Hermeneutics and Teaching Children

Here is an interesting post by John Walton about children’s Bible curricula.

If we are negligent of sound hermeneutics when we teach Bible to children, should it be any wonder that when they get into youth groups, Bible studies and become adults in the church, that they do not know how to derive the authoritative teaching from the text?

He identifies 5 common and easily avoidable mistakes. The fifth I found particularly convicting:

Focus on people rather than God: The Bible is God’s revelation of himself and its message and teaching is largely based on what it tells us about God. This is particularly true of narrative (stories). While we are drawn to observe the people in the stories, we cannot forget that the stories are intended to teach us about God more than about people. If in the end, the final point is “We should/shouldn’t be like X (= some biblical character)” there is probably a problem unless the “X” is Jesus or God. Better is “we can learn through X’s story that God . . .”

Read the whole thing at Zondervan’s recently launched koinonia blog.

Related posts:

1. Some Examplary uses of Bible Software
2. Web 2.0 for the “Local” Church
3. Use Ubiquity to Listen to the Bible Online
4. Ubiquity Command for the Westminster Bookstore
5. How to Type in Greek Part I: An Introduction to Unicode

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