SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE
ANNUAL MEETING
NEW ORLEANS
Why don’t I want to go?
The SBL is the largest academic society dedicated to the academic study of the Bible in the world and one of the largest academic societies period. Thousands of people descend on some unsuspecting city every November for several days of scholarshipping, pontificating, correcting, going for dinner, going to receptions, going for beers, sightseeing, and other generally academic activities.
Why don’t I want to go?
I’m not presenting a paper this year, so I can’t get funding to go, but I do have enough in my professional supplement fund to pay for the thing without dipping into my life savings, conveniently accessible through my Visa card.
And since I’m not presenting a paper this year, I won’t be horribly stressed out and miserable, grind my teeth because of nerves, get a toothache and drug myself stupid and fret the whole time because I have writer’s block. And giving a paper.
None of that this year!
I think my burglar alarm is fixed so the kitties can’t set it off by accident when I’m gone. Like what happened last year.
It’s not as if there won’t be any papers worth seeing. No, exactly the contrary. There is a whole session on Myth theory and the Bible, and since that is the basically the topic of my new research project, I really SHOULD BE THERE. It sounds like fun and really educational!
Bible, Myth, and Myth Theory
11/23/2009 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Dexter E. Callender, Jr., University of Miami, Presiding
Robert S. Kawashima, University of Florida
Myth, History, and Apocalypticism: The “Archaeology” of Apocalyptic Thought (30 min)
Rachel Havrelock, University of Illinois at Chicago
Myth and the Map: How Genesis Orders the World (30 min)
Ida Frohlich, Pazmany Peter Catholic University
The Origin of the Evil in Biblical and Nonbiblical Myths (30 min)
Shem Miller, Florida State University
Myth in Genesis and Hesiod: The Catalogue of Women and Genesis 6:1-4 (30 min)
Brian R. Doak, Harvard University
The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Hebrew Bible, the Iliad, and the Ancient Near East (30 min)
There are tons of other good stuff too. Check out the various Program units for yourself, or search the whole Program Book.
Why don’t I want to go?
I think it all started with my very first SBL meeting (cue fadeout to *reminisce sequence* “In them days, you had to walk through the snow 15 miles uphill to get you complementary totebag…”).
It was in freakin DISNEY FREAKIN’ WORLD! I was rather underemployed and broke. Everything was expensive and I thought right from the start that it was pure madness. Some guy on the plane from Miami to Orlando was ingratiating himself to strangers, and if they were headed to the meeting he was foisting his CV on them, whether they agreed to take it or not. I wanted to go home before I even got there.
My hotel was miles from the site, and I had to take the (free and generally efficient) shuttle bus. Despite the inconvenience, this actually turned out to be a good thing since food onsight was so darn expensive (and hard to come by) that I would have starved otherwise. There was a convenience store just around the corner from my hotel so for the second day I stocked up on bagles and bottles of juice in advance.
I found the meeting terribly lonely, disorientating and frustrating, and I still feel that way now, even though the venues are a lot better (except for the fiasco at the Grand Old Opry in Nashville, I hated that one too). I don’t schmooze, mingle or network very well, and I don’t often meet a lot of new people. I always feel hopelessly out of place there.
Yet, everytime I decide I will give it one more chance and to really get involved with discussions and what not, I count my pennies, plan my classes around the necessary dates, book my hotel and by my ticket and then dig into the program book. But long before I find more fascinating sessions like the one I reported above I find something like this:
“Catastrophe Transformed: Suffering Together as the Dependent Body of Christ”
Program Unit: Christian Theological Research Fellowship
Margaret B. Adam, Loyola College in Maryland
For many citizens of the modern Western world, any direct encounter with suffering and mortality is a catastrophe. When directly touched by suffering and the reality of mortality, they feel they have been dealt a terrible blow, caught by surprise, struck out of the blue by catastrophe. Suffering and death may happen to other people with some regularity, but not to our family or to my body. Societal efforts to resist human frailty and finitude have succeeded so well that people have come to believe that suffering and death should not apply to them, despite every evidence to the contrary. Then, when pain does come, when life ceases to go according to plan, it seems unprecedented, unfair, and catastrophic. This modern autonomous self thus suffers the incongruously heightened vulnerability of an endangered illusory self-sufficiency, an illusion to which the gospel offers an alternative both truer and more fully human: baptized into the body of a suffering Lord, they unite in interdependence; their solidarity equips them to endure suffering; and their willingness to share the suffering of their neighbors obliges them to put their strength and resources at the disposal of others.
“MORE @$(^!%@!5!!!! FULLY HUMAN”?????
MY SHATTERED NERVES!
How can humaness be quantified like that? What kind of academic standards are at play here? Virtually none. Decades ago, it was acceptable to write of indigenous people’s religion and other cultural products as “primitive”, as not representing the full flowering of human potential or intellect. We don’t do that anymore because we know that it is a bigoted, shitheaded thing to do. But the “Christian Theological Research Fellowship” never flags this and this travesty become part of an academic meeting.
I wonder how I would fare proposing a paper that declared Dawkins’ view on life as “more fully human” than St. Paul’s? Or perhaps Islam’s than Buddhism’s, or mine than yours? Is there any kind of academic merit to making asinine claims like that?
This paper is not alone in sectarian chauvinism, although the abstract stands out for its sheer outrageousness. The SBL regularly lets a variety of other theological groups meet at its big conference and a number of its own sessions are doing theology, not studying it academically.
Here is an interesting session:
BIBLE IN THE EASTERN AND ORIENTAL ORTHODOX TRADITIONS
Now, this seems at first to be a sensible topic for academic discussion, but guess again. This program is not critically examining the Bible in Orthodox tradition but “will offer a forum for biblical professors and scholars from the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox traditions … to engage in critical study of the role of the Bible in eastern Christianity, past and present.”
Why must the study of the Bible in Orthodoxy be restricted to scholars who are orthodox? Are they special, or something? Is Orthodoxy somehow understandable only to its own members? Should the SBL really allow such segregation? This kind of B.S. (“Biblical Studies”, of course), that implies that only insiders can or should be experts is just the sort of ridiculous idea that an academic society in religious studies should strive to overcome, not entrench!
Here is one group that is given space at the meeting that only serves to clutter up the program with non-academics.
THOMAS F. TORRANCE THEOLOGICAL FELLOWSHIP
This distinctively Christian research organization is devoted to the exploration, development, and dissemination of the theology of T. F. Torrance and other theologians contributing to this endeavor. The society exists to promote and sustain fellowship and truth-seeking (fides quaerens intellectum) in theological reflection upon the Christian faith, within the mainstream of the Christian Church and tradition in light of the theological legacy of Thomas F. Torrance. We are a Christian Fellowship serving the Christian faith and the renewal of the Church of Jesus Christ.
Alright, examining the influence of Torrence’s theology on the church is a valid academic enterprise. But serving and renewing the Christian (or any other) faith is something that an academic society should have nothing to do with.
Another “favourite” section:
HOMILETICS AND BIBLICAL STUDIES
The Homiletics and Biblical Studies Section encourages dialogue among scholars in both fields who share an interest in critical exegesis, its various methods, and the unique hermeneutical and theological problems inherent to the relationship between biblical interpretation and proclamation.
Call for papers: Invited panel session: Preaching from the Psalms. Invited panel session: Preaching and the Personal: Prophecy, Witness, and Testimony. Open call: The Homiletics and Biblical Studies section is seeking papers dealing with the relationship between biblical interpretation and proclamation.
Once again, biblical “scholarship” is drafted in as a servant of the church. This is not scholarship at all, and least not at all of the same vein as Assyriology, Hebrew linguistics, the social sciences, and what have you. It is a situation that scholars of religion should study, not engage in.
There is a lot more that I think the SBL would be best to dump, too but I will leave it at that.
Well, it felt good to get that off my chest.
In sum, besides the loneliness, the thronging mobs, my poor sense of direction that get me hopelessly lost on the way to interesting sessions, the reason I don’t want to go to New Orleans is because of the perverse mixture of real academics and theology that goes on there.
In reality, the SBL is always be in the grey area between being a real academic society and a theological bazaar. What I would really like to have happen would be for the SBL to drop all the associations with theological groups, put an end to doing theology itself and to have the American Academy of Religion to do the same. They could hold a joint meetings, a lot smaller than the old monster meetings of the past but easier to manage and focused exclusively on secular study of religion. Alas, it will never happen.
So, what am I going to end up doing? I always tell myself to go to the SBL and have a good time, and when I get there I end up vowing to quit the SBL for good and starting my very own Society for Atheist and Agnostic Biblical Research. I figure funding might be secured by taking all my empty cans and bottles back for the refund, and then again after every meeting.
Of course, I don’t have to go the theology sessions, and no one chases anyone down the hallways trying to give them Jack Chick tracts.
But still, the study of religion is not the practice of religion. I’m not suggesting that believers cannot be good scholars. That would be a patently false statement. All I mean is that context determines content: at an academic meeting one talks academics, plain and simple. At a conference of theologians or pastors, then religious discourse is to be expected. To have the discourses merged and muddled is not doing the advancement of biblical scholarship any good at all.
I know this doesn’t bother a lot of people who are pretty secular in their outlook, but for whatever reason it bothers me, and it always seems that I get into conversations about it with most of the few people I meet. I don’t bring it up myself, but I’m often asked how I balance faith and academics.
All that being said, I have met some very decent people at SBL. I just get tired of having to justify myself to people who simply assume that there is no real conflict between theology and religious studies, or as it is often put, the Church and the Academy,. For a number of the people I get into such conversations with (or whose stuff I read online or elsewhere), their idea of the Academy is STILL one that is distinctly accommodating of theology and not fully secular at all. So I wander around trying to find a friendly face who wants to go for a beer…
I wonder if there are any hotel rooms left in New Orleans?
Don’t forget PART TWO
For those who want to read a bit more from people who think more or less along the same lines as I do (although not exactly), the SBL online magazine SBL Forum has published a few articles.
Michael V. Fox “Fox Bible Scholarship and Faith-Based Study: My View.”
Hector Avalos “The Ideology of the Society of Biblical Literature and the Demise of an Academic Profession.”
Avalos was treated to a rejoinder by J.D. Walters “Response to Avalos”, who, along with the Forum editors, heard from Zeba Crook
August 17, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Why not try forming some kind of informal group within the group? Since membership of the SBL must be rather large, there is likely many, many other like-minded folks. Then you can go to the sessions that hold interest, and plan a place or places to meetup with each other? Given enough folks you could probably arrange to attend various sessions together as well.
August 18, 2009 at 5:35 am
this discipline is starved of independent analytical thinkers. So many are group dependent and cling to a particular little social sub group which perpetuates its own rhetoric in isolation from the rest.
August 18, 2009 at 8:01 am
If his presence at the SBL is anything like as entertaining as this blog post, I think Dr Jim should definitely go to SBL for all our sakes!
August 18, 2009 at 9:27 am
Why thank you Mark. I usually just end up in sessions being very very quiet. In the good sessions (and there are lots of them, don’t get me wrong), I’m usually intimidated by the fact that other folk are asking not only intelligible questions before I can formulate one, but theirs are actually intelligent…
I won’t be able to to wear my Thor hat, though. I had to recycle it to make my Homer Simpson as Ganesh outfit…
Perhaps if my halloween costume for this year turns out OK. It will require learning to sew…
That is what the SBL needs, a damn good religious-theme party as a highlight to the meeting. I host our dept. Halloween party every year and it is a great success. We have had a Mexican aviator with well washed hands show up: Poncho Pilot. Our dept. library rep once came in a very nice black suit with a name badge and a sandwich board over his shoulders with the (completely accurate) card catalogue entry for the Book of Mormon.
August 18, 2009 at 10:13 am
you must go. we can hang out and make fun of people!
August 18, 2009 at 10:15 am
I do really want to see the Myth session and the social sciences sections. If the guy selling the creationist books is there in the book display, again, though, I might make a fuss.
August 18, 2009 at 10:17 am
http://jwest.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/jim-linville-must-attend-the-sbl-annual-meeting-this-year/
August 18, 2009 at 10:30 am
Steph,
I think you are right. A lot of the sessions I am really interested in submitting abstracts to are often closed and have invited papers only.
I would like to have a section on Biblical Studies and Comparative Religion (i.e., wider than the ANE). The way I look at it, the study of the Bible and ancient Israel should help people understand something of the wider human religiosity throughout history. Such an enterprise can certainly learn from how scholars see ancient Chinese religion, or even modern religious discourses and symbolic constructions. Likewise, scholars in these fields could probably learn a few things from serious biblical studies.
August 18, 2009 at 10:49 am
Absolutely. My undergraduate degree was in world religions and I was fascinated in the origins of spirituality and ‘primal’ religious traditions both of which I studied as well as eastern and western religions. I ended up studying Christianity – NT origins and earliest texts – post grad, because it was something I knew nothing about. But primarily it’s history I’m interested in. Sometimes, observing the blithering social sub groups, I wish I was doing this phd in a history department. I’m a little worried about going to the SBL this year. I think I’d quite like to be a fly on the wall. It will be my first American one… you should be coming to the BNTC in Aberdeen. You’ve got three weeks to book and pack. I know one of the sessions is on its last legs. You could inspire some enthusiasm for a new session there…
August 18, 2009 at 10:58 am
but of course you should go to the American SBL. It would benefit from your analytical and independent mind. You could break up a few of those social sub groups
August 18, 2009 at 1:30 pm
While I’m not an SBL member, you mention that AAR deals with many of the same issues, and I think on the basis of this analogy it’s fair enough for me to submit a comment.
In the end I can understand your frustration as someone working from a secularist methodology, but it’s absurd to act as if academic biblical scholarship or religious studies more generally has not been or is not open to theological approaches. That is, you’re making a fair enough point on the level of methodological dispute, but if you’re going to argue that theology in its dogmatic or even practical aspects isn’t academic scholarship, I don’t see how you can do so by simply defining it out of the picture. These modes of inquiry have been a part of academic cultures for centuries, and they continue to play an important role in academic work. You have perhaps by your very disapproval demonstrated that there is no universal consensus today about the place of theological work in the academy or in biblical studies in particular, but that’s far different from making any sort of meaningful argument against that work being properly academic, or appropriate at a meeting of SBL or AAR.
My sense is that you are operating on an understanding of “academic” that is a matter of significant dispute. Probably best to give SBL (or AAR) the benefit of the doubt and assume that they intend to be an academic society. From there, you can explain why you’re right about academics, all those other academics be damned. But don’t act as if everyone is on the same page as you on what constitutes viable academic work and then question who let the religionists in. That’s just lazy rhetoric.
Your perspective here reminds me a lot of Kurt Noll’s recent article about theology. I don’t know what’s with these secularist lashings-out of late, but they conjure up incredibly awkward pictures of someone presuming to speak for a whole room of people when they’re really only speaking for a vocal and rather tone-deaf clique thereof.
August 18, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Evan,
I can understand some of your objections to what I wrote, but only in a very watered down form. I am not proposing a monolithic kind of Religious Studies, but merely one that distances itself from the practice of any particular religion.
Many believers can and do participate in the secular study of religion and I do not mean to diminish their contributions or to drum them out of the AAR or SBL. I’m also not suggesting that theology is not an intellectual endeavour or that it is totally irrelevant to the scholar except as something to dissect (although Noll’s points in that regard are not entirely wrong). Theology, however, is not the same as secular academics and I think that although there are points of contact, the two are rather different enterprises.
How would you define the academic study of religion in practical terms?
Should the AAR and SBL invite work that investigates the Book of Mormon as a real (rather than just claimed) revelation on real gold tablets and that it reveals something true about how people should think about a real god? Should these societies welcome sessions that reconstruct poetics of “Reformed Egyptian” from Smith’s “translation”?
To my mind the projections of LDS mythology onto an “intellectual” landscape is not fundamentally different than the similar projections from mainstream Christian denominations.
But that is just me. Where would you draw the line, or should there be multiple lines, one for your preferred traditions and some for the others?
Should religious studies operate under different rules for the study of Christianity (and perhaps Judaism) than it does for the study of Buddhism, Taoism, the religions of the Pacific Islands or Japan, that of the Norse, the modern Blackfoot or the Celts or the modern Wiccans?
What you call “secularist lashing of late” are long overdue in biblical studies and, to a somewhat lesser degree, in the wider field of religious studies. They are not really “lashings” at all, but are justified calls for heightened academic standards. Academics is not served by a free-for-all or by preserving in-group privilege, and the latter seems to be what you are defending. The more secular the AAR and SBL becomes, the smaller they will become but the better able to advance work into all religious traditions on a more or less equal footing. At present it is a mess, a workable one (albeit frustrating), to be sure, but if part of their missions are to promote the secular study of religion, they are falling short of their potential. They cannot be all things to all people and that seems to be what they are attempting to be.
August 18, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I agree with you that calls for heightened academic standards are necessary, and in fact I’d agree with your initial post and its disappointment at the standard of some of the presentations present at SBL or AAR. I’d also agree that free-for-alls and in-group privileges do not push forward the goals of academic scholarship.
But one could assess the relevance or quality of a panel on Mormon theology and find it wanting without thus finding any theological approach whatsoever wanting. I’m not personally competent to make such an assessment, though theologians with the appropriate background surely are. And while I’m not familiar with the textual claims about Reformed Egyptian in the Book of Mormon that you reference, I imagine that such a proposal would be judged in the same way that any other textual reconstruction would be judged. If you’re talking about purely textual studies here, then I don’t see how the question of revelation or the truth of Smith’s claims to translation even come into the picture. There’s a difference between Mormon theology and text critical claims about Mormon texts. Both can be judged in a critical manner, and by the competent faculties.
Your question of whether religious studies should operate under different norms for different religious traditions is a good one to raise, and I don’t have an especially good answer. But again, my work is in Christian theology and I don’t presume to speak past my competence. My sense is that the SBL and AAR are academic organizations that operate in academic cultures where Abrahamic, and especially Christian theological work is much more prominent than theological work of other religious traditions. That’s a simple demographic fact of what different academic departments are and are not doing. That the panels at SBL or AAR reflect this mundane demographic fact doesn’t mean that theological reflection in non-Abrahamic religions is beyond the pale of appropriate religious studies. It’s just beyond the pale of most prominent academic institutions that make up the culture within which SBL/AAR operates, and so it is reflected in the conference program booklet.
August 18, 2009 at 4:21 pm
How would you define the academic study of religion in practical terms?
In practical terms, I think that it’s a shady affair to try to define the academic study of religion as if we’re talking about a particular scholarly discipline. The SBL and AAR are organizations that center around a particular object of study which is not unique to any particular discipline… theology, history, sociology, anthropology, and many other traditional academic disciplines involve academic examination of religion. While veritable disciplines are often defined around their object of study, it seems that “religious studies” (and many other of the “X studies” pseudo-disciplines) come to an academic culture already rather filled with older disciplines already considering these objects of examination along with many others. There’s nothing wrong with that, or with trying to identify religious studies as an intentionally interdisciplinary venture, but because this is the case it would behoove scholars of religion to recognize that fellow scholars of religion do not necessarily come from the same disciplinary background, are not necessarily concerned with the same aspects of religion as an object of study, and will not operate under the same methodological standards.
It’s a mess, I know. But trying to tidy up the mess by setting a secular standard for academic study of religion simply means that you’re creating a subfield within religious studies for particularly secular methodologies- you’re not defining to an any more helpful degree what religious studies is. I think that any cross-disciplinary venture like religious studies will inevitably be somewhat of a circus, and that a generous pluralism of methodology and disciplinary concerns is the best approach.
I don’t think that in pursuing something roughly like this approach, the AAR or SBL are trying to “be all things to all people”. Quite the contrary, I’m sure that their respective executive boards are not blind to the fact that large portions of the membership find the work of other large portions of the membership completely useless. What they’re after, rather, is to recognize and reflect the fact that religious studies is not a monolithic discipline but rather numerous disparate disciplinary ventures gathered around the broad phenomenal center of “religion” or “biblical literature” as a preliminary object of research.
August 18, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Perhaps it’s the same frustrations that have led Hector Avalos to call for an end to Biblical Studies as it is practiced.
August 18, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Qohelet,
It is very much the same. Although I tend to agree that biblical studies has to change radically I cannot at all agree that the true mission for biblical studies is to end the hegemony of the Bible in Western consciousness. I don’t think that that is the job for people wearing “scholar” hats. Of course, if scholars want to put on their “secular activist” hats, that is something else entirely.
Evan, Thanks for the long posts, its good to be made to think! I will get back to you on them when I have a bit more time.
Jim
August 19, 2009 at 1:15 am
‘…baptized into the body of a suffering Lord, they unite in interdependence; their solidarity equips them to endure suffering;’
This is a perfectly sensible scientific hypothesis.
If somebody gives me a 50,000 pound research grant, I would be quite happy to see if it is true that baptized Christians can endure suffering.
Actually, I would probably do it for a tenner.
Now where did I put my TENS units?
August 19, 2009 at 5:17 am
Wow, that hit a nerve! Quite apart from the inherent loneliness where the “pop stars” of biblical studies have their crowds of groupies bunching about them while I stand in line to eat alone again, SBL has turned into something strange in and of itself. I know the Orthodox Bible section folks because of my past Gorgias Press connection, and I can honestly say it is really not academic. It is more of a “the Evangelicals have their forum, now we want one too.” But would the Bible survive in academia without the religious peddlers? I’ve read Avalos with some agreement, but there is a world of difference when such things are written by a tenured professor and when they come from a lost Ugaritologist who’s only trying to discover if the truth is out there!
August 19, 2009 at 7:49 am
you guys crack me up.
August 19, 2009 at 9:11 am
Steph, Good to see another worldly religion person! I did such a degree (although my big project was on Joshua) at the U. of Alberta in Edmonton and I would really like to see more comparative religions done in the SBL. I had a great time studying at Edinburgh, even though the faculty of Divinity was physically and institutionally isolated from Religious Studies (although Nick Wyatt held an appointment in both). I was actually discouraged from visiting the big library with the Religious Studies books. That being said, I actually felt less out of place and less defensive about my own beliefs and lack thereof at the Divinity faculty of Edinburgh than I do at the SBL meetings (both the National and the PNW regional).
As for the BNT in Aberdeen, alas, our term starts too soon and I’m more of an O.T. kind of guy. None of that New fangled Testament thingee for this traditionalist (just look at Jesus: he’s a hippy).
Evan: Haven’t forgot about you!
Steven C. See the comment by Jim (the non-un-evil one) a few below yours. You could ask him how it feels. Of course, get the research grant first.
Steve W. I don’t think the real audience of secular biblical scholarship is specifically the religious crowd. Sure, they end up funding the blurry mess we have now and secularists profit from it, but really, the audience of biblical scholarship should be the crowd interested in world religions as a whole. I don’t think B.S. is integrated enough into that field of study and the huge amount of theology etc. that goes on is an impediment to it.
One thing I’ve found is that a lot of religious studies students don’t see the point of studying Western Religions (except Islam), either because they have some stupid idea that monotheism or Abrahamic religions are boring, or that to study them perpetuates the “damage” such religions have done to humanity – “damage” apparently not caused by the Eastern traditions- or that the fields are specifically religious in nature.
Many of the sub-disciplines within biblical studies certainly do not serve the purposes of understanding human religiosity in a meaningful way. Consider all the book published about developing new strategies of reading the bible in the post-modern era and so forth. It preserve the theologically based idea that the Bible is somehow special, unlike other corpora of ancient religious texts, that it is eternally relevant and so we must find ways of demonstrating that (Avalos talks a lot about this). No wonder many secular Western students feel more comfortable studying the Mahabharata and shun the Bible and, hence, Ugaritic material.
This is something I think secular biblical scholars need to address in a very serious way.
Jim (the non-un-evil one): What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… And, on going to SBL., a friend reminded me that New Orleans probably has a large number of Slinky Jazz Babes performing countless venues across the city. I am looking into that possibility.
August 19, 2009 at 10:32 am
Ha – my undergrad degree was at home in New Zealand. I fell into religious studies after studying music, sociology and psychology, art history and first year anthropology. Religion seemed to incorporate all of those. My main interest was origins of spirituality and history of religions and after eastern religions and Judaism my main focus was Islam (because I knew alot of Muslims). I avoided Christianity other than a brief introduction probably because I wasn’t Christian and felt far too ignorant about it but I got sucked in because I became was so fascinated with history and obviously so I wouldn’t remain completely ignorant. So then it became New Testament, biblical languages and Jesus. I’m fairly comfortable now with my ignorant agnosticism and even more obsessed by history. But Jesus a first century hippy? No more than a Jewish cynic. He was a first century apocalyptic prophet and exorcist who believed his mission from God was to bring Jewish people back to God but when he knew he had to die (but hopefully not actually have to) he knew it was for the salvation of Israel!
August 19, 2009 at 10:45 am
Oh yeah, I forgot.
August 19, 2009 at 10:54 am
yeah well it’s a theory – with more primary source material backing it up than the American Jesus seminar’s cynic.
August 21, 2009 at 7:13 am
Great post!
My feeling at the AAR is that it is about 45% Christian, 45% liberal universalist, and I’ve got to look hard to find the other 10% freakshow where I belong.
Evan, I’m curious: you say that competent faculties can critically judge theological work just like historical critical work, or whatever. I’d like to know what the standards are for the theologically competent faculties. If I said that the Holy Spirit (which is actually the fourth member of the trinity, not the third) primarily manifested herself in warm hugs these days, on what grounds would a theological faculty accept or reject such a claim?
August 21, 2009 at 8:24 am
You mention criteria of orthodoxy in the other thread as one possibility of where I might go by way of responding to you here. I would first like to say that were such criteria the basis of judgment for a faculty of theology, it wouldn’t thus present the situation of “anything goes” that you (and I!) fear. At least not any more than a law faculty that practices within the constraints of a particular tradition is arbitrary for working within a tradition- maybe not of orthodoxy, per se- but of rules of some sort or another, and rules that exercise some sort of legitimate force.
Different faculties will of course operate in different ways; one may hug a confessional orthodoxy quite closely while another may engage in a more correlationist mode of judgment. Others may for all intents and purposes operate as intellectual history- because doctrine is in many ways a thing passed on even if developed over time, the more pertinent question might be what Isaak Dorner or Charles Gore taught, rather than whether or not these teachings were true. I imagine that you or Jim would not have a problem with this sort of enterprise, and probably wouldn’t even call it “theology” of the constructive sort that you express weariness against. I’m fine with that- we can call it “history’ or whatever else- but it remains important to constructive work in theology, because theology isn’t simply a creative venture in imagining God’s qualities, but also a textual engagement with past thought. This work belongs in a theology department as much as the history of philosophy belongs in a philosophy department.
The Barth-Harnack dispute is also always worth raising as a caution, however. You’re right that in many cases the competence for judgment of theological work falls outside the realm of what might be broadly considered as properly academic or scientific, and this presents problems when scholars from across the academy decide to gather for a yearly conference (much less co-exist within an academic department together on a day-to-day basis). But I would submit that in this case my previous point about academic cultures comes in. Even if Barth went on to write a Church Dogmatics and insist upon constructive theology as a basically ecclesial enterprise, the boundaries between this community of discourse and others is rather porous. Academic work clearly goes on at religious institutions as it does at secular institutions- accreditation doesn’t stop at the door of denominational schools simply because they function under denominational norms. To say that something isn’t properly critical under neo-marxist norms, then, is fair enough, but the question needs to be asked whether these (or the denominational norms themselves, to be sure!) are adequate to judge what is legitimately academic for the whole of the academy, or for a particular area of study such as biblical literature or religion. Theological approaches are currently widely acceptable (if not accepted) practice, and it strikes me as inadvisable to play culture-wars on AAR/SBL turf, rather than simply publishing the best research possible and leaving it to the continued discourse to continue to establish what is proper academic work. One needn’t go on a witchhunt of “tenured radicals” simply because they’re radical any more than one needs to exclude theologians because their critical work is informed by theological criteria. Rather, we contribute to and exclude from the academic dialogue based upon critical standards within and across methodological boundaries. And hopefully, we’re all the better for it (even if a bit frustrated by the oddball presentation or the glut of books that don’t interest us in the publishers’ booths).
August 21, 2009 at 9:04 am
Evan, I may of course be misreading you, but it seems to me like you’re assuming something like this: we all have different (and relatively autonomous) discourses we’ve inherited and in which we are situated. Some are working within a Barthian discourse and some are working within a neo-Marxist discourse. The standards of one are not fit to judge the other, and vice versa, so the academy should have some sort of live and let live policy toward other discourses. This doesn’t mean that the academy is without standards, only that there are multiple (relatively autonomous) sets of standards. This view seems reminiscent of Christan Smith’s Moral, Believing Animals, in which he suggests that when we pass beyond foundationalism, we just have different worldviews, and there’s no way to justify one over the other—so one will be just as good as another.
Again, you may or may not be assuming such a view; I think I’m not entirely wrong in detecting something like that in your comment.
The problem, for me, is that this is relativist, and it denies that one discourse is better or worse than another. It’s like Richard Rorty’s ridiculous suggestion that all we have is unjustified ethnocentrisms bouncing off of one another.
Although I’m not a “foundationalist,” I strongly resist this sort of relativism. Some perspectives are better than others.
August 21, 2009 at 9:21 am
If I said that the Holy Spirit (which is actually the fourth member of the trinity, not the third) primarily manifested herself in warm hugs these days, on what grounds would a theological faculty accept or reject such a claim?
Presumably you wouldn’t make this claim in the form that you present it here (and hopefully you don’t think that theologians make such bald assertions!). Were your above claims submitted for review by a theology faculty, I imagine they would receive similar treatment as the following would in the appropriate faculties:
“Sublation acts upon one concept rather than two, and primarily manifests itself in a complete preservation of what came before with no subsequent development”
or:
“Law is the decisions of legislators but not of judges, and primarily manifests itself in various societal perceptions or reactions to these decisions”
All of these claims are perfectly interesting (if perhaps odd, unsubstantiated, wrongheaded, or simply confused), but it’s difficult to move forward in even beginning to talk about how a faculty would deal with them simply given these examples… at least difficult to do so in a way that’s obviously objectively critical without employing the grammar that is already established for a particular academic discourse, and which is already not universally known, accepted, or a matter of much concern for other academics, including many working on studying the very phenomena with which the above faculties are concerned.
August 21, 2009 at 9:35 am
The problem, for me, is that this is relativist, and it denies that one discourse is better or worse than another. It’s like Richard Rorty’s ridiculous suggestion that all we have is unjustified ethnocentrisms bouncing off of one another.
This is a fair critique to make… I would note that I acknowledged that even the most communally-centered academic theological discourses are porous, and beside that I mentioned other examples that intentionally were not so cordoned off from other disciplines. I’m not trying to assert a live-and-let-live environment, at least not a strong assertion of this, one that lacks any interdisciplinary codes of conduct whatsoever.
But I would also want to be careful not to invest too much in “academic” status or assume that the work of academic communities, if ultimately pluralist and centered on various different norms, thus require some sort of basic unjustified and relativist free-for-all of what can be determined to be true. Academic disciplines do not have a monopoly on inquiry into the truth, and they are not exclusively committed to such inquiry either. Much of what is important for academic work is ancillary or related to establishing a knowledge of reality, but this does not mean that we should regard these related matters as the be-all and end-all for receipt of knowledge. Just because the forward movement of these various inquiries can appear a bit of a circus does not mean that knowledge of any sort of truth about reality need be (or that such knowledge need be the sole or exclusive responsibility of the academy).
August 21, 2009 at 9:53 am
Yes, I don’t think you were suggesting that academic discourses are isolated one from another; that’s why I said “relatively autonomous” rather than “autonomous.”
About the other stuff; I simply cannot understand how you can justify the inclusion of ANY supernatural claims in the academy.
August 22, 2009 at 4:01 pm
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