I know it goes against the point you’re making, but I could suggest that, if these guys really want to put an emphasis on doctrine, they could start insisting that Sunday School teachers be trained professionals.

Frankly, that means paying them, which is why I don’t think even they would go for it.

The challenge from a Biblical scholarship point of view is that the world and traditions within which we read often read from a theological angle that creates anachronistic readings of texts. Yes, that will always occur, but part of our job is to listen for what it said in the first century, before hearing what it said to a 16th century audience, before trying to figure out what it is saying to us now. The challenge that I experience is that folks too often have few categories for thinking like this, and are often not able to see how their theology is determining a reading that would be completely inaudible to early readers.

“Story isn’t a flight from reality, but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.”

As Christians, the reality we are being carried towards is a God in relation to his people. It is the quintessential love story, and is told as such in Scripture. It’s depressing to think that people would even hint at placing doctrine, knowledge, over that most story-bound virtue love.

1 Corinthians 13 might not be so well understood after all.

By the way, terrific blog Dr Kirk. Long may it continue.

I had Dr. Parrett as a professor in seminary at Gordon-Conwel, actually last year. I think you may be misunderstanding him a bit. I don’t think he is saying stories bad, doctrine good as much as saying that often we teach are church members bible stories as moral lessons rather than stories about God’s redemption in history. Also, teaching Bible stories without doctrine betrays the fact that we always look at the Bible through the lens of a tradition. He thinks churches need to ask the question, what must we teach? What is a local church responsible for educating its members about? I think he is right about Catechesis, not because propositions are better than story, but because its important for our church members to know how those before us have read the bible and that we don’t read the bible in a vacuum. By the way, Parrett’s and extremely kind and thoughtful Christian man. He is not a Reformed theology pit bull. His book should be worth reading.

It was once I started reading the Bible as it is and stopped saying to myself “well, I know that’s what it looks like, but it can’t be, because my theology says…” that I noticed the Bible is far more diverse and wilder than our theologies want to allow us to believe.