ETYMOLOGY, SCRIPTURE, AND RELIGIOUS PEDAGOGY

IN MODERN CHILDREN’S BIBLES

by

David Riley

Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in

Biblical Studies The Master’s College

Santa Clarita, California April 2014

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CONTENTS ABSTRACT iv INTRODUCTION v SURVEY OF LITERATURE x CHAPTER 1. THE MODERNIZATION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 1 CHAPTER 2. THE BIBLE FOR CHILDREN IN MODERN RELIGIOUS PEDAGOGY 28 CHAPTER 3. GENESIS 1-11 FOR CHILDREN IN THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT 47 CHAPTER 4. BIBLE KNOWLEDGE, AUTHORIAL INTENT, AND GENESIS 1-11 60 CHAPTER 5. AN ETYMOLOGY OF REVELATION 80 CONCLUSION 91 BIBLIOGRAPHY 94

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ABSTRACT

For the last three centuries, Children’s Bibles have often been the first encounter children

have with the Bible, and text and pictures together have been instrumental in forming lasting

impressions. Used as tools in families, religious education, and culture making, children’s Bibles

are suspect, because as tools for Biblical Education, they make it a point to alter the biblical text.

It is the purpose of this thesis to uncover the values and presuppositions that authors rely on

when they transform the Bible for children.

Children’s Bibles are examined from their origins in the Enlightenment, which resulted in

children’s literature and its sub-genre: children’s Bibles. Children’s literature, as is known today,

was formed during the Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) and relies on several insights from this

important time in history, including education and childhood. It follows that children’s Bibles are

aligned to the same trend and are made with the same preunderstanding. Combined with an

Enlightenment-created understanding of children’s Bibles is the related idea of modern religious

pedagogy; that formulates the Bible towards modern views on the Bible and the nature of

childhood. These factors serve the background of modern children’s Bibles, an understanding

that is a guiding assumption in viewing retellings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as

well as twentieth-century and contemporary versions. The result of these observations is a

contrast between Bible story retellings in Genesis 1-11 with the biblical text.

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INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this project is to determine how children’s Bibles have been shaped by

the etymological, pedagogical, and religious beliefs of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment

has been described as a movement where philosophy became an “all-comprehensive medium” in

which the “principles of natural science, law, government, and religion are formulated,

developed, and founded,” a formula that covered all of Western Europe and America by 1750.1 It

is to be shown that children’s Bibles also have been formed as a product of Enlightenment ideas,

and they remain an enduring part of Western culture. As such, children’s Bibles are a cultural

document, and in turn, they shape people’s earliest perceptions of the Bible. Since Christians

believe the Bible is the Word of God, it is a subject that deserves careful attention.

Can culture shape perceptions of the Bible? Anticipating the completion of the new

campus at my local church community, I volunteered to make a mural for the nursery. Upon

completing a draft, which was to be copied from a grid onto the wall, the design was opposed by

someone who has raised children and served in the nursery department for many years. It was an

artistic representation of Psalm 23 that pictured a shepherd and a flock overlooking a “valley of

death” (i.e., rocks and brambles in a deep, dark valley) and had green hills on the other side.

Since those from the church community look at the same Word of God and come from different

walks of life and have different vantage points, I intentionally avoided the impressions of Psalm

23 created by contemporary Christian frameworks. When I read Psalm 23, I also have vague

images of a shepherd with a lamb in his lap, sitting in a green, well-watered meadow as the flock

is enjoying a clear spring day. But these kinds of images do not come from the text itself, for

1George Ahlstrom, The Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 352; cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), vii.

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they are what has been impressed onto the mind from without. Instead, I created a picture

appropriate for a nursery that celebrated the diversity characteristic of those who have found life

in Christ and can find unity in saying, “The Lord is my Shepherd.” And it was at the point where

my work did not match the collective consciousness developed over the past three centuries that

a front of opposition was set up to rally a flank. But I later realized that I was not up against a

force I could beat, because it was a force bigger than anything I had imagined––the force of

culture. To really understand the opposition I was facing was to understand the origins behind its

value and presuppositions, that is, its cultural background. Therefore, I focused my attention on

children’s Bibles, because they do profoundly influence impressions of Scripture, and culture

profoundly influences those impressions.

The Need, Importance, and Significance

When we read a children Bible, we read a cultural document, and as such, it contains a

cultural impression of the biblical story. They are adapted biblical narratives for the young, and

Bible Stories for the Young, by Sally Grindley and Jan Barger is one such example.2 Grindley

and Barger’s book is retold for ‘lap-readers,’ perhaps toddlers and up, indicated by the style of

images and level of simplicity of language. In many children’s Bibles, as in this one, the story of

“The Flood” (Gen. 6:1-9:19) becomes the story of “Noah’s Ark.” In Text, Image, and Otherness

in Children’s Bibles, a collection of essays by biblical scholars concerned with Bible story

retellings for children, Emma England is interested in how different versions depict the

description of the flood and the destruction of all living things.3 Bible Stories for the Young

2Sally Grindley and Jan Barger, Bible Stories for the Young (Waukesha: Little Tiger Press, 1998). 3Emma England, “’The Water’s Round My Shoulders, and I’m––GLUG, GLUG, GLUG!’: God’s Destruction of Humanity in the Flood Story for Children,” Atlanta in Text, Image, and Otherness in Children’s Bibles, ed. Caroline Stichel and Hugh Pyper (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 213-239.

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chooses not to edit out the violence of the ruin, but instead, text and picture, in a passive and

playful way, focus attention on the ark, which is still floating. Pictured in a fun and childish use

of pen and watercolor is a multicolored ark above the cute and tumultuous waves while a parade

of fish and sea creatures are happily swimming below the surface, as a line of pink, blue, and

purple houses are underneath that.4 Using a similar method is Captain Noah and his Floating

Zoo (1972), with entertainment and humor depicting the ruin, but focusing actively on the

ruined, a picture explains,

It looks like a sea It’s rising like a fountain! It looks like––HELP! I’m making for the mountains! It looks like AAAH! The water’s round my shoulder, And I’m––GLUG! GLUG! GLUG!5

Related to the striking differences from the biblical text and the retellings is the authorial intent

of the retelling; that takes into account the image of the child reader. More importantly, what is

the author’s purpose in creating this disjunction? And what impact do these kinds of early

impressions have on the reader?

I have suggested impressions of Bible stories are formed by culture, which children’s

Bibles derive from, from which derives the importance of this study. England makes the case for

a “top-down” approach to children’s Bibles, where readers already familiar with the biblical

narrative will compare the retelling to the source. That settles it, and children’s Bibles are not

problematic! However, she continues, “When a verbal text is accompanied by illustrations, this

4Grindley and Barger, 23. 5Referred to in England, “’The Water’s Round My Shoulders, and I’m––GLUG, GLUG, GLUG!’: God’s Destruction of Humanity in the Flood Story for Children,” 229.

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difficulty … is compounded. Words and images have a complex relationship.”6 Indeed, texts and

images together can easily give the allusion of what Alfred North Whitehead calls a truth-

relation: “Two objects may be such that their composite natures may include a common factor

although in the full sense of the word, their ‘essences’ are different.”7 The objects have

“participation,” a “methezis,” and their Appearance is the same; “In virtue of this identity there

is a transference of subjective form from a feeling of one object to that of the other. What is

appropriate for one is appropriate for the other.”8 Images are a powerful thing, and texts and

images get abstracted into one impression. This is the nature off all picture books, and Bible

stories set to pictures are included. Impressions of Bible stories, especially pictorial, can and do

have lasting effects on what we see in the text.

Everyone in society is an offspring of a cultural heritage, coloring how the Bible is seen,

creating impressions, and it is an impossible task have it any other way; however, by analyzing

the color of the lens and marking its blemishes a scratches, this will help to provide a better

understanding of the object of study beneath. I have chosen to observe children’s Bibles, because

they have a lot to say about how the Bible has been received in Western society over the last 500

years. Furthermore, as an artist and illustrator, I have been interested in children’s literature for

several years, and as a student of the Bible, I have a deep concern for how the Bible is taught and

received in the Western cultural setting and especially among children. I hope that this study will

contribute to the reception of the Bible as the true and living Word of God, even in the 21st

century.

6England, 214.

7Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1933), 242. 8Ibid.

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Method of analysis

The reception of the Bible in Western culture by analyzing children’s Bibles will be

multi-disciplinary. Because children’s Bibles are a cultural artifact, it will be necessary to gather

information from the sociological, intellectual, and religious histories that have influenced the

formation of children’s Bibles as they exist in the 21st century. Furthermore, I will draw on the

insights from the discipline of Biblical Studies in observing the historical origins of children’s

Bibles. After giving some definition to children’s Bibles, I will compare retellings of Genesis 1-

11 with a Biblical exegesis. The result will reinforce the distinction between children’s Bibles

and the Bible, and conclusions and considerations for the future can be made.

Limitations and assumptions

Like all people––who “look through a glass darkly”––my thoughts are guided by

assumptions, and my work is limited in several ways: (1) I am an American from European

descent, and I have only focused on a Western climate. Children’s Bibles, as known in the West,

are a phenomenon of our common Western heritage. Furthermore, modern religious education

and children’s Bibles are mostly a result of Protestant efforts. (2) Concepts on the nature of

childhood are informed by society, and they are changed and adapted by culture. For instance,

birthday parties are a tradition from ancient Rome. I have limited my historical study to about

the last 500 years. (3) I am limited in clarity, only being able to introduce things I have found; I

am a Biblical Studies student and am not trained in history, cultural anthropology, or children’s

literature; and my driving concern is with the Bible. (4) Most significantly and my overarching

assumption for this entire study is my belief that the Bible is the Word of God, meaning that it is

divine revelation, and divine inspiration runs through its every page. Therefore, I believe the

witness is trustworthy and the meaning is normative for life.

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SURVEY OF LITERATURE

The work that brought awareness and resulted in the present study was Russell Dalton’s

article, “Perfect prophets, helpful hippos, and happy endings.” In it, Dalton explains how “the

rich story and discourse of Hebrew Bible stories” are removed of the excellent resources that

make them useful in religious education. Instead, “Many children’s Bible storybooks available in

the United States since the late nineteenth century retell these stories in ways eliminate these

very features, often reducing the stories to simplified morality tales with Bible heroes serving as

upstanding role models.”1 It became clear that ‘use and abuse’ of the Bible had been established,

and it was related to another subject: “religious education.”

Most all of the English publications I found on children’s Bibles were published in the

last twenty years. Interestingly, it is a subject that has just recently gotten scholarly attention.

One of the earliest is Ruth Bottigheimer’s The Bible for Children: From the Age of Gutenberg to

Present. She does have an article, “Bible Reading in Early Modern Germany,” in Past and

Present, which is useful in providing an example of how CB’s (Children’s Bible(s)) were used in

Reformation Germany, and she also has an article in Studies in Church History, vol. 31 (1994),

which I did not include in the bibliography, because it is retold in a fuller manner in her 1996

book. KODOC’s (ed. Jan Maeyer) wonderful research on Religion, Children’s Literature and

Modernity in Western Europe: 1750-2000, researched very well, with essays heavy on

objectivity and light on the subjective, was indispensible. It showed very clearly how “religious

modernization” was a reality expressed in religious children’s literature from the utilitarianism of

the Religious Tract Society to the Christian fantasy of C.S. Lewis, that moved along with secular

1Russell Dalton, "Perfect prophets, helpful hippos, and happy endings: Noah and Jonah in children's Bible storybooks in the United States." Religious Education 102, no. 3 (2007), 298.

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trends in children’s literature. Penny Schine Gold, a sociologist at Cornell, has written Making

the Bible Modern: Children’s Bibles and Jewish Education in Twentieth-Century America, an

important book in showing how Judaism borrowed from how Protestants were able to modernize

the Bible through religious pedagogy. Another excellent and timely collection of essays I

gathered was from Society of Biblical Literature; Text, Image, and Otherness in Children’s

Bibles, where Biblical scholars and Hebraist react to the “othering” of the Bible in retellings for

children. Using the ATLA Religion Database as well as JSTOR, I found several more helpful

articles including Jacobs, Nel, and especially, Linton.2 Most of the journal articles consider a

particular story and singular issue, like Nel’s, "Violence and the Daniel tales in a children's

Bible.” The scholarly works on children’s Bibles are from many different academic disciplines

and include many different religious and theological perspectives.

One problem in the existing works, well, kind of a problem, is that many publications

encountered had far different interests. For example, Bottigheimer, in her important,

groundbreaking book, took feminist issues as a driving concern. Where this became a problem

was when Bottigheimer began to give special attention to Bible stories, like “Deborah and Jael,”

where she feels as though children’s Bibles consciously or subconsciously fail to represent these

women as heroes.3 One should try to remove bias to evaluate perspectives, for there may be

something to learn, but there is no validity to “Deborah and Jael” as intended as a feminist

runway, but then again, nor is the Bible meant to showcase role models. It is an interesting

sociological issue at best, not a biblical one. So, maybe there is as much validity to feminist

portrayals of “Deborah and Jael” to “David and Jonathan” as teaching true friendship. The real

2Alan Jacobs,, “A Bible Fit for Children,” First Things no. 73 (1997); Marius Nel, “Violence and the Daniel tales in a children's Bible,” HTS Theologiese Studies 65, no. 1 (2009); Anna Linton, “Accounts of Child Sacrifice in German Bibles for Children, 1600-1900,” The Modern Language Review 105 no. 2 (2010). 3Bottigheimer, The Bible for Children, 139-151.

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problem was that most of these works diagnose problems satisfactorily, but they do not help me,

except a few, to know what children’s Bibles are.

To understand children’s Bibles, understanding historical origins was fundamental, and

this meant understanding the culture that made and received them. A valuable resource was

Sydney Ahlstrom’s volume, The Religious History of the American People, because it traced

American society on religious lines, the most fundamental part of a culture. Another useful

perspective was George Mardsen’s, because of he focused on evangelicalism and

fundamentalism in America, which is different to some degree than Europe’s situation. These

historical works showed that the Enlightenment was indispensible to understanding the

American story. How have these views about God, religion, the afterlife, and individuality

shaped our culture? John McManners, in Death in the Enlightenment, in his consideration about

the change in perspective on life and death has had the most profound effect on my thinking, for

the book showed change in how people thought of existence itself.4 A survey of children’s

literature, by Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter

(2008), shows that even the genre as we know it today was engendered in this time, or more

correctly, it came to maturity. On Christianity in the Enlightenment, Jonathan Sheehan’s, The

Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture, followed by Michael Legaspi’s, The

Death of Scriptures and the Rise of Biblical Studies, have valuable insight into how the Bible

was viewed in the Enlightenment West; how it was transformed in people’s minds.

However, most of the focus of study was put into the Enlightenment changes in

educational theories. This project refers to John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau as two of the

most important figures on modern conceptions on childhood and pedagogy, and they are not

isolated as individuals, but they are just distinct voices of post-Renaissance humanism. With the 4John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

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Enlightenment in focus, Robert Ulich’s, A History of Religious Education, does a careful study

of the changes in religious education from the Christian era of the Roman Empire to the

contemporary context. The Church and Childhood, similarly, presents over thirty articles that

follow closely a chronology from the beginning of the Christian era until the 20th century. In

addition to the above texts that concern the nature of childhood and modern religious pedagogy,

Jack Seymour’s, From Sunday School to Church School: Continuities in Protestant Church

Education in the United States, 1860-1929 and John Calam’s, Parsons and Pedagogues: The

S.P.G. adventure in American Education showed to be cases of modern religious pedagogy at

work. Furthermore, there are several early 20th century scholars from what was then a newly

formed discipline of religious education: Soares, Myers, Cole. These three are published in The

Journal of Religion, are proponents of liberal Christianity, and they are a small sample of a large

pool of religious pedagogues of the 20th century. All of the above works point to a DNA of

religious education that shows it to be an offspring of the Enlightenment.

The understanding of the historical background of the West forms the understanding of

the modern children’s Bible as a cultural documents and past prints as cultural artifacts. Since

children’s literature in general presents the beliefs, values, and ethics the adult community

cherishes and would like to pass on to the next generation, children’s Bibles are a good place to

look for what society believes about the Bible and about children. Thus, using the words of Riitta

Oittenin, Jacqueline du Toit says, “Translating a children’s Bible into any mold … is ‘no

innocent act.’”5 These things became guides in a critical evaluation of children’s Bibles in the

modern era. Trinity University (San Antonio, TX) has been a great resource for historical and

5 Jaqueline. Du Toit, “’All God’s Children;’ Authority Figures, Places of Learning, and Society as the Other in Creationist Children’s Bibles,” in Text, Image, and Otherness in Children’s Bibles, 42; R. Oittenin, “No Innocent Act: On the Ethics of Translating for Children,” in Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies (2008), 35-45.

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theological works as well as for historical documents of religious pedagogy. However, most of

the CB’s and religious children’s literature cited and used in my bibliography have been accessed

through HathiTrust, a digital library started and organized, in part, by the University of

California, and most of the religious children’s literature documents from 1800 thru the early

1900’s. Most all religious children’s literature printed before 1800 were accessed through Early

American Imprints micropaque archive produced by Raedex Microprint. The remaining

documents were brought to attention by research already mentioned.

There are many ways to analyze CB’s; Bottigheimer’s own method is sociological,

showing how children’s Bibles are didactic, reinforcing desired behavior, and there is use in

analyzing that characteristic. However, the emphasis of this study was the likeness of them to

Enlightenment scholarship, which viewed the Bible as historiography, and CB’s, which viewed

it as “Bible history.” Enlightenment scholars believed in the “conquest of the historical world,”

because understanding the past about humanity was valuable for the present and future

generations. History would bring enlightenment. This humanistic undertaking included the Bible.

It is argued that this understanding helped start a hermeneutical shift in regards to historicity, and

it has contributed to moral didacticism, which is characteristic of CB’s today. The focus of

analysis is hermeneutical. Except for some brief mentions, the other research, as far as I know,

have done no significant study on the matter, save Gottfried Adam, in “Protestantism and

Modernization in German Children’s Literature.” But Hans Frei, Jonathan Sheehan, and Michael

Legaspi, and Frei in particular, refer to “the eclipse of biblical narrative” in biblical scholarship

in the Enlightenment,6 and it was here that there could be a point of contact with what was going

6Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

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in the grown-up world of Biblical scholarship and the nursery material of Enlightenment

Christianity.

If CB’s of the past were shaped, in part, by Enlightenment scholarship, then CB’s in the

contemporary context should have some remarkable signs of continuality. What are the changes,

if any has “post-modernism” introduced to the genre? “Post-modernism”: Jan Maeyer observes

Staf Hellemans and opts to call it “reflexive modernity,” referring to “modernity as a continuous

process.”7 Five examples of contemporary CB’s are used in this study, giving particular attention

to Genesis 1-11, in order to show that there is continuity. Selections of documents are chosen on

notoriety of the book, creativity of the authors and illustrators, and how well they contribute to

the diversity in biblical interpretation.

The overriding interest of this study is to analyze the biblical text against CB’s to

distinguish the Bible from its cultural presentation in CB’s, and literature has been gathered from

several disciplines for that reason. When the authorial intent over against the cultural intent

becomes clearer, the meaning and purpose of the Bible is illuminated, and if the Bible student or

teacher can see beyond the pretensions, especially those created by the cultural document of

children’s Bible, perhaps the Word of God will shine brighter in the heart of every believer.

7 Maeyer, “The Concept of Religious Modernization” (ed. Maeyer, 2005).

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CHAPTER 1: THE MODERNIZATION OF RELIGIOUS REDAGOGY

In Matthew 18, after the disciples ask Jesus who is greatest in the “kingdom of heaven,”

upon calling a child to himself to add force to his reply, he says, “Verily I say unto you, Except

ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”1

What were the thoughts that went through the minds of the disciples in that moment? Were they

confused, offended, or even indignant at the thought of becoming as children, with their dirty

faces, inept reasoning and speaking ability, and their undeveloped noses, eyes, and mouths that

were cartoonish representations of a man? But arising from Jesus’ reply gives rise to the notion

of a “child-like faith.” In the context of the twentieth century, probably most people imagine a

“child-like faith” as something that is pure, innocent, and unwaveringly devoted, bordering on

naivety (if they find Scripture hard to believe) in a way consistent with how childhood is viewed

today. But this is not how childhood was viewed when the words were spoken and written, and a

contemporary exegesis can be problematic. A better understanding that considers context sees a

child as weak, dependant, and in need of guidance. Likewise, the church fathers viewed

childhood as a metaphor for those who have been born of God and are need a παιδαγωγος

(paidagogos), a “child-guide.”2 Therefore, Jesus is summoning his disciples to a kind of faith

unto salvation that a learned Jew or a ‘self-sufficient” Westerner may be offended by, that he

might stumble over.

Some striking changes have taken place in the social conception of childhood over the

past 2000 years, and upon so, Seth Lerer, a professor of children’s literature at University of

1AV Mt. 18:2. 2 Graham Gould, “Childhood in Eastern Patristic Thoughts: Some Problems of Theology and Theological Anthropology,” in The Church and Childhood, ed. Jan Maeyer (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 45.

2

Chicago, says: “The study of children’s literature is cultural studies, not just that it draws on

literary, socio-historical, and economic methods of analysis, but in that it may serve as a test case

for the syntheses of current cultural criticism.”3 The pedagogic material presented to children

reveals what is important to society. For example, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational

treatise, Emile, he advocates one book as suitable for use in childhood education––Robinson

Crusoe;4 this is, of course, because Daniel Defoe’s 1719 adventure tale is free of any religious

dogma, reinforcing instead individuality, self-sufficiency, and technological mastery––the

characteristic moral traits of humanism––and according to Rousseau, “natural education.” The

character of Crusoe is void of any internal religious reflection, and instead he possesses what has

become known as a ‘Puritan ethic.’ History testifies Defoe’s influence even before Rousseau

canonized him, but Rousseau gave his book a surge of influence, as seen in its many translations,

abridgements, and the inspiration it provided for generations more of island adventure stories,

from The Swiss Family Robinson to Treasure Island.5 Upon the above references, it is apparent

the connection between grownup society and its pedagogy. In much the same way, (1) by

focusing on the dominant spirit surrounding the Enlightenment in regards to Education, (2) its

assessment of the Bible and divine revelation, (3) and its refection in enlightened pedagogy, it

will be shown that religion, and specifically religious education, also lies in the shadows of

modernization.

3Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 9. 4“Since we absolutely must have books, there exists one which, to my taste, provides the most felicitous treatise on natural education. This book will be the first that my Emile will read. For a long time it will alone compose his whole library,” Rousseau, Émile (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1918), 188. 5This is pointed out in Seth Lerer, 130-131.

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I: Etymology and the Enlightenment

The political, social, and religious philosophy of the Enlightenment has impacted every

area of modern life in the West, from the education of the youngest members of society to even

the preparation for death of the old. Amongst the changes, John McManners, in Death and the

Enlightenment, believes “children were established as beings in their own right and not as

deficient adults.”6 This is not to say that before the Enlightenment there were never mothers or

fathers or guardians that elevated the status of their children, being attentive to their needs and

recognizing their human need or desire for happiness, but during the eighteenth century, this was

becoming the norm for all, irrespective of religious devotion. What was at one time considered a

desire––happiness––would be considered for an adult as well as a childhood: need; a happy

childhood was a prerequisite for a successful life. Individual happiness is a datum of the

Enlightenment. Phillip Doddridge (1702-1751), a eighteenth century Congregational minister at

Northampton, England, in a sermon to his local congregation, delivered in a series entitled, “On

the Education of Children,” which, unusual for its time, is characterized by a sensitivity for

children and their spiritual development. In these sermons, he quotes John Locke––“He that has

found out to keep a child’s spirit easy, active and free, and yet at the same time to restrain him

from many things which he has a mind to do, and draw him to things uneasy to him, he has got

the true secret to education”7 ––and applies his insights into what is otherwise a distinctively

reformed theology in a process consistent with modernization. What has influenced the legion of

philosophical and ethical ideas that have covered all of Western society?

6John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 457. McManners supports this analysis by the appearance of children in French paintings of this time, from Chardin, Greuze, and Boucher, as well as the emphasis on childhood by many poets and writers of this time. 7Doddridge, Sermons on the Religious Education of Children, 34.

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It may be impossible to provide a bird’s-eye view of the ideas and events leading up to

the Enlightenment and were carried through it and are, perhaps, remaining in the contemporary

Western outlook on life. Yet, in a 2000-year span, the Church enjoyed a brief time of life before

its apparent death in corruption, and it was revived upon men who began to pay close attention to

the Scripture. But who would have guessed that the Catholic Church would have been the

unfaithful steward of God’s Word and the derelict bearer of Classical learning, carrying these

beacons into the dark ages, through the Renaissance on the other side, and holding them up,

almost unknowingly, for whoever would learn to gaze at them? And who would have guessed

that humanity would prove to be unworthy of the Scriptures, leading them to violent revolutions,

devastating wars, and pervasive international conflicts? If one tries to find the source, it becomes

most plain the answer begins with and ends with man. The spirit of man is the antagonist of the

historical tale in a very real way. Sydney Ahlstrom says, “It is important to see that the impulses

which led Luther to the Wittenburg church door were also those which sent Spanish caravels to

the Western Sea.”8 Ahlstrom goes on to describe this impulse as ‘Renaissance attitudes,’ which

is the “rebirth of learning, the revival of antiquity, the passionate resurrection of individuality

and … the search for standards of beauty, truth, and relevance independent of the church and its

dogmas.”9 Whatever else guided Luther, this “impulse” should be taken into account.

Pedagogical Theory and the Enlightenment

Education was central to seventeenth and eighteenth century humanists, necessarily so

because the human mind is the highest faculty of man: the material substance that elevates him

from the rest of creation. McManners refers to “sensational epistemology,” the technical term

8Sydney Ahlstrom, The Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 25. 9Ibid.

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undergirding this way of thinking, and it is “proposition one of the Enlightenment.”10 ‘Natural’ is

a key word of the Enlightenment––‘natural religion,’ ‘natural science,’ and, of course, ‘natural

education.’ John Locke (1632-1704), the chief expositor of sensational epistemology, though

holding to Christian theology and revealed religion, his philosophy is aligned to a materialistic

worldview upheld by empiricism. In emphasizing education, he says, “Of all the Men we meet

with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.”11

However contradictory Locke’s philosophy may appear to his own religious confessions, that

Scripture is revealed, it should be remembered that Locke was a man living in an environment

where science and theology were harmonious, and ‘natural religion’ and ‘revealed religion’ were

believed to be two strands of the same fabric. What sensational epistemology meant for Locke

was not a blind faith in human reason, but it reinforced for him the need for learning and caused

him to recognize the need for childhood education. Specifically, in Some Thoughts Concerning

Education (1692), Locke provides the telos of his ideas about the human mind, a robust

philosophy on ‘natural education.’

In the preface to the 1989 rendition of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, R. Quick

quotes a German historian and pedagogue concerning both Locke and Rousseau, “Sie machen

Bahn wir Andern folgten.”12 In this way, Locke lays down the gravel on the path treaded down

by the men of the Renaissance who gloried in man’s supremacy over the natural world, being

made in the imago Dei; and for Locke, since man is a created being, man is natural, and so is his

mind. Thus, bodily health and education of the mind are principle parts in the “Business of

10McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 154. 11John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, edited by R. Quick (Cambridge University Press, 1889), 1. 12Some Thoughts Concerning Education, xii.

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Happiness,” which is to be put into the “Constitution” between parent and child.13 “Due Care

being had to keep the Body in Strength and Vigour, so that it may be able to obey and execute

the Orders of the Mind.”14 The goal of this kind of nurture is to better equip children to learn

“Mastery of the Mind.” Locke tells us that “Recreation,” child’s “Play-things,” and “Play-

games” are to assist in this educational goal. He says, “This will accustom them to seek for what

they want, in themselves and in their own Endeavours; whereby they will be taught Moderation

in their Desires, Application, Industry, Thoughtfulness, Contrivance, and good Husbandry;

qualities that will be useful to them when they are Men.”15 “Play-things” can also be used in

teaching a child to read, the use of images or objects in conjunction with the text, also including

mnemonic devices in “Educational Games,” “Amusing Books with Pictures,” and especially

books to “Entertain.” In this educational scheme, Locke places faith in God as the highest of

“Virtues:” “As the Foundation of this, there ought very early to be imprinted on his Mind a true

Notion of God, as the independent Supreme Being, Author and Maker of all Things, for whom

we receive all our good.”16 Isolating Scripture and God in his section on virtues, Locke mentions

all the academic disciplines, French and Latin, Arithmatik, Geography, Chronology, History,

Geometry, Ethics, Logik et cetra, as necessary in the ‘Liberal Arts,’ but virtue and the liberal arts

together are the necessary components in educating the whole man. Undergirding Locke’s

educational theory was an understanding of education as an organic process aimed at ‘mastery of

13Locke, 3. Locke then goes on to suggest ways to raise a healthy child, describing everything from fresh air, swimming, eating fruit, meals, sleep, medicine––things to nurture the body, 4-19. 14Ibid., 20. 15Ibid., 113. 16Ibid., 116.

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the mind’ where knowledge is obtained through the senses and “to know” is the reasonable result

to the study of the material world.17

Childhood and the Enlightenment

“Sie machen Bahn wir Andern folgten:” Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) also led the

way to modern pedagogy, but Robert Ulich clarifies the claim when he says that Rousseau was

indebted to “the writings of Montaigne, Locke, and the English deists before him.”18 What

Rousseau does do is give new voice to the spirit of humanism in his work; “With a rare lyrical

enthusiasm, intellectual sophistication, and moral earnestness, Rousseau was expressing the

religious beliefs of so many, probably most, of the educated men of the Enlightenment who had

become doubtful about Christian revelation.”19 Rejecting Locke’s view on the body-soul

dichotomy, Rousseau, like a Romantic theologian, supported the notion that the body and soul

were two separate entities, the soul being immaterial.20 In Nouvelle Helios, Rousseau tells a tale

instilled with his Romantic philosophy of the human spirit. Julie, the central character of the

novel was the “centre of a web of family affections; her self-sacrifice created the happiness and

achieved the moral reform of others. … Her femenity is not an inferior form of being: it is a

perfection of its kind.” In this story, Julie pursues fulfillment deep inside her soul in spite of her

circumstances in the material world. “And even Julies secret, interior unhappiness points toward

17While John Locke is known as the ‘father of liberalism,’ and his name is associated with empiricism and materialism, it would be unfair to say that this was his goal, to give materialism a supporting argument, or even that this was in his mind. Rather, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he offers a warning against the “Danger of Materialism:” “Matter, being a thing that all our Senses are constantly conserving with, it is so apt to possess the mind, and exclude all other beings but Matter, that Prejudice, grounded on such Principles, often leaves no room for the Admittance of Spirits” (ibid 168). But this matter-spirit dichotomy, of course, has affinities with Aristotle, and it better to see him as a materialist is to see him as a man who’s work strengthened the separation between religious and secular society, where the sciences are natural, and revealed religion is spiritual. Knowledge of God is the highest. 18Ibid., 222. 19McManners, 148. 20Ibid., 148-155. See note 16 for Locke’s view of the soul body relationship.

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the great ideal, as yet unrealized, when lovers reach total unity.”21 In this way, it is the goal of

inner happiness, the attainment of the humanistic ideal, the freedom of the spirit, which

undergirds Rousseau’s Romantic philosophy. “The natural man is complete in himself; he is the

numerical unit, the absolute whole, who is related only to himself or to his fellow-man.”22

Rousseau romantic view of human nature is instructive on his view of childhood. To

Rousseau, inner man is good upon birth, his soul is a tabula rasa, and corruption only comes

from without. Necessarily so, along with other Enlightenment thinkers, he rejected original sin.

Therefore, nurture of the child becomes fundamental to his entire philosophy. Emile is his most

influential work, operating under the assumption that “we do not know childhood.”23 Like John

Locke, Rousseau expounds an education back to nature: “Plants are formed by cultivation and

men by education. … We derive this education from nature, from men, or from things. The

internal development for faculties and organs is the education of nature.”24 Thus, as central to his

educational theory, Rousseau offers “domestic education,” and accordingly, this includes

“nurture” and strengthening the bond between mother and child.25 A child’s education should

begin “before he can speak and understand.”26As a Romantic Prophet of Humanism, Rousseau

says, “O men, be humane; it is your foremost duty. Be humane to all classes and to all ages, to

21McManners, 452. 22Emile, Book I, 5. 23Rousseau, Émile or Treatise on Education, vol. 1, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1918), xlii. 24Emile, Book I, 1. 25To Rousseau, this theory is in opposition to the popular custom of hiring a wet-nurse to “nurse,” Ibid, 10. 26For his imaginary pupil, Emile, he offers this, “All children are afraid of masks. I begin by showing Émile a mask of a pleasing appearance, and presently some one puts it on before him. Thereupon I begin to laugh, and, as everybody joins in the laugh, the child laughs as the others do. Gradually I accustom him to masks that are less pleasing, and finally to faces that are hideous. If I have managed my gradation skillfully, far from being frightened at the last mask, he will laugh at it as at the first one. After this I have no fear that he will be frightened at mask,” ibid, 28. Rousseau also offers this method for the sound of fire-arms.

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everything not foreign to mankind. What wisdom is there for you outside of humanity? Love

childhood; encourage its sports, its pleasures, its amiable instincts.”27 It is worth a lengthy quote

that expresses his enthusiastic, Romantic vision of natural education:

Let Emile spend his mornings in running barefoot in all seasons around his chamber, up and down stairs, and through the garden. Far from scolding him for this, I shall imitate him; only I shall take care to remove broken glass. I shall presently speak of his employments and manual recreations. However, let him learn to make all the steps which favor the evolution of the body, and in all his attitudes to take an easy and firm position. Let him learn to make jumps, now long, now high; to climb a tree, to leap a wall. Let him always find his equilibrium.28

The ideal of a child educated according to nature will be that, “He has no faults, or has only

those which are inevitable to us; he has no vices. … Without disturbing the repose of any one, he

has lived as contented, happy, and free as Nature has permitted.”29 If “Nature” is allowed to be

the child’s pedagogue, “self-love” will be a preserving passion in the child.

According to Rousseau, amour-prope is also one’s moral faculty, which Nature gives the

child. Therefore, all the “benevolence” needed in a virtuous life is already within and needs only

proper nurture to be brought out.30 In this way, the supposed “Golden Rule” of the “Sermon on

the Mount,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” takes on a certain

significance as a maxim instilled in nature, meant to bring out the good and noble within man.

The “moral teachings” of Jesus take on this meaning for Rousseau. To preserve the “innocence

of children” as moral beings, accordingly, we must love childhood, which provides a window

into nature. Because of this, Rousseau thinks it confounding to education to nature even speak of

religion until the child has passed the Age of Discretion, for a child lacks the ability to picture 27Emile, 45. 28Ibid., Book II, 100-101. 29Ibid., 191. 30Ibid., Book III, 194.

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abstractions anyhow. At the same time, religion is an educational tool useful in developing

individual virtue and to serve as the stabilizing force in man’s moral compass, which directs him

to truths, beauty, and happiness.

In the Enlightenment scheme of development, views on childhood and views on

education are central, where man is natural, and natural education is the key to man living to his

potential. For Locke, knowledge of the divine was gathered through the senses as a virtue, to be

instilled in the mind at an early age. In a similar way, Rousseau believed religion was a learned

virtue accessed through the mind, and it provided direction for achieving spiritual happiness. But

for both, piety and virtue, the manifestations of religion, came from knowing, and knowing was a

material endeavor.

II: The Bible and the Enlightenment

Correlating with the new educational theories, the purpose and role of the Scriptures

would also take on a new shape. Even through the Enlightenment, the role of education remained

the same as it always had, to ensure the continuation of the body of doctrines that unites a

community and to perpetuate life into the future. Robert Ulich makes the case that the Jews have

understood this since the Babylonian exile, “The Jews, politically powerless, knew that they

would be absorbed by the surrounding ethnic and religious groups unless they held strictly to the

tradition. Their schools did not cease to exist even after the destruction of Jerusalem by Tiberius

in AD 70.”31 Childhood education was important for the Jews, Greeks, and Romans, as well as

the Church.32 When the Church was the dominant social institution, it meant that, “For over a

31Ulich 14. 32 S. Shahar, “The Boy Bishop’s Feast: A Case-Study in Church Attitudes Towards Children in the High and Late Middle Ages,” in The Church and Childhood, ed. Jan Maeyer (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994). This excellent article provides a model for what the church believed were the stages of child development and how they should be nurtured. Infantis; to age 7. Peuris; to age 14, also showing the importance of childhood in Catholic Europe.

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millennium, Western Christians read and revered the Christian Bible as Scripture, as an

authoritative anthology of unified, authoritative writings belonging to the Church. The Scriptural

Bible was neither reducible to a written ‘text’ nor intelligible outside a divine economy of

meaning.”33 In this way, the Bible was “not simply the foundation of the Church’s academic

theology; it also furnished its moral universe, framed its philosophic inquiries, and fitted out its

liturgies.”34 The Bible was the foundation of life, and the Church was its steward. Yet, by the

fifteenth-century, a growing trend was to see the Church’s dominion in connection with the Dark

Ages, and for the humanists of the Renaissance, the night was nearly gone, and the new day was

approaching.35

The conflict between the New and the Old came to its sharpest focus when Martin Luther

nailed his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg chapel in 1517 and is known today as the event

leading to the Reformation, in which there was a “a clear affinity between the humanist program,

captured in the slogan ad fontes (‘to the sources’), and the sola sciptura principle of the

Reformers.”36 Meanwhile, the Catholic insistence on the Latin Bible as the authoritative Word of

God and the corruption of ecclesiastical and papal authority raised the tide to what was already a

tumultuous season for them. Erasmus’ Novem instumumentum (1516), directed by the humanist

33Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scriptures and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3. 34 Ibid. 35J. Burckhart, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. Middlemore (New York Macmillon, 1904) 203; he says, The humanists spawned “a new civilization, founding itself on that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages.” 36 Legaspi, 11. With other Evangelicals, I consider Martin Luther’s commitment to the meaning of Scripture as an example of God at work in human history. Unlike a Deist conception of God, he is intimately involved in the world and accomplices his purposes through men. But the idea here it is not to separate religious history from world history, but the purpose is to look at the consensual environment of the late Renaissance, which Luther was a part of, and no doubt, it influenced him. “Where humanists sought to reform the church by restoring the humanities and adopting a simpler, more ethically robust form of Christian, the reformers attacked the central doctrines of the church and it's very right to pronounce authoritatively on scriptural matters” (Legaspi, 12).

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insistence on ad fontes, was done, in his own words, “[With the] chief hope for the restoration

and rebuilding of our Christian religion … is that all those who confess the Christian philosophy

the whole world over should above all absorb the principles laid down by their founder … in

which the heavenly Word which once came down to us from the heart of the Father still lives and

breaths for us and acts and speaks for us.”37 Even though Erasmus was a devout Catholic, the

Church would not see things from his perspective until several centuries later, and dissent would

begin with what Legaspi titles his book, The Death of Scriptures and the Rise of Biblical Studies.

The Bible divided Europe

If there were any negative consequences surrounding the Reformation, it stemmed from

the fact that the Bible was now subject to human interpretation by study of the Greek and

Hebrew text. “Over the course of post-Reformation controversies, the Bible showed itself to be a

contested legacy for Western Christians, ultimately devolving into a multiplicity of Bibles with

distinct canons, separate ecclesial context, and prolific theological superstructures.”38 Catholic,

Reformed, Lutheran and other systems would be ‘modes’ of interpretation. Gone were the days

of a universal Bible. Post-Reformation America was comparably tolerant to individual or group

differences in biblical interpretation, for example, only banishing dissenters and leaving them to

settle in the colony of Rhode Island, a resting place for the fringe communities like Baptists and

Unitarians.39 On the other hand, Europe became a battlefield full of bloodshed, coups, and the

public execution of “heretics.” One result of the European conflict was that by the end of the

seventeenth-century, religious devotion and faith in the Bible as the Word of God was at an all-

time low, expressed in figures like Spinoza, Locke, and Diderot. In this way, John Calam

37Legaspi, 13; quoted from Cornelius Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence, 89. 38Ibid., 4. 39Sydney Ahlstrom, The Religious History of the American People, 155-166.

13

discusses how preceding the formation of the SPG (Society of the Propaligation of the Gospel),

which sent Thomas Bray to begin an Anglican missionary enterprise in America, was the English

government’s concern for the moral decay of the people and began as a mainland effort.40

During the years of tumult in Europe, America served as a safe haven for every

theological dissenter, but “The New England Zion was never an untroubled Christian utopia.”41

The colonies never had the violent religious conflicts that plagued Europe, but the men and even

a few women were just as passionate about the fundamental theological question as to the place

of law and ‘legal obligation’ under the Gospel order and the question the nature of ‘The Visible

Church.’ In 1657, the Connecticut-Massachusetts council had to meet concerning a heated debate

concerning those being members of local churches, who were baptized, lived respectable lives

but did not have a “regenerative experience.” Were they or were they not elect? This led

“Radical” dissenters like Roger Williams and Henry Dunster to become Baptists.42 Finally, the

uncertainty led the council to decide on a “half-Way Covenant,” in which any professing

member was a part of, which never settled the conflict.43 The sources of theological tension

could be great and they could involve biblical interpretation on a macro scale or they could be

small and on a micro scale and involve praxis, but the resulting breaking of unity was the result

in Europe and America.

The Formation of a Bible to Unite Europe

The Bible had shown to be a divisive tool, and in Europe, there began a couscous effort

to unite people again under one Bible that was irrespective of creed. The Bible could not be 40John Calam, Parsons and Pedagogues: The S.P.G. adventure in American Education (New York: Columbia University Press 1971) 5-8. 41Ahlstrom, 151. 42Ibid., 158. 43Ibid., 159.

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thrown out, for its ethical power could not be denied, and it was a source of divine truth that had

formed the West for nearly two millennia. And for eighteenth-century scholars, study of the

Bible became a “cultural enterprise aimed at overcoming confessional loyalties while preserving

Christian intellectual and religious forms.”44 Making a “cultural Bible” was already an idea in

England in the making of the Authorized Version, envisioned as a standardized text of the

English Bible, which David Norton calls “the most important book in English religion and

culture.”45 What the English did for the Word of God in 1611 is what Enlightenment academics

and philosophers wanted to do for the text in the eighteenth century for a secularized Europe––

the “forging [of] a cultural Bible.”46 The most prominent shapers of the Enlightenment Bible

belonged to the German Aufklarung. Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791), also influenced by

English deism, writes in the middle of the eighteenth century:

When the Bible is freed from religious zealots and teachers, “The state avoids the danger [irrelevance of the Bible] if theology is drawn from the Bible with sufficient linguistic confidence and if it is enlightened by philosophy …. It will train still more effectively the obedient citizen who, because of his duties, treats it as law. Because of its ongoing connection to philosophy, ancient languages, and history––in short, to many sciences related to Biblical research––theology will cultivate scholarship and therefore help improve and promote the tastes and knowledge of the people.47

Biblical scholars have often credited Johann Phillip Gabler (1753-1826) with the creation of

Biblical Theology as a discipline, but it has been more recently recognized “Gabler’s debt to his

44Legaspi, 9. 45David Norton, The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 1. 46Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightened Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005), xi. It is not the goal here to provide an exhaustive survey of this development but rather to point out a few ways Enlightenment thinkers did this. For more thorough treatments see Legaspi and Sheehan. 47J. D. Michaelis, Raisonnement uber die protestanishen Universitaten in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1768-1776), vol. 1, 72-73. Quoted in length in Legaspi, 35-36.

15

predecessors.”48 Nearly half a century before Gabler gave his famous address at Alfdorf, “An

Oration on the Proper Distinction between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology and the Specific

Objectives of Each,” Michaelis became a lecturer in Hebraic Studies at Gottingen, “the epicenter

of the German Enlightenment,” where he oversaw and drew a line between Biblical Studies and

Theology.49

Two important factors in the formation of a “cultural Bible, or “Enlightenment Bible,”

are: the Bible as historiography, and the Bible as a moral code. First, the Bible is historiography;

it can, and should, be separated from theology and deduced onto a linear chronological plane.50

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment scholars have been separated according to two types,

“Neologists” and “Rationalists.” The “Neologists,” which includes Michaelis, Gabler, and

Eichhorn, saw that the “the context of exegesis was a knowledge of the ancient world in which

the Old Testament had been written.” 51 To arrive at a proper understanding that allows proper

exegesis, the areas of study are: knowledge of existent authors and literature in the context,

reports of travel to the location, and awareness of ancient customs.52 An example of the new

historical emphasis can be found in the Enlightenment interpretation of Moses. Instead of being a

narrative about God’s deliverance of his people by his ‘strong hand and outstretched arm,’ which

Moses was an extension of, Michaelis’ concern was with the man Moses, who could be

illuminated with related historical data. What the people and events the text pointed to was the

48Charles Scobie, The Ways of Our God: An Approach to Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 15. 49Legaspi,38; also see 45-50 for a treatment on the Theology discipline at Gottingen. 50Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), is a useful and important in identifying this development. 51John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPCK, 1984), 17. 52Ibid., 18.

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object of interpretation; for him, the account of the event was the meaning of the text.53 The

Bible was a grand history book. Legaspi points this out through an examination of Michaelis’

six-volume set Mosaisches Recht (1770-1775). In this work, Moses is a “legislator and a state

builder,” and the Pentateuch is a source full of philosophic and political inquiry.54 Michaelis

presents a Moses who is “immortalized in a film by Charlton Heston and Cecil DeMille,” which

presents the man as a “champion of just and rational monotheism.”55 Monotheism is thus a

historical development accumulating to a glorious, “Golden Age,” started by David and had its

heyday with Solomon and finally had its telos in the parousia of Jesus Christ. Related was an

academic attempt to see the Old Testament as “Jewish national history,” which was useful

because it contained things that pointed to salvation in Jesus Christ.56 In this way, the

Enlightenment idea of ‘the conquest of the historical world’ also included the biblical text.

Another characteristic of the “Enlightenment Bible” was the Bible as a moral code. In

addition to its historical character, understanding the Bible as “partly philosophic and partly

philological” re-formed Scripture into a Text to “cultivate” a society enlightened by humanism.57

The “Rationalists” were “inclined to see morality as the highest manifestation of religion,” but

the formulation and logic of the moral code is expressed enthusiastically by Michaelis.58 The

historical and the moral go hand-in-hand. His assessment that Moses is the ‘champion of just and

rational monotheism’ is supported with his firm belief in Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, 53This may seem like a small departure from traditional exegesis, but it is one that Sailhamer thinks is important to discuss in length; John Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition, and Interpretation (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009), 100-148. 54Legaspi, 130. 55 Ibid. 56Rogerson, 16-17; refers to his short discussion of J. Semler. 57Michaelis, Raisonnement, 1: 73. 58Ibid., 19.

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and he understands that the Mosaic Laws are ancient “customs converted to ‘immutable laws’”

that are designed to bring unity and happiness to the new freed slaves and peculiar nation of

Israel with “the endeavor to extend happiness as far as possible.”59 Penny Schine Gold refers to

John Prince, an early twentieth century Bible teacher, who points out a central implication to this

historical-moral shaping of the Bible, saying that there was “a gradual development and

unfolding of moral and religious ideals, attitudes, and practices among the Hebrew people

covering more than a thousand years and flowering in the exulted spiritual insight of Jesus and

the faith of his early followers.”60 By re-forming the Bible as the single, most important moral

and ethical treatise, Bible scholars shaped an ancient document into Enlightenment Age

relevance.

The Enlightenment Bible was nowhere better received than in America where its “moral

philosophy” became imbedded in its politics, education, and culture. “The effect of the

Enlightenment on Christian thought … became deep and pervasive,” the “central thesis” on the

Bible’s purpose and role of it existing in Locke’s, The Reasonableness of Christianity.61 In 1835,

a French traveler came to America and wrote of the people:

Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but nevertheless it must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions. … I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion for who can search the human heart … but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.62

59Legaspi, 144. Taken from Michaelis, Commentaries on the Laws of Moses, Article 243. 60Penny Schine-Gold, Making the Bible Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 113; in Prince, “Past, Present, and Future Place,” 206. 61Ahlstrom, The Religious History of the American People, 353. Ahlstom even quotes Jonathan Edwards referring to Locke and saying that he found more pleasure in reading him “than the most greedy miser finds when he gathers up handfuls of silver and gold from a newly discovered treasure” (351). Though Edwards is not a man of the Enlightenment, the pervasive influence of Enlightenment philosophy is apparent. 62Quoted in length in Ahlstrom, 387.

18

In this way, the Bible was a ‘rational’ book and served the ‘rational’ purpose of cultivating a

freedom and liberty loving Enlightenment society. Ahlstrom refers to a “distinct form of

Enlightenment theology,” which emphasized “believing in Jesus and moral living” and “ethics as

the chief end of its advocacy” and was advocated by eighteenth-century moderates and liberals.63

Similarly, George Mardsen can even speak of “the evangelical love affair with Enlightenment

science,” in which he refers to an Enlightenment mode of thinking applied to academic inquiry

that also affected the Orthodox.64 Even though there was some dissent concerning “Rational

Christianity” and its Bible, Enlightenment thinking about religion was “the basic intellectual

trend” of the times.65 Perhaps if Johann David Michaelis could have visited America in the

remaining years of his life, and if he could humble himself from his wild-eyed German pride, he

would smile and wink and say, “Yes, that is how it should be done.” Even though there was a

continental divide, the Atlantic Ocean, separating Europe from America, Enlightenment

philosophy was a powerful force and sent ripples into America, through its universities, washing

over the Puritan strongholds of Harvard and Yale by the beginning of the eighteenth century; and

through this means, Renaissance humanism would live on in the New World and would be

instrumental in forming a unique and lasting “American Christianity.”

III: Religious Pedagogy and the Enlightenment

In fact or in theory, the Bible always remained the basis for Christian education, for

Christianity was formed on it. And for the Reformers, the Word of God was central to the

education of the young. Robert Ulich describes John Calvin, who “conceived of education as that

63Ahlstrom, 356-357. 64George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991). 65Ahlstrom, 356-359.

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part of spiritual order that should pervade all its activities,” as seen in his model, the academy

being in conjunction to St. Pierre Cathedral.66 Aside from a fundamental difference concerning

salvation and the glory of God, the Geneva school had much in common with humanism,

stressing the liberal arts and classical languages, but for the purpose of understanding the Word

of God. The Puritans in colonial America followed the Geneva model, Harvard being founded in

1636, and candidates for the school being “enjoined not only to read Old and New Testaments in

the original and to interpret them logically and in the Latin tongue, but also to have some

knowledge of logic, natural and moral philosophy, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.”67

Furthermore, childhood education was made a necessity by John Calvin as well as his Puritan

successors, a law passed in 1647 known as “the whole deluder, Satan act,” which, in order to

defeat “one chiefe project of ye ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of ye

scriptures as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue ” orders that any town of 50

households or more are to teach children how to read and write, and furthermore, in the town of

100 or more a grammar school is to be set up “to instruct youth so farr as they shall be fited for

ye university.”68 Knowledge of the world would lead to knowledge of the Holy if the youth were

given the right pedagogue. But through a process of modernization, in the following centuries,

the emphasis on reading for the goal of understanding Scripture, classical learning as

supplemental to the goal, and the memorization of catechism to be the pedagogue in this effort

was changed into a conception of religious education that emphasized enculturization and

religious identity, Bible stories and Bible knowledge to elevate this goal, and ecclesiastical

training as the guide. The Bible was to be a tool in religious education.

66Ulich, A History of Religious Education, 123. 67Ulich, 156. 68 Ibid., 155.

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The Changing Shape in Religious Instruction

The Bible always remained the source text for religious education, while the influence of

natural education led to significant adjustments in the way the church proceeded to do

pedagogy––the modernization of religious education. Phillip Doddridge, a central figure in

Protestant revision of religious education, united the educational philosophy of John Locke to a

Puritan theology.69 He was a man, exceptional for his time, revealing his own grief, bordering on

dramatic indignation for effect, when “God whom we love and serve, in whose Friendship we

have long trusted and rejoiced, should act what, to Sense, so unfriendly a part: That he should

take away a Child; and if a Child, that Child; and if that Child, at that Age.”70 Francoise

Deconinck-Brossard highlights the unusual nature of Doddridge’s words in a time when “not one

half live to the age of Man … Not one half survive the Term of Childhood.”71 In Sermons on the

Religious Education of Children, Doddridge employs his theme from Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a

child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” and instructs on

religious education in what bears a remarkable similarity to John Locke in Some Thoughts

Concerning Education. As opposed to John Calvin, who magnifies the role of the academy in the

process of a man coming to salvation, and where Locke separates religion as a virtue from the

academy in the process of “natural education,” Doddridge assumes the Lockean view and locates

“religious education” as a domestic discipline of dutiful and devoted parenting, a “prudent and

religious parent.” For Doddridge, though salvation is ultimately an act of “Blessed Spirit,” it

69The Lockean influence on Doddridge has already briefly been observed in the introduction. 70Doddridge, Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children, Recommended and Enforced, in a Sermon Preached at Northampton (London: 1740), iv. 71Francoise Deconinck-Brossard, “Representations of Children in the Sermons of Phillip Doddridge,” in The Church and Childhood , ed. Jan Maeyer (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 380; quoted from Samuel Eaton, A View on Human Life, In a Series of Sermons on the Following Subjects, (1764), 27.

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does not “weaken our obligation to the most diligent use of our proper means.”72 “Children

should be trained up,” which Doddridge uses in every point of his sermon, ‘in religion and piety

towards God,’ in the ‘way of Jesus Christ,’ in ‘obedience to parents,’ followed by a list of

virtues, all together in a Lockean fashion: “Children should be trained up in the way of

benevolence and kindness to all … the way of diligence … integrity … humility … [and] self-

denial.”73 Also like Locke, Doddridge believed that up to age five was the most impressionable

age” in which maxims are “most easily admitted, so they are most firmly retained.”74 He makes

the reference to modern educational theory when he refers to the concept of tabula raza, which

Locke also refers: “The ancients, those judicious observers of human nature, as well as many

modern writers, are full of this remark in their discourses on education.”75 While the importance

of the earliest years for childhood development is commonplace today in developmental

psychology and is information given to new mothers, Doddridge’s sermon should be seen in the

context of religious dialog with Enlightenment philosophy, and Doddridge’s vision of “religious

education” marks a shift from Scriptural and dogma-driven education to a developmental-driven

education that would, in the future, focus on childhood, his “needs,” his “learning capacity,” his

character, and his eventual incorporation into adult church––or “Big Church.”

Bible knowledge was a means to an end in education for John Calvin, but in the modern

era the definitions of the means and the end became blurred with Enlightenment conceptions. By

the nineteenth century, religious education was actually becoming education in religion, which

72Doddridge, Sermons on the Religious Education of Children, 4. 73Ibid., 14-21. The similarity to Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, “Self-denial must be taught early [21] … Spoiling a child and its results [22] … Safeguard in early training of self-denial [25]… Do not reward importunity [26] … Parent and Child [27] … Father and Son [28].” 74Doddridge, Sermons, 28. Doddridge’s similarity to the tabula raza, “scraped tablet” is observed by Deconinck-Brossard, 385. 75Ibid., edited from the printed edition.

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was the expression of piety and virtue, which was learned by natural education, and the

modernization of religious education is seen in the development of the “Sunday School”

movement.76 The first “Sunday School” was modeled by Robert Raikes, who saw it as a

“philanthropic and educational effort to train poor children in reading, writing, arithmetic, and

morality,”77 having much in common with eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy on

religion and the Bible. In this way, “Sunday Schools” spread to America and were supported by

religious and public leaders as a means of “providing the morality and education necessary for

the democratic republic.”78 Upon the formation of the American Sunday School Association in

1824, Jack Seymour describes a “fundamental redefinition” in the purpose and role of Sunday

School for the life of the church, and, “by 1870, Sunday School had become unquestionably the

nursery of the church.”79 In the process, Seymour points to a number of variables that bend the

curve––the church’s interest in evangelism and public schools––and they began to subsume the

original design of “Sunday School.” But one thing that he fails to point out is that the trend

follows the path of religious modernization. In Germany, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834),

the “Father of Modern Liberal Theology,” spoke extensively on religious education, which

amounted to a post-humously published, Lectures on Philosophy on Education.80 Schleiermacher

believed religious instruction should be postponed in youth, and since the state controlled

education, instead “Youth should be taught by special appointees of the Church as a supplement

76Jack Seymour, From Sunday School to Church School: Continuities in Protestant Church Education in the United States, 1860-1929 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982). 77Seymour, 26. Raikes 1783 model was accepted by John Wesley. 78Ibid., 26. This view was held by, amongst others, Benjamin Rush. 79Ibid., 46. Seymour describes the process on 26-46. 80Ulich, 240-243; he describes FS’s educational philosophy.

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to family education.”81 For him, a branch of the church should take the role of “explaining the

Bible and the meaning of the cult as basic to the life of a Christian community;”82 and by 1870,

the Americans were morphing the ‘Sunday School to Church School,’ a nursery aimed at the

incorporation of the young into the life of the church community that used “sensational

epistemology” and the Bible as its tool.

Techniques in Modern Religious Education

Experiential knowledge consistent with modern concepts of pedagogy became the

primary means of religious education by the twentieth century.83 In this way, John Locke’s ideas

on pictures as educational tools to “entertain and delight,” “Play-things,” and “Play-games”

became incorporated into Bible Stories, hands-on illustrations, and games like “Sword Drills,”

into “Church School,” providing the knowledge and experience necessary for entrance into “Big

Church.” Furthermore, Rousseau, who “laid the foundation of a new developmental psychology

when he showed that children cannot picture distant scenes or abstract ideas” into the process of

natural education, laid down ideas that would be used to maximize the effectiveness of the

nursery of the church. 84 The modern insights on pedagogy led Horace Brunshell (1802-1875),

judged a “heretic in the eyes of American Protestant orthodoxy,”85 who was nonetheless

influential in Protestant religious education, to believe that “the true idea of religious education”

is that the “child is to grow up a Christian … [who] is open on the world as one that is spiritually 81 Ulich, 241. 82Ibid. 83I think “sensational epistemology” is consistent with “experiential knowledge” is consistent with “natural education.” Stewart Cole, “What Is Religious Experience,” The Journal of Religion 6 no. 5 (1926); A. J. William Myers, “The Content of Religious Education,” The Journal of Religion 5 no. 3 (1925); Theodore Soares, “Religious Education in the Last Twenty-Five Years,” The Journal of Religion 6 no. 1 (1926). These three are liberal, and so they have human progressive goals, but orthodox Christians began to use the same methodology. 84Quote from McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 457. 85Ulrich, 245.

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renewed, not remembering the time when he went through a technical experience, but seeming

rather to have loved what is good from his earliest years.”86

Consistent with Enlightenment theory, the Bible was moral, ethical, and historical and led

to several revisions of the Bible for children. One revision meant downplaying, ignoring, or

rejecting the Reformed dogma on the imputation of sin; Children did not need “conversion” to

benefit from Bible knowledge, and the Bible was used in nurture based on the child’s “needs.”

Slyvanus Stall, a New England Lutheran pastor, in accumulation of modern religious education

theory up to his time, wrote his final book, With Children on Sundays: Through Eye-Gate and

Ear-Gate into the City of Child-Soul (1911), provided with advice to parents and educators, how

to make Sundays the “most cheerful, sunniest, happiest, and best day of the week,”87 fitted with

photographs of families modeling church for the readers,88 and advice on “Bible Drills” that lets

the child relate his Bible “knowledge.”89 Finally, Stall devises examples of illustrations with

spiritual and moral points from the Bible in order to instruct in a way to keep the child’s interest.

For example, the story of the “Oyster and the Crab” teaches on “Conscience” and “The Worm in

the Apple” teaches on “Sin in the Human Heart.”90 Another revision was to make sure the

complexities of the Bible were condensed to its moral implications. Clara Mateaux speaks

directly to children in Sunday Chats With Sensible Children, and in the preface to parents, she

86Horance Brunshell, Christian Nurture (New York: Scribner, 1861), 6. Opposition to Brunshell’s theory, Thomas Curtis, The Progress of Baptist Principles in the Last 100 Years (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1856), 250-259. 87Sylvanus Stall, With Children on Sundays: Through Eye-Gate and Ear-Gate into the City of Child-Soul (Philadelphia: The Uplift Publishing Company, 1911), 9. 88Ibid., 15-16. Stall actually suggests ‘Playing church’ as a way to enculturate the young into real church. A caption reads “Little Billy and his interesting audience” (15) and another with “Little Billy taking up the collections” (16). 89Ibid., 23-24. Similarly is a list of questions from the Bible that focuses on the historical and geographical from the “Old” and “New” Testaments, 25-26. 90Ibid., 27-37.

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writes, “I have sought to interest them in a variety of subjects … men, customs, and facts in any

way connected with the glorious truths of Christianity, showing them how faith, hope and charity

have guided and comforted Christians in all ages.”91 Pictures and homilies in the book include

Bible history as well as world history as a way to expound enduring moral principles.

The revisions of religious pedagogy introduced by the Enlightenment became defining to

the religious education of children, revisions introduced by changing views on education,

childhood, and the Bible. Religious education became no longer synonymous with biblical

education, but it became “religious” education in a very real way. Those who believed in human

progress and looked favorably at the Enlightenment believed that religious education worked

with the “natural desire for knowledge” and purposed to inspire piety and virtue, “increasing in

ratios, till the full-grown man, on the full-fledged wings of intellectual maturity, soars aloft, as

the eagle from the mountain-top, in the quest of new and greater discoveries.”92 Bible knowledge

was a servant of this goal; or, the meaning of the Bible harmonized with this goal; or, whichever

way one looks at it. It is not possible to say that all of the above approach to Bible knowledge is

particularly modern, but it does point out a distinct meaning and method of teaching the biblical

text to children.

Concluding Remarks

Amongst the changes in religious education over the last several centuries is the media

given to children, which traditionally was in the form of children’s literature. Hillary Warren, a

journalist and communications analyst, examines religious education in digital media in, There’s

Never Been a Show Like Veggie Tales, and expresses a fascination in her book with Veggie

91Clara Mateaux, Sunday Chats With Sensible Children (Boston: Lee and Shephard), v. 92Samjjung Kang-Hamilton, “The Bible and the Education of Children: Lessons from Alexander Campbell,” Restoration Quarterly, 138. Quoted by Campbell, a contemporary of Brunshell, “Is Philosophy an Inductive Science,” 96.

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Tales; “that a computer animated video series that tells Bible Stories and morality plays has

shown that a Christian message can walk the line between sacred and secular and builds a market

on both sides.”93 But it is her book that is fascinating, in which she gives an objective and

unbiased look at the success of Big Ideas Inc. in the family, entertainment, and corporate world.

In light of the modernization of education, childhood, and the Bible, Veggie Tales, with its Bible

stories and moral tales “to entertain and to delight” (to quote Locke), its message, “God Loves

you very much,” and its non-confessional use of the Bible make it an unfascinating creation of a

universal Enlightenment Bible and religious pedagogy, irrespective to doctrine or creed.

One thing that stands out about Veggie Tales is its presentation of Bible stories. Bible

Stories have been told to children at least since the Church Fathers, and Chrysostom advocates

them before age ten, because the theological nature of them “will train him [the child] to trust

God.”94 But armed with modern views of an idealized child, with all the tools of “natural

education,” with an enlightened view of the Bible that draws exclusively on its historic and

moral poles, Veggie Tales presents a Word of God that can be reenacted by animated vegetables

from Larry the Cucumber, Bob the Tomato, to Junior Asparagus––to name a few; it presents a

Word that can be edited to add humor to something not humorous or make a detail appropriate

that is otherwise “inappropriate” for children; and it presents a show that moms will be pleased

that her kids are enjoying the Bible, while the kids think they are just being entertained. Children

walk away from the show happy to have seen the latest episode, and maybe, but probably not,

obtaining a moral truth.

If Veggie Tales is anything more than alternative Christian media, it presents an

alternative purpose of biblical knowledge, aimed at children inside the Christian community, to

93Hillary Warren, There’s Never Been a Show Like Veggie Tales (Lenham: AltaMira, 2005), 2. 94On Vainglory, ch. 51.

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enculturate them with Biblical knowledge. Furthermore, perhaps it fits childhood into a mold of

an Enlightenment realized and idealized childhood in which a child is still unformed and plastic

and needs the right nurture to one day serve in the adult community. Laurel Koepf says

something I think is fitting in this regard as well as for the concept of childhood envisioned by

Rousseau, “The idealization of children and their lives in children’s literature expresses nostalgia

for childhood, not the reality of childhood itself.”95 But what happens if this nostalgia informs

the pedagogical decisions of parents, educators, and writers? Koepf says this contributes to the

“othering” of childhood, a consequence of artificially presenting an idealized view of the child to

idealized children. When “nostalgia for childhood” informs Bible stories and the author’s

concept of the implied reader, along with the propensity to moralize, this often leads to

censorship of details, altering the text, or omitting entire sections all together by adults who think

they are nurturing, and together with the influence of the Enlightenment Bible on modern

Christian pedagogy, modern children’s Bibles are explained.

95Laural Koepf, “Inside Out: The Othered Child in the Bible for Children,” in Text, Image, and Otherness in Children’s Bibles, ed. Caroline Stichel and Hugh Pyper (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 17.

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CHAPTER 2: THE BIBLE FOR CHILDREN IN MODERN RELIGIOUS PEDAGOGY

Children’s literature is known today as a modern creation arising out of the climate of the

Enlightenment, with John Locke and John-Jacques Rousseau being two of the chief architects.1

Though there has always been reading material made for children, it was valued for its

educational purpose, which was moral and religious, but by the middle of the eighteenth century,

there began to appear a number of books marketed specifically for children that claimed a new

approach of entertainment and delight. For example, the grammars of the past, infused with

biblical passages, moral instruction, and catechisms, like The New England Primer, aimed at

biblical literacy, literature for children in the 1700’s began to be aimed to the child as a child,

and not only as a future adult. But even in the case of Rousseau and his endorsement of Robinson

Crusoe, literature remained pedagogical. In Religion, Children’s Literature, and Modernity in

Western Europe from 1750-2000, the University of Leuven devotes an entire work to a collection

of essays on how the church responded to the secularizing tendency by the emergence of

“religious children’s literature” as a form of sacred education.2 In addition to citing religious

children’s literature made after 1750 to make the point of ‘religious modernization,’ essays also

trace the histories of several Protestant and Catholic presses of children’s literature that offered

1Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), ; Ria Christens, Marc Depaepe, Mark D’hoker, “From Enlightened Tutelage to Means of Emancipation: The Educational Function of Catholic Children’s and Youth Literature in Flanders in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” in Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe: 1750-2000, 52; Jan Maeyer, “The Concept of Religious Modernization,” in Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe: 1750-2000, ed. Jan Maeyer (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), 43. Indeed, it is common knowledge. 2Jan Maeyer, Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe: 1750-2000. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005).

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“good press” in opposition to secular publishing houses.3 What is shown is that religious

children’s literature was never innovative but corresponded exactly to the literary ascetics in the

changing market of secular children’s literature. Furthermore, religious children’s literature, like

all children’s literature, was viewed as critical to a child’s education, which motivated the

religious publishing houses.

Children’s Bibles, as a subgenre of children’s literature, should be seen in the context of

the modern pedagogical theory while also being a form of modern religious pedagogy. Jan

Maeyer begs, “I would like to plead for the abandonment of the view that the relationship

between modernism and religion is necessarily a hostile one.”4 She means that the clash between

the sacred and the secular is not so dramatic as made out to be, but rather, they exist and live off

each other, and children’s literature is a good example of what she calls “religious

modernization.”5 It will be argued that modern children’s Bibles, in the same way, merges the

enlightened view of childhood and an enlightened view of the Bible into a ‘nurturing’ tool

consistent with ‘religious modernization’ and will be observed (1) in the development of modern

children’s Bibles during the Enlightenment (2) in connection with ‘religious modernization,’

specifically in relation to modern hermeneutics and interpretation of the Bible.

I: The Development of Modern Children’s Bibles

Since the beginning of the Christian era, the Bible had the place at the center of religious

education, and children’s Bibles present a fascinating perspective on religious modernization not

only because they provide a window of how pedagogues did religious education throughout the

3Verena Rutschmann, “Catholic and Protestant Children’s Literatre and the Process of Modernization in Switzerland and Germany in the 19th Century,” in Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe: 1750-2000. 4Jan Maeyer, “The Concept of Religious Modernization,” 41. 5Ibid.

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ages, but they also reveal how adults have changed, interpreted, and adapted Scripture for

children in the scope of religious modernization. Moreover, the justification for change has to do

with the adult community’s vantage point, and the modern children’s Bible could not have come

in to existence without the pedagogical insights of the Enlightenment or its historical and

religious vision. In Ruth Bottigheimer’s important study of children’s Bibles, The Bible for

Children: From the Age of Guttenberg to Present (1996), she provides a detailed analysis of how

the Bible for children underwent significant changes in the modern era. Amongst the changes,

“In children’s Bibles, God’s nature undergoes profound shifts. Divine immutability has been

routinely claimed, but it is its opposite, mutability that reigns.”6 She shows the reality of the

didactic changes regarding biblical theology through an analysis of depictions of God’s character

in Creation, his wrath upon the transgression of Adam and Eve, and his fury leading to the Flood

as well as in illustrations of God in early children’s Bibles, ranging from a depiction of God’s

omnipotence thought rays of light encircled by the name יהוה (‘Yahweh’) to an eventual image of

a bearded man in a robe and a staff.7 “From the eighteenth century onward, most children’s

Bibles present God as a father analog, an ultimate parental and paternal principle. The line

between earthly and heavenly fathers, however, could easily blur.”8 In this respect, there is not

much of a leap from the fatherly figure of God to a gradual attempt to highlight exemplarity

father figures in Bibles for children by editing out the parental faults in Lot and his Daughters or

David and Absalom. Similarly, “Protestant children’s Bibles seek and find explanations for

unaccountable behavior with noteworthy flexibility. For example, Protestants invented and

6Ruth Bottigheimer, The Bible for Children: From the Age of Gutenberg to Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 62. 7Ibid., 65-69. God as YHVH pictured in Incones Biblicae (1625) (fig. 4.1), 66 and pictured as a bearded man in Ein Bibel in Birdern (1825-1860)(fig. 4.4), 68. 8Ibid., 69.

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inserted obedience on Isaac’s part into nineteenth-century English, Swiss, and German children’s

Bibles.”9 Not only does Bottigheimer’s excellent research reveal that children’s Bibles serve as

religious pedagogy consistent with Enlightenment Christianity, but they often do so at the

expense of the text, keeping in mind that Enlightenment theologians and shapers of Bibles for

children would think they were abstracting the real meaning. But how did the shape of children’s

Bibles Bottigheimer discusses come about?

A Bible for the Laity

Bibles and religious books for children and simple folk have existed long before the

Enlightenment for imparting knowledge of the Bible along with established dogma, but not in

the shape they began to take in the eighteenth-century. All the way back in the ninth-century,

Alfred the Great, upon the realization of lack of the knowledge of the Word of God among the

Brits, opines, “Then I remembered how the whole law was first known in Hebrew, and again,

when the Greeks had learned it, they translated it into their own language, and other books

besides. And again the Romans, whence they had learned it, they translated the whole of it

through learned interpreters in their own language.” He continues, “Therefore it seems better to

me … for us to translate some books which are most needful for all men to know into the

language which we can all understand.”10 Following this tradition, in the twelfth century, there

appeared Biblia Pauperum, a “poor-man’s Bible” that “represented the transition to illustrated

Bibles, made possible by the invention of wood blocks and individual woodcuts.”11 These prints

were available for the common folk and presented illustrations along with portions of biblical

9Ibid., 75. 10King Alfred's West Saxon version of Gregory's pastoral care, ed. Henry Sweet (London: 1871), 2–8. 11Ulich, A History of Religious Education, 89.

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texts in the vernacular, going along with the overwhelming view of medieval scholastics that

“education is one of the means by which sinful man can obtain salvation.”

Martin Luther is sometimes credited with the first Children’s Bible, but his Passional

should be understood in his own words as a “Laienbibel” [Bible for the laity] and was aimed at

children and simple folk who could not read or were inefficient, and it should be seen in the

same tradition of imparting Bible knowledge to common folk.12 The Passional is a Bible booklet

in the fashion of the medieval “passional,” a pamphlet that presents the life of Christ as central,

but Luther’s is different in that it “starts with the Old Testament story of God’s grace in creation

and ends with the resurrection of Christ, his coming again at the end of time, and the missionary

injunction to teach the gospel to the whole world.”13 The booklet consists of fifty woodblock

illustrations alongside fifty biblical texts, existing in Luther’s vernacular translation, and another

version in Latin. Upon examination of the Passional, Bottigheimer concludes, “In terms of

children’s Bibles, it represented a textual position far in advance of his age.”14 However,

understanding the pamphlet in a slightly different light, in the medieval “passional” tradition,

Luther did not create a Kinderbibel but a Laienbibel that critiqued the scholastic position of the

Church and expounded by story selection from the Old and New Testament a Reformation

rereading of Scripture that saw the meaning of Scripture according to a theme of justification by

faith and the New Testament fulfillment of the Old in Jesus Christ as an integral part.

12Gottfried Adam, “Protestantism and Modernization in German Children’s Literature,” in Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe: 1750-2000, 235-237; Bottighiemer, The Bible for Children, 23-36. 13Adam, “Protestantism and Modernization in German Children’s Literature,” 236. 14Bottighiemer, The Bible for Children, 35.

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From a Bible for the Laity to a Bible for Children

One thing Martin Luther’s Passional reveals in relation to modern children’s Bibles

(because they do, of course, relate) is that in abridging the Bible for the sake of imparting Bible

knowledge, the selection of pictures and text is commentary and provides a guide to the text that

has an effect of standardizing and preserving accepted interpretations. While commentary with

Biblical texts existed long before even The Geneva Bible, with typographical and layout

distinguishing it from Scripture, in abridgments and adaptations, commentary was unannounced

and indistinguishable. In the years following Luther, Protestants began to see that Bibles for

children served the same pedagogical purpose of catechizing, to provide the young with guided

theology and methodology in religious education. And by the beginning of the eighteenth

century, there is evidence that German Lutherans even began to replace older methods of

pedagogy with special Bibles books for children. Anne Linton describes the development of

children’s Bibles in Germany: Justus Gesenius intentionally omits the chatechismal method in

his Biblische Historien (1656) and instead asks questions at the end of passages, puts in

reflections for application, and adds pauses for relevant prayers and hymn singing.15 Similarly, in

1714, Johann Hubner published Zweymahi zwey und funffzig Auseriesene Biblische Historien.

One author describes Hubner as the most famous author of German Bibles for children, his

version existing in more than 270 reprints and spanning into the twentieth-century.16 Influenced

by Gesenius, the book was designed for school children and uses a four-step method to biblical

knowledge: “Biblical narratives, questions, precepts, and pious thoughts.”17 While it is aimed at

15Anna Linton, “Accounts of Child Sacrifice in German Bibles for Children, 1600-1900,” The Modern Language Review 105 no. 2 (2010), 458. Cited in Gesenius, Biblische Historien, fols b7, c-cij. 16Adam, 237. Hubner’s work is also described in Linton, “Accounts of Child Sacrifice in German Bibles for Children, 1600-1900,” 459. 17Adam, 237.

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providing the young with the vital parts to a right understanding of Scripture, it also “reflects the

social and economic changes in society.”18 Gottfried Adam rightly analysis the work’s historical

significance when he says:

Therefore, the following virtues are often emphasized: piety, charity, humility, hard work, truthfulness, peacefulness, modesty, patience, obedience, and solid life in wedlock. Sin is not primarily seen as the turning away from God, but a plain disobedience to the Ten Commandment. The vision of life governing this school Bible is dominated by reason and experience and is directed toward practical piety and usefulness. It stands exactly on the threshold between Lutheran Orthodoxy and the early Enlightenment.19

Since the introduction of Luther’s Passional, in 1529, intending to impart Scriptural truth by

relating to his thematic approach of justification by faith to children and simple folk, by the time

of Hubner, Bibles for children were becoming an acceptable and preferred form of religious

pedagogy by Protestants who favorably looked to the coming Enlightenment.

Children’s Bibles and religious books for children in the years before the Enlightenment

surge in children’s literature follow closely the Biblical text through popular Reformation

translations or through adapted verse and show a range of religious concerns for children: from

the salvation of souls to promoting piety and virtue. In the same timeframe as Phillip Doddridge,

who reflected on John Locke’s education philosophy and Reformation theology, there appeared

portions of the Bible for children in Europe and America in the form of abridgements and verse.

Influenced by Isaac Watts’ (1647-1748), Divine and Moral Song in Easy Language for Use of

Children, The Holy Bible in Verse (1729) circulated in America and is self-described as “very

pleasant and profitable and greatly intending to encourage children and others to read, and after

18Adam, 237-238. 19Ibid., 238.

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to understand, what they read in that Sacred Book.”20 Notably, the book expresses the depths of

Reformation theology in simple verse. A one-page verse of the book of Exodus reads:

So fast that Pharoah’s Heart soon fails Yet gives Command to drown the Males. But Moses God preserves, that he From bondage might all Israel free. And Pharoah’s Heart is harden’d so That he’ll not let the People go. Then, Plagues from God in number ten Destroy’d a Multitude of Men. The Isra’lites are freed at last, And o’er the Red Sea safely past. [With] Pharoah thinking to surround, Then, he and his company are drown’d. The People murmur and transgress Tho’God with Manna doth ‘em bless. To guide us to the great three One. The Ceremonies in this Word, Are Types of Jesus Christ our Lord.21

It is useful to recognize in The Bible in Verse that it presents a tool consistent with Reformed

religious pedagogy, contrasting with the Enlightenment Bible of Neologists and Rationalists. But

for all, a special Bible for children is able to take the place of catechisms as a guide to a proper

reading of Scripture.

From a Bible for Children to a ‘Children’s Bible’

Though there are differences in early modern Bibles for children, by conveying specific

Christian doctrines related to salvation in Jesus Christ, they stand in contrast to the modern

children’s Bibles of the Enlightenment. Brought about by the pedagogical ideas of Locke and

Rousseau––in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke even recommends special Bibles

for children and gives criteria for story selection. However, “most agree … that that the genre of

children’s Bibles reached its zenith between the 1770s and 1790s, coinciding roughly with the

20The Holy Bible in Verse (1729). Text quoted above expanded on the title page. 21Ibid., Pages not numbered.

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proliferation of publications marked for children.”22 Reverend J. Sooy writes a word to parents in

the preface to Bible Talks With Children: “This is the Age for Children. Never before was so

much tension and time and study given to the little ones.”23 And so, characteristics that mark out

modern children’s Bibles is that they are aimed at the child’s “needs” according to his level of

understanding; they are made to entertain and to delight, and stories are told more freely and

with more detail; they employ a hermeneutic that allows the child to relate his experiences to the

character in the story; and they are selected and screened to edit out or present differently

unsuitable material.

One of the first authors of children’s Bibles in America is Isaiah Thomas and operates

under the Western consensus that special Bibles need to be made for children to be “both

instructive and entertaining.”24 The Holy Bible Abridged begins with an introduction to the Old

Testament that describes God as the “Creator of all things, and the director, Protector, Preserver,

and Sustainer” followed by a literal translation of Genesis 1:1-2:3 along with wood cut prints of

the creation narrative.25 This ‘introduction’ frames the remainder of the book, more than 200

pages of Bible abridgements, presented as the revelation of God in continuation with Genesis

1:1-2:3, and in this way, Thomas’ children’s Bible presents a divine revelation that is a history

book. Chapter 6, “Of the Flood” begins, “It was the year of the world 1656, before Christ 2346”

followed on the next page by a text that passively mentions the destruction of the flood and

instead depicts with a woodcut the Ark being picked up by the water as the people outside are

22Linton, 457-458; see also Adam, 238-239. 23J. Sooy, Bible Talks With Children or The Scriptures Simplified for Children (New York: Union Publishing House, 1889), 3. 24Isaiah Thomas, The Holy Bible Abridged: or, The History of the Old and New Testament (Boston: Thomas, Son & Thomas, 1796), vii. The copy I have located is from 1796, but the book was first published in 1789. 25Ibid., 17-25.

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gathered together against a flood; that will overtake them too.26 However, the book spends much

of the space provided on biblical characters like Abraham, Joseph, and Moses as central to the

purpose while devoting a few paragraphs to also fit in the exciting life and times of men like

Joshua and Samson into a historical overview of the biblical world that leads to the life of Christ.

In this way, the overwhelming purpose of the book is to lead to the life and teachings of Jesus

Christ, and while a handful of pages describe the betrayal, death, and resurrection, the majority

of the New Testament material includes instruction on the ethical teachings of Christ, what to do

and what not to do, like do the “universal and golden rule of morality,” and do not be “a house

build on the sand.”27 In “the end matters” section at the close of the book, Thomas recommends

other books for “Instruction and Amusement” published by Thomas, Son & Thomas including

Robinson Crusoe and Virtue and Vice: Or, The History of Charles Careful and Harry

Heedless.28 In this way, by the end of the 1700s, the ‘Children’s Bible,’ an interpreted, abridged,

and re-processed standardization of the Bible, is preeminent in a genre for children made for

“Instruction and Amusement.”

In addition to being devices for the ‘instruction and amusement’ of children, possessing

the intrinsic qualities of children’s literature, children’s Bibles are located as religious children’s

literature and should be seen as tools used in modern religious education. German theologians

who adapted biblical texts for use in school defiantly thought so, and while many of the

Reformed tradition continued to use the biblical text as the central part of education consistent

with sola Scriptura, ideas that focused on the needs of the child and the elevation of the place

nurture in the church and in the home helped to reshape religious education in most Protestant

26Thomas, The Holy Bible Abridged, 34-35. 27Ibid., 130-131. 28Ibid., 172-174.

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churches in the centuries after the Enlightenment.29 The experience-centered approach of Horace

Brunshell fits into this development: “the true idea of religious education” is that the “child is to

grow up a Christian.” In this way, on the bookshelf of children’s Bibles are categories divided

into each particular stage of psychological development in accord to Enlightenment science with

contemporary titles like Thomas Nelson’s The Read and Share Bible for Toddlers, Zondervan’s

The Beginner’s Bible, and Reader’s Digest’s Baby’s First Bible. It would be a mistake to see

these titles as innocent nurturing tools for the development of a child’s senses. One book

advertises, “Bringing the world’s greatest book to life in the heart of every child!”30 The word

“Bible,” mentions of God, and pictures of Jesus connote sacred, and not only are the above

“Bibles” characterized by the approaches of modern religious education, but also they deduce

what is the essence of biblical knowledge for young minds, and this decision demands

interpretation.

II: ‘Religious Modernization and Children’s Bibles

In addition to becoming a source of instruction and amusement consistent with

Enlightenment pedagogy, the instruction part is also conformed to the process of modernization.

The process of forming a Bible for the cultivation of an enlightened society has been briefly

described.31 In Making the Bible Modern, Penny Schine Gold describes how, in a process of

modernization, “The Bible was remade into a core text of Jewish education and adapted for

29Robert Ulich, The History of Religious Education describes the Catholic Church’s resistance to modern religious education into the mid-1900’s. For example, in the year of the book, the Catholics used catechisms over the tools of Sunday Schools and Children’s Church; “The Rise of Catholic Education,” 254-272. 30Baby’s First Bible: A Carry Along Treasury (Pleasantville: Reader’s Digest, 1986), back cover. 31In (II) of the previous discussion, with the research of Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightened Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture and Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scriptures and the Rise of Biblical Studies being important in forming my understanding of the German Enlightenment and its influence.

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audiences of modern Jewish children and adults.”32 Away from the Talmudic tradition as the life

defining guide to Jewish life, the Jewish community began to see the Bible according to the basic

Enlightenment Protestant understanding as the “great inheritance of our race,” in which the

stories and instruction are “pervaded by a perennial humanity, a direct simplicity that makes

them appeal to the young of every age.”33 Part of Schine Gold’s thesis is that the Jewish

community in America accepted and used the Bible as a non-secretarian means to join its youth

to American culture, and thus, Jewish and Christian children’s Bibles share in common the same

moral and ethical overtones informed by the grammatical-historical approach of the

Enlightenment.34

Following the program of modern children’s Bibles, The Children of the Bible, published

in London by the Religious Tract Society in 1799, contains fourteen sections of Bible children

from Moses, Samuel, the Little Children Brought to Jesus, ending with “The Child Jesus”

himself, and these are, of course, intended to be character models.35 Accordingly, the preface

describes walking through a house of kings and nobles and noticing the portraits of famous

kings, queens, and princes: “If they were among those who feared God, these pictures may

remind us of what we should copy in their conduct. But if they did not live holy lives, then we

may learn from them what to shun. Now, the Bible may be compared to the picture gallery of a

126Penny Schine Gold, Making the Bible Modern: Children’s Bibles and Jewish Education in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 26. Traditionally, the Talmud, not the Bible, had been the center of Jewish life, but Schine Gold describes how the Talmudic commentary and its halakah became a source of scorn by Enlightenment Europe who glorified reason over human tradition. Many Jews conformed to modernization in the Wissenschalf des Judentums movement, which elevated the biblical text to the main source of study and Jewish life. 33Scine Gold, 64. Quoted by Ella Lyman Cabot, Ethics for Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), xviii. I particularly value Schine Gold’s contribution and understanding of modern, especially, Reformed Judaism, she herself being a Jew. 34Of course Jewish and Christian children’s Bibles differ in some profound ways––significantly with Jesus Christ and the OT leading up to his parousia. 35The Children of the Bible (London: Religious Tract Society, 1799).

40

king.”36 Beginning with Ishmael, who is described as “envious and spiteful,” is made to be in

opposition to obedient Isaac, who is also the child of promise.37 The pages come to a close with

the ultimate child of promise, “The Child Jesus,” and conclude, “Oh! Who would not wish to be

like Jesus? That you may be so, seek the grace of his Holy Spirit every day … and believe in him

as your Redeemer and Savior with all your heart; and then as one of his children, you shall

forever dwell with him in glory.” Similarly, The Children of the New Testament begins with the

“The Child Jesus,” which sees in Jesus as the Son of God a heightened morality not extant in the

Old Testament.38 What is common in these documents, besides their use of childhood as a point

of contact between the biblical figures and the contemporary child, is that “we can observe a

shift to Sittenlehre (elementary ethics) and information about the fundamental principles and

basic terms of religion. Because of this trend, the specifically Christian perspectives become less

important, while the central categories of natural theology (notably God, immortality, and virtue)

become dominant.”39

Children’s Bibles and Enlightenment Christianity

Modern society looked back on the medieval days as a time of darkness with the papacy

spreading a shadow all over Europe. As an example of religious modernization, Protestant

denominations shared similar views. The Enlightenment was an age of knowing, of

understanding, and the church had broken its shackles of “popish superstitions,” and Christianity

has reached its fullness as a result of the Reformation. At the end of the nineteenth century, the

New England Congregational preacher, Leonard Woolsey Bacon, wrote A History of American

36The Children of the Bible , 1. 37Ibid., 3-10. 38Theophilus Stork, The Children of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1854). 39Adam, 241.

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Christianity, in which he describes how the time was ordained for the New World to be

colonized in the Protestant age: if America would have been settled centuries before, “the

Christianity transplanted to the western world would have been that of the church of Europe at its

lowest stage of decadence.” Even though the Spaniard’s, under the guise of the authority of the

church of Christ, found the New World, their medieval devices would not allow them to keep an

American empire. “But the grandeur of human enterprise and achievements in the discovery of

the western hemisphere … [is a result of] divine wisdom and controlling providence which, for

reasons now manifested, kept the secret hidden for so many millenniums … until the fullness of

times.”40 Bacon opens his work by mentioning the discovery of America in “the fifteenth century

after Christ” and presents Protestant Christianity as the glorious accumulation of history past, the

endorsement of most Enlightenment theologians. Since Christianity was viewed in a historical

process consistent with the “Enlightenment conquest of the historical world,” a related modern

vision saw religion, morality, and piety in the same historical process. Rudolf Christoph Lussius,

writing the introduction to his eighteenth century children’s Bible, Die altesten Geschichten der

Bibel fur Kinder, instructs on the enlightened Biblicism of Neology when he says, “The character

of the times before the arrival of the Savior is different from the character of our times. There is

darkness, here is light, there was childhood, and here is adulthood, there was rawness, and here is

refined sensibility.”41 The “groans and birth pangs” of men and women throughout history was

nurtured at last in the life, death, and ministry of Jesus Christ and arrived at maturity in

Enlightenment Christianity.

40Leonard Woolsey Bacon, A History of American Christianity (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1897), 1-5. The section entitled “Providential Preparation for the Discovery of America.” 41Adam, 245. Refers to Die altesten Geschichten, 11.

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In The Children’s Bible: or, A history of the Holy Scriptures, the author writes directly to

the child reader and says that the book must be kept with “respect and devotion,” for it contains

“no less than the words of God Almighty,” and “The Bible then we are to apply as an infallible

director in all cases relative to our early and heavenly happiness; that is to say, religion is the

foundation of goodness, the necessary cause, without which it cannot fulfill.”42 The book

includes 129 pages of the “History of the Old Testament” that draws on moral observations and

reflections on the coming Christ, leading to, in the same volume, The Principles of the Christian

Religion, Adapted to the Minds of Children: With a Small Manual of Devotions.43 The section on

“The History of the New Testament,” which takes the most space in the volume, draws on the

ethical teachings of Jesus, the lives of the Apostles, and promotes piety and virtue. In addition to

teaching an Enlightenment conception of Christianity, especially in The Principles of the

Christian Religion, this children’s Bible promotes a eighteenth century conception of the

Christian religion that sees it’s worth in respect to inspiring moral piety and as the highest human

philosophy that, perhaps, also assisted in forming the hegemony in ‘American Christianity.’

Children’s Bibles and Historiography

One defining attribute of The Children’s Bible, along with the majority of children’s

Bibles of its time, is its emphasis on Bible History. John Sailhamer spends some pain staking

efforts to describe how Enlightenment and evangelical Protestants understood the Bible by

changing from a “focus from historical narratives as historical accounts of real events to the

events (res) themselves lying outside the narratives. Thus, the task of the study of biblical

‘history’ in this new orientation of method “consists of clarifying, explaining and adding to the

42N. H., The Children’s Bible: or, An history of the Holy Scriptures, (London, 1763), v-vi. Reprinted in America. 43Ibid., 130-159.

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biblical narratives depictions of the Biblical events.”44 This hermeneutic, though seemingly only

a nuance is an important aspect to biblical interpretation, which arguably has led to the historical

emphasis on Enlightenment Christianity. Furthermore, it is the hermeneutic that reigns in the

modern children’s Bible.

Behind the cover of an American publication, bannered with the words, “A Sacred

Token,” picturing a female angel reading a book to five small children, investing it with

authority, the Young People’s Illustrated Bible History: Being a Simple and Attractive Account

of the Great Events Mentioned in the Old and New Testaments Concerning Also the Lives of the

Patriarchs, of Christ and His Apostles, and of the Remarkable Women and Children Mentioned

in the Sacred Volume, as stated in the title, presents the Bible to children chiefly as

historiography and, therefore, provides a character-driven retelling of events that emphasizes

also modeling or shunning the behavior of “individuals” in the Bible.45 The book exists in nearly

600 pages with stories and pictures of Bible characters and scenes divided into two columns per

page, expanded to draw on principle and put in the fashion of a Bible, followed by detailed maps

of the Holy Land, and finished with an appendix that includes a thorough Biblical chronology

according to Usher’s system, with the date of the Exodus being 1491 BC.46 While Young

People’s Illustrated Bible History is for children who are already able to read, most children’s

Bibles in the eighteenth and nineteenth century use the same treatment of understanding the

44Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch, 100-101. 45Alan Bond, Young People’s Illustrated Bible History (Norwich, CN: The Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1878). 46Ibid., 546-577.

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Bible as a history book, and all of them focus on the characters in the narratives according to

desirable or undesirable behavior aspects intended to shape the child reader.47

Since the time of Martin Luther’s adapted Bible pamphlet, which critiqued and modified

the medieval “passional” Bibles, children’s Bibles have been fitted for children to guide them to

the particular views of the educators. This, of course, is the fundamental nature of education, to

impart a body of beliefs. Children’s Bible simply adapts the beliefs. So, religious modernization

is enlightening for the examination of modern children’s Bibles as is underlined in its

development with children’s literature and highlighted in its use of Enlightenment conception of

Christianity as it relates to its particular historical hermeneutic. These things raise questions for

the contemporary context: are modern hermeneutics on Bibles for children enduring? If they are,

then they are enduring for adults. A pamphlet from a public library in 1906 recommends stories

to be read to children in the children’s department, which was a fast growing genre in this time.

In the list, stories are recommended for their use of “humor, pathos, moral teaching or for its

imaginative qualities.”48 Included in the list are Bible stories that offer younger children these

very qualities: “The Boy Samuel,” “Daniel and the Lions’ Den,” “David and Goliath,” and of

course “Noah and His Ark;” these are described as stories to grip attention, ones that include

children, and ones that can be used to foster virtuous and moral behavior. Recommended texts

are to KJV Bible followed by Beale, Stories from the Old Testament or Foster, Story of the Bible.

Some, especially from the religious community, might comment, “Those were good old days,”

when the Bible was still a culture defining text. Besides the change in culture from then and now,

47Other examples are Joseph Francis, Peter Parley’s Book of Bible Stories (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1836); The Pictorial Child’s Bible (Philadelphia: The National Publishing Co., 1876). 48Pittsburg Public Library, A List of Good Stories to tell to Children Under Twelve Years of Age (Carnegie Library of Pittsburg, 1906), 5.

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perhaps even the thought reveals that there are vestiges of the Enlightenment Bible that remain

alive and well in the contemporary context and continue to shape methods of interpretation in a

post-Enlightenment context––for children as well as adults.

Concluding Remarks

Though one can speak of a “biblical heritage” and a “cultural Bible,” in the 21st century,

the Bible does not enjoy the place of prominence you once had. The King James Version Bible

once thrived in America as the “cultural Bible.” In Pen of Iron, Robert Alter praises the artistry

of style and the influence of the King James on American prose: “The King James Version of the

Bible, once justifiably thought of as the national book of the American people, helped foster, at

least for two centuries, a general responsiveness to the expressive, dignified use of language …

[of which] a certain kind of English could move readers.”49 Alter describes how staples of

America’s past—Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Herman Melville’s, Moby Dick—have

drawn from the KJV, which seeks to preserve the use of rhythm and parataxis, amongst other

things, from the Hebrew Bible. But even though recent presidential speeches do not possess the

figurative language and pathos of the former, nor does contemporary fiction display the

majestical monologues of Ishmael or Captain Ahab, the cultural Bible remains alive and well in

the form of children’s Bibles.

Bible stories, retold and adapted, have found a place in homes, religious schools, and

churches as a valid way to introduce the Bible and to cultivate Bible knowledge to children, and

modern children’s Bibles have remained one of the best loved mediums since the Enlightenment

rise of children’s literature. But as demonstrated in a brief survey of a few noteworthy works,

children’s Bibles also have value as religious artifacts, illustrating “religious modernization.” In

49Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 41.

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The Enlightenment Bible, Jonathan Sheehan persuasively argues that the “Biblical heritage” of

the Western world was created out of the concept of Bildung that “took over all these aspects of

the Enlightenment Bible––its literary quality, its pedagogical virtues, its philological

exemplarity, and its historical depth––and unified them beneath a single enormous banner… the

Cultural Bible.”50 Through the use of biblical figures for character modeling, a hermeneutic that

saw the Bible as a historical document, often supporting the progress of Protestant Christianity,

and a view that the Word of God can be reduced to “Bible stories” flavored “by the use of

diminutives, quaint expressions, and cute descriptions” for a purpose of religious pedagogy that

focused on Bible knowledge and enculturation, children’s Bibles are an enduring example of

“religious modernization” and Sheehan insistence on a “cultural Bible.51

50Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, 220. 51Jack Zipes, The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm (New York: Bantam, 1987), xxxiii. Zipes says this in reference to the "use and abuse" of German folklore by the Grimms’ brothers for the purpose of the 19th century society.

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CHAPTER 3: GENESIS 1-11 FOR CHILDREN IN THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT

If one were to analyze the reception of the Bible in Western culture over the last 500

years, then the topic of children’s Bibles, arguably, should come up. Nancy Klanker has recently

defined the emerging discipline of Rezeptiosgeschichte as primarily interested in the “plasticity

and political and cultural utility of discourse, including interpretations of the Bible, within local

and particular culture–making.”1 An examination of titles like A History of the Holy Jesus and A

History of the Bible reveal that children’s Bibles were commonly received as histories, and until

the 1920s, they were titled as such. Schine Gold writes that “’biblical history’ was, it seems, a

way of distinguishing material adapted for children from the reading of the actual text of the

Bible, which would be ‘Bible reading.’”2 Reviewing Schine Gold’s section “Bible Stories or

Bible History,” one would conclude that calling a children’s Bible “Bible history” shows a

“commitment to ethical instruction, accomplished by direct application of biblical examples to

modern life.” As well as the examples Shine Gold provides by analyzing Jewish children’s

Bibles in America, children’s Bibles following the Enlightenment advance in Christian culture

reveal the same historic and ethical approach to the Bible.

But calling a Bible storybook for children a “history” is not just a title that shows a

commitment to ethical instruction, for it has deep roots in Enlightenment scholarship. Johann

David Michaelis, one of the founders of modern Biblical Studies, believed that scholars were

servants of Enlightenment society with the task of uncovering “those legacies of the biblical

world that had endured the ravages of time, the loss of memory, and the deprivation of texts,

1Nancy Klancher, “A Genealogy for Reception History,” Biblical Interpretations, 21, no. 1 (2013), 101. 2Schine Gold, 166-167.

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legacies odd to the modern mind but utterly characteristic of the ancient one.”3 Scholars were the

priests, and the Bible was a cultural document, and scientific inquiry were rites––philology,

archeology, geography––illuminating the past for the benefit of those in the present. The result

was Bible history. What this practically meant was that the proper meaning of the Bible was in

need of scientific inquiry in order to properly understood. But time has gone past, and in Biblical

History and Israel’s Past, which offers a contemporary analysis of scholarship on Biblical

history, Megan Moore and Brad Kelle as a matter-of-factly declare that “scientific and

anthropological scholarship in the 19th and early 20th centuries … put to rest serious academic

consideration of the creation stories of Genesis 1-2 as literal accounts of the origins of the

universe and humanity. Thus, by extension, the whole of the Primeval History has ceased to be

accepted as historical reportage.”4 While there is validity to what Moore and Kelle say,

“reflexive modernity” describes modernity as a continual process, and one would expect

continuality in the place of the cultural Bible. Children’s Bibles reflect how the Bible is received

in society through the pedagogical nature of them, and the historicity presented in Children’s

Bibles has changed and adapted over time on some level, but the changes are small and

superficial. Contrarily, by examining presentations of Genesis 1-11 (“Primeval History”) in

children’s Bibles from the 20th and 21st centuries, an accurate understanding of how the Bible is

received in Western culture can be understood.

One presentation of biblical history in children’s Bibles is that the Bible is a reliable

historical document and is, therefore, historical reportage. Contrary to what Moore and Kelle say

in their study of Biblical history scholarship, the reliable historical document view has endured

3Sheehan, 206. Sheehan is referring to Michaelis, 199-211. 4Megan Bishop Moore and Brad Kelle, Biblical History and Israel’ss Past (Grand Rapids: Eardman’s, 2011), 43.

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through the Enlightenment, being plainly noticeable in children’s Bibles, and if this presentation

exists in children’s Bibles, it exist in popular culture. One of the most popular publications in this

marketing group is The Children’s Illustrated Bible, by Selina Hastings and illustrated by Eric

Thomas, published in 1994 and existing in three reprints into 2005, and though it is not titled as a

“Bible history,” it shares much in common with the “Bible histories” of the past, such as Young

People’s Illustrated Bible History.5 In this way, the book offers an educational introduction

about the transmission and translation of the Bible that corresponds to a documentary

understanding of the text: “The Bible is a collection of books written by different people during

more than 1000 years ….”6 Inside, the book is filled with texts wrapped around image boxes

extending from the margins, filled with renderings of ancient statues, tools, and concise

explanations, as well as spreads with maps and photographs of the Fertile Crescent and Ancient

Palestine, all resembling an elementary textbook and being reminiscent of the 18th century

Neologists. The book treats “primeval history” as historical reportage even though it presupposes

that the text originated as oral tradition, as it believes is the case for most of the Bible. Genesis 1-

11 is divided into stories, or more appropriately to the presumptions of the book, documents: The

Creation (Gen, 1-2), The Garden of Eden (Gen. 2-3), Cain in Able (Gen. 4), Noah’s Ark (Gen. 6-

7), The Flood (Gen. 7-9), and The Tower of Babel (Gen. 11). The texts forming the stories are

shortened for readability to children, adapted for simple reading and comprehension, and edited

of repetition, genealogies, and difficult texts. From the story of “The Tower of Babel,” pictures

and texts together show men and women with black hair, ancient attire, hard at work making tar

5Selina Hastings, The Illustrated Jewish Bible for Children (New York: Dorling Kindersly, 2005). 6Ibid., 8-11. Though the book is aligned to the historical viewpoint of the documentary hypothesis and Robert Albrights Biblical chronology, the book is still aligned to a viewpoint that the Bible presents reliable history.

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for mortar, drying them in the sun, and stacking them on the tower.7 Notes and images in the

margins enlighten the reader by showing him or her where ancient Babylon was located, that

“the tower of Babel may have been a Ziggurt” (proceeding with an explanation of what a Ziggurt

is), and describing the common Middle-Eastern method of making mudbricks. In considering the

readers education as central to the purpose of biblical history, the encyclopedic method used in

The Children’s Illustrated Bible teaches biblical history as a non-secretarian way of imparting

the “biblical heritage” of Western society to the next generation. Likewise, The Illustrated

Jewish Bible for Children is a republication of Sarah Hastings 1994 book, using the same

typography and cover art and only removing the New Testament and more pointedly focusing on

the Jewish nation, and this underscores the Enlightenment idea of the social utility of the Bible as

a historical document.

A second approach in the contemporary market of children’s Bibles is to present what has

been considered “Bible history” as “Bible story.” This approach considers the Bible an ancient

historic document, but the contents are the thoughts and beliefs of a primitive humanity. They

are documents from the time of infancy, whereas society is arriving at maturity. Yet, it considers

Bible stories as a fundamental part of Western civilization, and by seeking to impart the stories

from the Bible to the rising generation, it is continuing a foundational legacy. One recent

publication, Stories from Adam and Eve to Ezekiel, makes clear in the pre-face that it is presented

for the “compelling quality of the stories it tells and for the deep, resident role the Bible has

played in Western culture … [and] to give children a greater understanding of their own cultural

inheritance.”8 So, where The Children’s illustrated Bible seeks to naturalize the biblical story as

7Hastings, 28-29. 8Celia Lotteridge, Stories from Adam and Eve to Ezekiel (Toronto: Douglas & McIntire, 2004), inside front cover.

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much as possible, the “story” approach revels in the extraordinary and highlights the wonderful,

and sentimental language like “best-loved,” “treasured,” and “adored” are words to describe

adapted Bible stories. One popular medium in this method is picture books that contain only one

story, such as The Creation, by Ori Sherman, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, by Jane Ray,

and Noah’s Ark, by Jerry Pinkney.9 Jerry Pinkney version of “Noah Ark,” which he retells in

simple, poetic language and illustrates with brilliant watercolor images, is all done for the tale’s

inspirational power and “enduring message of peace."10 Framed in his collective imagination of

the Genesis text is an image of fire and smoke coming up from a burning city to depict the

“wickedness of man,” described in 6:1-7, Noah as a jolly and wise grandfatherly figure for his

description as a “righteous man” (6:8-9), and a rendition of the famous Noah and his family hard

at work constructing the Ark (6:22), and a parade of animals entering the ark, on two whole

spreads (7:13-16)!11 Other notable features of the book are Pinkney’s interpretive decisions to

portray the deluge and ruin of all the living with an underwater scene of whales and sharks

surrounded by submerged villages and cities as the bottom of the Ark is seen safely floating on

top of a pristine and clear water-world, and a classic way to avoid, “He drank of the wine and

became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent” (9:21 ESV), by ending the story with Noah farming

what would be a vineyard. Jerry Pinkney has been retelling and illustrating stories since the

1960s including Aesop’s Fables and the Ugly Duckling, and it is useful to point out that the

constructs of his “story” approach, and his ahistorical interpretation of Noah’s Ark, are derived

9Ori Sherman, The Creation (New York: Dial Books, 1991); Jane Ray, Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); Jerry Pinkney, Noah’s Ark (New York: SeaStar Books, 2005). 10Pinkney, inside front cover. 11 Ibid.

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from the totality of 300 years of biblical scholarship, the same academics who formed “the

cultural Bible.”

A third approach in the contemporary market of children’s Bibles is the presentation of

“stories” as sacred history. City of Gold and Other Stories from the Old Testament, told by Peter

Dickenson and illustrated by Michael Foreman presents an artful retelling of thirty-three of the

best-loved Bible stories, beautifully illustrated with vivid washes and a masterful use of line and

color.12 It is much like the “story” approach in that it celebrates what it considers to be the

primitive of human history through imaginative ways of depicting the extraordinary and

wonderful, but it also presents the Bible as sacred history in line with post-modern discourse,

celebrating foklore as human metanarrative. Even though the document’s claims are not

scientifically verifiable, they find value in providing meaning inside a community. Each of the

33 stories is told by a fictitious narrator in the ‘oral tradition’ before ‘the final form of the text.’

Thus, “Cain in Abel” is “Told by a nomadic herdsman at a temporary market, where nomads

gather seasonally to trade animals.”13 Dickenson is lavish in filling in the “gaps” of the text and

free in his interpretation; “Cain,” the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, a nomadic herdsman warns

a friend who is about to buy an animal from a man with the mark, is, “You know the kind, sullen

with strangers, mean with hospitality, a fierce dog chained at the doorpost.”14 The intent of the

fictitious narrator’s retelling is that “If you can help it, have no dealings at all with men who

wear the mark. If you must speak with them, keep your voice low and your temper even.”15

However, the real narrators intent of the retellings is more difficult to determine and is only

implicitly apparent in the final story, “The Fall of the City,” “Told by an exiled Jew to an

12 Peter Dickenson, City of Gold and Other Stories from the Old Testament (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 13 Ibid, 17; told 17-21. 14 Ibid, 17. 15 Ibid,21.

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informal class of boys in Babylon.”16 Describing the destruction of the “City of Gold” and the

ruin of Jerusalem, the narrator concludes,

That evening, as we sat and ate our ration, we made a sacrifice of part of it on a rough stone in the desert, just as Abraham might have done. There we vowed to God that when our sons were old enough to understand we would gather them into a school and teach them every wall and winding of the city we carry in our hearts. I was chosen to be the schoolmaster …. So today we begin, remembering always that it was God’s will that the city should be destroyed. Only then could it be built––by you, or your children, or your children’s children.17

Underlying Dickenson’s approach to the Bible is an idea that finds religious value in the “story.”

The point is what the story does for the religious community, how the power of “story” is able to

bring inspiration to its adherents. In a 2011 article, Micheal Dinker makes discourse with the

latest from the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, “Not only do narratives reflect a community’s

worldview, but they also create and perpetuate the unique identities of those who tell them.”18

Dickenson’s approach to the Old Testament intersects with Dinker when he writes, “Centuries of

Christian witnesses bespeak the almost infinite number of ways these stories can entice, entrap,

convict and convince—and ultimately change lives.”19 By presenting the Bible as sacred history,

Dickenson is able to invest it with enduring cultural significance.

A fourth approach to Bible history sees the text as natural-history, an approach sharing

much in common with the historical-critical view, finding a partner in Enlightenment Neology,

for it is difficult to separate the natural history approach from the 18th century German

16Ibid., 176. 17Ibid., 180. 18Michael Dinkler, "Telling transformation: how we redeem narratives and narratives redeem us," Word & World 31, no. 3 (2011) 287. 19Ibid., 293. For this application in other disciplines see: Bruno Bettelheim, The Usefulness of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Penguin, 1978), 4; Michael D. Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusclanum, 1998, “It is in the elusive intercourse between public stories and private experiences that redemption may be possible,” 250.

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Enlightenment; that also saw the Bible as natural history.20 Taking a hyper-literal approach to

Biblical history, Dinosaurs of Eden: A Biblical Journey Through Time, by Ken Ham, interprets

the Bible as being meaningful as a witness to the event and so brings new life to the

historiographic view of the text.21 Ham retells the Bible by presenting a boy and a girl who are in

some sort of time machine and get to witness the actual events described in creation and the

garden of Eden and more, indicated by the two children who are in some kind of space outfits

while they are tinted blue and outlined in white as if they can look on at the event, but the people

there cannot actually see the young time travelers:

This captivating adventure … projects you back to the Garden of Eden and to the real world inhabited by dinosaurs––and to the exciting days of Noah’s flood and the tower of Babel. You’ll be there watching … traveling through the centuries … learning the true history of the earth, and along the way discovering the very meaning and purpose of life.22

On one page, Adam and Eve are in the garden feeding berries to the animals while a

“Ceratosaurus: meaning ‘horned reptile’” is eating coconuts from the top of a tree and a

“Deinocnychus: meaning ‘terrible claw’” is to his right eating from some kind of citrus tree. In

the next few pages after Ham makes his point that dinosaurs really did live in Eden, there is

pictured Eve with a flower in her hair reaching over to Adam who accepts the forbidden fruit

from her hand. The serpent with four legs is up in the tree watching with a gleeful look on his

face while an Avaceratops and a Euoplocephulus are innocently speculating in the background,

and the children are peeking from behind a tree in terror. Ken Hams hyper-literal reading is in

20For an example of the natural history approach, see Johann Michaelis, Deutsche Uebersetzung des Alten Testaments (Gottigten und Gotha, 1771), 39 and his naturalistic translation of Exodus 14:21: “When Moses stretched his hand toward the sea, God drove away the waters with a strong wind that blew the entire night so that the water became dry and was divided in the middle. And the Israelites went through the middle of the sea on a strip denued of water and what water remained them on either side served them as a wall;” pointed out by Sheehan, 186. Conpare this to the Biblical text, which is void of any natural-historical explanations. 21Ken Ham, Dinosours of Eden: A Biblical Journey Through Time (Dallas: Master Books, 2001). 22Ibid., front cover.

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the commentary: God said to Adam he would ‘surly die,’ and “In the original Hebrew language,

‘surly die’ is actually a phrase that means, ‘dying you will die.’ In other words, he would start to

die.”23 However, most would agree that מות תמות (Gen. 2:17), which uses an infinitive before

repeating the imperfect verb, is just an emphatic way of saying the imperfect of “to die.” But the

example illustrates Ham’s hyper-literalism, in which he understands the Bible in terms of a

contemporary idea of chronology and epistemology, a historia bibion of the natural world. While

correctly emphasizing the foundational aspect of Genesis 1-11 in the Christian cannon and

Christian theology as well as the reliable testimony of the telling, Dinosaurs of Eden is also

highly subversive for a children’s Bible, fostering a “hermeneutics of suspicion” to the scientific

foundation that has grounded all of Western society, including the “Christian heritage,” while

ironically continuing a form of biblical-materialism that proclaims the biblical document as

natural historiography.

A fifth and final specimen on the contemporary shelf of children’s Bibles is what will be

referred to as the thematic approach. The Jesus Storybook Bible, told by Sally-Lloyd Jones, is

thematic and shares much in common with City of Gold in its presentation of the Bible as meta-

narrative, and to highlight its popularity in relation to other children’s Bibles in the post-modern

context, if one types “children’s Bibles” in the search box on amazon.com, it is the first in the list

of results.24 But unlike City of Gold, Lloyd-Jones book is distinctively evangelical, and whereas

City of Gold presents the Bible as disparaging documents originating as oral tradition, Lloyd-

Jones retells the Bible in the traditional concept of a complete canon, consisting of both

Testaments, in which she makes the person of Jesus Christ as the binding thread. She makes her

purpose clear in the introduction: “The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about 23Ham, 23. 24Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009).

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a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about

a brave prince who leaves his palace, his throne––everything––to rescue the ones he loves.”25

Most Bible histories for children in the past have made Jesus central too, but what does it present

about history? The book avoids the description of the Bible as history, and instead, Lloyd-Jones

continues, “Its like the most wonderful of fairytales that has come true in real life!”26 In her

presentation of the True-Story of “The Terrible Lie: Adam and Eve Lose Everything, from

Genesis 3,” she uses a very complex intertextual method of commentary and simple age-

appropriate revisions with cute and playful descriptions:

Adam and Eve lived happily together in their beautiful new home. And everything was perfect––for a while. Until the day when everything went wrong. God had a horrible enemy. His name was Satan. Satan had once been the most beautiful angel, but he didn’t just want to be an angel––he wanted to be God. He grew proud and evil and full of hate, and God had sent him out of heaven. Satan was seething with anger and looking for a way to hurt God. He wanted to stop God’s plan, stop this love story right there. So he disguised himself as a snake and waited in the garden.27

In addition to being informed by a certain mawkish nostalgia for childhood, Lloyd-Jones

presentation is informed by two things: the first is to her dedication of the Bible as the Greatest

and True Love Story with a Christocentric meaning, which informs her every decision, including

the choice to present the question in Eve’s mind, “Does God love me?” which the seditious

serpent causes her to ask in tempting her to eat the fruit.28 The second is her purpose to the

implied audience. While the book is theologically-driven and represents dogmatic pedagogy, it is

also an evangelical retelling, where she seeks to correct the tendency to present the Bible as a

25Lloyd-Jones., 17. 26Ibid. 27Ibid., 28. 28Ibid., 30.

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history book and individual stories as glorified morality tales––though her “grand love story”

theme is sometimes intrusive and distracting. But it is a retelling driven by theology that

understands the Bible as a living and true “sacred story,” and so The Jesus Storybook Bible

represents a departure from “Bible histories” of the past while remaining in continuity with the

cultural aspect of children’s Bibles; that presents “Bible stories” as a tool for religious education.

Upon examining the similarities between contemporary children’s Bibles in relation to

“Bible histories” of the past, there is continuity. The Children’s Illustrated Bible, with its

encyclopedic method of teaching ancient geography and customs make the commonality clear.

Dickenson’s presentation of the Bible as ancient folklore further shows that the Bible has been

transformed and instilled into culture as an ancient document, and authors of children’s Bibles

variously expound this understanding by making the Bible relevant, whether it be done by

presenting the material in an encyclopedic fashion via education, or by emphasizing the

extraordinary and wonderful in events via amusement. Children’s Bible, contemporary and past,

flow from the same deep well; that finds its source in the Enlightenment.

If contemporary children’s Bibles reveal anything about how the Bible is received in

Western culture, Beale and Kelle are validated in concluding that Bible history has been

redefined and reunderstood in the twentieth-century. Children’s Bibles also show that the

enduring value of the Bible in Western culture is its place in culture, and the aim of children’s

Bibles is the continuation of “our common heritage.” Celia Lotteridge makes this clear in the

introduction to her children’s Bible when she says her goal is “to give children a greater

understanding of their own cultural inheritance.” It is apparent that what was a tool for religious

pedagogy has become instrumental in cultural pedagogy. It is also apparent that her

presupposition comes from centuries of Bible transformation and culture making that uses the

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Bible for the purpose of enculturation through instruction and delight. It is such a reality that

when people hear the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark, and the Tower of

Babel, they do not hear the Word of God, but they hear and see the cultural meaning, and

perceptions are shaped and impressions are embossed on the mind.

Concluding Thoughts

By focusing on the characters and events in the text, children’s Bibles have variously

found meaning in history education, moral didacticism, and entertainment. However, Sally Lloyd

Jones’ helps to reverse this trend when she retells the Bible as a story that presents it with

enduring meaning for its readers. She does this by presenting a story that has a message that can

be understood when the Bible is read according to its canonical intention. How well she related

the canonical meaning in The Jesus Storybook Bible is a matter of dispute, but by presenting the

Bible as a true story, she invests the Bible with life and empowers the reader to discover

meaning. Lloyd Jones helps to rebrand the stories according to a canonical purpose, and yet it

remains that her retelling combines text and image, follows modern developmental psychology,

and is designed to transmit Bible knowledge. In this way, it aligns closely with the cultural

function of all children’s Bibles.

For a long time, children’s Bibles have served an educational function in Western culture.

In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead refers to “routines.” “Routine is the god of every social

system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every

factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.”29

Children’s Bibles are also directed by a routine, and the extraordinary becomes ordinary in

pictures and playful language, and the ‘hard to explain’ parts become simple and fun. Familiarity

works hand in glove with routine. Whitehead continues his discussion, “When adequate routine 29Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas, 90.

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is established, intelligence vanishes … No one, from President to miner need to understand the

whole system.”30 Whitehead goes on to maintain that “routine” is good and necessary for social

maintenance. It can equally be maintained that the effectual routine created in Bible stories leads

to Whiteheads bald statement that “intelligence vanishes.” Perhaps, Biblical education,

especially in the form of children’s Bibles, can have the opposite effect of what is intended.

Maybe, at the end of childhood development, when the Bible has been presented appropriate to

every stage, when routine has been firmly established, intelligence vanishes. After the flood of

text and images, and the mind is firmly impressed with knowledge, curiosity ceases. The tabula

raza is no longer a blank slate, but it is a tablet that has been colored with elaborate pictures of

what the Bible is.

30 Whitehead.

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CHAPTER 4: BIBLE KNOWLEDGE, AUTHORIAL INTENT, AND GENESIS 1-11

In Ken Ham’s Biblelikish retelling that synchronizes a modern understanding of

etymology and chronology with a “literal” reading of Genesis 1-11, the real scientific fallacy is

revealed in his placement of dinosaurs eating coconuts in Eden (however absurd that may

sound), not necessarily because it intentionally denies modern geological evidence, but because

it misconstrues authorial intent and misunderstands the biblical narratives. Biblical scholarship

over the last 500 years has created a disjunction between knowing Bible history and knowing the

meaning, knowing the event and knowing the purpose of the testimony, and knowing text and

knowing the authorial intent, and children’s Bible have contributed to this since the eighteenth

century.

Scholars and theologians have long voiced their concern or the loss of meaning that the

Bible as Scripture had once brought to the Christian community. Hans Frei called it the “Eclipse

of Biblical Narrative,” created by the scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries.

But in search for meaning, Jeannine Brown understands Scripture as a communicative act and a

communicative model as the appropriate way to grasping it: “If we view the Bible as a

communicative act and not simply an autonomous text disengaged from its author, we are

ethically bound to grant the author the privileges due more routinely to all communicators.”1 By

understanding the Bible as the Word of God, and “word” according to the Greek antecedent,

logos, or the Hebrew davar, both referring to words, matters or things, perhaps the contextual

grid of the modern reader is not an absolute barrier to grasping intent, and maybe when the

locution becomes normative to the reader, communication has happened, and then what appears

1Jeanine Brown, Scripture as Communication, 127. I read Brown’s book in Hermeneutics in Spring, 2110 for a review, and it has positively effected my thinking about the subject.

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to be such an ancient document, othered in “Bible histories” and made alien to the modern mind

by historical and textual criticism, the words become not so foreign. Then, we can find a source

of common ground with Robert Alter who studies the text and says, “It seems to me that we shall

come much closer to the range of intended meanings––theological, psychological, moral, or

whatever––of the Biblical tale by understanding precisely how it is told.”2 What Alter means by

“how it is told” is its language peculiarities, syntax, structure, diction, et cetera. Bruce Waltke,

an evangelical scholar who has found much use in Robert Alter and narrative criticism in his

commentary on Genesis as well as in his Biblical theology, writes, “Unlike a geometry textbook

that may aim only to be didactic, Genesis is literature because it communicates doctrine in an

artful way … The narrator uses words not as a stick, but as a web.”3 Therefore, with a method

that searches diligently for authorial intent, the following exegesis (1) will take a closer look at

the genre of Biblical history in order to better understand the author’s method to contribute to

(2) an understanding of “Primeval History” that draws from the insights of narrative criticism

and as an appropriate way of grasping meaning.

I: The Genre of Biblical History

A general name used to describe Biblical narratives, and especially in Biblical

scholarship, is “sacred history.” In describing the nature of “historiography,” John Walton, an

Old Testament scholars, believes that a better term is actually “perspectives on history,” because,

2Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (United States: Perseus Books, 1981), 179. A useful summery of style and structure is Jerome Walsh, Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2001). These are well known and easily accessible scholars. Also referenced in my thesis proposal, July, 2013. 3Bruce Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 31; his synthesis of narrative criticism to Biblical theology, Waltke, An Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007).

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in a sense, any historiography should be viewed as an “editorial column.”4 In this way, ideas

about how history should be written are answered in questions like: “What is important about

events of the past? Why is the account being compiled? How do events come to pass? What

causes or forces drive history? Are there patterns in history? Is there design in history?” Indeed,

in the modern world, there are economic perspectives on history, feminist perspectives,

anthropological, and, of course, religious perspectives on history, and in the West, these

questions have been answered on the grounds of natural causes and effects in the material world

on the grounds of reason.5 To illustrate the difference between modern and ancient

historiography, a modern historian’s response to ancient transcendent historiography might be:

“It has not provided material that is reliable, since it is so full of deity,” while an ancient reply to

the modern historian might be that, “It is unreliable, since it is so empty of deity.”6 For the

modern to read the ancient’s history, there is a temptation, even a compulsion, to adjust it. “Such

may be considered necessary in order to present ancient history to the modern reader [as

Enlightenment Neologists believed], who will want to read history in the context of his or her

own cognitive environment.” “But,” Walton concludes, “[this] represents cultural imperialism.”7

Especially in children’s Bibles, the result is alienating the text, making the character’s foreign

and strange, and “othering” the Bible; or Ken Ham’s, Dinosours of Eden, which seeks to

harmonize the two methods of historiography; but the result of both methods of adjustment is

4John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academics, 2006), 218. 5Walton, 219. Walton introduces some good literature on the subject, including Ziony Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel (New York: Continuum, 2001). 6Ibid., 220. 7Ibid., 221.

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confusion, and this provides a reason for the loss of meaning in the biblical story for the modern

reader.

The “othering” of characters in the biblical story is observed in evangelical pedagogy.

Charles Barnard’s, The Door in the Book, is a religious juvenile novella that tells of Edith, who

“is related to an old Puritan family … who originally came from the Bay Settlements where

some of the Sheldon’s had lived since 1640,” and the author is likely intending to relate his

character to that Christian heritage of America.8 In the tale, young Edith is transported back in

time, when she opens her Bible, to the ancient environment to meet the historical personages of

“The Little Sister of Moses,” “The Maid in Naaman’s House,” and “The Shunnamite Woman

and Her Son.” Some might be obliged to consider The Door in the Book a creative way to make

the Bible real, but it clearly shows how modern thinking has “othered” the biblical characters by

misreading biblical history and denying the reader the rich layers of meaning in the words.

Instead, by looking closely at the nature of the text through an analysis of “Bible history” as

narrative, meaning becomes clearer.

Meaning is in the telling. Jerome Walsh writes, “A narrative is, in latest analysis, words:

storytellings builds worlds, and characters, and actions, out of vocabulary and syntax––nothing

more, nothing less. To appreciate any story in its wholeness we must cherish its words––their

sounds, their meanings, their connotations, their collocations, and their allusions.”9 The creation

stories and the flood stories in Genesis has often been compared to ancient Near Eastern myths

by biblical scholars as a result of misunderstanding where meaning is found, especially with

Enuma Elish, but Robert Alter and other recent scholars have observed that whatever similarities

they share, the biblical “monotheistic writer works not only with very different theological

8Charles Barnard, The Door in a Book (New York: Fleming H. Revill Company, 1903), 7. 9Jerome Walsh, Style and Structure in Hebrew Narrative (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2001), 1.

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assumptions but also with a radically different sense of literary form.”10 The way the narrator fits

words together is where the meaning is at, and the recognition of poetic features in the Biblical

text helps the reader to determine the narrator’s interpretive lens. “By determining where his

emphasis, criticisms, and approval lie and where they do not, we are given insights into the

narrator’s evaluative point of view.”11 The author’s point of view can be in a description that

seems so minute, the place where letters meets words, or in something so large as the point

where a text meets a group of texts.

One way the author relates meaning is his point of view that is subtly cast onto a text. In

Genesis 4, after Adam and Eve are cut off from Paradise because of their transgression, upon a

concise description of the lives of Cain and Abel (4:1-2): “And it was the end of days, and Cain

brought from the fruits of the ground to give to the Lord” (MT 4:3).12 The text continues, “And

Abel brought also––from the firstlings of his flocks, and from their best––and the Lord looked to

Abel and his offering” (MT 6:3). This awkward translation shows that the description of Abel’s

offering, “from the firstlings of his flocks, and from their best” (מבכרות צאנו ומחלבהן), and the

elaboration on the part of Abel’s offering is meant to contrast Cain, who brought “from the fruits

of the ground” (מפרי האדמה). In revealing this, the narrator is showing the difference between

Cain and Abel, what is significant in his evaluation, and most significantly what it reveals about

God: “And the Lord looked to Abel and his offering, and to Cain and his offering, he did not

look” (4:3b-4a). In this way, the narrator builds layers of meaning by a few strokes of the pen.

10Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 29; to see Alter’s contrast between YHWH and Mardok, the Babylonian god, see pp. 8-31. 11Waltke, 34. 12Most of the time, will use “Lord” for “YHWH/’Yahweh’”

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Another way the narrator builds layers of meaning is through the weaving a text into a

larger piece. In Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative (2001), Walsh is interested in

the compositional strategy of the narrator, because the Bible presents a well-told story and,

therefore, must “establish continuity and connections between contiguous units.”13 He analyzes

Genesis 1-11 as a single literary unit:

A. Narrative: creation (1:1-3:24) B. Narrative: sin and curse of the son (4:1-16) C. Geneology: the origins of culture (4:17-26) D. Genealogy: from Adam to Noah to Shem (5:1-5:32) E. Narrative: blurring the divine human boundaries (6:1-4) A’. Narrative: re-creation (the flood story: 6:5-9:19) B’. Narrative: sin and curse of the son (9:20-9:29) C’. Genealogy: the origins of nations (10:1-10:32) E’. Narrative: blurring the divine and human boundaries (11:1-9) D’. Genealogy: from Shem to Terah and Abraham (11:10-26)14

Walsh calls the compositional strategy “forward symmetry with one transposition” and says it

does two things. The first is that the linear progression of ABCDE, resulting in “a return to the

pre-creation chaos and a new start from the original point,” and the second is the transposition

between E’ and D’ in A’B’C’E’D,’ which “preserves the forward momentum” and suggests a

different divine response to human transgression “and will lead the human story into a new

era.”15 Jerome Walsh’s analysis shows that there is logic in the composition to Genesis 1-11, and

while it is impossible to tell if the narrator is conscious of his method, it points out that even

small and seemly insignificant passages have purpose in the author’s mind. Thus, in chapter 12,

the reader can see that the narrator is emphasizing God’s call of Abraham as a new beginning in

human history.

13Walsh, Style and Structure, 2. 14Ibid. 15Ibid.

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One brief analogy will illustrate the validity of the Bible as being understood as historical

narrative. While events do not happen in ‘forward symmetry with one transposition’ or follow

concentric structures in real life as they often do in the Bible, it is for emphasis on meaning that

the narrator does so, and if the strategy seems a strange way of writing history to the modern

mind, it is helpful to point out the power of perspective. If a husband comes home from work, his

wife might ask how his day was. If it was a good or bad day, he might organize happening and

events in a certain way to highlight the quality of his day. He might use certain language, syntax,

and expressions––he might color utterances in his monologue––in a way to make his point. If the

wife wanted to know a chronology or the observable causes that effected her husband’s day, she

asked the wrong question, and trying to uncover those observations from his report would

involve a lot of superfrivilous work, and conclusions would only be speculative. In the same

way, the biblical narrator uses his words to create an elaborate mosaic that pictures the character

of God and his acts in history as central.

II: A Narrative Exegesis of ‘Primeval History’

Genesis 1-11 provides a foundation to Biblical revelation concerning the nature and

character of God and man, his elevation in creation, his descent into death, as well as a forward

directing momentum that leads to the call of Abraham.16 Umberto Cassuto says that the story is

“to teach us that the whole world and all it contains were created by the word of the one God …

[and] is thus opposed to the concepts current in the ancient Near East who were Israel’s

neighbors.”17 This understanding of God is projected forward in the remainder of the text with a

16Rashi, Pereshas Berashas, 1.1. Rashi presents a common Jewish perception that Genesis is meant to show to Israel and other their rightful place as conquerors of the Promised land; Paul House, Old Testament Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 58-71. As House does, it is common to see Genesis as the starting point of theology in the Biblical canon. From any perspective, Genesis functions as the beginning. 17U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, vol. 1, trans. I. Abraham. (Jerusalem: Magnus Press, 1989), 7.

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language that is “tranquil, undisturbed by polemic or dispute; the controversial note is indirect, as

it were, through the deliberate, quiet utterances of Scripture, which sets the opposing views to

naught by silence or by subtle hint.”18 The mastery of language and the perfection of style is seen

in the narrator’s description of creation (1:1-2:3), and its structure is based on numerical

harmony of the number seven for the seven days. Cassuto observes that “light” and “day”

together is found seven times in the first and fourth paragraphs [the first is the creation of light

and fourth is luminaries]; water occurs seven times in two and three; and in five and six “living

things,” seven times. Even more fascinating is that in each paragraph, there are seven words in

the first verse, fourteen [two times seven] in the second, and the words in the seventh paragraph

total thirty-five [five times seven]. Not only does the text show a compositional unity and points

to a highly capable narrator, but also it compliments the nature of its description of the One

God––who is the unhindered Creator of an orderly world.19 The text also shows that language is

a powerful conveyer of meaning, which the narrator uses to reveal God’s character and actions in

creation, and this understanding of the text will provide a base of how to look for meaning in

Genesis 1-1l as well as a better understanding of biblical history.

(2:4-4:26) “These are the Generations of the Heavens and Earth”

There are many ways the book of Genesis and the Bible has been divided, and “Bible

story” is the most common. In his commentary on Genesis, David Cotter uses narrative criticism

in his exegesis and divides Genesis 1-11 (“Stories About Beginnings”) into “The Story of

Creation” (1:1-2:3), “The Story of the Creation of Man and Woman, the Paradise In Which They

Lived, and That Which They Chose To Lose, and the Sin That Ensued (2:4-4:26), and the whole

18Cassuto, 13. 19Ibid., 14-15.

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of the unit in this fashion.20 As mentioned above, Jerome Walsh divides the unit into what he

perceives as narrative strategy. However, the book of Genesis follows ten clearly demarcated

sections that begin with אלה תולדות “These are the generations” or זה ספר תולדת “This is the

book of the generations.” Walke’s example of dividing Genesis 1-11 into its five natural

divisions of 2:4-4:26, 5:1-6:8, 6:9-9:29, 10:1-119, 10:10-11:26 will be used. In 2:4-4:26 the

“perspective [of 1:1-2:3] now shifts from God as sole creator to humanity as reactor” in the

‘account of the generations of the heavens and earth.’21

Genesis 1:1-2:3 can be described as a “prologue” to God’s revelation. After the

introduction to the subject, “These are the generations of the heavens and earth when they were

created, in the day the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, the narrator continues with a

flowing narrative: 22.וכל שיח השדה טרם יהיה הארץ וכל־עשב השדה טרם יצמח By using the

word טרם, which always means “not yet,”23 the narrator describes the state of a pre-cursed

ground, when all the “shrubs of the field שיח השדה … [and] crops of the field” עשב השדה were

not an observable reality to the narrator’s audience. The above translation comes from Cassuto’s

observation, against the view that the words refer to the whole plant kingdom, that שיח in the

Bible is used to refer to inedible plants that include “thorns and bristles” (3:18), and עשב refers

to cultivated plants.24 If this is the case, then the narrator is bringing his audience back to the

primeval day when the heavens and earth were as it should be, ואד יעלה “and a flow would rise”

20D. Cotter, Genesis (Collegville: Liturgical Press, 2003), 3-76. 21Waltke, Genesis, 79. 22MT 2:5. For my own ease in writing, I am not using vowel points. 23Rashi, 2.5. 24Cassuto, vol.1, 101-103; Waltke, 84. esev does not refer to “cultivated plants” all the time, as in 1:30, but maybe this is true for esev hasadeh. But the possibility should not be ruled out.

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(2:6), later described as a river the was the source of four rivers that watered the whole earth,

(2:10-14) that flows from the Paradise of God. Heaven and earth are joined in harmony, and it is

realized in the garden. It is in 2:4-4:26 that the narrative begins to focus on a Creator God as the

protagonist, and as will be realized more and more, that man is the antagonist, who acts

independently, but who serves a role of revealing God’s character and actions through a

theological perspective on history.

Before the modern era of the world, the heavens and earth were not conceived of as a

universe, and the heavenly realm belongs to God, as in “The heavens are heavens for the Lord,

and the earth is given to the sons of men” (Ps. 115:16). In this way, “The Lord God formed the

man האדם from the dust of the ground האדמה, and he breathed into his nose the breath of life”

(2:7-8a). It is the account of “the heavens and the earth,” and so it follows that “man” adam is

from the dust of the “ground” adamah. Though he is only a product of the ground, God has

breathed into his nose a breath of heaven, mixing the two realms, upon which the Psalmist

writes, “You have lowered him a little from God, and you have surrounded him with glory and

majesty” (Ps. 8:6). In comparing the accounts of the creation of man, the difference is not only

that between telling and showing, but Cotter observes that “God was transcendent and removed

from physical contact with creation [1:1-2:3] …. Here, God, called YHWH God to indicate that a

different aspect of characterization comes into play, acts as a potter shaping the clay.”25 God,

now revealed as an intimate, active, and present God, shapes man from the ground with his own

hands and breathed into his nose with his own breath. This is an important tension between the

two distinct accounts, and any attempts to harmonize the events do a disservice to the reader.

25Cotter, 29.

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The account of the heavens and the earth continues to tell of the history of the two

realms: “And the Lord God took the man and laid him down in the garden” (2:15). The text can

be understood in a concentric structure that is useful in describing the narrator’s point of view

from the formation of “the man” from “the ground,”26 which serves as a motif that binds 2:4-

4:26 to the rest of Genesis 1-11. While the beginning of the unit shows a unity between the

heavens and the earth, between God and man, the remaining part shows how the relationship

between the two realms are severed, and man is isolated from the rest of creation and alienated

from God.27 However, the narrator does not leave the ground as isolated or man as alienated but

provides a ray of hope that runs through the rest of the story of Primeval History. After the man

is laid in the Paradise of God, “the garden of Eden,” he is given a prohibition and a warning:

“And the Lord God charged upon the man saying, ‘From all the trees in the garden you may eat,

and from a tree, The Knowledge of Good and Evil, you may not eat from it, for in the day you eat

from it, you will surly die’” (2:16-17).28 There are many interpretations of the ‘tree,’ most

considering it allegorical. However, understanding a few things about language may help provide

an understanding. טוב “good,” is an evaluative adjective God used to describe creation in

Genesis. God later evaluated man and says it is “Not good for man to be alone” (2:18). In 4:6,

when Cain is angry, God says to him, “if you do not do good, sin is crouching for entrance.”

However, other than in regards to the tree, רע “evil” is not used until, Genesis 6, and previously,

26Alter’s translates “man” as “human” and “ground” as “huumas” to imitate the relationship between adam and adamah, Alter, The Five Books of Moses (New York: Norton, 2004), Gen. 2.7, in commentary. 27Walsh, Style and Structure, 21-23. Walsh provides a useful way to structure 2:4b-3:24, and I have observed value in this concentric structure, but I think it should go further to include all of 2:4-4:26 and show the unity between heaven, earth, and man and end with division and alienation between these same elements. 28I used a fairly literal translation from the MT. a couple of things to notice, following Cassuto, (vol. 1, 111-113) observing how the definite article indicates a title that the original readers would have known––indeed trees are symbolic in most religions around the world––I am indicating this tree with a name. Further, I will almost always render the vav as “and” and not the more common “but” for this case.

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the reader is merely shown what evil looks like. But quickly in the book Genesis, רע is a

negative evaluative word used to describe someone who is “ill,” had “bad” day, lived a

“troubled” life, or the sickly state of the cattle in Pharaoh’s dream (Gen. 41:19). Therefore, the

knowledge of good and evil is something that begins in the senses at the level of sight and

evaluation, which is reserved for God, which in man, caused a critical bend that he can posses if

he eats of the fruit.

In the narrative, the Creator evaluates and says, “It is not good for man to be alone.” It

follows God’s judgment that he creates a woman from the man (2:21-22), and they are one

complete being in two relational aspects in a way that conjoins the story to the poetic passage in

Genesis 1: “And God created the man in his image/ in his image God created him male and

female/ male and female he created them.” When God brings the man to the woman, the man

expresses himself in his own poem: “This at last is bone of my bone/ and flesh of my flesh/ for

this will be called woman [ishah]/ for of a man [ish] was taken this” (2:23). Like God’s own

image, the husband and his wife enjoy a communion unhindered by criticism, inequality, and

power struggle. “In the first moment of coexistence, there is partnership without any sense of

victor or vanquished, openness and without fear.”29 The final verse of the perfect estate of the

heavens and the earth is captured: “And it was that the two of them were naked, the man and his

wife, and were not ashamed” (2:25), and from there, the drama unfolds.

Nakedness is realized by sight, and it takes the craftiness of a serpent in order to distort

perception. “And the serpent was more crafty than all the beasts of the field” (3:1), and the

connection between “naked” and “crafty” is intended by the author to propel the story forward:

Enters the serpent and interjects with a misquotation of God’s prohibition in a .ערום and ערומים

29Cotter, 33.

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way that seeks correction from the woman, “Surely God said you shall not eat from all the trees

in the garden.”30 Of course, Eve corrects the serpent, but she adds one small addendum, “you

shall not eat it and you shall not touch” (3:3). Furthermore, and interestingly enough, the woman

hurries her account of the prohibition when she simply says פן־תמתון [lest you die], and it is the

serpent who corrects with a emphatic מות תמותון of God’s original utterance while masking it

over another blatantly false statement לא־מות תמותון “You will not surly die” (3:4).31 But the

serpent has done his trick, and now the lines are blurred between what God said, what the serpent

said, and what the woman said, and so he finishes his work by critiquing, not God’s words, but

his very thoughts: “For God knows that in the day you have eaten from it and your eyes have

opened [ונפקחו עיניכם], you will be as God is knowing of good and evil.” The difference

between the above translations and many modern translations, including the NRSV and the

NASV, following the AV––“then your eyes shall be opened”––is that the serpent is not telling

them if they eat, then this will happen, but rather he is turning the first two clauses into a blanket

statement that points to the realization of being “as God,” merely another subtle nuance that

points to the serpent’s craftiness. The result: “And the woman saw that the tree was good for

food and that it was delight to the eyes and the tree was desired to make one wise, and she took

from it and ate and gave also to her man with her, and he ate.” During the incident, the narrator

does not describe any words between the man and the woman, but only “And the eyes of the two

of them were opened and they knew they were naked” (3:7).

The man and the woman never became as God, and the knowledge of good and evil had a

much different result than they expected. Their newly found sense of evaluation and judgment of

30 It is observed by many commentators that the serpents introductory line is not a question, indicated by the ap ci amar elohim. It is an interjection. 31 The serpent is addressing both of them, since he uses the plural.

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creation not only had undesired consequences, but it resulted in a separation between heaven and

earth and, thus, between the God of heaven and man [adam] of the ground [adamah]. But as

realized in 1:1-2:3, God is the protagonist in the biblical story, and the narrator will show us the

reaction of God, the unhindered Creator, to the fallout of man in the escalation of the reality of

death and the corruption that comes from the knowledge of good and evil in man. In reverse

order of the way man, woman, and the serpent entered the scene, God directs his attention to the

serpent first (3:14), and the most remarkable thing God says to the serpent is in v. 15: “And

enmity I will put between you and between the woman and between your seed זרעך and her seed

will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” This verse has troubled הוא he :זרעה

commentators for many years, and David Cotter provides a common view in biblical scholarship

concerning the whole address to the man, woman, and serpent: “The interest is etiological, why

snakes do not have legs, why people fear snakes, why childbirth hurts, why there is sexual desire,

why men dominate women, why work is burdensome, why people die.”32 But many in the

Jewish tradition have interpreted the passage differently. Matthew Goff examines 4QInstruction

(1Q26, 4Q415-18, 423) to see how Palestinian Jews viewed Genesis 1-3, one text referring to

spirit of flesh,” creating a dualism that undergirds much“ רוח בשר people of spirit” and“ עם רוח

of Qumran’s view of mankind.33 Similarly, Targum Jonathan relates in a pesher of 3:15: “And

when the children of the woman keep the commandments of the Law, they will take aim and

strike them on you head. But when you forsake the commandments of the Law, they will take

32Cotter, 35. 33Matthew Goff, “Genesis 1-3 and Conceptions of Humankind in 4QInstruction, Philo and Paul,” in Studies of Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity. Ed. Craig Evans (London: T & T Clark, 2009), 116-117; the passage in use is 4Q417 i.13-18. This rsearch was used in a spring, 2013 paper on a different but related subject: “The Triumph of the Church in Romans 16:17-20.”

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aim and strike you on the heel.”34 The dualism and enmity in mankind is realized in taking

“seed” in the same way of taking, “plants yielding seed after its kind … trees bearing fruit with

seed in them.” The text of 3:15 projects the account of the heavens and the earth through the

offspring of the woman, the adam of the, now, cursed ground [adamah] into what is the

emphasis that binds the units of Genesis together, pointing to what most Jewish commentators

have seen as a prologue to the nation of Israel, God’s chosen people, over the lawless nations,

and the passage connotes an eventual and sure victory by the “seed of the woman.”

After leaving his audience with a ray of hope, the narrator places God as addressing the

man and the woman in reverse order of how they appeared in Gen. 2. “To the woman he said, I

will surely multiply your toil, and toil in your procreation חרנך you will bear sons, and to your

man will be your longing, and he will rule over you” (3:16).35 The translation above is intended

to show an all-encompassing loss of the former harmony between ish and ishah. The completion

and unity that appeared when God created woman as she appeared in the garden would be turned

into division and peace to strife as an othering would reign in one another’s eyes as a result of

the new ability to evaluate between good and evil. Finally, God speaks to the man [adam], and as

he was formed from the dust of the ground [adamah], the harmony that existed between man and

the ground was severed: “Cursed is the ground because of you: by toil you will eat all the days

of your life.”36 Finally, in what has become a well-known refrain, God says to man in a way that

wraps the passage back into his original formation, “By the sweat of your nose, you will consume

34Tg. Jonathan, 3.15; similar is Tg Neofitt. 35Even though the verb harah is said to mean “to conceive,” I have translated the relation noun heron as “procreation” because it seems to be related to the whole process of teldi banim. For example, in speech to the woman, Rashi believes the words refer to the whole act of childbearing, including raising (Eruvin, 100). The pain caused by Cain murdering Abel would be a prime example (Gen. 4) and would follow the intended meaning. 36I like the word “consume” for achal instead of “eat,” for like when Henry David Thoureau, yes that transcendentalist, says, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” when he refers to living life to stay warm, consuming firewood and consuming food just to burn energy to create heat and to continue the struggle to stay alive.

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food until you have returned to the ground, for from it you were taken, for dust you are and dust

you will return (3:19). As the man was laid down in the Paradise of God and was given a woman

of his own flesh to share in perfect communion, he is “cast out” of the same with the same

woman from which he is now isolated and alienated (3:20-24).

By understanding the characters, plot, and themes, understanding the rest of the unit of

2:4-4:26 becomes a much simpler task as well as its relationship to the other units of Genesis 1-

11. In Genesis 4, the narrator shows how the curse becomes a reality, the enmity between the two

seeds, the toil in procreation, the toil between man and the ground he is from, and the growing

separation between man and woman. The difference between Cain and Abel’s sacrifices has

already observed by what the narrator omits in his description of Cain’s sacrifice.37 It is in

Genesis 4 that transgression is referred to at all as what we call “sin” (4:7. Cain’s murdering of

Abel, his “sin,” not only illustrates the reality told to the woman that “I will surely multiply your

toil,” but also the curse to the ground, and by default, the man of the ground. God probes Cain

about his deed: “What have you done? The sound of the blood [dam] of your brother cries to me

from the ground [adamah]” (4:10). The relation between “blood” [dam] and “ground”

[adamah], and man, adam, points to the “cursed ground” as a total corruption of the earth. But

the new realities that God told to the man and the woman are escalating and pervasive, shown to

the audience as a poetic post-script of one of the sons of Cain:

“And Lamech said to his two wives Adah and Zellah: Hear my voice two wives of Lamech, give ear: A man I murdered to injuring me, and a boy I struck. For seven-fold will Cain be avenged, And Lamech seventy times seven.”38

After the account of the heavens and earth that tells of the corruption of the ground (4:17-

37Section I. 384:23-24.

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24), the narrator provides a bridge that links the account to the next account while also reminding

the audience about a door of hope for the seed of the woman (4:25-26). “And Adam knew his

wife again and she bore a son ... and she called his name Seth … and to Seth was also born a son

… Then (אז) he began to call on the name of YHWH” (4:25-26). It is in 4:25 that the man is first

named without the definite article, haadam becomes adam, and the name “Adam” is now a title

that puts him as the figurehead for all of humanity. What does the narrator want his audience to

see in the broad stroke painted across his canvas? In final evaluation, the heavens and earth

began in harmony with God as Lord of the heavenly realm, and man, created male and female,

his image bearer, as the ruler of the earth. The tragic happening in the garden destroyed the

harmony that existed between the two facets of reality as the ground grew more and more corrupt

and the creature moved further and further from the Creator. By mentioning, “Then he began to

call on the name of YHWH,” the narrator wishes us to see the forward thrust to his revelation of

reality.

It is with this forward momentum that closes, “These are the generations of the heavens

and the earth” (2:4-4:26), that he begins again, “This is the record of the generation of Adam in

the day God created man. In his likeness God created him male and female he created them, and

he blessed them and called their names Man in the day he created them” (5:1-2). After the

introductory refrain that alludes and links the account to the original creation account, the

narrator tells in what is a genealogy, avoided in children’s Bible, man continues his duty to the

ground as servant and procreator. In this way, in a text that points back to God’s creation of man,

it says of Adam, “And was born in his image according to his likeness, and he called his name

Seth (5:3). But in addition to man’s procreation duty as image bearers, the narrator makes his

audience aware of the cool reality of death at the end of every life, indicated in the refrain, “and

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he died.” These characters and motifs, the tensions between heaven and earth, God and man,

man and the ground, the seed of the woman and the serpent, and between man and woman that

are the necessary threads to grasp the meaning of Genesis 1-11, of the Flood and the Tower of

Babel. And it is at this point the significance of “And God said to Abram ‘lech-lach’” (12:1),

and it is here that the believer in Jesus Christ can better understand the place of “Primeval

History” in the scope of Bible history as well as his own place, and perhaps, we can gain a better

idea of what ‘Biblical History’ really is.

Concluding Remarks

When an author of a children’s Bible retells the Bible for children, he or she not only

comes to the text with some idea about the about the perspective on reality in the story but also

with a definite understanding of the intended audience, who needs a simplified way to

understand biblical narratives. Melody Briggs observes three basic approaches: value-driven, that

foregrounds a particular social issue, “constructing an implied reader who needs moral

guidance,” dogma-driven, which “seek to protect the reader from theological error and so

construct an implied reader who needs theological boundaries,” and education-driven, which

supplements the narrative material with material not central to the biblical story for a reader who

needs Bible knowledge.39 Briggs also mentions an engagement-driven approach, which provides

characteristics of all three. As shown in the above exegesis that connect Genesis 1-4 in the scope

of Genesis 1-11, the Biblical narrator is revelatory, but in children’s Bibles, “the text becomes a

didactic tool, and narratives take second place.”40

39Melody Briggs, “The Word Became Visual Text: The Boy Jesus in Children’s Bibles,” in Text, Image, and Otherness in Children’s Bibles, ed. Caroline Stichel and Hugh Pyper (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 158. 40Ibid., 166.

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One effect of all Bible story retellings is an altering of the Biblical narratives that mingles

culture, ideology, and theology.41 One example is the differences in accounts between Genesis 1-

2:3 to Genesis 2-3. When children’s Bibles concentrate on harmonizing the events in the two

accounts, they miss the bigger picture the author is trying to convey. One must search hard and

fruitlessly to attempt to discover a children’s Bibles that express the tension between a God who

speaks creation into existence (Genesis 1) and who forms man and woman with his hands and

walks and talks with them (Genesis 2). It has been argued that the disjunction is hermeneutical;

that it is a method that misunderstands the relationship between the event and the author’s intent.

A search for meaning in the narrative distinguishes this kind of hermeneutic from a more faithful

one.

It is a misunderstanding of Scripture that seeks to harmonize Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 in

terms of events, and it is damaging to a child’s understanding of the meaning. “As a result, the

child’s resources for understanding the Biblical God are diminished.”42 But perhaps it is a

problem of religious education. Children’s Bibles, as religious pedagogy, employ a hermeneutic

that prioritizes knowing the event. Knowing the Bible is equated to knowing the events and how

to connect the events, like when Sylvanus Stall describes, in With Children on Sundays, that

“sword-drills” allow children to relate their Bible knowledge. But the transfer of Bible

knowledge from teacher to pupil, especially with the joining between text and image, the

homogeneity that happens as a result, along with the effects of routine on intelligence, may result

41Mark Roncoce, “Conflating Creation, Combining Christmas, and Ostractizing the Other,” in Text, Image, and Otherness in Children’s Bibles (Stichel and Pyper, 2012). 42Roncace, 206.

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in an unintended lifeless text that “produces theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly

pious idol worshippers.”43

43D. Brisben and A. Klein, "Reading the Old Testament as Story: a Pedagogy for Spiritual Formation," Christian Education Journal 9, no. 2 (2012), 327; referenced to C. Bartholomew and M. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker Academics, 2004), 12.

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CHAPTER 5: AN ETYMOLOGY OF REVELATION

Christians read Scripture as the Word of God, who is revealed in his own begotten son,

Jesus Christ; and while we are sons of Adam, being joined with Christ, the εσχατος Αδαµ “the

last Adam” (1 Cor. 15:45), we are ‘sons and heirs,’ children of God and the victorious humanity

promised in Genesis 3:15. This reality about God and man is revealed and is finally made known

only in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is with the resulting sense of

communion that we read the Holy Writ; in pursuit to know and love God, as Hosea prophecy’s

and writes: “For love [חסד] I desire and not sacrifice, and knowledge [דעת] of God more than

burnt offerings” (Hos. 6:6).1 “Knowledge of God” and, especially, ידע “to know,” requires a

deep, personal, and intimate communion. Thus, in “And the man knew Eve his wife” (Gen. 4:1),

yada is even an appropriate word to speak of a sexual union. The significance of Hosea’s use of

“to know” is realized more when one understands Hosea prophesy’s about the Lord’s dispute

with Israel, his covenant people, over their blatant and pervasive covenant infidelity, likened to

adultery. After many indictments and proven accusations, the husband is justified in throwing

her out, but Hosea interludes with a vision of restoration:

Come, and let us return to the Lord, for he has torn and he will heal; he has struck and he will bind us up. He will revive us after two days; By the third, he will raise us up. And we will live, and we will know: Let us pursue to know the Lord (MT Hos. 6:1-3).

1hesed is translated as “love” instead of the more traditional “lovingkindness” or, perhaps, the more correct “covenant loyalty,” in order to draw on a point.

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It is with this metaphor that the Biblical text bears immense weight for those who are now

restored to God and seek to know him.2

Understanding the Bible as the Word of God, and not an archaic document, means that

the contents within are revelation from God about his character and his actions and plans in and

for creation, and the authorial intent lies much deeper than a pedagogues method of enculturation

or a scholarly analysis of the text could educate. The reality revealed in the Bible is far wider

than what can be transmitted in a children’s Bible. It may be that children’s Bibles, which are a

tool in religious and cultural education, shape two-dimensional perceptions on the mind of image

and text, while in actuality, Biblical reality is a four-dimensional and can only be grasped in

relation to text, event, author, and reader. Children’s Bibles have shown to be problematic in

transmitting, not necessarily in giving “knowledge,” but meaning, and the kind of knowledge

they transmit, through routine, can lead to a vanishing intelligence. While it should be admitted

that most children’s Bibles are a cultural success, in terms of revelation and meaning, their

method of etymology is a failure.

Understanding Etymology

The perception of reality in human history of mankind has not changed; only evaluations

have. When ancient Israel looked at reality, they understood their special relation to the ground

according to the directions of “sunrise, “towards the sea,” and “left” and “right,” and not in

terms of latitude and longitude and north, south, east, and west like modern “civilized” man

does. Furthermore, there was no “universe,” but rather “the heavens and the earth.” When

ancient man slaughtered an animal for food, he was forced to do the act and to see the blood and

realize the preciousness of life and was made aware of the cost of life. When a person today goes

to the store to buy meat, their mind is always on something else, perhaps, is it organic, or just 2 This thought is expanded and clarified from my research proposal for this project.

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grain fed? Things change, and evaluations of the natural world become more complex. Indeed,

philosophers and scholars have been correct in their observations of process in mankind. The

humanistic ideal began, as is accepted by historians, in ancient Greece, by the philosophers, and

was brought by scholars fleeing from the Turks, who brought Greek learning to Western Europe,

the catalyst for the Renaissance. Yet, the Bible reveals that the ‘humanistic ideal’ began long

before, in the Paradise of God, the Garden of Eden, when the creature transgressed the word of

the Creator, and man and woman became evaluators of creation. However, the concepts come

from two different origins, where one is observed, and the other is revealed.

In the history of mankind, observations and evaluations of the natural world, according to

Whitehead, go through a process of “specialization.” This means that man’s relation to the

ground, his need for “sunrise” get assimilated into more specialized notions of the direction:

“East,” and former ways of thinking become primitive and foreign, and the elementary

principles behind ancient civilization concerning existence, though logical and practical, become

lost in highly specialized thought forms. This study has considered humanism in the modern era

related to etymology and childhood applied to Scripture and religious pedagogy, and the

concentration has been on how lines of these have been blurred with another by a parallel vector

that joins in a point in time referred to as religious modernization. A more specific focus in this

understanding is applied to children’s Bibles. All of these are results of specializations of the

natural world. In the scheme of human progress, religion is perceived as a highly formulated

evaluation of observed reality; for example, the Ugaritic myth, known as “The Baal Cycle” tells

amongst other things, of the battle between Baal and Mot, the god of death and the underworld:

Baal eventually defeats Mot, and in practical application, after Baal defeats him and returns from

the underworld, the victory and rising up is signaled on earth by the ending of the dry season and

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the beginning of a new season of rain and fertility, perpetually every year. Similarly, a modern

specialization would be that of a meteorologist. Indeed, the modern form of thought has many

advantages over the Ugaritic form, greatly improving in understanding and even being able to

predict future weather patterns and, sometimes, to near exact science. However, “highly

specialized forms” of evaluating observed realities is much different than the Bible, which

reveals that God created the great lights “for times and for seasons for days and years” (Gen.

1:14) and “give[s] your rain in its season, and it gives the land produce, and trees of the field

will give its fruit” (Lev. 23:4). In terms of specialized modes of thought, ‘Primeval History,’

presents the basest form.

The Bible and Christianity have been assimilated into complex formulation of

evaluations of observed reality: natural religion. Whitehead says in Adventures in Ideas that out

of the “gracious, simple mode of life” and beliefs of early Christians was born the West’s most

precious instrument of progress––“the impractible ethics of Christianity.”3 His assessment

harmonizes well with the observations in this study about religious education and children’s

Bibles. The historical-grammatical mode of thinking applied to the Bile as an ancient document

as well as the categories of virtue, ethics, and immortality impressed into religious pedagogy

added to the Enlightenment vision of Christianity being an agent of progress for humanity. The

zenith was reached in the glory days of Enlightenment Christianity, when the West was in the

prime of its “Biblical heritage.” In this way, the Bible is foundational to Western culture.

Revelation and Faith

Even though the Bible as a text has been subsumed into the wide fabric of Western

culture, by accepting the Bible as the Word of God, Christians affirm the testimony, and it is not

3Whitehead, 17. What he means by “impractable” is that in the early years, it was characterized by “fierce enthusiasm and impractible moral ideals.”

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a mere text or an ancient document, and meaning can begin to be realized as revelation. Charles

Scobie reminds us, “The Bible is most truly interpreted in its canonical intention not when it is

not dissected by historical critics, but when it is read as the Word of God by God’s people.”4

Thus, it is faith in the testimony that forms the believer’s understanding of history; that sees the

meaning of the telling as a revelation of reality; that sees it as a revelation of God and of his

purposes in the cosmos. In this way, Paul writes, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the

word of God” (Rom. 10:17). It is faith in the testimony that allows the hearer/reader to grasp the

meaning, and it is the “word of faith” that connects the Christian community to those in the

original audience who believed its testimony and grasped its meaning. The only satisfactory

explanation of the enduring testimony of Scripture is that it is an eternal reality that pierces

through all evaluations and complex formulations of observed realities: ancient and modern.

As reaffirmed by so many philosophers and in so many ways, truth and human

knowledge are not the same, and speaking of absolute reality based on epistemology is

impossible. David Clark, an evangelical writing on methodology of theology in the

contemporary context, agrees: “Knowledge is [only] some person’s … apprehension of the true

nature of reality.”5 As evaluative creatures of the universe, humans are bound to epistemological

failure. As historians, humans can investigate present artifacts that are effected by actions in the

past, like when a criminal investigator searches for and interprets evidence, and his search leads

him to the testimony of others: their story of the past. Sensible people rely on the testimony of

others. In this way, Provan, Long, and Longman understand that “the reliance on testimony is

fundamental to knowing … [and] it is fundamental to knowing about historical reality,” which

4Scobie, The Ways of Our God, 41. 5David Clark, To Know and Love God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2003), 354-355. Clark draws from post-modern insights into reality.

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serves their purpose of writing a history of Israel against those scientific positivists who pride

themselves relying only on their own mental ability to interpret data and wag their heads at all

testimony as biased and ideological.6 Rather than uncovering a record of the past, reading God’s

word takes a much different approach.

With a prehension of faith in the testimony, not employing a “hermeneutics of

suspicion,” Scripture as revelation is realized; and the community gazes for meaning, not in

isolation from the original audience, but in unison at the living Word of God. The individual is

singled out of his own community and comes to hear the telling of the history of the cosmos and

receives it from his own vantage point in the crowd of men and women and children throughout

the ages. After focusing attention to the teller’s voice, he first begins to grasp the meaning for the

first time, and in excitement he goes to stand over by one who has been long gone to see if it

sounds any different from there, next, to a woman, to a rich noble, to a poor peasant, and finally

to a boy. He stands by those who walked in the desert of the ancient Near East, by the Psalmist,

by the Apostle Paul, by the early monastics, by the medieval Catholics, by Martin Luther, the

Calvinists, Enlightenment scholars, Dispensationalists (upon hurrying on, because they remind

him so much of Enlightenment scholars), and even Liberals. He stands by those close up and by

those far in the back. After examining the perspectives of so many and gaining insights through

evaluating others points of view, the listener walks back to his original spot and faces ahead.

Finally, he sits, looks, and listens with eyes bigger and brighter and ears directed to be more

attentive than ever before; to learn to know God and see how Jesus Christ the Lord and his

people fit into the big picture. Therefore, in seeking to understand biblical reality, a humble

response is, “We invite diversity … because diverse viewpoints are demanded by the manifold

6I. Provan, V. Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 45.

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mysteries of great things. … We embrace ambiguity … because we understand the inadequacy

of our concepts to embrace the vastness of great things.”7

Revelation and Pedagogy

In the modern era, views on knowledge and childhood began to shape how children were

educated, seen at least as early as John Locke. Along with some useful insights and important

concepts for childhood development and education in general, in a process of religious

modernization, religious pedagogy underwent some important shifts that can be seen in the

concept of Sunday Schools that took root in Western Europe and America in the early nineteenth

century as well in the transformation of the Sunday School into Church School, the nursery of

the church, by the late nineteenth-century. As part of this, religious knowledge took a

fundamental turn. Developed along Enlightenment categories of history, ethics, and immortality,

the “forming of the cultural Bible” began to transform religious pedagogy, and children’s Bibles

throughout the modern era are molded by such doctrines. Bible knowledge became something

that could be transmitted as easy as the alphabet, as anything else in the etymology of

sensational-epistemology.

In the passing of time, the evaluative spectra increases, and it becomes clearer that

receiving the Bible, the Word of God, as revelation and receiving the Bible as an educational

tools come from two different kinds of etymologies. One is transmitted by natural education, and

the other is by supernatural revelation. “Youth Groups Driving Christian Teens to Abandon

Faith,” is a 2013 article that expresses concern with modern youth ministry, because a study of

men and women in their 20’s who grew up in the church, two-thirds “are now spiritually

7Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 110.

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disengaged.”8 The article goes on to describe how the problem is a result of “peer-dependency”

and failure of the family as central, specifically fathers, to development.9 There may be some

degree of truth in Carr’s conclusions, but remembering the tried and tested rule that ‘correlation

does not sell causation,’ evaluation should not end there. The article also relates complaints by

church members that youth-groups are “too shallow and too entertainment-focused, resulting in

an inability to train mature believers.” Many of those in youth-groups have grown up in churches

and have been impressed with Bible stories in a way that is optimal to each stage of

development, have done hundreds of delightful and educational games and interaction conducive

to Bible learning, as well as fun Bible songs for children in a way to compliment adult worship.

Youth groups are the next and final stage of religious education that combines instruction and

delight, along with community, as a means to enculturation. One result of this educational

method is spiritual disengagement.

When one has learned to listen to the testimony of Scripture, after they have sat

attentively and gazed at the teller and grasped his impression of reality, how is the full weight of

the story transmitted? In discussion of the origins of “pedagogos:” Longnecker observes the

custom in Greek households, where a pedagogos is distinguished from a didaskalos. More

accurate than the KJV, “school-master,” “the etymology of the word suggests (pais plus agogos)

a ‘child-tender.’”10 The ‘childleader’ was usually a household slave tasked to be a guardian and

had a large and important responsibility in the child’s upbringing, like guiding him to and from

8Carr, Abbey, “Youth Groups Driving Christian Teens to Abandon Faith,” Charisma News, October 13, 2013, under http://www.charismanews.com/us/41465-youth-groups-driving-christian-teens-to-abandon faith 9Ibid. 10Richard Longenecker, “The Pedagogical Nature of the Law in Galatians,” Journal of Evangelical Theological Society 25 (1982), 53; in Michael Smith, “The Role of the Pedagogue in Galatians,” Bibliotheca Sacra 163 (2006), 198.

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school and guarding him from danger.11 Therefore, in order to be an educator of Scripture, not

just of children, but also of all people, perhaps we have to admit that the work is not so much

didactic as pedagogic, not so much being a teacher but a guide. Then, the task becomes how to

guide the subject to the teller, so he can grasp the meaning himself.

Closing Remarks

A study of children’s Bibles confirms that they are apart of our cultural heritage. As such,

they are often the first encounter people have with the Bible, and presentations of Bible stories

and images do have lasting impressions of characters and events on the mind of its subjects,

often shaping lifelong perceptions. Furthermore, they have been profoundly shaped by a concept

of etymology and hermeneutic that understands the Bible as an ancient document for historical

and ethical inquiry. The result is a loss of meaning, pointedly illustrated in an exegesis of

Genesis 1-11, focusing on 2:3-4:26, that shows it as a piece in a larger mosaic, complete with

characters that are further revealed as the telling develops. Children’s Bibles do educate the

child, but it is not with Biblical knowledge in any real sense of the word.

What should be the response to these observations? Koepf reminds us, “People of any

age can appreciate artful retellings and illustrations of Biblical narratives.”12 While words and

pictures together can and do lead to a ceasing curiosity and a vanishing intelligence, aesthetics

may be the right place of a children’s Bible. Certainly, presentations of truth and beauty can have

a function in the Christian community, helping to offer perspective on great mysteries revealed

in God’s Word. When someone in the church community responds to a truth in God’s Word in

the form of music, if done right, the performers own perspective and emotional reaction is

transferred to the listener thought the expression, and the listener can actually experience the

11 Smith, 200. 12 Koepf (Stichele and Pyper, ed. 2012), 27.

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same perception and emotions of the performer. As Christians, we should strive for unity and not

uniformity, and diversity of perspective in ascetic portrayals should be understood as a force of

good in a community devoted to the manifold mysteries of the Word of God.

How could an artistic retellings and pictures better serve the Christian community? (1)

They could give attention to narrative structure. For example, Genesis 1-11 uses certain

techniques to unity the distinct parts, and texts and pictures together could assist in helping to

bring these qualities out. (2) The Hebrew Bible often uses figurative language and word relation

to express meaning, and elements in Bible stories could imitate this. (3) The narratives are

sometimes described as containing “gaps,” which are parts of the story a reader might like to

hear, but it is not in the narrator’s purpose to tell. An effect is that the reader seeks to fill in these

“gaps.” For example, in the story of the Flood, God tells Noah to build an Ark, which he gives

instruction for, but the text does not say how God spoke or how Noah carried out the task, but

only that he did it and how long it took. Many children’s Bibles fill in the “gap” by teaching hard

work, productivity, and obedience with text and pictures of father and son hard at work. The

creator of children’s Bibles should be cautious when filling in gaps so as not to distract from the

meaning. (4) One should remember the influence of modern thought on contemporary views on

childhood. One fact about contemporary views on childhood is that when grownups express

nostalgia of some idealized view of childhood, children are affected. However, children are best

served when there is difficulty to overcome and challenges to face, where mental activity and

curiosity are high, and when Bible story retellers simplify and harmonize, they are given an

easier read on the alter of simplicity. There is no evidence that there is anything innate in a child

that makes him respond to cute picture and diminutive words. Perhaps, it is all for the sake of the

grownups sentiments. (5) Finally, the Bible is the Word of God, and I have simply observed

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Genesis 1-11. There are many ways children’s Bibles retell other parts of the Bible. How the

Jesus story has been told in the modern era and the perceptions of Jesus that are formed as a

result should be a concern and consideration. Furthermore, the New Testament has a narrative

style too. How could a children’s Bible be faithful to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’s

distinctive witnesses of Jesus Christ, rather than a harmonization of the gospels according to

event?

Finally, how should pedagogy work in the Christian community? Since Sunday Schools

are a reality established by religious modernization, it is practical to meet conclusions of this

study in the real world. Here are some thoughts for consideration and for future study that would

be helpful in true pedagogy. (1) Natural education and theories on childhood development

inform methodologies in many church communities. What would be validated and invalidated

about the modern understanding compared to a Biblical theology on childhood? (2) There will

always be a disjunction for finite man concerning reality; understood as explanations and

evaluations, what are the benefits and limitations of using doctrines and catechisms derived from

systematic theology in pedagogy? (3) N.T. Wright rightly observes that the Spirit is ‘not some

kind of vapor or gas.’ God’s activity in the lives of individuals can be understood in observing

the effects. How does God work to cause a believer to receive and understand the testimony of

his Word? When I read Scripture, I read it as a man, and it is unconvincing to hear that the Spirit

of God is some kind of force that gives me insight. No, he gives me faith to believe the testimony,

and so I look and listen carefully for meaning. The best anyone can do is to guide their children

to Jesus, the ‘author and perfecter of faith.’

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CONCLUSION

Those looking back on Western civilization can refer to the ‘Enlightenment’ as that time

when the most pervasive mood amongst the people was that humanity had arrived at a point

where the past was behind in a new era of progress, where philosophy, science, and religion had

finally come to full bloom. Like in the “Allegory of the Cave,” Western man has realized his

shackles are gone, has turned around to see the sun, and has begun to adjust his eyes to the

effulgence of the day. The task of this study has been to determine the ways children’s Bibles

have been shaped by the etymological, pedagogical, and religious beliefs and insights of the

Enlightenment. It has been shown how modern religious education has run parallel to

Enlightenment philosophy (Chapter 1), referred to later as religious modernization.

Enlightenment insights into education, childhood, and Christianity are the mold that forms a

significant part of religious education, where even though a chasm rose between the sacred and

secular, Enlightenment scholars found value in the Bible for culture-making, and the secular

would depend on the sacred. Chapter 2 shows how religious modernization is a reality expressed

in a significant tool in modern religious education: the Children’s Bible. As a subgenre of

children’s literature, children’s Bibles played a significant role in cultivating an Enlightenment

realized form of Christianity that saw the Bible as historiography and a moral code. Chapter 3

examines the ways society has adapted the cultural document of children’s Bibles into

contemporary relevancy. By understanding post-modernism as reflexive modernism, that

understands Enlightenment modernism as a continual process, an examination of presentations of

Genesis 1-11 in regards to contemporary views on Bible history show parallels between the

children’s Bibles of the past and contemporary ones. Chapter 4 shows how authorial intent is

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supplanted when the Bible is understood as historiography, which past and contemporary

versions do in their own perspective ways. This is underscored by an exegesis that follows the

integrity of the narrative and seeks to grasp its meaning. Finally, in Chapter 5, it is argued that

meaning is grasped when the reader has faith in the testimony as revelation. Only when it is read

according to authorial intent, which is by faith in the testimony, can the Bible bring true

enlightenment. As for the Enlightenment as an age in human history, the believer can proclaim

with the Psalmist: “Put them in fear O Lord; let the nations know the are but men. Selah”

(NASV Ps. 9:20).1 Amen.

It is my own interest in children’s literature, along with my degree in Biblical Studies,

which led me to this study. I wanted to determine the best method a writer and illustrator could

follow in designing, producing and publishing a children’s Bible, armed also with the original

languages. What I found out was that the values and presuppositions that form modern children’s

Bibles are the same that depend from Enlightenment Christianity. Yet, when one unravels the

knot, it is still apparent that the biblical story still needs to be told and that children still need to

hear. However, the knot needs to be unraveled, and Bible educators and creators of children’s

Bibles need to be aware of the values and suppositions that they might otherwise be inclined to

conform to and expound from. Then, children’s Bibles can remain a functional, positive part of

the Christian community, the body of Christ.

What could a children’s Bible be, and what should be its characteristics? On the

imaginary bookshelf of children’s Bibles, between the torn and dusty covers of religious

pedagogies and bedtime stories, exists a book that stands out from the others. The reason it

stands out is that the cover makes it appear is though its not marketed specifically for children.

1This is a satisfactory translation. Morah “in fear” is actually a noun, so if morah is, indeed, related to the root for “fear,” a literal rendering would be “an object of fear,” or “an object of awe;” “Put up O Lord, an ‘object to make them awe;’ so the nations will know they are but men.”

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Indeed, opening the book, it seems as though the author does not feel the need to talk down to

children, nor does he expect too much of him. Rather, his authorial intent is to be faithful to the

text, even if it diminishes comprehensibility or entertainability. Being familiar with Genesis 1-

11, the pages are opened to reveal texts and pictures that work in perfect harmony. The Hebrew

text is written as a flowing narrative, and this translation strives to imitate it, and if at all

possible, it keeps the integrity of Hebrew idiosyncrasies, grammar, and syntax, and so it also

keeps the language simple and impressionistic. The illustrations are strategic and flow with the

written text: a visual narrative. Shape, line, and color are all used to express the growing tension

in plot and the escalation in the characterization of God and man and the heavens and the ground.

Finally closing the book, it is apparent that the authorial intent is not didactic. It is not

educational. It is not even overtly evangelistic. Instead, it is purely ascetic, but perhaps by being

an expression of truth and beauty alone––ascetic––it can also be used as a tool for what should

be the real goal of biblical education: spiritual formation.

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