Secularization, Objectivity, and Enlightenment Scholarship: The Theological and Political Origins of Modern Biblical Studies

In Verbum Domini, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI addresses some of the dangers of the “secularized hermeneutic” often present in modern biblical criticism.¹ This is a topic that has long remained close to his heart as he has exhorted Catholic Bible scholars to study the roots of the methods they employ.² The academic study of religion and modern biblical studies in the university share a common origin, namely, the purported quest for objectivity.³ Both scholarly disciplines came of age in the nineteenth century, and especially in German universities. Thus, it should come as no surprise that two of the most common designations for the academic study of religion in the university are German in origin: Religionsgeschichte and Religionswissenschaft. For the purposes of this article, I will assume the history of the discipline of comparative religion along the lines Tomoko Masuzawa argues persuasively in her groundbreaking work The Invention of World Religions, and thus I will not spend time reviewing that history.⁴ What I hope to accomplish in this article is to provide a partial response to Benedict’s call for a “criticism of criticism” by providing a genealogical account of the advent of modern biblical criticism underscoring the secularizing framework within which the field operates. Historically, this secularizing trend had both theological and political aspects. The argument I make consists of three parts. In the first, I discuss the theologies and politics that shaped the modern project, commenting on the link to the emergence of modern centralized European states.⁵ The second portion describes the early history of the drive toward modern biblical criticism from the medieval through the early modern period. In the final section, I emphasize how the attempt to achieve objectivity continued in Enlightenment universities and in nineteenth-century academic contexts that were often inseparable from European colonialism. Biblical criticism in the nineteenth century became, in William Farmer’s words, “state supported biblical scholarship.”⁶

The Theological Politics of Secularization

Before plunging into the genealogical history of modern biblical studies, it would be beneficial to review the development of modern notions of religious and secular, which undergird both religious studies and biblical studies in the academy today.⁷ Talal Asad, Paul Griffiths, and William Cavanaugh provide important discussions of this development, and I am relying on their foundational studies.⁸

In 1990, John Milbank famously quipped, “Once, there was no ‘secular.’”⁹ As any thorough study of antiquity demonstrates, Milbank’s assertion is obvious, when we take modern notions of what it means to be secular as our starting point. In English, secularization entered the language with the violent dissolution of the monasteries in the English Reformation. Agents on behalf of the English crown forcibly removed, or exterminated, Catholics from land the Catholic Church owned, and such land—ostensibly taken in order to support England’s peasants—was handed over to the crown’s supporters among wealthy noble families.¹⁰ Secular eventually became associated with space absent of what we might call religious particularity. Once atheism, agnosticism, the New Age movement, and other more amorphous spiritualities became more prominent, God became one more example of religious particularity, and thus secular—then and now—tends to exclude God in popular discourse.¹¹

Prior to its emergence in the English language, the secular, saeculum, pertained to a sphere in time, in the world, which was saturated with God. In time, saeculum denoted linear history that was created by God and which would come to an end when God brought it to an end.¹² As pertaining to the world, saeculum places an emphasis on the natural order, and continues, for example, to play a significant role in official Catholic theology. In its dogmatic constitution on the church, Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council taught that:

The laity have their own special character which is secular [saecularis]. . . . It is the special vocation of the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and ordering these in accordance with the will of God. They live in the...