eBookTeaching Biblical Faith - ePub [eBook] (Teaching Biblical Faith - ePub [eBook])
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Overview
Biblical faith is a lens for viewing life, and Jack Seymour refreshingly illustrates how the reading of scripture is a resource for ongoing theological reflection connecting experience, vocation, daily life, and faith. Teaching has concrete consequences affecting the very ways people of faith view the world and make decisions for living. It matters; it makes a difference in how people think and act.
Written in an accessible style, the book provides a manageable way to inspire conversation about the many ways the Bible can be taught, the purposes and outcomes of each approach, and how biblical wisdom shapes personal and corporate decision-making. Useful strategies for leading group Bible study help congregations respond faithfully to the Biblical witness and cultivate a whole congregation approach to Bible study.
"Seymour provides guidance on what it means to be a teacher and how to teach Christian faith, suggesting that teachers are like animators who envision and enliven the biblical stories and invite people to make connections in life." Narola Ao McFayden, Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Va. (Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 71(4)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781630884314 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 05/05/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 794 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Teaching Biblical Faith
Leading Small Group Bible Studies
By Jack L. Seymour
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2015 Abingdon PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63088-431-4
CHAPTER 1
Biblical Faith
How do we live as faithful persons? Every day we encounter many beliefs and many perspectives. Advertisements define our wants and needs. Too often we make decisions on the spur of the moment without considering implications—we are caught in the routine. In addition to the differing beliefs of many faiths, we hear great diversity among those who call themselves Christian. We often quake when the media names comments as Christian —they always highlight the extreme.
Living faithfully takes practice—seeking through prayer, study, community, and service the meanings of Christian living today. The followers of Jesus found themselves confronting the military power of Rome with its technological superiority. Yes, Rome had improved roads, provided clean water in many places and even sewerage systems, yet at what cost? Romans demanded allegiance. The people they conquered were required to worship their emperors as gods incarnate. Our Jewish forebears resisted these expectations, seeing them as idolatrous—substituting an empire for the God of creation. This resistance was at the heart of Jesus's message. It further empowered the disciples, Paul, and early missionaries to spread the gospel of a hope and new life. They proclaimed how to live in the light of the one, holy God, instead of Caesar.
Just like our forebears whose lives were defined by Roman expectations and hierarchies, our lives are too are often defined simply by our culture's expectations and hierarchies. We lose awareness of what it means to be "children of God," what it means that God has created and is creating, and that God has dreams for a future defined by "shalom"—healing, hope, justice, and community. We also lose awareness that God expects us to be part of that dream—following God's realm (God's kingdom) as agents of shalom.
Seeking Faithfulness
To reclaim our identity as children of God and our vocation as partners in creating, we have to probe the wisdom of our traditions. In prayer and humility, we make decisions about how we will live and act, knowing God is alive in our world.
The Methodist movement initiated by John Wesley had at its core small groups where faithful persons joined together in means of grace—that is, in acts of piety and mercy, like scripture reading, common study, prayer, communion, service, and attendance at worship—to inspire each other for Christian living. These groups often asked members, "How is it with your soul?" How are you living your faith journey? People shared their lives, prayed together, studied together, and supported each other to live holy ways. Lives were changed.
Yet, what does living biblical faith mean? The Bible consists of many books written across time to many different situations with differing understandings and commitments. Jeremiah writes about the events that lead to the people's captivity in Babylon. Ruth deals with issues of inclusion of strangers in God's love and care. Psalms provides prayers and hymns for private and public occasions of worship and petition to God.
In fact, the Bible is a library of books, some from the early Jewish community and others added by the Christian community. The Jewish community eventually organized their books into Torah, Prophets, and Writings. To this, Christians added Gospels and the Letters.
In Jesus's day, both a Torah reading and a prophetic reading (Law and Prophets) were shared at each Sabbath celebration. Studying the books of Torah and Prophets as well as drawing on the wisdom of the Writings was a way of seeking to understand God's gifts and expectations. In fact, the witness of the Jewish synagogues in the diaspora of the Roman Empire was so strong that many Gentiles would gather to listen to their study of scripture. These "God fearers" experienced integrity, hope, and new life—things too often missing in Roman culture.
Jesus and his disciples practiced the traditions of studying and interpreting the Torah and the prophets (see Luke 4, for example). The followers of Jesus continued these practices of reading and studying the scriptures of Law and Prophets.
They later supplemented them with letters from Christian leaders and biographies (gospels) of the life of Jesus. As the communities following Jesus read these texts, they experienced their authenticity to build community and to communicate faithfulness. The books became their "rule" or "measuring stick" (the Greek word canon). Studying the scriptures provided directions for living the faith.
Understanding Biblical Faiths
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann helps us identify aspects of biblical faith. He sees three faith perspectives in the Hebrew canon that also affect New Testament understandings. While complementary, each of these faith patterns represents particular commitments and embodies a distinctive form of education. The three are priestly faith, the honoring of Torah, tradition, and identity; prophetic faith, addressing human and social distress; and wisdom faith, seeking to connect the faith to everyday, ordinary events.
Priestly faith seeks to pass on and preserve the traditions of a community. The focus of priestly faith is to clarify what God expects of us. Integrity is found in honoring the faithful witnesses who came before and who shaped the identity of the community. Just like my family sought to teach me what being a "Seymour" meant (identity), priestly faith shaped identity. Teaching thus sought to instruct the people in the expectations and "normative claims of the community."
While respecting the past, prophetic faith immerses the believer in the depths of people's pain and the search for God's hope. The great prophets like Hosea, Jeremiah, and Amos called the community to faithfulness. For them, simply following the marks of identity was not sufficient when it did not take into account those on the edge of the community—widows, orphans, and strangers.
In fact, Amos proclaimed God's word: "I hate, I reject your festivals; I don't enjoy your joyous assemblies" (Amos 5:21). Why would God hate what the tradition expected? Because, as Amos said, "Doom to you who turn justice into poison, and throw righteousness to the ground" (5:7); "You crush the weak" and turn away "the poor who seek help" (5:11-12). In other words, prophetic faith is focused on living justice in a particular time and place (vocation). As Amos concludes, "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (5:24). Prophetic faith is an alternative imagination focusing on God's ongoing call to faithfulness. Education thus attends to living a vocation of justice.
Finally, the tradition does not have answers for all of life's questions. As new questions and new times arise, wisdom faith seeks to help us know what to do and be. No clear instructions from the past define all the situations we face in the future, so how is a person to know how to live? The writers of Proverbs, of Job, of Song of Songs, to name a few, sought to answer the questions of living. Through education, they taught people a way to extend the meanings of the Torah and the Prophets into this new day and time. How do we deal with personal suffering, with love, with primary relationships, with children?
Knowing that definitive answers are not available for everything and knowing that we face circumstances never before imagined, wisdom faith calls for prayer, humility, and theological reflection seeking to discern God's will. The answers of the wisdom writers often were more tentative than the expectations of the Torah or the call of the prophets.
Brueggemann argues that these three patterns tend to lead us in different ways, yet all three are present in the biblical witness. Priestly faith focuses on the gifts of the past and how we are to live as holy people. Prophetic faith focuses on God's justice and how "creation groans" for the fulfillment of God's dreams. Wisdom faith asks how we can be faithful in a new day when the world has so radically changed.
What then is biblical faith? Is it following the tradition, seeking God's justice, or enacting the hopes of the faith in new times and new places? Honestly, we can answer, all three. No wonder there are conflicting views among congregations of faithful people. These three are in dynamic tension seeking to be faithful to a living, creating, transforming, and sustaining God.
Following Jesus
Yet, we all wish for more clarity. Across differences of experiences, surroundings, and faith stories, we struggle for faithfulness. Without time and colleagues with whom to reflect, without prayer and humility, we miss the richness and depth of biblical faiths.
Christians look to Jesus and his followers to help us understand biblical faith. What Jesus asked of his disciples is a foretaste of what Jesus asks of us. Jesus drew on all three faith patterns.
Like his Jewish colleagues, Jesus's identity was rooted in priestly faith —in the Torah. The Shema prayer shaped his teaching and living: God is one, God creates life, God is faithful, and God expects us to be faithful. Love God and neighbor. Remember that when Jesus was questioned by the lawyer about the most important commandment, he quoted the Shema: "The most important one isIsrael, listen! Our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your mind, and with all your strength.The second is this, You will love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater than these" (Mark 12:29-31). In Luke's version of this questioning, Jesus adds the story we call the good Samaritan, helping the legal expert to realize that "the one who demonstrated mercy" was the one who fulfilled God's commandments (Luke 10:37). Here we see Jesus honoring the Torah and focusing it, as a prophet, on justice and mercy.
Furthermore, even his first sermon shows how important prophetic faith was for him. That sermon was a commentary on Isaiah 61:1-2. There Jesus defined faithfulness as "setting free the mistreated, and breaking every yoke ... sharing your bread with the hungry and bringing the homeless poor into your house, covering the naked when you see them" (Isa 58:6-7). Jesus entered the pain of the people. He was particularly fond of Isaiah. Throughout his teaching, Jesus sought to help people fulfill the profound vocation Isaiah had defined for them as God's people: "Hence, I will also appoint you as light to the nations so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth" (Isa 49:6). The vocation of the people was to live holy lives so that others could experience through them the integrity, creativity, and holiness of God.
Wisdom faith also claimed Jesus as he extended it to a new day and time—one of oppression and loss. He pointed people to "markers" of faithfulness. One place these markers are obvious is in Jesus's discussion with the disciples of John the Baptist (Matt 11:1-14; Luke 7:18- 35). John is in prison for challenging Herod. Jesus, in turn, was becoming well-known for his healings and teachings. He probably was also well- known by the disciples of John, being a relative, having been baptized by John, and perhaps even living for a time as a member of John's group. When John's disciples inquire of Jesus, Jesus points to the heart of the redemptive ministry in which he is engaging: "Go, report to John what you have seen and heard. Those who were blind are able to see. Those who were crippled now walk. People with skin diseases are cleansed. Those who were deaf now hear. Those who were dead are raised up. And good news is preached to the poor" (Luke 7:22). Coupling Luke 4 and 10, the markers to which Jesus points at the heart of his ministry and that of his followers are the following:
• healing the sick,
• giving sight to the blind,
• offering hearing to those who are deaf,
• forgiving those who have sinned,
• proclaiming release to prisoners,
• preaching the good news to the poor, the least of these,
• restoring community, and
• enacting shalom.
For Jesus, then, biblical faith is an activity of discernment. It is living the gifts of the Torah by loving God and neighbor. It is touching the distress of the people with prophetic mercy and justice. Furthermore, it is seeking through practical wisdom to see and live the markers of God's realm—places where redemptive living was present every day.
These markers set directions for his followers who called people to the living God. Such a message challenged Roman society and order. As the followers of Jesus grew, they were not defined by ethnicity, as was the practice in the ancient world. Their actions were unusual: they practiced peace, resisting both worshipping and fighting for the Roman emperor (therefore they were called atheists by Romans for not believing in Roman gods, and they were persecuted); they crossed social boundaries by gathering rich and poor together in sacramental meals; and they shared the gifts of the table—the gifts of God's healing shalom.
It seems complicated: How do we attend to tradition, open ourselves to God's justice for the brokenhearted, and discern our vocation in new times and places? Practices that connect teaching, community reflection, worship, prayer, and discernment help us learn to live faithfully. We enter these processes with humility and openness, yet only with intentional and sustained teaching do we grow in living biblical faiths.
CHAPTER 2Teaching Biblical Faith
For Christians, teaching biblical faith thus means teaching so that people know their identity as children of God, are able to live their vocation as agents of God's shalom or peace in the world, and follow Jesus into new times and places. We are formed as we study the meanings of faith and seek to live in mission to the wider world. Small groups of committed persons are essential to our learning. They listen, support, and hold us accountable as we seek to connect faith and living.
Teaching Practices in the Bible
The Bible itself witnesses to a vigorous plan of teaching and learning. People connected their living to their study of scripture. Educational practices emerged in the Jewish tradition to teach identity and vocation. These practices affected Jesus and subsequently were refined in the church. Faith education connected worship, study, prayer, and living.
A first example is the Sabbath itself. The Sabbath was a day of study. Each Sabbath, people celebrated meals of remembrance and hope. Shabbat was the day when God's actions were remembered. Shabbat was a day of justice when one's entire household was freed to celebrate the life-giving presence of God. Each week the people read from holy texts (Torah and Prophets) and discussed their meanings. Studying the Law and Prophets was the heart of all teaching and learning.
A second example was the yearly festivals where people remembered and reengaged the acts of God. Scripture and living were connected. Look at the three festivals prescribed in scripture (see Deut 16; Exod 23:10-19; and Lev 23:9-14). The Festival of Passover (Pesach ), in the spring, recognized that God freed the people from Egypt and made them God's people. Freedom then was not simply a moment in the past, but the ongoing way God worked, even in times of persecution. In turn, freedom from oppression was at the heart of Jesus's message as he confronted the powers that destroyed life options for his neighbors in Galilee. He pointed to markers of God's realm even in the midst of oppression. Thus, we are pointed to God's present acts to free people to be and live as children of God.
Seven weeks after Passover, at the end of spring and beginning of summer was the Festival of Weeks (Shavuot or Pentecost). During this time, the people remembered that God gave them the Ten Commandments and the Torah to define how they were to live. Jesus in turn reminded the people of the "law" God expected them to fulfill. He called them to love God and neighbor. He interpreted the law in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5–7; Luke 6:17-49). Continuing today, these expectations of how we are to serve God and care for each other are at the heart of education.
The third festival was the fall Festival of Booths (Sukkot) reminding the people that when they had been freed from Egypt and wandered in the desert that God continued to care for them. They were reminded of their total dependence on God for direction and even for food (manna) and life. Jesus, in turn, reminded the people that God was the one who gave them life and nurtured them (Matt 6:25-34). Faithful living is being connected to God's hopes for life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Teaching Biblical Faith by Jack L. Seymour. Copyright © 2015 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
"Preface","Introduction: Bible Study Matters",
"Part One: Biblical Living and Teaching",
"Chapter One" Biblical Faith,
"Chapter Two" Teaching Biblical Faith,
"Part Two: Basic Approaches to Small Group Bible Study",
"Chapter Three" Historical (Exegetical) Study: What Did the Biblical Writer Want to Say?,
"Chapter Four" Book-by-Book Studies: Engaging the Purposes of a Book,
"Chapter Five" Living the Themes of Faith: Studying Important Theological Concepts,
"Chapter Six" Lectionary Studies: Connecting Study, Worship, and Service,
"Chapter Seven" Praying the Scriptures: Personal, Group, and Family Devotions,
"Chapter Eight" Story and Scripture: Drawing on African American Cultural Resources,
"Chapter Nine" Theology for Daily Living: Drawing on Latin American Cultural Resources,
"Chapter Ten" See-Judge-Act: Study for Mission and Vocation,
"Chapter Eleven" The Way of Jesus: Reading for Faithful Living,
"Chapter Twelve" Reading Collegially: Interfaith Reading of Scripture,
"Part Three: Advice for Teachers and Leaders",
"Chapter Thirteen" So I Am a Teacher: Aids for Planning and Leading Bible Study,
"Chapter Fourteen" Shaping a Biblical Congregation,
"Select Resources for a Church's Study Library",