Biblical Literacy - 1

How well do you know the Bible?

According to a 2010 study by the Pew Institute, Jews, Athiest/Agnostics, and Mormons score overall higher on religious knowledge than Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, or Catholics. The findings are interesting (and a little embarassing) and fit with a 2005 Gallup study commissioned by the Bible Literacy Project that suggests high school students have a lack of adequate exposure to the Bible to help them understand English literature like the works of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and John Steinbeck. This is interesting to look at in conjunction with the 2009 Barna Group study which indicates that, while interest in faith is rising in the US, Bible literacy is going down. Younger Americans, particularly those who have become adults since 2000 are interested in God, and even in Jesus, but not as much in the Bible.

I suspect this is a reaction (possibly an overreaction) to the way that the Bible has been used for some time in the US. Since about 1900 there has been a movement called Fundamentalism. Christian Fundamentalists teach that there are several principals (or fundamentals) that one must believe in order to be called Christian, inclusing the idea that the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and is thus perfect, without contradiction or error.

This insistence that the Bible is always right has led some Christians to insist that science, medicine, history, etc. must be wrong when they contradict the Bible. They also insist that the Bible is the perfect moral guide, even those portions that say things that seem horribly unjust and cruel to us. Those are two hard pills for a growing number of modern people to swallow, and I think they are right to question them.

I don't think turning away from the Bible is a good solution, though. You shouldn't either blindly accept or casually reject anything, including the Bible, without properly understanding it. Fortunatly there is a very good way to study the Bible critically and gain a deeper understanding of it.

The thing that has me thinking about this is a survey on Bible Literacy I recently took. The survey comes from the Freedom from Religion Foundation and, as you might guess, has a strongly anti-Bible slant. Still, it's an interesting test that covers some obscure but important parts of the Bible that ought to be looked at by believers.

There are a lot of questions so, take the survey, but if you don't test well, don't despair. I'll be doing a few more blog posts to look at the answers and deal with the spin.