Not a Bible Professor? You Still Need to Be Biblically Literate

A few years ago, while serving as an academic administrator at a Bible college, I sat across from a graduating senior in our business program for his exit interview. He loved his professors in the major, and he loved his Bible and theology courses. He’d gotten a lot out of both. Still, something was missing. His business faculty hadn’t shown him how to connect the two departments. He left discouraged.

He wasn’t alone. Over about three years of exit interviews, I heard some version of the same thing from many graduates outside our biblical studies programs. To be sure, we’d given these graduates a close-knit community, faculty who mentored them well, and serious study of the Bible. But we had failed to keep one important promise: to help them bring those things together so that graduates could enter their fields as people formed by Scripture.

Their professors were capable and caring experts. Yet arranging this connection for their students called for something more than their own graduate programs likely had included.

That preparation needs to begin with the teacher’s own formation. Professors at Christian universities, Bible colleges, and theological seminaries start from different places, but the need is the same.

Biblical scholar Dru Johnson offers a useful distinction. Biblical literacy, as he describes it, means knowing what Scripture contains and how its parts work together.¹ Biblical fluency is the ability to enter the world of Scripture and faithfully extend its principles to new questions. Literacy, then, comes first. By reading Scripture deeply over time, literacy grows into fluency. As it matures into fluency, biblical literacy shapes you, your field, your students, and your institution.

Here are five reasons biblical literacy matters for every professor.

1. Biblical literacy shapes your own discipleship
2. Biblical literacy puts Scripture at the center of your field
3. Biblical literacy trains you to teach within the world of Scripture
4. Biblical literacy teaches students by your example
5. Biblical literacy strengthens your institution’s mission
Where do we begin?
Conclusion

1. Biblical literacy shapes your own discipleship

Whatever else we are, those of us who work in Christian higher education are first and foremost disciples of Jesus. Biblical literacy serves that calling before any other.

The Apostle Paul gives the Church of Colossae a simple charge: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16 ESV). For us, that Word comes chiefly through Scripture. “To dwell” is to make a home, and “richly” means in abundance. Paul pictures Christ’s Word settling into our lives over the years as a family settles and fills every room of a house, from the kitchen table to the study.

Borrowing a term from Christian educator Roger Erdvig, we might call this immersion: the steady habit of reading Scripture through which literacy grows (Josh 1:8; Ps 119:11).² And because it’s the Word of Christ, biblical literacy aims not merely at knowing more about the Bible but knowing, loving, and imitating him.

2. Biblical literacy puts Scripture at the center of your field

Most of us have seen it happen. A class opens with a thoughtful devotion and prayer, then moves into a lecture that leaves both behind. Students meet faith and learning back to back, but never together. Or a verse gets pulled from its context to decorate a point, a practice we call proof-texting.

Early in my own teaching, I displayed a slightly different problem. I resisted opening class with a devotion at all because I couldn’t see how it would connect to the day’s material. I knew my Bible well enough. I just hadn’t learned to think with it yet.

Faculty developer Paul Kaak points out that Christian colleges hire faculty for their disciplinary expertise, and many professors begin teaching with far more training in their field than in Scripture.³ For many, biblical literacy has yet to be learned.

Thankfully, it can be—and so can the fluency I was missing. Over time, Scripture starts to inform even the foundations of your field: what counts as knowledge, what human beings are, and what your discipline is for. This is biblical fluency, the Scripture-centered form of what many schools call faith integration.

3. Biblical literacy trains you to teach within the world of Scripture

Kaak offers the example of a cybersecurity professor asking what safety means in a field that emerged long after the Bible’s last book was written. (The Apostle Paul, as far as we know, never had to reset a password.) Kaak suggests starting simply with a search of Scripture for the word safety and then moving to larger themes: protection, trust, and discernment.⁴ I would add vulnerability to his list: Ever since sin entered the world, we have lived in fractured societies where “thieves break in and steal” (Matt 6:19).

That move from word study to theme, and from theme back to the field’s own questions, is what fluency looks like. Fluency, in Johnson’s terms, means entering the world of Scripture. Through that world runs one true story, the drama of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. The church’s long tradition of interpretation, from the early Church Fathers and Mothers to the Reformers and beyond, then helps us read each theme faithfully, though it never replaces the text itself.

A professor who teaches from these themes can present security work as care for the people who depend on a system, and can frame each decision about access and risk as an exercise in discernment. The technical content loses none of its rigor. If anything, students gain more reason to pursue their subject well.

4. Biblical literacy teaches students by your example

Teachers tend to pass on what they themselves have been equipped to see. And students notice what we do with God’s Word more than we might think.

After more than a decade of teaching history and theology at Bible colleges, I saw this most clearly during a course I taught on the Bible in America. My students were upperclassmen with their Bible surveys and hermeneutics classes behind them. Together, we read Civil War-era sermons side by side with the passages they cited. North and South read the same Bible with seemingly equal conviction, reached opposite conclusions, and defended them doggedly—all the way to the battlefield. The defenders of slavery were wrong. They justified enslaving people made in the image of God. But even many opponents of slavery refused to recognize those same image-bearers as equals.

In both cases, my students discovered, culture had guided the reading of Scripture more than either side would admit. That realization unsettled many of my students. It also taught them that faithful interpretation takes discipline, humility, and a community of readers to help us see past our own moment.

Faculty report that students now enter college with less biblical grounding than earlier generations, so what they see modeled matters all the more.⁵ Fluency shows in what we say about Scripture, but just as much in the questions we ask, the emphases we choose, and the room we leave for students to bring their faith into the discussion. Students absorb it from the people they watch, much the way an apprentice learns a craft at a master’s side. Your students will learn to read Scripture the way they see you read it and engage with it.

5. Biblical literacy strengthens your institution’s mission

I have studied at both a Bible college and a Christian liberal arts college, and I now work with institutions across Christian higher education. In both settings, I’ve been encouraged to see a fresh attentiveness to mission. At Christian and Bible schools alike, that mission begins with Scripture, and it’s made visible by faculty fluency in the classroom.

Biblical fluency enables professors to connect the Bible and theology to every program so that students don’t have to figure out on their own how their Bible courses bear on their major.

Yet as education scholar David I. Smith observes, it’s entirely possible to hold strong Christian convictions and still teach in ways those convictions leave untouched.⁶ A nursing professor’s conviction that every patient’s days are in God’s hands (Ps 31:15) ought to shape both what she teaches about end-of-life care and how she teaches it, down to the way she has students practice speaking with a grieving family. Someday her students will sit at the bedside of a dying patient, and that patient will receive the school’s mission as care.

The same is true of every discipline, from accounting to music. Biblical fluency enables professors to connect the Bible and theology to every program so that students don’t have to figure out on their own how their Bible courses bear on their major. Schools already treat faculty outside biblical studies programs as essential, and fluency shows why: These professors carry the school’s Scripture-centered mission into every major.

Where do we begin?

How, then, do we begin to achieve biblical fluency?

Fluency appears after years of immersion. Kaak observes that faculty typically need three to five years of intentional development before they teach this way with confidence.⁷ That may sound like a tall order, but the first steps are modest.

• Start by reading whole books of the Bible in one sitting. As Johnson puts it, “Gulp, don’t sip.”⁸
• Then read through the whole Bible, and read it through again.
• Keep good reference works close at hand, such as commentaries and Bible dictionaries, so your questions lead to answers.

Some of this may seem almost too basic to mention. But simple isn’t the same as easy, and most of us—I’ll speak for myself—still have some gulping to do.

And don’t do it alone. Read and talk about Scripture with colleagues across your campus, Bible and theology faculty among them. The Word of Christ dwells richly where believers, filled with the Spirit, teach and admonish one another (Col 3:16; Eph 5:18–19).

At the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE), our Leadership Academy has launched Inhabiting God’s Story, a microcertificate learning path in biblical and theological literacy. It’s free to faculty at every ABHE member institution and includes Logos Bible study tools built into its courses. It lays the groundwork for future courses aimed at cultivating fluency.

Conclusion

I wish that business student had had a professor who could show him his field from within the world of Scripture. Your students can see the same thing in you. The Apostle Paul gives the Colossians a charge that applies to every discipline we teach: “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17).

Share your thoughts

In what ways does Biblical literacy make a difference in teaching, even outside of Bible and theology courses? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Resources for further reflection

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• Theology of Work: How and Why Our Work Matters to God

1. Dru Johnson and Joan Huyser-Honig, “Dru Johnson on Bible Literacy, Fluency, and Engagement,” Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, July 7, 2023, https://worship.calvin.edu/resources/articles/dru-johnson-bible-literacy-fluency-and-engagement.
2. Roger C. S. Erdvig, Beyond Biblical Integration: Immersing You and Your Students in a Biblical Worldview (Summit Ministries, 2020).
3. Paul Kaak, Academic Faith Integration in Christian Higher Education (Center for Academic Faithfulness & Flourishing, 2026), 12.
4. Kaak, Academic Faith Integration, 23–24.
5. Logos and Association for Biblical Higher Education, 2026 Academic Bible Engagement Report (2026), 28.
6. David I. Smith, On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom (Eerdmans, 2018).
7. Kaak, Academic Faith Integration, 34.
8. Johnson and Huyser-Honig, “Bible Literacy.”