Saturday, June 04, 2005

The hoodwinking of Catholic Bible scholarship

One of my deep disappointments with Catholic biblical scholarship of the last 50 years is how deeply and uncritically enamored it so quickly became of the whole secularized Liberal Protestant "historical-critical" tradition. Many Catholic Bible scholars since the Second Vatican Council have fancied themselves "liberated" from the "schackles" of an "embarrassingly ill-informed" and insular "rigid scholasticism" and have, for the past few decades, been bending over backwards, as if making up for lost time, to ingratiate themselves with the tyrannical fashion poodles of the secular protestant Bible Game Show. Thus they have rushed precipitously to the circus, hurling themselves over one another to be the first in line to sell their birthright for a mess of bad pottage. How desparate they have been for kudos from their secularized Protestant peers and mentors! How desparate to please their circus trainers and play to the audience at the notoriously agnostic Jesus Seminar (pictured left in New York). -- All together now: "Let's Demythologize & Deconstruct!"

The uncritical and cavalier ebullience with which Catholic Bible scholars (like Dominic Crossan, right) have unwittingly hurled themselves headlong into an abyss is breathtaking in its presumption. I have no quarrel with any Catholic Bible scholar wanting to be "well-informed" or make use of the "best available tools of contemporary research." The problem is the degree to which what counts as "well-informed," and what counts as the "best available tools of contemporary research," has been pervasively coopted by the liberal Protestant establishment and contaminated by assumptions imported from secular naturalism -- assumptions stemming from the Enlightenment as well as post-Enlightenment movements whose pre-theoretical commitments are deeply inimical to the Catholic tradition and Christian worldview. What is most ironical about the eagerness of Catholic biblical scholars to jump on this bandwagon is not merely the fact that the bandwagon's music is brazenly anti-Christian, but that it is such bad music -- the biblical theological equivalent of Anton LaVey lyrics in a setting by Marty Haugen. It doesn't take a sophisticated ear for "the ring of truth" to discern what is wrong here. Anyone acquainted with a little history of philosophy should be able to see that the jig is up.

The degree to which vestiges of a discredited and unsupportable logical-empiricist (positivist) epistemology continue to infect current scholarship can be seen in the continuing recrudescences of fact/value, history/faith dualizations such as appear in the well-schooled discourse of contemporary scholars. When speaking of Jesus, they refer, for example, to "what strict historical veracity suggests," in contrast to images "projected in the Gospels" by means of the New Testatment writers and their "theological imagination." But who and his presuppositionless army is going to justify his presumption that he is conclusively well positioned to tell us what "strict historical veracity suggests"? Who has a point-of-view-from-nowhere? And by what warrant will he presume to demythologize the account of Jesus given in the Gospels?

No less typical are statements such as this: "Reconstructing the Jesus of history by definition never takes us beyond the pre-paschal Jesus." Says who? Oh, I must have forgotten: those tyrannical fashion poodles. But why should one buy what they're selling? What, beside a dogmatic adherence to a residual Humean skepticism about the possibility of anything supernatural occurring in history, should lead anyone to reject the historicity of the post-Paschal Christ of Faith? Nothing. The dichotomizing premises underlying such "scholarship" are supported by nothing but western liberal bourgeois academic prejudice. The emperor of the liberal Bible Game Show wears no clothes. Why would anyone want to be caught dead bowing and scraping before him?

Try thinking outside the "fashion poodle" box, for once. Try reading, for a change, something that challenges your uncritical acceptance of the "Jesus-history-fact" vs. "Christ-faith-myth" bifurcation, like C. Stephen Evans' The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative As History (Oxford U.P., 1996) ... unless such a demolition of your history/faith dualizations would blow your circuits. Then, if you can handle the spadework, dig into Roger A. Johnson's classic, The Origins of Demythologizing (Leiden: Brill, 1974) -- which, unfortunately is currently out-of-print, though surely available through a good library (remember those?).

Additionally recommended reading (much of it online):
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