Secularism and Biblical Studies

Roland Boer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315478517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is secular biblical criticism? 'Secularism and Biblical Studies' presents a selection of essays that examine the nature of secular biblical studies and its hermeneutical principles. The essays outline and analyse debates within biblical studies over the issue of secularism and explore the interplay of atheism, agnosticism and faith in the interpretation of the Bible. The book argues for a hermeneutics of suspicion and a wider engagement with cultural, literary and anthropological disciplines. Examining biblical hermeneutics from a range of perspectives - from Europe, Israel and the USA - 'Secularism and Biblical Studies' offers a provocative and challenging approach that will be of interest to all students and scholars of the Bible.

Part D

THE PARADOXES OF SECULARISM

NEITHER RELIGIOUS NOR SECULAR: ON SAVING THE CRITIC IN BIBLICAL CRITICISM

Ward Blanton*

To begin with a tip of the hat to Hegel, it is clear that biblical scholarship’s insight about its own operations, about its own identity if you will, has not yet caught up to the true mode in which it functions today. Moreover, it is precisely this gap between the two, operation and insight, that guarantees biblical studies a smooth ride into that oblivion of acritical or apolitical repetition within which it seems to live, move, and have its being at the moment. As Marx loved to say about revolutions, namely, that they always misrecognize themselves in the portraiture of their non-contemporary predecessors, most contemporary accounts of biblical scholarship seem to me oblivious to the peculiar cultural logics of our own time, logics that go hand in hand with recent advances in religious studies and cultural theory. Missing these, biblical scholarship misunderstands its own potential to rework both itself and these new contextual logics in creative – even unprecedented – ways.

In this essay, I am particularly keen to consider a peculiar logic whereby those stalwart modern categories, “religion” and the “secular”, have undergone an inversion, a scrambling of codes, and ultimately a collapse into indistinction in terms of their respective critical or political potentials.¹ Needless to say, this particular oppositional scrambling and collapse affects a rather sensitive spot for biblical scholarship as we know it today, which is to say as we continue to portray it to ourselves, even if according to conventions of a world that no longer makes sense of what we are doing. What are we, after all, if not those who can translate ancient religion into something else, whether modern historical reason, sociological knowledge, or some such “critical” form?²

Indeed, what are we? As will become clear, my fundamental assertion is that, in order to remain critical, intellectually and politically vigilant, it is no longer helpful to organize a self-definition by way of the old certainty that there is any substantial difference between religion and the secular. Not in any way an easy-going “post-” to the risky critical aspirations of selfconsciously “modern” biblical scholarship, what we desperately need today is to push modern critique of religion yet further, indeed, to its limit where it begins to include in its self-surveilling purview that fundamental distinction which makes its operations possible in the first place. The unfinished modern project of biblical studies is, therefore, to allow the very difference between religion and its other, “modern” or critical thought in its many guises – history, sociology, literature, autonomy, etc. – to fall under the epoché of modern critique itself. It is only as we do so, I want to argue further, that we will be able to give an account of ourselves that is in keeping with the peculiarly aporetic or global cultural logics of our time. In short, it is only as we risk the loss of old certainties, above all that “religion” and historical “reason” are ontologically distinct states of affairs, that these names designate something “out there” in the world, so to speak, that we can attempt to save the power of modern critique itself from what is its current collapse within biblical studies into a (late) modern “historical-critical” mythology.

What is this mythological function of contemporary historical-criticism? It is its general refusal to question that fundamental modern doxa whereby it presents itself as the operation that translates religion into something else. It is with this goal in mind – the salvaging of that unruly, risky energy of critique, the scandal of which once meant lost jobs, ecclesiastical outrage, and official governmental censure – that I praise the only true stance left to the contemporary biblical critic: neither religious nor secular.³ The twists of the dialectical screw have revolved multiple times since the political and social dramas of Enlightenment biblical scholarship, the subsequent efforts to translate theology into anthropology, and the general nineteenth-century complexification and profaning of the otherworldly book.⁴ The contemporary political and conceptual task, therefore, is to articulate biblical studies in ways that do not refuse to question the basic operations, or paradigmatic questions, by which these two poles – the religious and the secular – have emerged into the light of modern cultural perception as the all-encompassing oppositional pair they have become. Without this risky next step in the progress of biblical scholarship, all the urging of the religious or the secular to take up their respective banners of identitarian faithfulness to the cause seems to me irredeemably retro, a diversionary misrecognition of our current critical potential in the bygone battles of earlier biblical scholars. In order to unearth or renew this critical potential, to save the critic in biblical criticism, we need to be aware of the way the old names of the religious and the secular have long since become dusty placards under museum glass.

A Single Discourse of Religion-and-Secularity

What might it mean to articulate biblical studies in a world without these old compass points? First and foremost, it means that our analysis is compelled to invent new modes of orientation, new modes of critical thought, or new modes of intervening in a discourse about religion, secularity, and history that has been of central importance in the political and academic self-constitution of the West. We should take our cue here from what i find to be the most significant academic insight in the past three decades of research about the role of “religion” in the modern world, namely, that the modern West may be read as a self-organizing, expanding (or “universalizing”) system that, we should never forget, operates free of the implied constraints we continue to imagine as inhering in a substantial distinction between religion and the secular (see below). Unfortunately we continue to have faith in this distinction, as if it were a kind of locational, conceptual, or political terra firma, an ultimate limit to which one could, in theory at least, move disputes to a point of ultimate stability (which is to say a point of ultimate incommunicability).⁵

To be sure, the ever-expanding discourse of religion-and-the-secular continues to develop hand in hand with Western notions of governance, concepts of human rights, and market interests. As Edward Said argued admirably for so long, one may even read this academic and social distinction between religion and the secular as a primary motor of the self-expansion of the modern, rational West.⁶ As Foucault argued so persuasively, however, this operational motor can only work to the degree that this fundamental distinction is made intelligible by the proliferation of a massive apparatus intended to measure, count, and otherwise reveal the difference between, alternately, local, traditional, irrational “religion”, and the autonomous, self-constituting, “modern”.⁷ Biblical studies has, in the past, functioned as just such a technology for the revealing of this distinction, making clear the difference between modern, rational subjects of study and pre-modern, religious objects of research. Nor do we have any reason to think that biblical studies will become less significant in the production and fixing of such distinctions, particularly as the quest to distinguish the specifically limited from the generalizable “human” has not diminished but only grown more aggressive as we enter the age of military intervention in the name of “human rights”⁸ Jacques Derrida⁹ repeats the same general observation about modern intellectual and political history more succinctly, formally, or theoretically than Said in his important “Two Sources of Religion” essay. Like Said, he describes the modern West as a system that organizes and expands itself precisely by way of this distinction between the (excessive or particular) religious and the (general, universal, or global) secular.¹⁰ In other words, the very naming of people, places, ideas, or events as religious or secular has been one of the fundamental tactics of a singular modern form of systemic self-expansion that Derrida calls “globalatinization”. The critical point to recognize is that to claim that the system works by way of the production and tactical exportation of this distinction b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Secularism and the Bible
• Part A: Initial Engagement at the Forum
• Part B: The Manifesto Debate
• Part C: The End of Biblical Studies?
• Part D: The Paradoxes of Secularism
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Subjects