‘GOD IS NOT IN THIS CLASSROOM’: TEACHING THE BIBLE IN A SECULAR CONTEXT Christian M. Brady The Pennsylvania State University It is considered a truism today to say that how we receive and read the Bible, or any text, is conditioned by our own experience. We bring as much to the text as we may get out of it. We would like to think that as scholars we are beyond this, able to read dispassionately and objectively the objects of our academic study. More importantly, the implicit, and in a secular context often explicit, assump- tion is that when we teach the Bible in a secular classroom we certainly present nothing but the most clear-eyed and unbiased presentation of the material under consideration. The reality is that how we teach the Bible is based as much upon our experience as is how we read the Bible. This should not cause us to despair, rather it should give us some sense as to how we might fruitfully engage our students and help them in their own reading and study of the Bible. Given such a preamble it is only appropriate that I begin with a few prelimi- nary comments about my own situation. My entire teaching career and most of my time as a student in higher education has been spent in secular institutions. 1 I spent nine years at Tulane University before moving to the Pennsylvania State University in 2006. My field of research is rabbinic literature, specifically Tar- gumim, and the most common question I was asked at Tulane University with a student population that is one-third Jewish was, ‘What is a nice Jewish boy like you doing with a name like Christian?’ The perspective that I bring to the classroom and this topic of how we should teach the Bible in a secular context is as a Christian, in name and faith, researching and teaching ancient Hebrew and Jewish literature, in a secular school, often with a rather even balance of students from Jewish and Christian backgrounds. 1.調I was at Cornell University as an undergraduate student. I majored in both Near Eastern Studies and History and was the first minor to graduate from the then newly-formed Religious Studies Program. I received an MA in Biblical and Theological Studies from Wheaton College in Illinois, an evangelical Christian college. I then received a Graduate Diploma in Jewish Studies from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in Oriental Studies. Webster.indd 73 Webster.indd 73 6/28/2012 10:23:18 AM 6/28/2012 10:23:18 AM