Scholars must not park their Christian faith at the door

By Deborah Gyapong
ChristianWeek

OTTAWA, ON -- Most people have heard about the Jesus Seminar, but few have heard of another group of scholars, the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar (SAHS).

SAHS co-founder Craig Bartholomew would like to change that.

"What has so often happened is that the unbelieving skeptic sets the agenda, and the Church puts all its resources into responding to that," says Bartholomew, who co-founded the SAHS in 1998 under the sponsorship of the United Kingdom's Bible Society and the University of Gloucestershire, where he was then teaching.

While the Jesus Seminar and the SAHS gather biblical scholars from around the world, the groups are diametrically opposed in their goals.

Recently-deceased Jesus Seminar founder Robert Funk set out to undermine orthodox Christianity, hoping to advance the "coming radical reformation." "We should give Jesus a demotion," Funk had written on his website. "It is not longer credible to think of Jesus as divine."

The SAHS takes the opposite stance.

"There is only one rule -- we cannot marginalize Christian faith in our discussions," Bartholomew says. "We want faith at the heart of the discussions, generating it, informing it.

"Let us set the agenda, and put rigorous scholarship to that end," he says. "We want to be aware of other agendas, but allow the gospel to set the agenda at the highest academic level."

Bartholomew came to Redeemer University College in Hamilton, Ontario a year and a half ago, making the university the international headquarters for the project. The SAHS has put out a handsome volume of scholarly papers each year on the latest in biblical research, as seen through the prism of faith -- eight so far.

"Hermeneutics at its best helps you to know where to put your ear so you are likely to hear God's address," Bartholomew says. "That's really the passion of the seminar. It's one thing to confess it is Scripture; it is another thing to listen to God's address. That's the kind of stuff we're after."

In the secular universities, biblical scholarship has been dominated for the past 150 years by a modernist paradigm called historical criticism. "The legacy of modernism was to leave faith at the door," Bartholomew says.

While the SAHS is not wedded to evangelicalism or conservative Catholicism, and encourages a range of belief within a Christian ecumenical framework, scholars in the SAHS "can't leave their faith at the door" to take part, he says.

While Bartholomew believes postmodernism is a catch-all phrase, and hesitates to say society has fully left modernism behind, postmodern influences have forced scholars to examine the philosophical assumptions behind modernism.

That examination has "thoroughly shaken up" historical criticism and put biblical scholarship into a crisis, he says. The crisis has led to a "pluralism" that is "liable to encourage all sorts of strange things" where "everyone is doing what is right in their own eyes," he says.

He points out the subjective approach to Scripture has led to "feminist readings" and "gay readings" among others, and created a sense of uncertainty and lack of direction for scholars in the field.

Bartholomew saw the crisis as a "time of opportunity to create new ways to recover the Bible as Christian Scripture." He hopes seminar participants -- numbering between 20 to 30 at any given time -- will do their scholarship "in a profound way as servants of God."

This, he says, "provides an excitement not available in most other academic contexts."

The seminar met in Rome last June, and will meet next at Baylor University in Texas in June 2006.

More information about the SAHS books, including the latest release Reading Luke: Interpretation, Reflection, Formation, can be found on the project's website.