'first run through' of Jesus' kingship to come. When you read the David and Goliath story, resist the temptation to see yourself in David's role. Rather, see Jesus...David represents Jesus - David's heir - doing the fight for us. If you want to see yourself in the story, you are among the people on the hillside cheering him on..."

The "Book-by-Book" Approach
Enns suggests that the study of books of the Bible in detail should be done as adults. For children, the better approach is to focus on the "flow" of the big story in general. "This overview of the biblical drama will help make subsequent book studies by your children in their adult years more profitable."

The "Defensive" Approach
Because Christians have tried to apply the Bible to current events and discoveries that the Bible doesn't address, great battles have taken place over the Bible in the past century. "Expecting from the Bible things that it may not be prepared to deliver can encourage a defensive, even argumentative, approach. Sometimes defending the Bible (with humility) is important and necessary. The difficulty come when we teach the Bible in such a way that we focus on the conflicts, rather than on laying the groundwork for a lifetime of study...The Bible is not a book that was written to be defended...The Bible is a book that is meant to be on the 'offensive', aggressively presenting a God who goes to great lengths to put the world back as it should be..."

The author urges us to present the Bible in a positive way, focusing on the larger picture it is giving. This chapter concludes with a very simple, wonderful overview of what God's story is:

"The story as a whole is one of a good and wise God doing unexpected things for an undeserving yet chosen people. This culminates in a vivid description of a new world that begins with Jesus' resurrection. In this new world, death is conquered and we can begin to live as we were created to live."

Next is Chapter 5, "A Final Word", which concludes Part One of the book.

Telling God's Story - Chapter 3: Teaching the Bible as God's Story

The subtitle of chapter 3 is "The three stages of teaching the Bible: elementary, middle grades, and high school."

The Elementary Years: Knowing Jesus - Who He was, What He did, What He said
The author contends that in the very young years of the child, our goal shouldn't be to teach them the Bible but to introduce them to Jesus who is the main purpose of the Bible.

"Jesus is the focal point of the Christian Bible. This doesn't mean we have to 'find Jesus' in every verse of the Old Testament. Rather, the Bible as a whole is going somewhere, and that 'somewhere' is actually a 'someone.' The Bible doesn't exist to talk about itself. It exists to reveal who God is, what he has done, and who we are as a result. The absolute center of all this is Jesus..."

Enns points out that the early church preached Jesus to both the Jews and Gentiles; though the Jews had strong background in the Old Testament writings, the Gentiles did not. Even so, the apostles did not first acquaint the gentiles with the OT but preached Jesus first. "...Jesus was proclaimed to the Jews as their Messiah...and to the Gentiles as their Lord, a term that had definite political overtones at the time...That proclamation was accompanied by all sorts of miracles...(and) was also demonstrated, very visibly, by the qualities of character that appeared in Jesus' earliest followers: joyful willingness to suffer and die for Jesus' sake...; self-sacrifice for others; generosity; forgiveness..."

The early church got straight to the point. "The point of Scripture is ultimately to introduce people to Jesus. His is what makes the Christian faith unique; not moral teaching, nor Bible stories, but a man who was also God...We hope for our children to know this Jesus - not to develop an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible..."

Enns points out that we should follow Jesus' own example of how He handled children, which was with warmth, comfort, acceptance, blessing. "In the early grades we should focus on bringing out the full portrait of Jesus. What should not be emphasized is the child's miserable state of sin and the need for a savior." The author's reason for de-emphasizing the issue of sin at this age is that young children want so badly to please parents that they will often make a "profession of faith" because they know this is what the parent is looking for. "We must remember that our children's salvation is not our work, it is the work of the Spirit."

The Middle-Grade Years: Getting a Big Picture of the Bible
In grades 5-8 the goal should be to place Jesus, who your child has been introduced to, into the larger context of the whole of Scripture. Starting with Jesus first gives coherence to the Bible because it helps the child understand that there is one overarching purpose to all that is recorded in scripture, which is Jesus. To use Enns' analogy of the messy bedroom and how to bring order to it, you could say that Jesus is the closet. He is the "grand organizing space within which we, as Christians, understand all of the Bible." And now in the middle grade years, your child will gain some strong and important hanging hooks to put in the closet.

The middle-grade child will learn the big story of God and His people. They should learn the basic flow of the biblical story (such as the timeline and overview of Israel's history - the small beginnings with one family and its growth; Israel's tribal existence and eventual enslavement in Egypt; Moses' leadership out of bondage and their wilderness wanderings; Joshua's conquests; the major kings of Israel; their fragmentation and subsequent dispersion and exile and finally their subjection to superpowers (Persia, Greece, and Rome). All of this leads to the time of Jesus.

"When students of the Bible learn to control this basic outline of Israel's history, many important hooks and hangers will be added to their closet organizer. They should also begin to get a feel for the different genres - or literary styles - of the Bible...The middle-grade years are the 'hook and hanger' stage, providing students with the most important 'pegs' in the biblical story on which to hang more detailed knowledge as they grow."

Grades 9-12: Understanding the Bible in its Settings
In this section Enns introduces ideas about the Bible that could be controversial to those of us who have been raised to think of it through a particular 20th century western evangelical lens. He presents the idea that the Bible is an ancient text and that "Genesis 1 has elements in common with creation stories of the ancient world - and those creations stories are older than the Bible. The same goes for the Flood story...The Bible seems to fit quite well in this ancient world - perhaps a little too well. As we study, the Bible can begin to look less unique; less like God's word."

Israel's laws look similar to other ancient law codes; portions of Proverbs and Job are similar to wisdom literature of Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts, etc. Because of these realities, it can thereby be easy for a young person, sitting in a secular classroom and hearing these things, to assume along with the instructor, that the Bible is simply one of many ancient texts. And if those other texts aren't true, then the Bible must not be true either.

It's important that we present the true nature and purpose of the Bible to our children so that they can understand that just because it is not entirely unique does NOT mean it is not God's Word. In this respect, we should return to the author's starting point in the previous chapter:  Jesus and the Bible are similar. "In the same way that we would not expect Jesus to be alien in his culture, we should not expect the Bible to be alien in its culture(s)."

The fact that the Bible has similarities with the ancient cultures in which it was written is NOT a strike against our faith, and the way we can challenge that mistaken idea is to study how the Bible fits into those cultures. As we do this, we get a better notion of what our God is like who, in His wisdom, chose to give us His word in a way that fits so well into the cultures in which it was written.

There are things in the Bible that can be fleshed out and clarified by the documents from the ancient world. "Generations of discoveries from the ancient Mesopotamian world have shed invaluable light on how these stories (in Genesis) are meant to be understood." Israel's laws, wisdom literature, temples, priests, sacrifices, prophets, kings all have counterparts in other cultures older even than Israel.

"This is the Bible we have...Study of the Bible's composition and its context will not present an obstacle to faith; but it will challenge and deepen faith, even as it nudges us out of our comfort zones."

Next chapter (4): "Traditional Approaches: Drawbacks and Misunderstandings"

Telling God's Story - Chapter 2: What the Bible Actually Is (and Isn't)

Telling God's Story has two major parts to it:

• Part One: How to Teach the Bible
• Part Two: Reading the Story for Yourself: The Five Acts of the Bible

Chapter 2 begins the portion on how to teach the Bible, and the author's objective is to give a clear explanation of the Bible's nature. He summarizes this by saying that it is "a complex and fascinating narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - not a book of rules or a manual of morals."

What we expect the Bible to be and do is critical in our approach to it. While making personal application to my life is good, that is not the primary purpose of the Bible. This is a difficult shift for us to make; but when reading the Word, we should learn to move from asking "What about me?" to "What does this tell me about God in the context in which it was written?"
A fundamental and beginning question we need to ask about the Bible is "What do we have the right to expect from God's word as a book written in an ancient world?"

In answer to this question, Enns presents two major thoughts:

1. Jesus and the Bible are similar. The fact that Jesus had weaknesses and limitations as a human and yet that doesn't detract at all from His being fully God, so the Bible has weaknesses and limitations and yet is truly from God; it is fully divine and fully human. The Bible is an ancient book, and "the fact that Genesis 1 reflects ancient creation stories does not point to error in the Bible, any more than Jesus' wearing sandals and speaking Aramaic was sin...Don't expect Jesus to be something He isn't...He was lowly. He came to serve. Likewise, don't expect something from the Bible it can't deliver. Don't expect it to be high and lofty, detached from the ancient world in which it was written."
2. The Bible is not a rule book or an owner's manual; it takes wisdom.  We've been taught that we can find answers to life's daily issues in the Bible, and as parents, we desperately want to find answers there to everyday questions as to how to raise our children; we tend to approach it as a "Christian owner's manual". But this isn't the kind of book God has given us; it does not address specifically modern situations but rather it tells "the story of how God's people are delivered from death to life, and as a result are now called upon to live a life in harmony with that high calling."

Enns goes on to say (concerning point #2) that the Bible, by telling the story of God's people and His dealings with them, is giving us a general vision for what the life of a follower of Jesus looks like. He suggests that the single most important concept for living the Christian life in any era is WISDOM (as opposed to having to find a scripture verse for everything we do).

He gives the example of his 12-year-old son who wanted to see the movie, "Saving Private Ryan". As he prayed and considered several factors about his son (such as personality type, his "internal filters", timing for him to see it in a controlled setting, etc.), he felt it would be good to watch it with him. Although a concerned friend used a verse from Proverbs to try to show him that he shouldn't have let his son see it, Peter felt that it was wisdom to watch it with his son at that time.

The fact is that much of our daily living requires that we "wing it" - this "winging it" is based on wisdom that we accumulate over the years through study of God's story, prayer, fellowship with other followers of Jesus, and life experience.

The reason it's important to move from viewing the Bible as an instruction manual that tells us how we should behave to seeing it as an ancient narrative/story about God and His people is that the latter view of scripture gives a big vision to our children. Seeing the Bible as a book of morals and principles diminishes its beauty and power to compel us to a transcendent way of life in God. "The story the Bible tells, which culminates in the Gospel, both disorients and reorients us. The Bible does not tell us about a religion that we practice; it points us to rebirth, a transformation, a whole new way of being. This, I think, has been lost on our young people; and when the vision is lost, they wind up abandoning their faith, blaming it for failing to 'connect' with their world."

Next we'll look at chapter 3: "Teaching the Bible as God's Story". 

Telling God's Story - Preface and Chapter 1: Laws about Mildew and Dragons with Crowns

Preface
In the short preface to his book, Peter Enns observes that there is a "big gap between what children tend to learn about the Bible in the early years, and how Scripture is studied in later years, as children mature into adults." In this book Enns proposes to focus on what the Bible is about as a whole, rather than on individual Bible stories.

The purpose of this kind of approach is "to prepare young Christians to have a vibrant faith in God and trust in Scripture in a world that is changing more quickly than we can describe."

Chapter one is an introductory chapter that leads into the two main parts of the book: 

• Part One: How to Teach the Bible
• Part Two: Reading the Story for Yourself: The Five Acts of the Bible

Chapter 1 "Laws about Mildew and Dragons with Crowns"
In this chapter, the author deals with why the Bible is such a difficult book to teach. He uses an experience with his children and their messy rooms as a metaphor for approaching the Bible.

After some years of frustration over the children's messy bedrooms, Peter got the idea of mounting a closet organizing system which, while not solving all the details of the problem, went a long way toward the children's rooms being more presentable and less chaotic. "...the Bible looks a little bit like my child's room. It's a mess. Names, places, events are all over the place, and you hardly know where to start cleaning up. It's such a mess...that if you ripped 20 pages out of Leviticus or I Chronicles, you might not even notice it was missing..."

After giving an honest assessment of many adult believers' struggles to get through "Bible in a year" reading programs or trying to make some sense of many large portions of the Bible (such as ceremonial laws about mildew, etc), Enns asks, "What should you make of all this? And what, if anything, should you teach to your children?"

The Old Testament is particularly difficult, but those difficulties also "bleed" over into our efforts to understand the New Testament since the NT has a total of over 1,000 citations and allusions to the OT in it! The Bible is a very detailed and sometimes difficult book to follow, and the author's desire is to help give some order to the chaos just like the closet organizers did for his children's bedrooms.

I'm going to close this post with quotes from the end of this introductory chapter, which are key for moving forward with the book:

• "Any teaching of Scripture to children must have a much more practical and deeper purpose: to encourage children to become mature, knowledgeable, and humble followers of Jesus, growing in faith. Growing in faith is not a contest or part of a daily to-do list. It is a journey that all Christians are on..."
• "So what is the Bible, and what are we supposed to be doing with it?...Why does the Word of God say the things it says? Why does it look the way it looks? And is obedience really the essence of what we are supposed to get out of it? Of course, the answer is yes - in part. But the Bible aims much higher; it teaches us to see ourselves and the world around us in fresh, exciting, and challenging ways. The Bible is not a Christian owner's manual. It bears witness to who God is, what he has done, and who we, as his people, are."

In answer to the normal fear of a parent to be able to teach their child the Bible in such a way that they not ruin the child spiritually, Enns says that none of us is up to the challenge, at least not on our own. "Remember that your children are God's children. It is your calling and responsibility to raise them in a godly way, but don't think for one minute that their success rests on your skills and abilities. Your children are, after all, God's work in the end...So have no fear, parents. You will make mistakes (although I hope this book will help you make fewer), but remember God's grace is bigger than the best of your intentions..."

 
 Coming next - Chapter Two "What the Bible Actually Is (and Isn't)"




 

Preliminary Comments on "Telling God's Story"

Before actually starting on the content of Peter Enns' book, Telling God's Story, I want to give my own short comments on it.

As I alluded to in my previous post, the main reason I'm interested in going through this book is that our children are growing up in a very different world than my generation of evangelicals did. We had no access to the worldwide internet; all that we were taught about the Bible (some true and some not so true) was more easily adhered to as we grew up because we were more confined to the small cultural Christian world we knew. Today as children grow and are exposed either to college friends or people in the workplace or simply to their own exploration on the internet, they discover many other ways of thinking. If the child is particularly an inquisitive sort, he/she will begin to ask his own questions and have doubts about what he's been taught at home.

If those of us who are raising today's children can get a better grasp of what God's purpose in giving us His Word is and at the same time let go of things that we have perhaps dogmatically believed about the Bible for the sake of better seeing the big story, then I believe our children will be much better prepared to face the questions and doubts that they will encounter eventually. Those who study trends in the church show that many young people are leaving the faith when they leave home because they encounter legitimate questions about God and the Bible, and without proper understanding of what the Bible is (and is not), they start to have their own doubts and end up abandoning the Christian faith altogether.

I believe Peter Enns does a good job of laying some groundwork on this in this small book. He is a highly trained scholar who has grappled with many questions related to scripture in both university and seminary classrooms. He has three children and they are the motivation for having distilled some of what he has learned into this simple form.

I'll be covering the book chapter by chapter - my objective is to present the author's material, not to critique it. This book is one of a few that Enns has published for teaching the Bible to children. For more information on the other books (and more that are coming), see http://olivebranchbooks.net/tgs.html. There is also more written about this curriculum and how it's being used at:  http://olivebranchbooks.wordpress.com/

I pray for the Spirit's help as we go through this book...

Reminder - Next Book: Telling God's Story, a Parents' Guide to Teaching the Bible

A reminder that sometime this month I'll begin to go through Peter Enns' book, Telling God's Story. For those of you who may not have seen my blog post of a few weeks ago about this, I'm re-posting it below:

I'm reading a wonderful book by Peter Enns about how to teach the Bible to children. Because I'm concerned with how I was raised to think about the Bible (see introductory post on The Bible Made Impossible - http://nitasbookclub.blogspot.com/2011/12/increase-of-truth-looks-like-error.html), I have a strong desire to see children raised now with a better idea of what the purpose of the Scripture is and thereby later in life find the Bible able to stand under scrutiny rather than to find it a stumbling block when doubts about it arise.  (Statistics show that young adults are leaving the faith in huge numbers now, and one reason for that is their sincere questions and doubts about what the Bible is presented to be by their parents and Bible teachers.)

I also have great respect for Peter Enns whose writings have had significant influence on me in the very recent years, particularly as they relate to what God's intentions were in giving us His Word.

For these reasons I'd like to go through his book, Telling God's Story, a Parents' Guide to Teaching the Bible.  It's available at amazon.com:  http://www.amazon.com/Telling-Gods-Story-Parents-Teaching/dp/1933339462/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354116103&sr=8-1&keywords=telling+god%27s+story

My prayer is that those who are raising and/or teaching children would find this book a blessing and encouragement.

(I hope to begin this early in 2013.)