Newsletter 15 June 2008
Time for a New Paradigm
The Rev. Peter J. Miano
As one of our esteemed alumni, you know The Society
for Biblical Studies primarily through your travel experience with us. Those
among our alumni who joined us after already having had the experience of
traveling with a commercial tour company know the difference between commercial
tourism and our unique pilgrimage experiences. I want to remind you that S.B.S.’
mission is distinctive, relevant, challenging and potentially transforming.
When people ask me if it is safe to travel to the Holy Land, I reply, “No.
It might change your life.” It is difficult for me to imagine that Jesus
died so that our lives might remain unchanged and I am suspicious of any discipleship
that does not transform us. If you want to assess the authenticity of your
spiritual experience, ask yourself how it has changed your life.
While travel is the way in which we pursue our mission, we are not a travel
company. We are fundamentally and primarily a religious organization with
an educational mission. Our mission is simple to articulate: to reform biblical
scholarship, to redeem pilgrimage and to renew the mission of the Church.
For the moment, I would like to focus on the first of these three elements
of our mission. What exactly is it about biblical scholarship that needs reforming?
When I was doing my doctoral work, I became acutely
aware that biblical scholarship renews itself about every ten years. All the
more astonishing, then, is the reality that the paradigm for teaching and
learning about the Bible has not changed in 150 years! In churches, Bible
study usually occurs in an informal classroom setting with a leader/facilitator
who guides more or less eager participants. In seminaries, the Bible is taught
in more formal classrooms by specialists who lecture to more or less eager
students. There, the Bible is studied in the comfort of libraries and in the
safety of classrooms. The academy is a sheltered environment. How do we expect
to transform sheltered seminarians into courageous pastors for a challenging
world? Rather than luring students away from the world and into the library,
The Society for Biblical Studies invites its participants to engage their
Bibles only after engaging the world.
In the academy, learning is measured by performance
on tests and papers. The primary mechanisms for studying and learning is reading
texts, listening to lectures and writing papers. In either case, the Bible
is an object. It is examined from the outside looking in. Especially in the
biblical academy, the Bible is subjected to careful scrutiny as if it were
a specimen under a microscope. Scholars champion values of objectivity, often
claiming to be scientific, as if being "scientific" is the measure
beyond all others. The primary faculty is reason. The heart is not usually
a part of the process. By contrast, we invite our participants to cultivate
a holistic approach to the Bible that involves not only the intellect, but
also the passions, the will and the body.
Moreover, especially in the biblical academy, including seminaries and graduate
schools of religion, the study of scripture presumes distinct assumptions
about gaining knowledge that are usually unstated and almost always uncritically
accepted. Almost all contemporary study of scripture in the biblical academy
presumes that knowledge about the Bible is gained by analyzing its component
parts. This is why generations of seminarians have groaned under the weight
of the historical-critical method. This presumption, however, is far from
self evident and nowhere is it proved. Further, it leads to a level of specialization
in the field of biblical studies, not to mention other academic disciplines,
that is more appropriate for insects than it is for people. Specialists in
one area usually do not have the time to access information from specialists
in another area. It is rare, for example, when insights from classical studies
are imparted to biblical scholars and vice versa. While biblical studies is
fundamentally an enterprise requiring historical investigation, few biblical
scholars are trained in history and many make errors that no historian would
make. For example, the frequency with which anachronism infects biblical scholarship
is shocking.
