As a part of the adult education class I am facilitating at my church I will be introducing the writings of the latter prophets. I think this is the corpus of scripture with which adult Christians are least familiar. This probably has to do with the difficulty of reading such literature as compared with the narratives of the Torah, the former prophets, the writings, and the Gospels. Let's face it, Hebrew prophetic literature is not a breeze to read, but I think it is still quite rewarding. Jesus quoted from Isaiah more than from the law, for example.

So I thought for tomorrow night's class we'd take a look at an infamous passage of scripture, Isaiah 14:

When the Lord gives you relief from your suffering and anxiety, and from the hard labor which you were made to perform, you will taunt the king of Babylon with these words:

...

Look how you have fallen from the sky,
O shining one, son of the dawn!
You have been cut down to the ground,
O conqueror of the nations!

The payoff is of course that this passage is the source of the moniker "Lucifer" and a fair portion of the popular history of Satan. We'll discuss the contextual referent and much more. It should help foster discussion and get everyone engaged with this genre.

A few weeks ago I wrapped up the adult education class I had been leading at my church. It was a whirlwind tour of "how we got the Bible," including overviews of each testament, and the issues of canon, transmission, and translation. Overall it was a very fun and rewarding experience for me. This was my first opportunity to lead a class like this, and I'd like to do it again. As a matter of course, I learned a thing or two as well, so here are some of my reflections on the experience:

I like to talk too much

I believe the class participants were genuinely interested in what I had to say (even though the late hour led to some droopy eyelids). Still, I basically filled almost every minute of the class with me talking. I was able to answer a fair number of questions during each class, so that was good. My weekly plan was to leave some time for generally discussion at the end of each class, but unfortunately that never happened. I need to learn to trim up my material to make room for discussion.

"I don't know" is a good thing

I was impressed by the breadth and quality of the questions the participants asked. In some cases, I was simply not qualified to answer, since the topic was outside of my grasp. But in this context (church adult education) I am not really a pedagogue, so not having the answer is not bad. Also, in some cases my ignorance fostered discussion within the group, because someone else did have knowledge of a particular topic. A great example of this came when biblical archaeology and geography came up, and some people in our class had actually visited Ephesus. Read more »

The class went fairly well last night. Unfortunately I tried to pack too much content into 1 hour 15 minutes, so we did not get as much question and discussion time as I had hoped. That was not terribly surprising given the scope of the material. Still, my churchmates were (apparently) engaged and inquisitive, and I think I was able to share with them a few things they had not learned before. Also, I have a good subgroup of folks who are knowledgeable in their own right, so I get to learn from them (not to mention borrow some really interesting books). Read more »

I recently began teaching an adult education class at my church. The title is "Historical Backgrounds of the Bible - How did we get the scriptures?" The class is only 6 weeks long, with 5 remaining, so time is going to be really tight. Here is my plan for the classes: