Category Archives: academia

Young Seminarian Visits With Old Theology Professor (Part Three: The Bible)

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Introduction

The last meeting (posted on December 19, 2023) ended with the professor’s summary of the conversation:

 “To doubt” and “to believe” are acts of situated individual subjects involving judgments, decisions, and moods. Every doubter is also a believer and every believer is also a doubter. The doubter possesses no inherent intellectual or moral superiority to the believer. I think this truth sheds light on your seminary struggles. You may have been beguiled by academia’s spurious claim that doubt is intellectually superior to belief and seduced by the offer of membership in a social class marked by its presumption to higher wisdom.

Setting: The young seminarian drops by the professor’s office without an appointment, hoping that the professor is in and available for a visit.

Seminarian: Hello professor. I remember that you have open office hours at this time on Wednesdays, and I was hoping to visit with you, if you have the time.

Professor: Good timing. A student just cancelled her appointment. Come in. Have a seat.

Seminarian: Thanks. I wanted to continue our conversation. Last time, you mentioned that we’d discuss the Bible next; that is, the contrast between the way the church treats the Bible and the way the modern academy treats it.

Professor: Oh yes, so I did. Since we last talked, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways, overt and covert, modern academia subverts faith. As we saw in our last conversation, modern academia canonizes doubt and criticism as methods of weeding out superstitions and other unscientific beliefs. It rejects tradition, orthodoxy, and commitment as ways of knowing and living. This institutional stance in itself, apart from any particular criticism, places faith under a cloud of suspicion. Of course, we know that modern academia is deceptive and hypocritical. As we learned last time, the doubter is also a believer and critics of one belief must remain uncritical of opposing beliefs. The modern university cherishes its own traditions, orthodoxies, and commitments, but it calls them by other names: professionalism, science, scholarship, equity, diversity, critical thinking, research, inclusion, tenure, academic freedom, free speech, progress, fairness, and academic integrity. So, as we begin our reconstruction of faith, I suggest we refuse to be intimidated by modern academia’s claims to moral and intellectual superiority over faith and tradition.

Seminarian: The Bible?

Professor: Okay. We are nearly ready for the Bible. But I want to know that you see academia for what it truly is. Its two traditional activities are teaching and research. On the one hand, it is tasked with educating the coming generation. It introduces young people to the current state of discussion among scholars of the arts and sciences and it helps them develop the skills they need to become expert practitioners and researchers in their chosen fields of study. On the other hand, academia is a way of generating and testing beliefs, hypotheses, and theories by means of criticism and doubt. It protests that its purpose is not to pass on political, moral, and religious tradition of any kind. But we know that American universities are much quicker to criticize traditional morality, conservative politics, and the Christian religion than they are progressive morality, leftist politics, and exotic religion.

Seminarian: I get it. I should adopt a critical attitude toward the critical attitude practiced in modern academia.

Professor: Yes! As a way into the subject of the Bible, recall as best you can the view of the Bible and the Christian faith you brought with you to seminary.

Seminarian: I don’t recall that I was taught a “doctrine” of Scripture as a child. In my home and in church, the Bible was quoted, preached, and taught as the true moral, religious, and metaphysical worldview. It was our unquestioned framework for meaning, identity, and purpose. In its teachings about creation, fall, atonement and the world’s end, the meaning of history and the destiny of humanity were laid out before our eyes. Our greatest enemies are sin, death, and the devil, and these foes can be dealt with only through the power of Jesus Christ and the Spirit. The Old and New Testaments’ stories and heroic characters provided examples of courage and obedience. The law, the prophets and the Writings provided moral rules and wise principles by which to live. Jesus’s teaching, example, and above all, his sacrifice on the cross and resurrection from the dead were at the center of our worship and moral lives. Religious and moral disputes were settled by determining what the Scriptures teach. Whatever the Bible says is the truth of God.

Professor: At what point in your development were you taught an explicit “doctrine” of Scripture, and what was it?

Seminarian: I can’t remember a particular occasion, but in my teenage years I became aware that there were outsiders who did not believe. This seemed very strange to me. How could anyone not believe? It stands written in the Bible and has been held true for thousands of years. The voice of the prophets, Jesus and Paul ring out as authentic and powerful witnesses to the truth they experienced. Who would have the temerity to label them liars or fools? Around the same time, I began to notice that the church leaders taught a “doctrine” of Scripture, albeit a rudimentary one.

Professor: I am very interested in exactly what you remember about the doctrine of Scripture you learned at this stage in your life. Understanding this process is important because we need to discover what made you vulnerable to the critiques you faced later on. So, try to remember the view of Scripture you internalized in your late teen years.

Seminarian: I will try. But I am not sure I can remember exactly how I understood things at that stage. I may have to use categories I learned later to express what I remember.

Professor: Okay. Do the best you can.

Seminarian: As I said above, as a child I accepted the biblical portrayal as the true world. The voices within the Bible seemed as real to me as those of my parents and the preacher. I believed not because I compared and contrasted it with other ways of understanding but simply because I was taught it. That is to say, I believed the Bible because I trusted my parents and the church. At some point I began to notice church leaders speaking not simply about the contents of the Bible but about the Bible itself. We learned about the distinctions between the Old and New Testaments and the various types of literature within each division. We memorized the names of all 66 books within the Bible. We even sang songs about the B.I.B.L.E. I could not have put it into words at that point in my life, but I could not help but notice that the scriptures were use as the exclusive source and authority for teaching within the church. The Bible was the authority by which theological disputes were settled. Church teachers and preachers often referred to the Bible as “the inspired Word of God.” I took this to mean that the voice of Scripture was the voice of God. I don’t think I heard the word “inerrancy” until I entered college, but even before then I would have rejected instinctively the proposal that the Bible contained mistakes, lies, and myths. Accepting such a proposal would shatter my biblical worldview and thrust me into an uncertain, chaotic world without guidance.

Professor: I presume that in college or seminary you encountered a more sophisticated doctrine of Scripture?

Seminarian: Yes. I learned what many people pejoratively label a “fundamentalist” doctrine of Scripture. That is that the Bible as a whole and in every part, from Genesis to Revelation, down to every word, is “inspired” or “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16). I took this to mean that God chose every word the human authors wrote and miraculously protected them from error. The words of Scripture are simultaneously the words of the human author and the Word of God. In terms of its use, this conviction reinforced the authority of the Bible for use in teaching and theological disputation. To quote the Bible was to quote God.

Professor: And you accepted this doctrine of Scripture?

Seminarian: Yes. But what I did not see at the time was that I accepted a doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture on the same basis that as a child I had accepted the reliability of the contents of Scripture; that is, that the church whom I trusted believed it and assured me that it is so. I did not ask at the time, “Can the doctrine of the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible be independently verified?” In my childhood, I could not have asked this question, because I accepted the word of those I trusted. To ask for their assurance to be independently verified would be to abandon the very basis on which I trusted Scripture. But by the time I entered seminary, I came to think that the absolute truth of the Bible could be (and needs to be) verified by reason. How this transition occurred I don’t know, but I think it had something to do with my conservative teachers’ efforts to demonstrate by rational arguments the complete truth of the Bible. In other words, my path to doubt was cleared by the friends of faith.

Professor: Humm. This seems like a good place to end for today. Let’s return next time to this ironic turn of events wherein efforts to make faith secure by rational argument ended up making it doubtful.

Seminarian: I look forward to disentangling the matter.

Professor: Goodbye.

Seminarian: Goodbye.

Young Seminarian Visits With His Old Theology Professor (Part Two)

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Introduction

For the full context of this post please read the first conversation posted December 05, 2023. In that meeting, the old professor addressed the question of why seminary training tends to weaken if not destroy the faith and piety that young people bring to the endeavor. In sum, the professor explains, seminaries participate in the ethos of modern academia, which sees as its main task critical examination of all inherited beliefs. Whether intended or not, this relentless questioning replaces the student’s initial certainty of faith with doubt. Many students enter seminary with the naïve belief that the indubitability of the faith is an essential sign of its truth. Hence some students take refutation of the faith’s status as absolute knowledge as disproof of its truth. Or, at least as a reason to refrain from embracing the faith wholeheartedly.

Setting: As our young seminarian approaches the old professor’s office, he notices that his office door is open. Their eyes meet.

Professor: Good to see you again! Come in.

Seminarian: Thank you, professor.

Professor: How have you been? Tell me what you are thinking.

Seminarian: In our last conversation you gave me much to consider. Some of which, I had never before thought about.

Professor: What was that?

Seminarian: That I may have unknowingly identified the believability of a belief with its indubitability; that if I can doubt it, I should not trust it. And in doing so, I may have mistaken the academic method of universal doubt and endless criticism for a livable philosophy. If you don’t mind, I’d like to pursue this issue today.

Professor: I was going to make the same suggestion. Examining this mistaken inference may go a long way to dealing with your concerns about the Bible and the credibility of the orthodox Christian faith.

Seminarian: I look forward to it.

Professor: Let’s begin by thinking about the terms you just used, “believability” and “indubitability.” In my experience, contemporary use of these concepts and their near relatives creates much confusion. I see three areas where we need strive for more clarity. (1) Note first that the words “believability” and “indubitability” diverts our attention away from the person who believes or doubts and focuses on the proposition in question. They speak as if believability and indubitability are properties inherent in the claims being made. I do not accept this attribution. Whereas a proposition’s truth or falsity is not dependent on the person believing or doubting, a proposition’s believability or indubitability is. For a claim may seem believable to one person but doubtful to another. Hence debates about the believability or indubitability of a proposition are a waste of time. It will be helpful here to recall that these terms are derived from the verbs “to believe” and “to doubt.” To believe and to doubt are acts of individual subjects. And one person may believe while another person doubts a claim. A proposition may indeed possess the property of truth or falsehood, but it cannot possess the property of believability or indubitability or doubtfulness, or any other like property. The assertion that a claim is believable means no more than this: “I assent to this claim and can see no reason why others would not do the same.” Likewise, the assertion that a claim is doubtful means no more than this: “I dissent from this claim and can see no reason why others would not do the same.”

Seminarian: This is helpful. It keeps our focus on the place where decisions between belief and disbelief must be made, that is, on the individual’s weighing of the evidence for and against the truth of a claim.

Professor: True. And I will return to examine the acts of belief and doubt in greater detail. But first, there is another area of confusion I want to address. (2) Faith and doubt (the acts of believing and doubting) are often seen as mutually exclusive. More precisely, they are seen as different kinds of actions; that is to say, faith acts and doubt refrains from acting. Faith assents and embraces a claim while doubt refrains from assenting and embracing. Belief moves, but doubt remains steadfast. According to this way of thinking, doubt is conservative and cautious but belief ventures into uncertain waters and risks error. Doubt rests secure until it is moved by evidence it judges compelling. The doubter claims the higher intellectual and moral ground and looks down his nose at the naïve believer.

Seminarian: As I look back on my first year in seminary, I now understand why I was so confused. Up to that point in my life I had thought of the act of faith as responsible and virtuous. Only people lacking true virtue embraced skepticism and doubt. They were clearly looking for a way to escape from the restrictions of morality and religious practice. But when I entered the academic world, these values were reversed. Doubt, skepticism, criticism and avoidance of commitment were viewed as responsible and virtuous. Belief and commitment were signs of fear, gullibility, and carelessness. I suppose I was gradually socialized into academia.

Professor: But it’s all based on a deception. For doubt is not the absence of belief. Doubters can refuse to be moved to belief by arguments for a particular claim only because they hold to other beliefs that exclude that claim. One may justify rejecting Paul’s testimony to the resurrection of Jesus based on their belief that miracles are impossible. A person who rejects the New Testament’s sexual ethics can do so only because they rely on other moral sources they trust more. Doubters can be just as gullible, fearful, and careless as believers! Everyone is simultaneously both a doubter and a believer. Hence debating the relative moral and intellectual superiority of doubt over belief or of belief over doubt is another complete waste of time.

Seminarian: I had never thought of that before! But it’s obviously true. Disbelief in one proposition is possible only because of belief in another opposing proposition. Academia’s critical method won’t work unless the criteria by which beliefs are measured are assumed true, at least provisionally. Criticism without criteria is an absurd idea.

Professor: Well said! Let’s move now to the third clarification. (3) As I said above, “to doubt” and “to believe” are acts of individual subjects situated in a particular time and place. The act of doubting or believing expresses a subjective state, a judgment, a decision, and a mood. (a) To say “I doubt” expresses the present mental state of the speaker. It communicates something like: “I do not find the evidence for your claim compelling.” It says nothing about the properties of the proposition in question or the evidence supporting it. (b) But clearly the subjective state of the doubter results from a judgment, which concludes something like, “The evidence for this claim is not sufficient to justify rational assent.” (c) Because neither expressing doubt nor affirming belief assert infallibility, treating either one as a basis for action involves a decision, a decision to move forward apart from complete clarity and certainty. (d) Many judgments and decisions are accompanied by certain moods: joy, triumph, glee, pride, etc. And these moods often indicate the operations of motives other than desire for truth and commitment to sober rationality.

Seminarian: I did not realize that believing and doubting were so complex. But I should have known this. Human beings are not calculating machines. Their judgments and decisions are conditioned by their multidimensional natures, widely different experiences, and diverse characters.

Professor: Let’s bring this line of reasoning to its point: “To doubt” and “to believe” are acts of situated individual subjects involving judgments, decisions, and moods. Every doubter is also a believer and every believer is also a doubter. The doubter possesses no inherent intellectual or moral superiority to the believer. I think this truth sheds light on your seminary struggles. You may have been beguiled by academia’s spurious claim that doubt is intellectually superior to belief and seduced by the offer of membership in a social class marked by its presumption to higher wisdom.

Seminarian: You may be correct. When I returned home after my first year, I’m ashamed to admit that I felt a bit smug when relating to the “unenlightened masses.”

Professor: I hope I’ve given you something to think about until our next meeting.

Seminarian: You have indeed! But I have many more questions.

Professor: We will take them up one by one. See you soon.

Seminarian: Goodbye.