My most recent audiobook is Therese Huston’s Teaching What You Don’t Know. I’m currently in the middle of chapter 3.

Huston says clearly what many academics know but do not talk about: most professors teach outside their areas of expertise. (The exceptions that prove the rule are specialist adjuncts with professional careers outside the academy and senior research professors who acquire grant money to farm out the courses that they don’t want to teach.) Very few professors are willing to talk about this state of affairs for fear of being “exposed” as inadequate. Adjuncts and junior professors who feel job insecurity most acutely are unlikely to raise their hands and say, “I don’t know anything about this course that you’ve given me.”

Here I come to it: my fall semester at Erskine College looks amazing, but I have to admit that there is one course more daunting than others.

Huston has inspired me to be more transparent about my sense of “teaching what I don’t (yet) know.” To that end, I want to tell you about a few books that I’ve recently picked up as I grope in the dark toward becoming a better teacher of things that I have never known before. I hope my process will be encouraging for some of you.

What I Have to Know, to Teach

I’m currently slated to teach the following in the fall semester of 2025:

1. Old Testament Literature and Interpretation
2. World Christianity
3. Johannine Literature
4. Christian Theology—Structures and Concepts
5. The Ancient and Old Testament Worlds (an Honors Institute round-table seminar)

I really have been trained as a generalist in theology and biblical studies, so I already feel a degree of confidence about designing #1, #4, and #5. I’m looking forward to writing more about them later in the year.

Re: #3, I’ve studied Johannine literature in depth (both in seminary and in doctoral studies), but I’ve never thought about how I would squeeze the Gospel according to John, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and the Apocalypse into an undergraduate course. Over the past couple of weeks I have done some research that has given me at least a sense for what textbooks to use and an overall approach to the course. More on that below.

Re: #2, I was not quite sure from the title World Christianity what the course would involve. When I looked at the catalog, I knew that I was very much out of my element:

This course examines the state of Christianity in the global context. It explores the remarkable expansion of Christianity in the global south (Africa, Latin America, Asia) and the ongoing eclipse of Christianity in the industrialized West (Western Europe, North America). The historical background as well as the theological, cultural, and sociological implications of this shift in gravity for the Christian community will be explored.

I know a fair amount of church history and historical theology, East and West. I am strongest on the late antique and Renaissance-Reformations periods. (Call me a “Protestant” if you will.) I can speak a bit about early American religion. But apart from a few short-term missions to India and Kenya, I know almost nothing about present-day Christianity in the “global south.” That is, until a few weeks ago! And I’m looking forward to learning a lot more as I teach this course.

What I’m Reading to Learn, to Know, to Teach

Christian Theology—Structures and Concepts

I used the course on Christian Theology as a prompt to read something that I had wanted to read but hadn’t made time for: the second edition of Robert Letham’s Holy Trinity. This book was well worth the effort, and it was very edifying. I won’t assign it as a textbook, but it has given me more historical-theological grounding than I had before.

I bought but have not yet listened to the audiobook of Herman Bavinck’s Wonderful Works of God. I read this book straight a few years ago (and I also “read” it at breakneck speed in seminary), and I am so excited to return to it with students. Even though it does not look like a conventional textbook, I trust that Bavinck will be an excellent guide for us all.

Johannine Literature

I have revisited Vern Poythress’s Returning King, which is written simply and is well suited to undergraduates. I will likely use it as one of the textbooks for the course. An added benefit is that students will not need to purchase it because Poythress has made all of his books and articles open access (one year after publication) on his website. You can find The Returning King there. I recommend this book as a non-technical introduction to the Apocalypse/Revelation.

I got an exam copy of Andreas J. Köstenberger’s Theology of John’s Gospel and Letters. It’s good. Köstenberger is solid, anyway. The organization of the book is mind-numbing and ill-suited for an undergraduate course. Frankly, the organization is not suited to any course that I can imagine. But I think that I can learn to navigate it well enough to help my students get something out of it.

I also got an exam copy of J. Scott Duvall’s Theology of Revelation. It’s fine. It doesn’t have the organizational problems of Köstenberger’s volume in the same series. Still, I think students will get more bang for their buck from Poythress’s Returning King, which is simpler and shorter and very solid. I’m still thinking through this one. I need to read more of Duvall’s work.

For Sunday reading, only incidentally connected, I’m working my way through G. K. Beale’s New Testament Biblical Theology again. (I “read” it in seminary so quickly that I learned virtually nothing from it.) I’m not reading this one for work, but I know that it will inform the course on Johannine Literature. As a bonus, because of Beale’s focus on the “storyline” of the OT, the first five chapters of it will also be helpful for the course on Old Testament Literature and Interpretation! A “win-win-win”!

World Christianity

I rifled through other people’s syllabuses for what to do to get started with World Christianity. That led me to Philip Jenkins’s Next Christendom, to which I recently listened in audiobook format. The third edition is a little dated now (2011), but it furnished an excellent orientation. I’d like to get my hands on something similar yet post-COVID. But Next Christendom at least gave me a sense for what students might be doing by the end of the semester. I’m currently thinking about blending the course concept into my own interest in hermeneutics. If I do that, students might combine their research about Christianity in various regions with distinctive applications of the Scriptures in those regions. Maybe.…

Following Next Christendom, I listened to another book that I found on someone else’s syllabus: Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. I really enjoyed this one and would recommend it to anyone interested in religion in America. I don’t think it will be useful for the World Christianity course, but I have basically decided to use it in the spring semester’s Religion and Contemporary American Culture (yet another course that I had no approach for teaching before now) alongside Carl R. Trueman’s Strange New World.

More Than the Textbook

The reading above is a mix of me looking for textbooks and me getting my feet wet.

One of the things that Huston emphasizes for “content novices,” professors like me in a World Christianity course, is the backward design process. Backward design is deciding what students should do or have done by the end of the course as the main guide for designing the course as a whole. Figure out the “ends”—both stated goals and the assessments tied to those goals—and then choose the “means.” (The way I design courses is actually much more iterative, but the backward design principle is still there.) It is generally a good way to approach course design; however, it is harder to imagine for a course whose learning goals and outcomes are beyond my own experience. But Huston insists that backward design can be done for content novices, and that doing it will relieve a lot of the burden of feeling like I need to “cover” a lot of things that I don’t know. It gives focus and coherence where content novices like me might otherwise be tempted to dump everything that they are learning on students, as we are learning, out of anxiety and fear of being discovered to be an impostor.

This summer’s reading should help me get to a place where I can figure out what I want students to be able to do, even if my reading doesn’t end up being the “textbook” that students use in the course.