So school got out Alice Cooper-style this year, and I lighted out for home and spent a good month in Omaha (with little trips to Missouri and Illinois). And to my shame, I accidentally left my Bible in South Carolina. I've been back for about ten days now, and I'm working on getting caught up in my reading. And so I'm back in Judges, just coming up on Samson. But before that, I read the story of Gideon, who had already been on my mind this month.
See, my mom has been taking Bible survey classes, and while I was home, I had the pleasure (and it truly was a pleasure) of hearing her rant about how we've all been taught wrongly about Gideon. "That Gideon," the Sunday school narrative goes, "now he had faith. When he wanted to know God's will, he put out the fleece. We should all be like Gideon. When you want to know God's will, put out the fleece." (I, for one, have no idea what it means in a twenty-first century context to 'put out the fleece,' but there you have it.) But mom's point is that God had already told Gideon his will (Judges 6:12-23). In fact, Gideon had a christophany, or at least so I take it to be, since the text refers to this visitor as "the Lord." The fleece test was Gideon getting a second opinion of sorts. And even that wasn't enough for him. It's not until God lets Gideon overhear his enemies discuss how fearful they are that he believes he can win. This suggests that Gideon in that moment trusted the words of his enemies more than the words of God. Anyway, mom was hating on Gideon all month in reaction against his lauded Sunday School status. It was a fun time, especially coming from a mom who could not have more faithfully raised us on Bible stories. I appreciated her honesty about her revised reading and her frustration about overly-simplistic explications of the Bible.
While I don't mean to hate on Sunday School, I wonder if there are stories you would say you were mistaught? Or how have your Bible reading practices changed in adulthood? Or with more education?
I completely agree with your mother about the Gideon story. I have two big disappointments with S.S. One, Bible characters were represented as flat and uninteresting, good or bad, no nuance, no development, nothing like the fascinating characters in other stories, nothing like real people. Two, there was no big picture, no concept that the Bible was one big integrated story, that the biggest character in it was God (He ended up being a flat character too, btw) and that He was incorporating me and Farmer Brown and Professor Wilson and Grandma Crawford and all the broken saints around me into the same story. This was completely absent.
ReplyDelete