After reading Jacques Berlinerblau¹s “An Afternoon with the Society
for Pentecostal Studies,” I have only one question: where has
professor Berlinerblau been for the last twenty years? Berlinerblau
critiques the Pentecostal scholars of the Society of Biblical
Literature with all the righteous indignation of a Victorian
rationalist who has discovered lingering faith commitments
compromising the purity of scientific objectivity. What field of the
humanities still operates according to such naïve scientism? For the
last twenty years or so, the secular academy has been awash in a sea
of perspectivalism, with post-structuralist, feminist, critical race
and queer theory scholars denouncing objectivity as
white-male-European-Enlightenment imperialism and offering in its
place a variety of interpretive frameworks seemingly incommensurable
with each other. These frameworks are in themselves rational.
Scholars working within these traditions make arguments by marshalling
evidence, engaging the work of other scholars, etc. Still, they
proceed from commitments (dare I say faith commitments) that are in some
sense beyond reason, and their objectivity is very much in the service
of advocacy, the advancement of a “progressive” social agenda.
To read Berlinerblau¹s critique of Pentecostal in the context of the
contemporary postmodern academy, it would appear as if Biblical
Studies is the last discipline required to submit to the ideal of
critical detachment that shaped the modern university in its earlier
Victorian and modernist manifestations.
What Berlinerblau observed at the Society of Biblical Literature is
one of the most positive developments in contemporary academic life.
It is not the abandonment of reason but rather the subordination of
reason to a higher Truth. Yes, Truth. Berlinerblau acknowledges that
the Pentecostal scholars giving presentations were all conversant in
recent biblical scholarship, but bemoans “that secondary literature
was relegated to the backmatter.” He is distressed that scholarly
debates about the text took a back seat to the quest to find “a larger
pattern of meaning” in the text itself. At the same time he concedes
that the “Q and A was unusually civil, cooperative, and good-natured,”
and that the “participants seemed earnestly interested in listening to
one another.” Berlinerblau implies that this civility was a function
of the scholars’ lack of critical rigor. I would interpret it rather
as a function of a shared commitment to a truth that transcends the
arguments (or the careers) of any particular scholar participating in a
debate. Without this shared commitment, there can be no community of
scholars, but simply a free marketplace of ideas, which is not likely
to be any more “free” than the marketplace of material commodities
that preceded it.
Berlinerblau asserts that this shared commitment to truth relieves
the participants from the responsibility of asking “troubling
questions” about textual origins and authorship. This may be so, but
the academy as it exists today survives only by its willingness to
avoid another set of troubling questions. What is the purpose of the
humanities after we have abandoned the pursuit of substantive truth?
The Victorian founders of the modern university set themselves against
all received traditions to advance an idea of reason that they
believed transcended all traditions.
No responsible scholar can accept this understanding as an accurate
account of the kind of reason that functions in the academy today. If
we insist that critical reason is an end in itself, this too raises
troubling questions. Imagine if the intellectual classes of the modern
West were to subject critical reason to the kind of critical scrutiny
that Berlinerblau demands Pentecostals impose on the Bible. Such
scrutiny would reveal critical detachment to be a fantasy of mere
human creation, complete with its own foundational myths and master
narratives of history; it would also show that modern critical reason
has been complicit in some of the greatest crimes of modernity, from
the genocide of native peoples to the Holocaust. Of course,
poststructuralist scholars have already advanced this critique, yet
modernist intellectuals like Berlinerblau pay no attention to that man
behind the curtain and continue to pay homage to the academic Wizard
of Oz, the self-sufficiency of critical reason. Indeed, when religion
enters the academy, even postmodernists circle the wagons with their
erstwhile modernist antagonists to keep religious perspectives (or at
least traditional Western religious perspectives) out of the conversation.
In my own field history, George Marsden long ago raised the
possibility of “the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship.”
Marsden argued that Christian faith brought certain sympathies and
insider knowledge that might actually enhance rather than undermine
our study of the past. I have spent much of the last ten years
arguing that Marsden’s proposal does not go far enough, that it is not
the particular sensibilities of the historian but rather authoritative
narrative structures that distinguish one kind of scholarship from
another. Scholars of different traditions may indeed draw on a common
tool kit of analytic techniques, but any scholarship worth pursuing
will be guided by something more than techniques. The pursuit of
purely technical truth has proved an illusion. I have worked in the
field of U.S. intellectual history long enough to see that this year¹s
revolutionary revision of all existing scholarship more often than not
turn out to be a recycling of some earlier argument long forgotten in
the rush to keep up with the cutting edge of revision.
Pope Benedict XVI, in his two-volume Jesus of Nazareth, provides a
model for how scholars should balance the technical and normative
aspects of scholarship. He acknowledges the achievements of the
historical-critical method of biblical scholarship, but also insists
that this method has come to few if any solid conclusions with respect
to the issues that originally animated it. It has certainly not
proven that Jesus Christ is not the Son of God. Benedict then
proceeds to draw on the best of this scholarship to aid him in his
very normative, confessional quest to encounter the person of Jesus
Christ. Even as I read this text devotionally, I always know that I
am reading the work of a German professor.
Benedict is a scholar capable of speaking at different faith registers.
He speaks and writes at levels both more and less devotional than
Jesus of Nazareth. In this too, he is a model for intellectual life
for scholars of any tradition. Berlinerblau’s nightmare vision of a
confessionalized field of Biblical Studies--ignored by the public at
large, ignored by humanists in other fields, rife with apologetics,
fractured to the point of incomprehensibility--describes nothing if not
the state of the contemporary secular academy, committed to the
self-sufficiency of critical reason. The Pentecostals of the Society
of Biblical Literature may have favored faith at the expense of
reason, but in the long run they chose the better part.
Sincerely, Christopher Shannon Associate Professor of History Christendom College