The Bible - U, PG or not Fit for Children?


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The actor Christian Bale claims that he won’t let his daughter read the bible. Bale, who plays Moses in the forthcoming Exodus: Gods and Kings, believes the Bible is too violent for young minds and I can’t help but wonder if he has a point.

One Christmas, when I was eight or nine, I was given a Children’s Bible for Christmas. I wanted a Six Million Dollar Man action figure but I got a bible. This bible had pictures on every page and was written in fairly simple language so I thought I would be okay and I started reading it in the same way that I read any other book, from front to back, page by page in chronological order. In Sunday School we had been told that reading the Bible every day was good for you and at first it was pretty exciting for in the first few pages we had the world coming into being, a terrible flood, violent family squabbles and Joseph and his amazing coloured coat (though I missed the songs in the Bible version).

It was not long, however, I started questioning what it all meant. In particular I was concerned about who God was because in the Exodus story he was someone who sent plagues and drowned people without mercy. I remember thinking back to the story of Noah and wondering how a loving God could decide to kill almost everyone and everything. One day I dared to think that the God of the Old Testament was not a nice person and that thought frightened me. This was not something I was supposed to think and I wondered if a lightning bolt would fly  out at me from the sky. I took comfort from the fact that such an event was pretty rare although one of my grandad’s cows once got struck. Maybe the cow was a liberal.

In the end my enthusiasm for reading the whole Old Testament ran out. Leviticus can do that to you when you’re nine years old. I jumped to the New Testament but unfortunately one of the first characters I encountered there was the devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness. Sadly there was a picture. The devil was bright red with yellow eyes, horns, cloven feet and a tail and rumour had it that he was real. Somehow I was drawn to that picture time and time again, and even when I closed the book that devil ran riot in my imagination, not as a fictitious character in a story I was reading but as a real possibility living in my own neighbourhood and scarier than my teacher (who come to think of it had a similar hairdo).

By this point you might be thinking that I am in total agreement with Christian Bale but I have another memory of childhood, of standing in church and singing what was then my favourite hymn:

God has given us a book full of stories,
Which was made for His people of old,
It begins with the tale of a garden,
And ends with the city of gold.

There are stories for parents and children,
For the old who are ready to rest,
But for all who can read them or listen,
The story of Jesus is best.

For it tells how He came from the Father,
His far-away children to call,
To bring the lost sheep to their Shepherd—
The most beautiful story of all.


It sounds more like 1877 than 1977 but I really liked that hymn. There was something very comforting about it that was echoed in Sunday School classes where we heard stories of selflessness, love, and forgiveness. As they years went by I became increasingly impressed by the fact that the message of Jesus emerged from such a hostile, violent society. Appreciation of context is a big teacher.

So where do these mixed memories leave me? Literacy experts tell us that just because a child can read the words of a sentence doesn’t mean he or she understands it. How any person makes meaning from a text is affected by many factors including family relationships, cultural values, what that person has read in the past and what they hope to get out of reading.  I don’t advocate banning children from reading the bible because there are many wonderful, rich and positively life-changing things to discover there but there are also troublesome waters that are best not navigated alone.

My Children’s Bible was a well-intended gift but I am more grateful for those people in my childhood who pointed towards a love that was bigger and better than any book. Perhaps for any child such people should be seen, initially at least, as a more important tool of biblical literacy than the book itself.







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