Saturday 3 July 2010

Stark choices

"The central issues before us are ... religious literacy and critical scholarship vs. orthodox Christian dogma and fideistic approaches to the Bible. We can pretend to have both for a while, but as our Lord told us, "You cannot serve two masters." Which will you choose?" (John Shuck)

Amen

2 comments:

  1. I firmly dismiss the idea that critical scholarship is in oposition to faith and orthodoxy. Sure, fundamentalists with no regard for anything besides their uneducated interpretation or what their pastor tells them on a Sunday morning ought not to be included in biblical research. However, to suggest that orthodoxy and fideistic approaches to Scripture are invalid simply because of those descriptors is inane. We do not need to lump modern (or postmodern) biblical illiteracy with orthodoxy/faith, else we lose the witness of the Church Fathers and the medieval mystics (who would have shunned the belief systems of much of the evangelical world), not to mention the Apostles.

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  2. "religious literacy and critical scholarship vs. orthodox Christian dogma and fideistic approaches to the Bible"

    A false dichotomy. I've encountered quite a lot of religious illiteracy in reading critical scholarship, which isn't mutually exclusive of orthodox Christian faith.

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