October 28 1996

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Evangelicals like their sermons tidy and their Bible studies messy. The typical evangelical sermon takes a text and tells the congregation what to believe and how to live.

But Bible studies, those family-room gatherings with six to eight people discussing a passage from an assortment of translations, are untidy times when authorial intent rarely intrudes and free association reigns supreme. That's not the way it's supposed to be, perhaps, but that's the way it is.

Bill Moyers, journalist and former Southern Baptist pastor, has now dressed up that untidy Bible study group for public television. This month, pbs stations across the nation have begun broadcasting a ten-part series of discussions of the stories of Genesis, discussions that could happen in any living room if you had access to the nation's most respected (and notorious) religion scholars, theologians, and novelists.

Moyers invited evangelicals, liberal Christians, Muslims, Jews, and even a few nonbelievers to engage the meaning of the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, the Call of Abraham, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, and so forth. He had hoped to include some fundamentalists, he told ct, but the ones he talked to seemed so eager to defend their doctrine of Scripture that they couldn't focus on the meaning of the stories.

Those whom Moyers rated as evangelicals, however, were able to pitch right into the discussions. Three of them had Fuller Theological Seminary connections (ethicist Lew Smedes, New Testament professor Marianne Meye Thompson, and former Fuller faculty member-former Eastern College president—current World Vision board chair—current Presbyterian pastor Roberta Hestenes). The one non-Fuller evangelical was Eugene Rivers, pastor of ...