My sister has unearthed a curious relic from the basement of our parents’ house. This is my 6th-grade mid-term exam from Bible class at our fundamentalist private school.
Seeing this brought back vivid memories of the smell of mimeograph ink, but no specific memories of the class or of this exam.
This was, after all, 1979 and I was 11.* Like most 11-year-olds, I had no idea who Voltaire was, hence the question I got hilariously wrong on this test. That wrong answer doesn’t bother me, but some of the “right” answers I gave here sure do. Some of those “right” answers are even more embarrassing now than the quirks of my 6th-grade handwriting.
Consider, for example, the questions about the number of books in the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament.” Those traditional names for the Hebrew and Greek scriptures aren’t necessarily wrong — the Hebrew scriptures are, in fact, chronologically older than the Greek. But I usually try to avoid those terms now to avoid the dangerous suggestion that the “New” replaces the “Old.” Supercessionism never leads anywhere good, and it’s worth going out of our way to avoid any hint of it. And that’s not the only confusion, distortion, or heresy that can arise from this “Old” and “New” terminology.
But for a class of 11- and 12-year-old kids, isn’t it easier to keep things simple and just stick with those classic names of “Old Testament” and “New Testament”? Well, no, not when the very next set of questions asks for a one sentence summary of “the message” of each collection, for which the correct/expected answers are those I recited here.
“The message of the Old Testament is ‘Jesus is coming'” is not an answer that should earn you an A on your mid-term. It’s a lens that distorts any attempt to read those 39 books as they are, obstructing and misdirecting our understanding of them. If that’s what you’re taught to expect to find in “the Old Testament,” then that is what you will find there — even when it’s not there. And if that’s “the message” you’re looking for, you’ll likely ignore every other message or meaning that might be found. Not only does this bungled summary ensure that you’ll misread and misinterpret the Hebrew Scriptures, it ensures that you’ll misread and misinterpret any Jewish person you encounter. The history of such misreading is Very Bad.
So those two questions were probably the most dangerous and damaging ideas that I would have to unlearn years after acing this mid-term. But neither of those were unique to Timothy Christian School or to its particular strain of white-fundamentalist American Christianity.
For a sense of something more specifically TCS-fundie, look at the many questions here focused on “plenary verbal inspiration.”
This is explicit in places like the True-or-False question: “Verbal inspiration means that God guided the author’s choice of words.” But it’s also implicit throughout most of this test even in places like that question I got wrong about Voltaire.
Voltaire shows up there as a well-chosen substitution turning what would have been a true statement into a false one. The “True” statement would have been about John Wycliffe: “One of the men who suffered greatly that we might have the Bible in our English language was John Wycliffe.”
Wycliffe is a key figure in the long providential history needed to bridge the very large gap between “plenary verbal inspiration” and the English translations of the Bible we were reading. We needed and wanted our English text to be inerrant and infallible. It just has to be, because the stakes here are infinite and eternal — Heaven vs. Hell — and thus we require a definitive, certain, authoritative text. Oh, and also, the claim that we have a definitive, authoritative, unambiguous text with divine authority is such a great weapon to clobber other people with when they dare to suggest we’re wrong about anything. Especially after a couple of decades during which the Black church embarrassed us by demonstrating that we were wrong about some very basic and essentially important things.
But anyway, just asserting that God dictated the Psalms to David,** who obediently wrote them down, verbatim, does nothing to reassure us that the English translation of the Psalms we’re reading today is an accurate, inerrant, and infallible representation of that original text. Especially since we don’t have that original text — or any original text for any of the 66 books in our canon. Our doctrine of inerrancy and infallibility thus requires a supporting framework of providential history to reassure ourselves that the Bible we’re reading is precisely the same as the God-guided-the-author’s-choice-of-words-in-a-language-we-don’t-speak lost originals.
That providential history involves lots of colorful stories about people like Wycliffe, or about certain dramatic archaeological finds, like (some of) the Dead Sea Scrolls.*** Those stories and legends might not all be literally, historically true, but we learned them all anyway because they convey the larger truth, which is that you must never, ever make a distinction between such larger truths and literal, historical truths. Or something.
All of the mythmaking about Wycliffe and Tyndale and Qumran didn’t quite add up to an unbroken chain-of-custody guaranteeing certainty that our received text matches the lost original, but that’s where the providence of providential history comes in. “God did it, miraculously when necessary” may not be verifiable, but it’s not obviously unverifiable either.
Anyway, in 7th and 8th grade I had a different teacher for Bible class, a man with the delightful name of Kingsley Baehr,**** who loved actually reading the Bible — all of the weird and obscure bits — too much to spend any time parsing the distinctions between “infallible” and “inerrant.” Mr. Baehr was a fundie too, but his idea of the Bible was something more like Mrs. Beaver’s: “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
That was a useful corrective to a 6th-grade curriculum that tried to reassure us the Bible was a tame lion.
* The date of this mid-term makes it notable as more than just an artifact of personal history. This was the first “Doctrine of the Bible” class prepared at Timothy Christian School following the production the prior year, in October of 1978, of the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.” Signatories of that fundamentalist manifesto included many of the men that TCS regarded as luminaries and authorities. If we had a bit more to go on here, we could trace if or how that document changed or influenced Timothy’s curriculum and understanding of “biblical infallibility.”
Alas, a single 6th-grade mid-term doesn’t let us explore that very far, but it’s still important to remember that there, in 1979, this “doctrine” of inerrancy and infallibility was still new and young and evolving. It was different than it had been in 1969 and was different from what it would be in 1989 or in 1999 or in 2009 or 2025. For a “doctrine” that’s meant to be all about timelessness and constancy and perspicuity, it’s quite a shifting, murky thing.
** This is where — if not quite in 6th-grade, then not long after — I first questioned this notion of “plenary verbal inspiration.” This notion ruins the Psalms. It makes the Psalms of praise seem weird and gross, and it makes all of the Psalms that question or challenge God seem like some impenetrable, multi-layered puzzle. If all of these poems apparently addressing God were instead written by God, then they all mean something other than what they at first appear to mean. The desire to claim an infallible text produces an unreliable narrator.
*** This was somewhat complicated at Timothy Christian, which drew students from KJV-only churches as well as from other churches that allowed or endorsed more modern English translations.
**** Named his son “Teddy,” then raised him to lean into it and not resent it. Respected both of them for that.
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