context of an ongoing affirmation of the Bible's importance and significance

in the contemporary world. We hope to encourage students not to give up on

biblical interpretation because of the Bible's complexity, or because of the

historical abuses of the Bible (for instance, to justify slavery or the Crusades).

We want to salvagethe Bible for those who have nearly abandoned it (and we

do have some students in this category), but who come to our courses giving

the text one more chance. We want students to be able to leave their college

experience with some confidence in how to approach a text, read and

understand it in context, and discover what it has to say to us today.

6. We hope students learn to acknowledge their own interpretive biases,

the way in which we all read the text through our own distinctive lenses.I

was once teaching a Sunday School class (a study of each week's Gospel Herald)

when I learned of another class starting next door at the same church. The

other class was a study of women in church leadership, and the teacher of the

class began by saying he wanted everyone to come into the course leaving

their baggage at the door -- their preconceptions about this issue, their social

locations, the fact that they were men or women, their life experiences, their

education, ideas which came from their culture, and all other notions which

had shaped them. Having left that baggage behind, the teacher said, they

would simply look at the Bible, and see what the unadulterated Scripture had to

say to them on this issue.

When I learned of this approach, I thought, "What an unfortunate

deception! It's impossible to leave all of these things at the door."Instead,

when I teach a Sunday School class -- or one of my courses -- I want people to

bring their baggage in with them. Together we open up that luggage, and we

place it out in front of us on the floor. And over the term we sort through the