Faith and Scholarship

I recently read a great piece in the Biblical Archeology Review (a journal I subscribe to) on four scholars, two who lost their religious faith through scholarship and two who kept it. The author interviews them and asks them questions on their faith and loss of faith.

The article opens up with:

Several media stories recently reported that Bart Ehrman, a leading expert on the apocryphal gospels and one of BAS’s most popular lecturers, had lost his faith as a result of his scholarly research. This raised a question for us that is not often talked about, but seemed well worth a discussion: What effect does scholarship have on faith? We asked Bart to join three other scholars to talk about this: James F. Strange, a leading archaeologist and Baptist minister; Lawrence H. Schiffman, a prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar and Orthodox Jew; and William G. Dever, one of America’s best-known and most widely quoted archaeologists, who had been an evangelical preacher, then lost his faith, then became a Reform Jew and now says he’s a non-believer.

Here are some highlights from the interviews:

Ehrman: First, I lost my fundamentalist faith because of my scholarship. Like Bill Dever, I have a fundamentalist background. I had a very high view of Scripture as the inerrant word of God, no mistakes of any kind—geographical or historical. No contradictions. Inviolate.

...I started finding contradictions and finding other discrepancies and started finding problems with the Bible. What that ended up doing for me was showing me that the basis of my faith, which at that time was the Bible, was problematic.

...

Theodicy is the question of how God can be righteous, given the amount of suffering in the world. The issue as it’s usually put today is that if God is all-powerful and is able to prevent suffering, and is all-loving so that he wants to prevent suffering, why is there suffering? This problem isn’t ever expressed that way in the Bible, but Biblical authors do deal with the problem by asking: Why does the people of God suffer?

...I decided that I couldn’t believe in a God who was in any way intervening in this world, given the state of things. So that’s why I ended up losing my faith.

...

Strange: ...I’m still a Baptist minister. I don’t have a pulpit. The only thing I do every now and then is a wedding for someone—or a funeral. Maybe now it’s more funerals. [Laughs] I bury more than I marry.

But to answer you more directly, I just don’t see the connection. My faith is not based upon anything like a propositional argument. When I indulge myself in all this scientific research and explication, I’m not doing anything about faith.

...

My faith is based on my own experience—a good old Protestant principle.

...

I love the existentialist philosophers. I love to read them, not because they’re giving me any testable facts. It’s because it’s like reading a really good poet. It does something to you that propositional truth never does.

...

Propositional truth is like: There is a loving God that intervenes upon the earth. That’s a proposition. It’s testable or it’s not. If it’s not testable, then you can’t falsify it; you can’t know if it’s true or not. If it really is testable, then the way you test it is to start checking out a list of experiences people have—and suffering is a prime one human beings have in common. So you end up saying, I’ve tested the hypothesis and it is now wanting. Suffering tends to disconfirm the hypothesis.

Shanks: You say your faith is not based on this proposition?

Strange: That’s correct.

Shanks: What is it based on?

Strange: Based on my own experience with God. For a lot of people, this makes me sort of a mystic in a cave or something. But I think it’s eminently practical and out there.

...

Shanks: Would you say that your scholarship, then, has had really no effect on your faith?

Strange: Virtually none. I mean I have a wonderful intellectual time with my scholarship. I get the same existentialist thrill out of touching the dirt when I’m excavating as I do holding my wife’s hand.

...

I grew up in east Texas, where the choices were you believed in the Bible literally or you didn’t believe in the Bible literally. That was it. I didn’t. So it’s my own experience with God that tipped me over on the other side. My best analogy is falling in love.

...

Ehrman: It seems to me that Christianity—Christian faith—has always been grounded in certain historical claims, for example, about Jesus. One thing that scholarship did for me: It led me to question historical claims that Christians have made about Jesus.

...

If Jesus hadn’t been crucified, if he grew up to be an old man and died and was buried in a family plot outside of Nazareth, then for me, when I was a Christian, that would’ve destroyed my faith.

In other words, the faith is rooted in certain historical claims. As historical claims, they can be shown as either probable or improbable. And I got to a point where the historical claims about Jesus seemed implausible, especially the resurrection.

...

Schiffman: One of the principles of the Jewish faith is not believing in Jesus. [Laughter] But, like Bart, I of course believe that he lived, preached and was crucified by the Romans.

From a Jewish point of view, these kinds of problems aren’t problems. First of all, the Bible was never taken literally in Judaism. It doesn’t mean that it’s not historical, but it is not taken literally in the Protestant sense. It’s not an issue in Judaism. Admittedly there is a literalist strain in a minority of medieval Jewish thinkers and a minority—maybe a growing minority—in modern Judaism, but it’s not classical Judaism. The Talmud doesn’t take the Bible literally in the Protestant sense.

...

I heard a recent lecture by a rabbi who is becoming a medical doctor. He talked about the problem of creation. And he said, well, evolution is obviously true. What do I do about it if evolution is obviously true? He said that we learn from Nachmanides that nothing in the Bible about creation is intended literally. What’s important to me is that I have the experience of God as the creator.

Let's take the problem of evil...We talk about the debate in Job and the various approaches explored there. We see the continuation of these debates in Midrash. But we know that we can’t explain evil, especially after the Holocaust. Any person who says that he can give an explanation for the Holocaust is crazy. So the bottom line is that we all go along living with the fact that this horrible thing happened and we can’t explain it. Judaism doesn’t claim that the individual will get all the answers to everything.

...

Dever: Well, my father was a fire-breathing fundamentalist. I grew up hearing him preach in tent meetings in the hills of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. He had a bigger voice than I do. I was ordained a minister at 17, put myself through undergraduate school and on through divinity school, through Harvard, then a congregation. I have 13 years’ experience as a parish minister and two theological degrees. For me, it was this typical Protestant conundrum: It’s all true or none of it is true. My sainted mother once said to me, If I can’t believe that the whale swallowed Jonah, I can’t believe any of it.

...

Living in the Holy Land, I became extremely cynical about religion. I began to think, more or less, maybe like all of you, that I had no talent for religion, that faith might be a matter of temperament as well as training. I never had a pious bone in my body. And I realized I was never really a believer, but it just took me 40 years to figure out that it was no longer meaningful. That’s when I converted to Judaism. [Laughs] I did it precisely because you don’t have to be religious to be a Jew. And I’m perfectly comfortable where I am.

...

Schiffman: You’ve got to decide: Do I believe there is a God? Do I believe that God communicated some kind of way of life to someone that became Judaism?

Dever: I think Judaism is about practices rather than a correct theology.

Strange: I think precisely that [about Judaism]. Christian tradition, on the other hand, made a mistake because we intellectualized it so much that Christian experience got submerged. Theology was bereft of any kind of experience.

...

Schiffman: But I think modern Judaism goes too far with the notion that you don’t have to believe anything to be Jewish. You don’t in the sense that you’re part of the community even if you don’t believe. But the question is, doesn’t Judaism really have in mind that a person will have certain types of faith commitments that are then acted out in certain ways?

Shanks: Larry, do you believe in God?

Schiffman: Yes.

...

I believe in a personal God, but I’m conditioned by the philosophical approach of Maimonides...I can say there’s a lot that I don’t know.

An Orthodox Jew can believe whatever he wants and be part of the community, but Orthodox Judaism assumes that a person does believe that there really is a God. There is a force that cannot physically be accounted for. There is a force, even if we don’t know how to present what it is in words. Somehow or other God reveals himself or his will to humanity. This revelation and its experience constitute in some mystical way, if not in a physical way, the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings. Otherwise, you could be a Jew...

Ehrman: It’s very interesting, because two of us have remained within our religious traditions and two of us have left our religious traditions. Bill and I have both left our original traditions. But there’s a difference between Bill and me. Bill adopted another tradition. It seems to me that, as somebody who has left his tradition, I have to decide if I’m going to believe something and what it is I’m going to believe. And even if that isn’t expressed propositionally, there still have to be reasons. Once one leaves one’s tradition, it isn’t an automatic move for me to go from Christianity to Judaism. There are ­hundreds of religions in the world. Why would I choose one over the other?

...

Schiffman: I don’t believe in pluralism. I believe in toleration and mutual respect. But I do believe that certain things are ultimately true or untrue. I believe that my religion is more correct than some other people’s religion. But I’m the first to admit that many other people’s religions make them better people and that many things taught in their religions are things that I agree with. We share a lot in common.

...

Ehrman: Larry thinks that at the end of the day you have to believe in God. And then your original question about “What kind of attributes does God have?” matters. Just believing in God is for me an amorphous idea. I think belief has content. Without content it’s simply some kind of feeling that you have inside. I think that faith has to have substance. But once you start putting some substance onto that, you get into trouble. Faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition has a God who intervenes...I don't see a God who intervenes.

Strange: What I can’t help but notice is that two people look at precisely the same event and one sees God intervening and the other does not. Apparently the one who has seen God is either fooling himself or there is something genuinely happening that’s going on.

...

Ehrman: I would actually like to be a believer.

Schiffman: I see the whole thing as a lifelong quest. It’s not that either a person believes or doesn’t believe. The life experiences of people are very difficult and very complex, and believing in God is itself a challenge. It’s not about whether I know the Exodus happened or didn’t happen. It has to do with understanding the difficult world that we’re in. Faith is a process.

...

Ehrman: I just think faith, in order to be intelligent, needs to have reasons behind it. I myself just don’t have sufficient reasons for believing in the Christian tradition. The same thing, I think, for the Jewish tradition.

...

Strange: I think I would say that faith/unfaith is sort of a false dichotomy. I think faith always contains elements of unfaith and vice versa. So in a way, we can’t avoid it. It’s just a matter of deciding what fits and what works. And also, where we get hope from.

Ehrman: Historical scholarship calls into question certain beliefs and can call into question faith. But it can’t resolve any faith issues. There are historians who agree with everything that I think about the historical Jesus, about the New Testament, about the development of Christian doctrine, and yet they’re professors in theological seminaries training pastors. If you ask them, they will say, “Yes, Jesus is God. Historical scholarship doesn’t determine what we believe.” So I think what’s important is that people engage in historical scholarship. It’s better to have a knowledgeable faith than an ignorant faith...

Image From:
The Age