sometimes lead to greater distancing before they evolve into deeper levels of

faith.

10. We hope that students will respect, and even love, the Bible.I

believe firmly that we can critique and challenge and still respect and love

others, and we can do the same with Scripture. As professors, we try to model

lives and perspectives which raise the tough questions, but do so within the

context of a deep commitment to biblically grounded faith. We do not worship

the Bible, but we discover the God whom we worship in its pages. We hope we

can inspire in students confidence in the integrity and goodness of the

biblical tradition, and that we can model for them a faith which suggests that

the Bible can stand up to honest, searching questions.

11. Finally, our vision would be that students -- even while

approaching the Bible through critical, scholarly lenses -- could also maintain

or develop an ability and a commitment to use the Bible devotionally.Perhaps

we don't work on this enough in our setting, or at least not in the classroom,

where we focus less on personal edification and more on faithful academic

approaches to the text. And perhaps in the midst of discovering new

methodologies for reading the Bible, we lose sight of Scripture's simple

meaning.

But we need not burn our scholarly books, nor discard academic

methods of interpretation, nor discount the insights gleaned from careful

analysis of the text. Our books and our methods are all essential, I believe. But

we trust that students also will read the Bible, at other times, purely for

inspiration and edification, or that they can hear it read aloud, and can feedon

it in public worship. Early Benedictine monks, whose spiritual disciplines and

scholarship were admirable, essentially memorized large portions of Scripture

by hearing and repeating it daily. Sometimes they were known as the