Bible

About this course

Tenth grade organizes the year around questions rather than around the storyline. The Old Testament unit opens with theodicy and works through the psalms of lament, Habakkuk's complaint, the biblical meaning of shalom, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, Israel among the surrounding religions, and the exile as national theodicy. The New Testament units compare the four Gospels as four deliberate portraits, then move through Paul's Christology, Romans, Galatians, Hebrews, the letters of John, and Revelation read as the unveiling of Christ rather than as a puzzle. The Bible study strand is largely systematic and biblical theology: the doctrine of God and the Trinity, the doctrine of Scripture including inspiration, inerrancy, and canon, the doctrine of humanity and the image of God, plus hermeneutics, genre, word studies, translation philosophy and how the King James Version came to be, and the difference between devotional reading and academic study. The character strand covers the classical spiritual disciplines, including prayer, Scripture intake, fasting, solitude and silence, service, and hospitality.

The most distinctive unit is worldview, which is essentially comparative religion. It examines secular humanism, Marxism, postmodernism, New Age spirituality, Islam with its Five Pillars and the specific point where it and Christianity cannot be reconciled, and Hinduism and Buddhism, and it also turns the same tools on the Anabaptist tradition itself, asking your student to identify its distinctives and then honestly evaluate where it may overstate or understate biblical teaching. Apologetics covers the cosmological, ontological, teleological, and moral arguments, the minimal-facts case for the resurrection, manuscript evidence, and presuppositional method.

The course is 180 lessons across 15 units, one per school day, at about 30 minutes each. A typical lesson is roughly 400 words of dense theological prose with the King James text cited throughout, and about half the lessons add a written assignment, often a one- or two-page research summary or a memory verse. Every lesson ends with a ten-question multiple-choice quiz that grades itself. Expect real writing this year beyond the quizzes, and expect your student to encounter other religions described accurately in their own terms before the course explains where it disagrees.

What the course covers

• Theodicy, lament, and the wisdom books: Job, Ecclesiastes, Habakkuk
• The four Gospels as four portraits of Christ
• Systematic theology: God, Scripture, and humanity
• Hermeneutics, biblical theology, and translation philosophy
• The spiritual disciplines: prayer, fasting, solitude, service, hospitality
• Church history from the age of martyrs to the twenty-first-century global church
• The Reformation, the Radical Reformation, and the Great Awakenings
• Apologetics: cosmological, ontological, teleological, and moral arguments
• Comparative worldview: humanism, Marxism, postmodernism, New Age, Islam, Eastern religions
• Ethics: life and bioethics, war and peace, sexuality, economics, and creation care

What your student will be able to do

• Give a biblically grounded response to the problem of suffering
• Organize scattered biblical teaching into a coherent doctrine
• Compare the emphases of the four Gospels and explain why they differ
• Describe another religion accurately in its own terms before responding to it
• Evaluate a tradition, including your own, against Scripture with honesty
• Write a short research summary and a reasoned Christian response to it

Scope and sequence

All 15 units of Bible for Grade 10, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 180 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 180 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.