Oklahoma Christian University is introducing a new core curriculum this fall which will increase required Bible class hours from 12 hours to 15 hours and the course material for the general education Bible courses will be entirely different. To learn more about the changes to the general education curriculum, click here.
This is the second new curriculum for the Bible Department in recent years. In the fall of 2022, the Bible Department launched a new course collection for freshmen revolving around the pursuit of a good life. These courses ultimately did not fulfill the university’s mission to its fullest extent.
Provost Brian Starr elaborated on the unmet needs of the former curriculum.
“The introductory freshman course was really designed for people who might not have had any exposure to Christ and the Bible. It was emulating a course that’s deployed at some other universities that’s just designed to take a person who has no familiarity with Scripture and say, ‘Here’s what the philosophers would ask: What is the good life? And how does Jesus answer that question?’” Starr said. “Well, that’s not a bad idea in and of itself, but we’ve got a lot of students who do have some background in Christianity. We’re in the Bible Belt, and we’ve got a lot of students who are ready to dive straight into the Bible and don’t need we’ve got some other students who don’t know the Bible at all, and we needed to get them back to the basics of Scripture before we look at these elective courses like Christian family or Christian personal finance.”
Dean of Bible Jeremie Beller also spoke to the concerns of the former Bible core.
“Then there were concerns from the board about our Bible core, and they asked us to go back and to evaluate it. Some of the concerns were, ‘Are we teaching enough Bible? Are students learning scripture and the story of Scripture?’ There are a lot of important conversations happening, but some of those conversations can’t happen if you don’t even know the story of Scripture,” Beller said.
Three new courses, Israel and God’s Kingdom (Old Testament survey), Jesus, the Church and God’s Kingdom (New Testament survey) and The Christian Life in God’s Kingdom (New Testament ethics), are being introduced to help students “articulate the Christian story.”
“Israel and God’s kingdom, we will begin talking about Genesis one and two and the creation… The creation story is pretty significant in showing who God is and what God’s expectation for creation is. You’re also going to talk about, how did we get in this mess? The Christian story explains that in the narrative of the Old Testament,” Beller said. “And then you see this, this plan of God working to redeem a broken creation. He does that through a series of covenants, covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham, the covenant with David. We’re going to follow those stories as God is being revealed in this storyline and is being revealed throughout the Old Testament.
If you read the Old Testament, by the time you get towards the end, we’re waiting for something else. This covenant question is still hanging out there. And so we want that first class to lead us up to Jesus, the need for Jesus and the questions that Jesus is going to be answering,” Beller said. “Then your spring semester, your freshman year, Jesus, the church and God’s Kingdom shows how Jesus fits into that storyline, that he is the answer to all the problems, all the issues, his identity, his teaching, his ministry, and why the the story of Jesus, the resurrection, is at the heart of our Christian faith, and how the early Christians were trying to live that out in their context.”
Beller explained why there will no longer be a senior Bible capstone.
“One of the justifications for saying, ‘Let’s move that down to more of a sophomore type class.’ And besides, we have often heard students say, ‘I wish I’d been introduced to some of this stuff earlier,’ which some of the reason it hasn’t been introduced is because there’s other groundwork that has to be done, which we’re trying to do in those freshmen classes,” Beller said. “But we also don’t want to introduce a bunch of questions just as we’re sending you out the door, we want to introduce questions that continue the dialog during your time at school.”
Starr discussed how the increase of Bible courses decreased other general core material.
“Oklahoma State Higher Regents requires six hours with a lab for all the state schools, but we’re not a state school. We require 15 hours of Bible that no state school requires, and so you’ve got to make some adjustments somewhere,” Starr said. “And that seemed a logical adjustment. So if you’re a journalism major, if you’re a Bible major, do you really need more than one science course? And we decided as a faculty, you don’t have to have it.”
Beller expressed the importance of Oklahoma Christian’s students graduating with a robust knowledge of the Christian story.
“This is our Christian story. Everyone needs to be able to articulate it. Everyone needs to be able to put it together. And our job and responsibility of the Bible faculty is to do that in a way that is engaging and helps students see the practicality of it,” Beller said. “It’s not just the story of creation. It is how God created us and what God intends for us. It’s not just the series of covenants historically, it’s the story of God moving to redeem things and inviting us to be a part of that, and well rounded Christian education students ought to be able to articulate that.”
0
0
Be First to Comment