When we try and understand the Bible and how it brings together the stories and experiences in it, it can be helpful to consider how we share stories and experiences in our own time.

Consider historical Australian events, such as the Gallipoli campaign or more recently the COVID pandemic. Accounts of these events include not just lists of facts, but also personal experiences and reflections on what they meant for different people in the community. The meaning of these events certainly depends on the factual details, but in the telling we often move beyond the accuracy of each detail to the broader truths that each person, and the community in general, holds about them.

Dr Margaret Carswell (pictured) is a senior lecturer at Australian Catholic University specialising in the teaching of Scripture. She argues that when teachers and students approach the Bible they should approach it with this in mind.

‘It is absolutely critical that in understanding what the Bible is that people understand the significant gap between the events the Bible talks about and the time and manner of the recording of those events’, Dr Carswell says.

Where meaning is made

This gap is crucial, as she argues, because the gap is the space where meaning is made. In the past the gap has been explained as essentially a process of whispering between the event and the recording, where it is conceded that no account can be truly factually accurate but where connection to factual accuracy remains the critical criterion.

Instead of being an impediment to truth, an embarrassment to be explained away, Dr Carswell suggests that the gap is precisely where the truth to be conveyed emerges.

‘The gap is actually one of meaning making’, she says. ‘It’s the gap between an event and our considering it, thinking about it, standing around and looking at each other and thinking “what the hell just happened to us”, and how am I different for having lived through that experience.’

Dr Carswell says something of this dynamic can be seen in the very personal process of eulogy writing. She came to discover this herself writing the eulogy for her own mother.

‘As a eulogy writer I become a curator of a whole lot of information, experiences, stories, a whole lot of things from my mother’s life which I then select from with immense love, commitment, insight and a deep sense of knowing. And I do that to share what I have come to know about my mum with a whole group of people.’

The truth of scripture

So, what does this means for those educating students about scripture?

‘We need to embed in religious educators’ heads, and indeed hearts, that the Gospel writers are curators, they are not report writers’, says Dr Carswell. ‘That means that the truths they are telling us are still truths in the way the Church talks about them, but the truths are not the factual details.’

This allows us, for instance, to accept as true the last words of Jesus set out by each of the four Gospel writers, each one different from the other, without engaging in a debate about the factual accuracy of any one claim. These are writers grappling with the meaning of Jesus’ life in the context of their community. Indeed, we will find ourselves feeling part of each of these different communities, and so in need of the Jesus revealed to them, at different times in our lives.

To be able to express and share this process with credibility in the classroom, religious educators need to understand and have deeply experienced the meaning making for themselves. Religious education then becomes a space for that ongoing interpretation and understanding of meaning. Students become a part of the interpretive process that began with the communities of the Gospel writers.

This carries with it, of course, the risk that we could ‘get it wrong’, and that happens, but it is the only intelligible way into the faith story. That possibility of ‘getting it wrong’ is significantly mitigated by the application of biblical interpretive skills that the Church has developed and shares with the faith community.

Space to engage with text

One of the issues in religious education Dr Carswell sees is where certain pieces of scripture are ‘fitted’ into the curriculum, without an understanding of the relationship of those pieces to the whole text.

‘In religious education we have typically made scripture the instrument of the curriculum, so the curriculum outcomes drive our use of the text. We proof text, sometimes to the point of using single verses.’

This approach of using individual verses or passages to prove a point takes away the need to understand and interpret because we have already arrived at a view of what the text means in the context of some unit of study. The full meaning, and so the truth of the text, is obscured.

Such an approach obviously cuts across the possibility of students discovering the meaning of scripture themselves, and for us as community, as Church, now.

‘Good teaching will allow the students to bring their own lens and experience to the text’, Dr Carswell says.

Especially in an increasingly religiously disengaged culture, care must be taken to ensure that the text is not simply dryly analysed but is treated as sacred text, inviting the reader to know God. This is, as Dr Carswell suggests, the core thing religious educators need to be attuned to.

‘They won’t come to know the God that our Gospel writers loved and wanted us to know unless we allow them to sit with those Gospels. We need to provide opportunities of retreat, of reflection. If we don’t allow our kids to love with a passion what they have heard they won’t know God at all.

‘They’ll know the story, they’ll pass the tests but somewhere along the line they have to have an experience, an encounter, for themselves, where they feel at the feet of Jesus, and it becomes a part of them.’