In Search of a Children’s Bible

It’s now been thirty years since the publication of my book, Offering the Gospel to Children, which included a chapter on children’s Bibles entitled “The Distorted Canon.” In that chapter I spoke of the “subtle but genuine disjunction for most American Episcopalians between their idea of ‘the Bible’ and their experience of the Christian life through prayer, liturgy, and the community of faith.’” This disjunction has not lessened in the decades since I wrote those lines. 

The books depicted in the illustrations are among my personal favorites, either because they come closest to meeting the criteria below or because they have beautiful illustrations or other outstanding features . Several are out of print but (thanks to the internet) are not hard to find second hand. Later in this article I will briefly review another recently published children’s Bible.

New children’s Bibles come on the market every year, and those published in the US nearly all reflect an evangelical-fundamentalist approach to scripture. And even those originating in the “progressive” churches or the much more ecumenical European publishing environment, reflect a certain tradition surrounding the framing of sacred story for children that arises from the nature of the Bible itself—the fact that only part of its story arc appears in its original texts as narrative; the rest is embedded in other literary forms that are much harder to translate for children.  “Story Bibles” for small children are bound to limit themselves to the best-known narratives of scripture; the real challenge occurs when a writer and illustrator set out to recast the “whole Bible” in a form more accessible to young readers than the thousand pages of text that is the printed Bible.

The Reader’s Digest Bible for Children is, in my opinion, hands-down the best for reading aloud to a group. The text is simple and dignified and the illustrations superb.

As I wrote more than thirty years ago,

[T]he heart of the Scriptures is a continuing pattern of exile and return, of loss, hope, and restoration, of new life out of renunciation and death.  And it emerges not only from narrative, but from prophecy, psalm, and hymns; from vision and exhortation; from parable, image, and metaphor. …

The prophecies of Second Isaiah and Ezekiel, the poetry of Lamentations and the psalms, the love affair of the people of God with Jerusalem, their anguish at her destruction, and their hope of her renewal forge the link between the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, make intelligible the figure of the Messiah, inform Jesus’s parables and sayings, and gloss the visions of Revelation.  The church turns to these scriptural images in prayer and supplication, in awaiting the Savior and celebrating his coming, and in the paschal season at Tenebrae and the Great Vigil of Easter.  It is these strands of Scripture that lie behind much of Jesus’ own spirituality. … 

Gretchen Wolff Pritchard, Offering the Gospel to Children, Cowley Publications (Rowman & Littlefield), 1992, p. 43

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To look closely at the selection of scripture represented in the lectionary, and echoed in our prayers and hymns, and to contrast that canon-within-the-canon with the table of contents of almost any children’s Bible, is to see how deeply rooted is this disjunction between “the Bible” as an artifact and the Bible as it is actually proclaimed in the historic liturgical churches.

The Augsburg Bible narration is paraphrased directly from scripture, with very little editorial intrusion. “My Very First Bible” by Lois Rock is one of the best choices for very small children.

As I struggled to embody, in my own storytelling for children, a way into scripture that was true to the church’s liturgical heritage rather than the evangelical and cultural “Bible,”[1] and to explain, in a workshop setting, what I meant by “liturgical storytelling, I came up with three defining features:

• Narrative, image and metaphor are allowed to speak for themselves, to stock the hearer’s imagination with tools for struggling with questions of faith, hope, love and witness.
• The story is presented not simply as a vehicle for concepts about God and precepts for behavior, but as autonomous, irreducibly strange, and powerfully formative in the life of a remembering and worshiping community.
• Episodes from Scripture are not offered in isolation as absolute paradigms for the human encounter with God, but in context, within the whole story of Scripture and salvation.

These three criteria seem to me to be basic requirements for a children’s Bible not to fight against the understanding of scripture that underlies the historic liturgical churches.  Yet even for the minority of published children’s Bibles that explicitly arise out of that tradition, very few seem able to meet them. 

The majority of children’s Bibles simply leave out almost everything between the story of David and the post-exilic stories of Daniel, Esther, and Jonah, before jumping straight into the New Testament.  And in the New Testament they effectively reduce the Good News to a series of episodes about a special man who, long ago, wonderfully fixed the personal problems of individuals, then died and went to Heaven.

Underlying it all is the almost insurmountable difficulty, already described, of finding a way to boil down into a coherent narrative the enormous body of obscure, repetitive, prolix, jumbled, oblique, archaic, violent, troubling, yet often breathtakingly beautiful and spiritually seminal material that fills the Hebrew scriptures after the relatively straightforward, relatively easily condensed, narrative from Genesis through the First Book of Samuel.  The majority of authors of children’s Bibles barely even try to tackle this basic challenge: they simply leave out almost everything between the story of David and the post-exilic stories of Daniel, Esther, and Jonah, before jumping straight into the New Testament.  And in the New Testament they do the same: selecting only the narrative, they effectively reduce the Good News of the Gospel to a series of episodes about a special man who, long ago, wonderfully fixed the personal problems of individuals who were lucky enough to cross his path, then died and went to Heaven.

The DK edition is thorough and factual, excellent for a child more interested in history and archaeology than in emotionally stirring images. The Children of God story collection emphasizes diversity, with pictures by many different illustrators in different styles.

And so the vast majority of children’s Bibles feature a radical, baked-in distortion of the message of scripture, in both Testaments.  Omitting the non-narrative material in the New Testament—the images from the Epistles and Revelation of the glory of the Cross, of baptism and adoption, of the Body of Christ, the Communion of Saints, the Lamb that was slain—distorts the reader’s concept of Christ as Savior and Lord just as much as the omission of the Exile and the prophets and the psalms distorts the Old Testament.

Equally common in many children’s Bibles is a pervasive distrust of the capacity of Holy Scripture to speak for itself, and of the capacity of the child to be captivated by it, without the intervention of a didactic narrative voice, explaining, mediating, justifying, and instructing.  A moment’s thought will lead us to observe that no other storybooks for children do anything of this kind; it is our anxiety around how children will respond to our sacred book that drives authors to this unique narrative approach.

These are the same book, from Lion, retold by Murray Watts and illustrated by Helen Cann. One of the most complete and richly imagined Bibles for children. The strength of the illustrations is almost enough to compensate for the somewhat pedestrian and didactic text.

The most obvious form of this intervention is when the narrator explicitly packages each story as a lesson or a fable, and supplies a summary or a prayer at the end of each chapter or episode, to direct the reader how to feel and respond. More subtle, but equally closed-ended for the reader, is the widespread tendency of compilers of children’s Bibles to radically alter the narrative genre of scripture.  Nearly all Bibles for children obscure the characteristically austere and enigmatic style of ancient narrative by adding details and dialogue, and explaining and judging the characters’ motivations (often including the motivations of God).  This reframing of ancient stories into a more “realistic” world, typically described as “making them come alive,” then creates unnecessary cognitive dissonance when the stories veer off into the miraculous or supernatural. 

Even more problematical is the increasing tendency of children’s Bibles (especially, but not exclusively, those coming from the American evangelical subculture) to liven up the story with features drawn from the world of contemporary children’s media—TV, comic books, and goofy children’s humor.  This is of a piece with the devolution of so much evangelical worship into an entertainment mode, of pastors being lionized as “cool” and “awesome,” of children’s programming and VBS packaged as “adventures” and “fun.”

The Biggest Bible Story Storybook, by Kevin DeYoung, illustrated by Don Clark. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022, 528 pages. Pictures downloaded from the publicity for the book.

Does “best-selling author and dad” Kevin DeYoung really believe that the story of the Magi is improved by these additions?

And find him they did. And when they did, the Bible says they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy! That means they were really, extremely, super-duper happy. … Then the wise men gave Jesus their three gifts.  No dinosaur toys or video games or building blocks to play with, just gold, frankincense, and myrrh. (p. 290)

This selection is from a brand-new, very ambitious children’s Bible, more than 500 pages in length (and weighing over three pounds), with saturated-color, highly stylized illustrations on every page.  It is organized into seven sections: “The Pentateuch,” “History,” “Poetry,” “Prophets,” “The Gospels,” “Acts and Epistles,” and “Revelation.” Yet the while the “Pentateuch” section includes a chapter on “The Daughters of Zelophahad” (Numbers 27:36), the “Poetry” section contains only one psalm, Psalm 23, which is recast in jingly rhyming verse.  And throughout the book, all the stories, in every genre, are filtered through the “dad” voice of the narrator:

Years later, God brought Elijah to heaven in a whirlwind with chariots of fire.  Pretty cool.  Even cooler—the next time Elijah would show up on a mountain, it would be with Moses as they point to an even better prophet, Jesus, God’s own Son. (p. 170)

Every chapter ends with a prayer, wrapping up what the narrator wants the reader to take from the story, including an explicitly supersessionist theology in which everything in the Hebrew scriptures is framed as having the sole function of pointing to Jesus. The illustrations are striking, though the palette of purple, orange and green, combined with the frequent use of white-fonted text on dark-colored page backgrounds, can feel claustrophobic after a while.

Some years after formulating those three criteria for “liturgical storytelling,” I realized there should be a fourth:

• The story is not just told once, but again and again, and incorporated into the participants’ and hearers’ hearts and bodies through ritual, prayer, and sacrament.

This fourth standard is not within the power of author or artist, but is the responsibility of the family and community in which that book is given to a child.

Indeed, serious consideration of this fourth criterion brings up an interesting question about our models for transmitting our scriptural heritage.  It is self-evident that this goal—of incorporating the story into our hearts and bodies through ritual—can be met much better for children by liturgical catechetical models such as the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, Godly Play, Beulah Land, and Diddy Disciples, than by any conceivable children’s Bible or collection of Bible stories in book form.  And it’s worth noting that the very idea of encountering Scripture through private individual reading of a book, rather than hearing it read aloud in the community gathered for worship, is still a relative innovation in the history of Christian life:  before the Reformation and the invention of printing, any such experience was limited to clergy and monastics, who alone had the language and literacy skills and the access to the precious, hand-copied text.

“Explaining” faith in Christ happens far more organically and authentically through prayer and sacrament in community than through the intrusion of an anxious or controlling or condescendingly “cool” didactic voice between the reader and the text.

As the Ethiopian eunuch said to Philip, “How can I understand what I am reading, without someone to explain it to me?”  And especially for children (but really for all of us), “explaining” such mysteries as the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ happens far more organically and authentically through prayer and sacrament in community than through study alone or through the intrusion of an anxious or controlling or condescendingly “cool” didactic voice between the reader and the text.

There is certainly a place for children’s Bibles, especially in the lives of bookish or introverted children, and children whose exposure to the gathered Christian community is limited by a lack of interest or commitment on the part of the adults in their lives.  But the evangelical dogma that the Bible alone (sola scriptura) is sufficient to convey the depth and breadth of the plan of salvation to an inquiring reader, underlies the assumption that the text and pictures of a children’s Bible should comparably bear the entire weight of introducing and explaining the Christian story and the Christian faith and the Christian life to a young reader.  And it is this assumption, compounded by the challenges of distilling more than a thousand chapters of unwieldy text into a form that is accessible to children, that has led to the typical problems and distortions we find in these volumes.

© 2022 by Gretchen Wolff Pritchard.  All rights reserved.

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[1] See my storytelling materials, Beulah Land, and especially their introductory material.