"15 years from now half of the universities that exist will be bankrupt and in some fundamental way facing extinction"
[Jim]I saw something on FB about some old Pillsbury alumni discussing taking “The Christian Family” college class. Observation .. is that really a college level class? I feel the same about NT and OT introduction.
When I was a Freshman at Faith, I took a class called “The Family.” In that class I learned the four rules of communication, and I still remember them 20 years later:
- Be Honest
- Keep Current
- Attack the Problem, not the Person
- Act, don’t React
I think an emphasis on life skills as they relate to the family is important in the life of every believer, and I support the need for this class. Is it a college level class? I don’t know, but I never would have gotten the information in that class in a high school class from my public school, so…..
As for NT and OT introduction, I think those classes are vital, because not every student grew up in a Christian home, born in the church nursery, had daily family devotions for 19 years before getting to Bible college. I needed those classes to fill in the gaps in my knowledge about the Bible.
I agree with Steve Picray’s comments about OT and NT Introduction courses. In addition even church kids from a Christian family such as myself were deficient in our general Bible knowledge. I also found general Bible Survey courses to be quite helpful, and the content did include some introductory issues with each book of the Bible covered.
Also, in Seminary, the titles OT Introduction and NT Introduction were(and are, depending on the Seminary) somewhat misleading(not intentionally I presume, probably a need for brevity). I took one semester of Seminary at BJU back in 2004. One of the classes I took was New Testament Introduction. For that class the only item required to learn and memorize regarding actual Bible information was the content of the New Testament. The majority of the class dealt with issues of Introduction, such as principles of Textual Criticism, a survey of liberal critical theories and their key developers(men such as Bultmann, etc…), and issues of authorship, date of writing, and geographical origin of each book of the New Testament. All in all, definitely worthy of a college or seminary level class.
Now, students are taking classes like Apologetics and Worldview (some Christian high schools may also have this now), Church History, or Hermeneutics, all of which I would have found useful, among others. I think that, like in other subjects, there should be Bible placement tests that would allow testing out of the the “basics,” if they are already sufficiently mastered. This way a Christian college can keep the introductory Bible courses for those that need them, but would allow further challenging study for others who already have a strong Bible background.
Of course, had my Bible Study or NT or OT classes included things Jeremy mentioned like principles of textual criticism and other more advanced topics, then I think they would have definitely been a good university-level followup to what I learned in high school.
Dave Barnhart
Maybe they should look into being able to “test out” of these introductory Bible courses for kids like you who already knew the material.
Or they could just give everybody in the class a “pretest” to see how much they know about the Bible, and if you get above a certain grade, you automatically pass the class.
Discussion