Professing in the Postmodern Academy: Faculty and the Future of Church-Related Colleges

"Academic" vs. "Confessional" Study of the Bible in the Postmodern Classroom: A Class Response to Philip Davies and David Clines

“Academic” vs. “Confessional” Study of the Bible 169 What constitutes academically sound and ethically responsible education in Bible in the postmodern, church-related classroom ? I approach this question in earnest, as a scholar of Hebrew Bible and as a teacher—for eight years of undergraduates at a church-related college and now of seminarians at a denominationally affiliated institution.1 While for most of my own intellectual journey the supposed clash of “faith” and “learning” has been a nonissue (the critical study of scripture enriching my reading of it), I believe that current challenges to the enterprise of faith-informed scholarship, particularly the issues raised by ideological criticism, are substantive ones. My goal in this chapter is to review and to respond to some of those challenges, a task I consider imperative for my own ability to function honestly and responsibly in my institutional context. OLDER NOTIONS OF THE COMPATIBILITY OF “FAITH” AND “LEARNING” Numerous scholars have offered diachronic surveys of the evolving conception of the compatibility of “faith” and “learning ” in the development of Christian higher education. Noll’s scheme, for example, traces an ever-deepening estrangement “Academic” vs. “Confessional” Study of the Bible in the Postmodern Classroom: A Class Response to Philip Davies and David Clines JULIA M. O’BRIEN 170 JULIA M. O’BRIEN of the church and the academy. While Puritan ideology perceived the world’s wisdom as consistent with biblical orthodoxy , such that Reason (the questionable) was compatible with Christianity (the given), the Revolutionary Generation, under the influence of what Noll terms a “conservative Enlightenment ,” reversed the formulation, such that Christianity (the questionable) was seen as compatible with Reason (the given). While Samuel Quincy could posit that “Christianity is a rational religion,” the new emphasis on the Rational and the Real signaled a change in education’s ultimate allegiance.2 In Noll’s outline, it was the synthesis of these traditions, combined with a staunch belief in America’s destiny and in individual freedom, that produced a “Protestant Newtonianism ” in which God-ordained laws could be studied by human reason. The reorganization of higher education at the end of the nineteenth century, however, posed the greatest challenge to church-related institutions. The impact of Darwinism, greater emphasis on vocational training, and the adoption of the German model of “electives” within the curriculum brought to higher education a new emphasis on scholarship and professional credentials.3 Other surveys complement Noll’s schema and elaborate upon late twentieth-century developments. Welch’s history of the development of religious studies highlights the years 1945 through 1970 as an “Era of Expansion” in the field, spurred in the secular arena by the Supreme Court’s Schempp case decision in 1963, which permitted teaching about religion “when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education .”4 Similarly, the Report of the Task Force for the Study in Depth of Religion identifies the 1960s as a watershed in the development of this secularized discipline: “Faculty set out to design cross-cultural, interdisciplinary studies in religion, without sectarian bias.”5 The Task Force’s Report notes with approval this “objective” model of teaching religion: Whatever traditions are studied, furthermore, the methods of study are appropriate to the modern university and differ markedly from the various venerable practices of textual study, self- “Academic” vs. “Confessional” Study of the Bible 171 interpretation, catechesis, and spiritual reflection that have developed within many of the religious communities themselves.6 While the Task Force advances the necessity of an empathetic understanding of the religions being studied (the report maintains that students must understand two traditions well in order to exercise proper comparative work), it argues against understanding religions from an internal perspective: Though they [students of religion] pay close attention to the selfinterpretations of religious communities, along with other aspects of their belief and practice, they do not privilege these self-interpretations in their own understanding of these communities.7 POSTMODERNISM AS SAVIOR The equation of religious studies with the objective observation of religious phenomena has certainly in rhetoric, if not reality, served as the self-description of the field within the modern university—a place where commitments to the material studied have no academic or intellectual value.8 Such a paradigm clearly challenges the very basis of church-related colleges and seminaries, institutions generally founded by persons of faith and attempting, in various ways, to meet academic standards in the context of...