Understanding Religion

If I had it to do all over again . . . not that I have specific regrets per se . . . but if I had it to do all over again, I would have pursued a graduate studies course less focused on language and philology and more on the academic study of religion. I wish I had known about Baylor's program in the Sociology of Religion 3 or 4 years ago, for example. Many students and scholars in biblical studies go through their entire academic careers without ever considering how their field relates to the broader field of academic religious studies. A total lack of awareness of religious studies theory and methodology characterizes the curriculum of many biblical studies grad programs. My own intellectual interests are drawn more to the study of the religions that have built their traditions on the Bible than on an interest in biblical exegesis for its own sake. For that reason, I was excited to have the opportunity to teach a course called "Understanding Religion" at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin this semester.

Unfortunately, while I am well-trained in biblical studies, I am mostly self-taught on religious studies theory and methodology (despite my religious studies minor which lacked an explicit methods course). This undergraduate course is an introduction to the basic concepts of religion and an exploration of theory and method in academic religious studies with a goal of promoting basic religious literacy -- the ability to understand, recognize, and intelligently discuss religious issues.

Below is my starter bibliography for my self-education on academic religious studies and the wider relationship between religion and culture. I'd appreciate any comments or feedback from anyone who notices that my bibliography is missing something important. Are there any seminal journal articles or essays out there that I should know about?


What I Have in Hand and Have Started Reading

• Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books, 2001.
• Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
• Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. [1915.] New York: Free Press, 1965.
• Eliade, Mircea. Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. [1960.] New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
• ---. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. [1959.] New York: Harper & Row, 1961.
• Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, Inc., 1973.
• Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.
• Hitchens, Christopher. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve, 2007.
• James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. [1902.] New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004.
• Keller, Timothy. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. Riverhead Books, 2008.
• Kessler, Gary E. Studying Religion: An Introduction through Cases. 2nd Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2006.
• McGrath, Alistair and Joanna Collicutt McGrath. The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007.
• Pals, Daniel L. Seven Theories of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t. HarperOne, 2007.
• ---. God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World – and Why Their Differences Matter. HarperOne, 2010.
• Sharpe, Eric J. Understanding Religion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
• Stark, Rodney. Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief. HarperCollins, 2007.
• Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. [4th Ed. 1956.] Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

What I Know About but Haven’t Looked at Yet

• The Encyclopedia of Religion. 2nd Ed. Macmillan, 2004. 
• Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: The Roots of Religion and Folklore. 1890.
• Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. 2nd Ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• McCutcheon, Russell T. Critics, Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. SUNY Press, 2001.
• ---. The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric. Psychology Press, 2003.
• Smith, Jonathan Z. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
• ---. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
• ---. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
• Stark, Rodney. Exploring the Religious Life. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
• Stark, Rodney and William Sims Bainbridge. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. University of California Press, 1985.
• ---. A Theory of Religion. Rutgers University Press, 1996.
• Stark, Rodney and Roger Finke. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. University of California Press, 2000.

Hendel: Farewell to SBL

Anyone interested in the ongoing tension between faith and reason in what passes for biblical studies today will want to read Ron Hendel’s piece in BAR titled “Farewell to SBL.”

I fully agree with Hendel that SBL should be focused on critical investigation of the Bible, free of overt religious proselytizing and theologically-motivated biblical interpretation.

Here is Hendel remarking on Waltke’s recent review of Fox’s Proverbs commentary.

Instead of reason, “faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”—as interpreted by evangelical scholars—should be the rule in Biblical scholarship. Waltke dismisses critical inquiry as an annoying nuisance, like the scratchy sound of an old LP. This is in the midst of a review of a brilliant scholarly commentary on the Book of Proverbs, written by a Jewish scholar, in the Anchor Yale Bible series.

On the one hand, I give Waltke the respect he has earned as a scholar, and I am happy to listen to his views. But when he says such rationally absurd things as “the factual data validates Solomon’s authorship of Prov[erbs] 1:1–24:33” (which belongs to a post-Solomonic stratum of Hebrew, as Waltke ought to know), and when he asserts that Moses wrote the laws of Deuteronomy (which are written in post-Mosaic Hebrew), we are clearly not in the world of critical Biblical scholarship at all. This is religious dogma, plain and simple.

I was equally incredulous reading Waltke’s assertion that Solomonic authorship of Proverbs was “factual.” (See the discussion here on that review and Waltke’s position.) Hendel continues, pointing out why this growing trend for the SBL to accept non-critical Bible scholarship is leading closer to full validation of their non-critical and dogmatic views.

Why is this a problem? Certainly Waltke is entitled to his views. The problem is that the SBL has loosened its own definition of Biblical scholarship, such that partisan attacks of this type are now entirely valid. When I learned of the new move to include fundamentalist groups within the SBL, I wrote to the director and cited the mission statement in the SBL’s official history: “The object of the Society is to stimulate the critical investigation of the classical biblical literatures.”³ The director informed me that in 2004 the SBL revised its mission statement and removed the phrase “critical investigation” from its official standards. Now the mission statement is simply to “foster biblical scholarship.” So critical inquiry—that is to say, reason—has been deliberately deleted as a criterion for the SBL. The views of creationists, snake-handlers and faith-healers now count among the kinds of Biblical scholarship that the society seeks to foster.

This trend in the SBL likely explains the odd reviews that Alan Lenzi pointed out on his now-gone blog this past spring – confessional, dogmatic, non-critical reviews published by RBL (like Waltke’s, for example).

For my part, I had found secular biblical studies and the forum provided by SBL to be an intellectually stimulating middle ground where those of us of all faiths (including no faith) could discuss the Bible from a critical, academic point of view, free from dogma and religious divisions. I was surprised, then, to find scholars blurring the line between confessional faith and factual argument even last year at the annual meeting.
What’s to be done? We can’t all just let our memberships lapse and leave the society, can we?

Bob Cargill on 'Heresy' and Biblical Criticism

Bob's thought for the day is worth repeating in part:

it is never heretical to point out the inconsistencies of the biblical text to students. ever! if the one’s faith can’t survive a few critical questions, it’s either deeply flawed or it is not worth maintaining. shielding students from textual problems does not help their faith, it only sets them up for a greater fall.

and reading in full. I agree with Bob completely. If we shield students (and believers in general) from the hard questions and interpretive problems that close study of the Bible brings to light, then we're potentially setting them up for a bigger fall and hurting our own credibility if they discover some of those difficulties on their own. I, for one, was very disappointed when I found a few professors had misrepresented critical bible scholarship in an attempt to insulate us from facing those types of questions.

The Famous Footnote 4

The apologist vs. scholar dichotomy has been getting some thoughtful attention lately inspired by Alan Lenzi’s reflections on several theological puff pieces passing as book reviews in the Review of Biblical Literature.

In a very real sense, this is a false dichotomy because no one is ever either fully on one side or the other. All of our thinking is more or less affected by our experiences, education, values, beliefs, agendas, etc. Some discussions of this issue play up the false dichotomy (e.g., Russell McCutcheon’s Critics Not Caretakers).

A balanced philosophical approach to this phenomenon – the conflict between religious experience and rational thought – was recently brought to my attention. It is apparently somewhat famous (or infamous).

Footnote 4 of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s The Halakhic Man (JPS, 1984) contains an extended philosophical discussion of these two fundamentally opposed perspectives. On the one hand, “cognitive man” wants to classify and prove everything based on verifiable evidence. This is the approach preferred by critical scholarship. Sometimes we confuse our religious or philosophical commitments with “verifiable evidence.” Here’s a sample quote from Soloveitchek (not from the footnote but from the main text).

“We must undertake a comparative study of the fundamental and distinctive features of the ontological outlooks of homo religiosus and cognitive man. For only by gaining an insight into the differences and distinctions existing between these two outlooks will we be able to comprehend the nature of halakhic man, the master of talmudic dialectics” (pp. 4-5).

Before I read more, I need to brush up on my philosophy jargon.

The Elusive Objectivity of the Religious Insider

Or, why religious history written by an insider for insiders is unsuitable for general academic consumption. Let me explain.

I've been reading Lawrence Schiffman's history of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism From Text to Tradition (Ktav, 1991). If it weren't on my prelims reading list, I would've put it down long ago. The simplistic ease with which Schiffman uncritically reports tradition as history raises the question of how well religious insiders can be historical critics of their own faith tradition. The question is not can they or should they because I think they can and they should, but I think all sources need to be evaluated critically, even sacred or semi-sacred texts. There is value in examining your argument and evidence from the perspective of an outsider just to see if your explanation of the data makes sense (HT: NT Pod 21; I'm indebted to Mark Goodacre for this observation). 

It's more than a little ironic that while Schiffman claims to take a critical approach to his sources as a historian (pp. 4-5), his historical account is dominated by an uncritical acceptance of the story of Judaism as told by the Bible and rabbinic sources (refracted somewhat through the lens of contemporary Judaism). For example, the "historical sketch" began on p. 17 narrates the migration of the patriarchs as if it was perfectly reasonable historiography to simply retell the biblical account. As I read, I was almost immediately struck by Schiffman's acceptance of the claim of continuity put forth by Jewish tradition: 

Behind the continuity so often asserted by the tradition there is a complex development that we seek to uncover. The existence of such a history should in no way be taken as a challenge to the affirmations of continuity made by the Jewish tradition. On the contrary, continuity can only be achieved in a tradition which adapts and develops. . . . Because we recognize the underlying continuity we see no reason to avoid the occasional use of the term 'Judaism' to describe the religion of the Hebrew Bible, the earliest stage in the history of Judaism." (p. 3) 

If anything, recent research on Israelite religion has concluded it was nothing like what we recognize now as Judaism. Personally, I would hesitate to use the term Judaism at all before Ezra-Nehemiah.

Now we all have areas where in practice we diverge from our stated methodological principles, but the juxtaposition of statements like "before any source can be used, it must be approached critically, and the extent of its reliability must be carefully evaluated" (p. 5) with later statements like "the Romans saw at least some of the rabbis, most notably Yohanan ben Zakkai, as leaders with whom they could deal" (p. 168) reveals a striking methodological incongruity. Rather than critically evaluating his sources, Schiffman appears to be an apologist for the traditional model of the development of Judaism as presented by the classical sources. More current research on tannaitic Judaism suggests tannaitic influence was historically much less normative and dominant before the Babylonian Talmud than the sages themselves claim. In other words, the only evidence we have of their power and influence comes from the texts they wrote telling us about their power and influence.

But Schiffman appears unaware of any uncertainty regarding the power the rabbis claimed for themselves. The prominence of the 1st century sages as leaders of the Jewish community and representatives to Rome is reported as historical fact (pp. 168-169). In the quote above, is Schiffman uncritically accepting the rabbinic legend about b. Zakkai and Vespasian as a historical fact? The way b. Zakkai is mentioned by name leads me to suspect his source is the legend found in Avot d'R. Natan ch. 4 (pp. 35-37 in Goldin's translation, Yale, 1955.) 

The legend, in brief: Yohanan b. Zakkai has himself smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin and carried to Vespasian. When he jumps out of the coffin, Vespasian recognizes him as the renowned Yohanan b. Zakkai and offers to give him whatever he wants. Ben Zakkai replies that all he really wants is Yavneh so he can have a place to teach his disciples, establish a prayer house, and perform all the commandments. Vespasian gives him permission, and the school at Yavneh is traditionally understood as the starting point of rabbinic Judaism.

That I have to guess at what his source was brings out the other major flaw with this work--the total absence of direct citation of either primary or secondary sources. Each chapter has a bibliography, but the lack of documentation makes this book a poor choice for scholarly use. It is difficult to assess his critical use of sources when he rarely mentions where he's getting his information. Now I doubt this text was ever intended for a scholarly audience. It appears to be a popular distilling of Schiffman's expertise on second temple and rabbinic Judaism published for a Jewish audience by a Jewish press.

So is it unreasonable to expect a religious insider writing for his co-religionists to attempt some semblance of objective critical evaluation of his source material?

At any rate, I will be recommending the removal of this book from our PhD reading list. It is not valuable for scholarly work on ancient Judaism because of its lack of documentation and interaction with primary and secondary literature and his oversimplified presentation of the development of Judaism, heavily influenced by the tradition which is itself the object of study.

Filtering the Data

I’ve been catching up on episodes of the NT Pod over the past week or so. I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed Mark’s series on the Synoptic Problem, especially the more complete picture provided through the extended episodes. I’ve come to realize that I’m a Hebrew Bible person primarily because it’s the fountainhead for all later biblical interpretation, and what really interests me is the history of interpretation. To that end, I’m trying to be a well-rounded generalist in Second Temple Judaism, New Testament, and classical Judaism.

One thing struck me out of Mark’s discussion of the Synoptic Problem that I think is relevant for many many many issues in biblical studies. He talked about how most NT introductions never really present the student with the problem when they discuss the Synoptic Problem. They start with one of the solutions and filter all the pertinent data through the solution. (By the by, Mark, I’m not a NT expert but you’ve convinced me in your case against Q anyway.)

Filtering the data seems to be a common way for unexamined consensus positions to get passed on intact to the next generation of scholars. We all take away a certain perspective on the biblical data from our teachers. That perspective often works like a filter preventing us from seeing the data in a fresh way. I try to be as aware as possible of my own filters, or rather, I try to be aware of when a particular perspective or presupposition is coloring how I interpret the data. It’s hard to do, but it might be a good exercise for us all to think through how we might be filtering the data when we read the Bible or study any particular problem in biblical studies.

I can think of two perspectives that I’ve gained from my teachers that color how I approach my scholarship. First, in Qumran studies, I first learned about the Dead Sea Scrolls from a non-consensus scholar, so it would probably take nothing short of an angel from heaven revealing to me that Essenes did, in fact, live at Qumran and compose the sectarian scrolls there for me to accept the validity of that consensus. Second, in biblical studies, I learned to keep theological conclusions about the truth claims of the text from overrunning what the text itself actually says. That is, I learned to identify it when I or any other interpreter has come to the text peering through a particular theological lens. The result is that I am not a fan of unexamined consensus positions, and I draw a hard line between apologetics and critical scholarship.

Well, have you thought about it? What are your filters that affect how you read the Bible? Do you think of them as strengths or weaknesses?

Teaching the Bible in Public Schools

USA Today recently published an opinion column discussing the issue of teaching biblical literature to public school students. Like it or not, the Bible has had a profound influence on history and culture throughout the world. Several of my students taking biblical poetry last semester were English majors, only there to raise their biblical literacy enough to catch and understand more of the biblical allusions in classic English literature. Time magazine ran an article a year or so ago that explored the issue of teaching Bible as an elective in public schools. Their article looked specifically at what was being done in some of the states that had added the Bible elective to their curriculum. Here's an excerpt from USA Today. I recommend reading the whole piece.

"Students who want to do serious study of Western civilization need to know the Bible," says Barbara Newman, Northwestern University professor of English, Religion and Classics. "They need to know the Bible, even if they do not believe the Bible."

Harvard professor Robert Kiely, for one, agrees. In 2006, he participated in an academic survey of professors from many of America's leading universities — including Yale, Princeton, Brown, Rice, California-Berkeley and Stanford. The survey — commissioned by the Bible Literacy Project, which promotes academic Bible study in public schools — found an overwhelming consensus among top professors that incoming college students need to be well-versed in the stories, themes and words of the Bible.

"If a student doesn't know any Bible literature, he or she will simply not understand whole elements of Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth. One could go on and on and on," Kiely told Concordia professor Marie Wachlin and her research team.

"Knowledge of the Bible can be a key to unlocking other subjects. . . especially literature, art, music and social studies," say Chuck Stetson, co-editor of the visually stunning high school textbook The Bible and Its Influence, and founder of the Bible Literacy Project.

And knowledge of the Bible can be a key to understanding much of today's pop culture. Like Stephen Colbert's irreverent humor on Comedy Central. Or Jim Carrey's screwball spirituality in Bruce Almighty. Or the devilishly clever title of the band White Stripes' release, Get Behind Me Satan.

Not surprisingly, students growing up in non-religious homes are often behind the curve. "Many of my students are quite secular and have very little knowledge of the Bible," Northwestern's Newman says. "This is a major disadvantage."

Indeed, Newman says that trying to appreciate biblical allusions in literature without an underlying knowledge of Scripture is like trying to appreciate a good joke when someone has to explain the punch line. You might eventually "get" the joke, she says, but by the time you do, "it's not funny anymore."

Noll's Ethics of Being a Theologian

I finally got around to reading K.L. Noll's Chronicle article on the difference between religious study and theology (thanks to my colleague Chris for posting a link to it on Facebook). I know that several others have evaluated this piece recently, but I'm still mulling over Noll for myself and will perhaps respond more fully later once I've read the thorough critiques by Chris Heard and Tyler Williams. I have to admit that on first read, I'm very sympathetic to Noll's characterization of the difference between religious studies and theology. (I've posted before on the issue. Here. And on the related issue of apologetics vs. critical Bible scholarship.) While I continue to ponder the implications of Noll's article, here are a few excerpts that caught my attention.

My encounter with that professor reflects a problem endemic to academe. Most people do not understand what religious study really is. Professors of religion are often confused with, or assumed to be allies of, professors of theology. The reason for the confusion is no secret. All too often, even at public universities, the religion department is peopled by theologians, and many of those theologians refuse to make the distinction that I am about to make.
 . . .
Theology also views itself as an academic discipline, but it does not attempt to advance knowledge. Rather, theologians practice and defend religion. Theology is a set of words about a god; therefore, while theology is one of many objects of investigation for a religion researcher, it is the substance of the scholarship produced by a theologian.

There is nothing wrong with the practice and defense of religion, but it is not the study of religion. The best theologians are scholars who have immersed themselves in many of the same academic disciplines favored by religion researchers. Like good religion research, good theology is generated by the application of sound reasoning to empirical evidence. But there is a crucial difference. The religion researcher evaluates that evidence from within a tradition of secular, academic "wisdom." The theologian evaluates the same evidence from within a tradition of sacred, esoteric "wisdom." The distinction is not trivial and ought to be recognized and honored by religion researchers and theologians alike.
. . .
In other words, the theologian maintains that there exists an irreducible element in religious ritual that we religion researchers cannot hope to comprehend. I expect every theologian to believe this and will never argue with theologians about it.

I was surprised when I read the comments to this article at the Chronicle. Maybe I followed him because I'm sympathetic to his reasoning, but the reactions were defensive and apologetic. I shouldn't have been surprised. My own posts on the subject garnered a similar reaction - objectivity is impossible, you're just as biased as we are, etc.

Lately, I've been wrestling with this issue - separating my approach to the Bible into professional and confessional categories and carefully trying to keep them apart. Perhaps Joel Willitts is right that it's more important to keep them together, realizing we can't separate the scholar from the scholarship.

Religion and Biblical Exegesis

The quote I posted from Ziony Zevit last week has sparked a bit of discussion again on the issue of how belief (religious or otherwise) can color how we interpret the Bible. While the influence of our own presuppositions likely hinders us from being truly objective, we can come close by keeping an open mind about all of the interpretive options. I thought Ken Brown expressed it well today when he said:

For this reason it remains vital for all interpreters to foster a critical approach both to scripture and their own traditions, seeking (though perhaps never finding) the objectivity to honestly assess the interpretive options. Not only believers (of various stripes) but unbelievers as well must be careful to guard against letting their own presuppitions silence the text. On this score, the believer is aided by a natural tendency to read the Bible charitably, while the non-believer is aided by a natural tendency to recognize the fundamental otherness of the text. Much of the vitality of biblical studies comes from the dialogue–sometimes friendly, sometimes less so!–between these two approaches.

The debate also reminded me of a good quote from Stephen Prothero on the difference between studying religion and doing theology.

I am by training a professor of religious studies. That means, among other things, that just about every time I step onto a plane or attend a party I have to explain to someone that, no, I am not a minister, no, I do not teach theology, and, no, I do not work in a divinity school. Theology and religious studies, I often say, are two very different things--as different as art and art history. While theologians do religion, religious studies scholars study religion. Rather than ruminating on God, practitioners of religious studies explore how other human beings (theologians included) ruminate on sacred things. Scholars of religion can be religious, of course, but being religious is not our job. Our job is to try to understand what religious people say, believe, know, feel, and experience. And we try to do this work as fairly and objectively as possible.
(Prothero 2007, 10; emphasis original)

The theologian is doing religion. The religious studies scholar is studying religion. That distinction has impacted my thinking quite a bit because I view biblical studies (in its SBL secular academic sense) as a branch of religious studies (as we were challenged to do by JZ Smith at the presidential address in Boston).

The issue is similar to the distinction between apologetics and critical Bible scholarship that I wrote about in April.

Reference: Prothero, Stephen. 2007. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know-and Doesn't. HarperCollins.

HT: Phil Sumpter and Ken Brown for their thoughtful responses.