I have been telling my students at Boston University that the pictures they hold in their minds are important. They shape the way we interpret the world and our experiences. As a result, it's important to check their internal pictures against reality.
Quickly, picture the Pilgrims in your mind's eye. What are they wearing? The picture most of us will come up with is a group pressed in black with white cuffs and ruffles. The women will be wearing bonnets and then men will be wearing ridiculous tall hats with, of all things, belt buckles. We've seen them depicted like this often. Yet, they never dressed that way in reality.
In reality, they wore shirts and pants and dresses (the women anyway) in solid colors. Yes, they liked color. They wore single colors because they had not been able to bring looms over yet. The men wore hates, but they were mostly stocking caps. A few wore floppy brimmed hats. The women wore bonnets when they worked to keep their hair clean.
Where did our modern picture come from? The nineteenth century to be exact. The picture was created about the same time our modern picture of Santa Claus was formed. Both wore buckles because people thought they were quaint at the time and they looked good on greeting cards. The Pilgrims must have been especially quaint. They got an extra buckle on their hat.
Many of you were taught that people opposed Columbus' trip across the Atlantic because they thought the world was flat and they would fall off. I think this picture originated from a combination of lazy teachers and American cartoons (curse you Bugs Bunny). In fact, we have known that the world was round (or roundish) since the ancient Greeks. The math had long been worked out. The reason people opposed Columbus' expedition is that they thought his numbers were wrong, that he thought the world was too small. They feared his crew would starve. They were right. Columbus' math was extremely off. If there hadn't been an extra continent sitting there,that Columbus knew nothing about, his crew would have died.
The one that really bummed our students had to do with the Vikings. What do you think of when you think of Vikings? Helmets with horns of course! Yet, there is no evidence that Vikings ever attached horns to their headgear. I blame opera and, again, Bugs Bunny.
These are not earth shattering revisions, but they point to bigger things. How many of our pictures are wrong? Do you see Thomas Jefferson as a strong Christian? Do you know that he rewrote the New Testament and cut out the miracles of Jesus because he did not see Jesus as divine? Most Christians think their eternal future is in some etherial, and very Platonic, heaven while the Scriptures tell us we will be resurrected bodily to live together on a restored earth. This last, false picture has often led to a godless approach concerning our stewardship of God's creation and toward our investment in community.
Cultural pictures are strong, and our culture has volumes to say about Jesus. Most of these pictures were formed as an attempt to reform Jesus into our own image. If we don't replace these pictures with truth, then we are setting our students up for failure.
We need to be proactive in this and avoid reaction. Reactions have led to teaching about environmental stewardship, social justice, and science that are as atrocious as they are anti-Biblical.
I know I have been influenced by the pictures my culture has given me. That is why I continually seek to be transformed by the renewing of my mind (Romans 12:2). I then have the responsibility to pass that knowledge on (2 Tim. 2:2).
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