Does Belief Have Any Function in Scholarship?

Here is a rather crucial debate for many of us who endeavor to do scholarship within the framework of religious institutions.

In the SBL Forum Michael V. Fox has posted "Bible Scholarship and Faith-Based Study: My View." Here are the opening salvos of his piece.

Recently, claims have been made for the legitimacy of faith-based scholarship in the forum of academic scholarship (on a related issue, see the recent FORUM article by Mary Bader and the responses to it). In my view, faith-based study has no place in academic scholarship, whether the object of study is the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or Homer. Faith-based study is a different realm of intellectual activity that can dip into Bible scholarship for its own purposes, but cannot contribute to it. I distinguish faith-based Bible study from the scholarship of persons who hold a personal faith. In our field, there are many religious individuals whose scholarship is secular and who introduce their faith only in distinctly religious forums.

Faith-based study of the Bible certainly has its place — in synagogues, churches, and religious schools, where the Bible (and whatever other religious material one gives allegiance to) serves as a normative basis of moral inspiration or spiritual guidance. This kind of study is certainly important, but it is not scholarship — by which I mean Wissenschaft, a term lacking in English that can apply to the humanities as well as the hard sciences, even if the modes and possibilities of verification in each are very different. (It would be strange, I think, to speak of a "faith-based Wissenschaft.")

Any discipline that deliberately imports extraneous, inviolable axioms into its work belongs to the realm of homiletics or spiritual enlightenment or moral guidance or whatnot, but not scholarship, whatever academic degrees its practitioners may hold. Scholarship rests on evidence. Faith, by definition, is belief when evidence is absent.

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Al Mohler, Jr., President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, challenges Michael Fox in "Can Believers Be Bible Scholars? A Strange Debate in the Academy." Here is a portion of Mohler's response.

The naïveté of Fox's approach is self-evident, but he apparently fails to see that even an atheist brings a certain "faith" to the work of scholarship. As he sees it, Jewish scholars who would wish to publish academic research on the Old Testament are simply to be discounted because they may well believe in the existence of deity and may see the Old Testament writings as sacred. Beyond this, Christians are to be discounted wholesale, and Christians who engage in biblical scholarship are to be denied the status of scholars, regardless of which testament is their focus of study.

"Faith-based study of the Bible certainly has its place," Fox concedes--but those places are "synagogues, churches, and religious schools, where the Bible (and whatever other religious material one gives allegiance to) serves as a normative basis of moral inspiration or spiritual guidance." His next statement serves as the theme for his entire essay: "This kind of study is certainly important, but it is not scholarship--by which I mean Wissenschaft, a term lacking in English that can apply to the humanities as well as the hard sciences, even if the modes and possibilities of verification in each are very different."

Look carefully at Fox's next sentence: "Any discipline that deliberately imports extraneous, inviolable axioms into its work belongs to the realm of homiletics or spiritual enlightenment or moral guidance or whatnot, but not scholarship, whatever academic degrees its practitioners may hold."

This is where Fox's own lack of intellectual honesty brings his argument to a standstill. Does he really believe that he, or anyone else for that matter, comes to the task of scholarship with absolutely no "extraneous" presuppositions? No, Fox concedes that "everyone has presuppositions and premises," but he insists that, for scholars such as himself, "these are not inviolable." He continues, "Indeed, it is the role of education to teach students how to recognize and rest their premises and, when necessary, to reject them."

Of course, this simply begs the question. Why is the presumption of atheism any less inviolable than belief in Jesus Christ as Lord? In its own way, the same argument holds true for assertions of agnosticism, since the true agnostic argues that the question of God's existence simply cannot be answered. That is about as inviolable an axiom as one is likely to encounter.