Are we presenting the Bible like a fairy tale?
A young prince is driven into exile by a wicked king, but, knowing it’s his destiny, later triumphantly returns to take the throne. A poor young man defeats a giant in combat. Someone has power to control the weather. A supernatural being offers someone the opportunity to make any request, and it would be granted. An evil creature deceives a woman into making a decision that destroys her life. Intelligent and/or supernaturally-guided animals provide help, advice, and provision to humans.
If you’re familiar with the Bible, you may recognize these as elements of the lives of David, Elijah, Solomon, and Eve. You might also recognize them as elements of The Lion King, Jack and the Beanstalk, Frozen, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and others.
All these stories have spectacular supernatural elements, or at least too-good-to-be-true triumphs. The characters are often perceived as black and white, good and evil. They all make it into children’s books and animated movies. The difference is that one set of them is real, and the other set isn’t.
But are we to expect our children to just accept that? I have interacted with many people who are nonbelievers who perceive the Bible this way — for whom the story of Elijah is no more plausible than the story of Elsa, because they are just different versions of a magical story. And so I frequently hear nonbelievers say stuff like, “The Bible is just a bunch of fairy tales.”
The sad thing about this is, the idea that the Bible is “a bunch of fairy tales” is demonstrably false, and it’s very easy to prove it. Archaeology has corroborated numerous biblical narratives. You can count the number of credentialed historians of any religious persuasion who doubt the basic outline of the life of Jesus as presented in the Gospels on one hand. There really were these Jewish men who, after their Lord had been humiliatingly crucified and they ran like cowards, suddenly began courageously preaching that he was risen, completely changed their views on beliefs that defined the Jewish community in which they had found their lifelong identity, and were willing to suffer and die for refusing to recant that belief under any circumstances. That much is not a fairy tale, but an event that cries out for an explanation. What is in question is often not whether these events occurred, but whether they ought to be interpreted as acts of God or something else.
So what is it, then? Why is it that so many people, especially those who have been in church learning the Bible for years, don’t at least have a more sophisticated view of the Bible than they do of The Little Mermaid?
I think there might be something about the way we often teach the Bible to children that puts it on the level of a fairy tale. In my experience, I’ve seen a lot of emphasis on the biblical narratives as morality tales, along with high emphasis on the miraculous events because they grab people’s attention, which is really not unlike the way fairy tales are presented. And when they perceive the Bible as fairy-tale-like and become teenagers and young adults, and they see the real world doesn’t work like a fairy tale, some throw it all out. Indeed, the number of Americans who identify as having no religion is unprecedentedly high, and disproportionately made up of young people. Even more distressingly, it seems that the scientifically-minded are far less likely to believe, because they observe the natural world every day and don’t see anything magical going on.
It seems to me that we need to keep a few things in mind as we are teaching the Bible to children, and teens too for that matter.
The Bible is not a bunch of morality tales. Yes, we can take good examples from many biblical figures (and also a lot of bad ones, often from the same figures). Obviously, many of the teachings of Jesus are specific instructions on moral living. But the point of the narratives of the Bible isn’t the characters; it’s God. We want to strive to emulate the character of God, not the character of Abraham or David. There are enough morality tale fables out there. The primary point of the Bible is not to tell us how to live morally; we have a conscience and can mostly figure that out on our own (Romans 2:15). The point is to tell us about who we are, where we come from, and most of all, who God is.
We shouldn’t make it sound like our lives are going to be like the lives of the figures of the Bible. I think we do this sometimes. We focus on the lives of people like Joseph son of Jacob and David, and how God rewarded them because they trusted in him through every obstacle. Even the story of Job ended with him receiving back double what he’d lost. The implication we often make — or that people draw from it — is that if we exercise that same kind of faith, we’ll be rewarded, too. But the focus of these stories is God, not us. The point of the life of Joseph son of Jacob, for example, is not, “Trust God like Joseph, and everything will be all right in the end.” The point is that God had a plan all along, and his plan was to set the stage for something huge for his people. But the part we play in his plan is not the same part Joseph played.
We should teach the history. During my first college class, my professor Dr. Rubel Shelly read from Sennacherib’s Prism, an inscription made by the Assyrian king Sennacherib. In one place, he talks about the siege of Jerusalem told about in Isaiah 35-38. Same story, two different points of view. That made it a lot more real to me. Dr. William Lane Craig, one of the foremost Christian philosophers and apologists of this generation, recently did a podcast where he mentioned how his assistant pastor showed a slide of a real first-century fishing boat during a sermon on when Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and showed a slide of a real Mesopotamian furnace for the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I try to do the same thing with my youth group; sometimes I’ll even show a Google street view of the location where the story takes place. I wonder how far making a practice of this would go in making it more real for children.
We need to live out the Bible every day in our lives. This is most important. Our children and students need to see clearly that our faith in God is what directs everything we do. We don’t try to live righteously because some stories told us to; we try to live righteously because we personally know the God that the Bible reveals. If we don’t take the Bible seriously, then neither will our children and students. If we do, they just might as well.
Of course, this is not a comprehensive list, and these thoughts are based on my limited personal experiences and observations. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any thoughts, or like or share!
