Kurt Noll’s op-ed in The Chronicle Review, ‘The Ethics of Being a Theologian’ (27 July 2009) has generated a fair bit of discussion. As always, he’s controversial and stimulating. At best he makes succinct points that cut through the BS which is the unfortunate yet not always inappropriate acronym of Biblical Studies. At worst, his near positivism could do with some nuancing.
Noll makes great statements like this, which might resonate with many people involved in religious or biblical studies:
“Most people do not understand what religious study really is. Professors of religion are often confused with, or assumed to be allies of, professors of theology. The reason for the confusion is no secret. All too often, even at public universities, the religion department is peopled by theologians…”
And then there is Noll’s contrast between religious/biblical studies and theology:
“Religious study attempts to advance knowledge by advancing our understanding about why and how humans are religious, what religion actually does, and how religion has evolved historically… Theology also views itself as an academic discipline, but it does not attempt to advance knowledge. Rather, theologians practice and defend religion.”
There is something quite true in this contrast, in that some methodologies are inherently better than others at finding new aspects of what is true and real. Astronomy wins hands down over Astrology, for example. But when Noll talks about non-theological methodologies which are “unencumbered by overtly ideological agendas”, everything turns on Noll’s use of the word “overtly”. Theology is overtly a means to use data to defend existing presuppositions. By contrast, in biblical and religious studies, at best, our ideologies are less overt. They’re still there, of course, as “the trendy postmodern” thinkers highlighted. Yet a fundamental difference exists in that so many more of the presuppositions of religious and biblical studies are themselves open to challenge and reformulation. It’s not enough to just point the finger and say, “You’ve got presuppositions too!” Well, d’uh. Of course we do. Instead, the salient question is this: “What kind and how many presuppositions aren’t you willing to challenge?” Sure, in practice, our willingness to change our presuppositions and paradigms might be slow. But only in theology are too many such changes prevented on a priori grounds, and only in theology is this defence of so much of what is already believed held up as a virtue.
The difference between serving your ideology and being open to data is always one of degree. But it is this very relative difference which makes the distinction between theology and academic studies so fundamental.
The Dunedin School 
On another line – ‘theologians practice and defend religion’. In short, theology is apologetics, a rearguard action. Oh come on, Noll (via Tyrone)! Why is it assumed that theologians must be believers? We don’t expect a teacher of French to be French, or a student of ancient Greece to believe in the Greek gods, or even an art critic to be an artist. So why does a theologian need to be a believer (in God I mean)?
Roland, the sense in which a theologian must be a believer is that a theologian is, strictly speaking, distinguishable from a historian of religion or a philosopher, biologist, psychologist/anthropologist of it, etc.
Theology proceeds from the premise that knowledge of God is specially mediated to human beings through elements of allegedly sacred tradition. Either through the words of “prophets” or through the writings of “sacred texts” or through the authority of a Church or comparable religious institution, etc. When one theologizes, one adopts the assumption that such sources provide valid information which can be synthesized with other knowledge to discover truths about God, reality, humanity, morality, salvation, etc.
In order to be a theologian, and not simply a philosopher of religion or metaphysician or philosopher of God, by definition these sacred texts must be sources of knowledge about reality for you. If to you all the texts are are sources of insight into religious psychology or religious history or if their insights into God are only incidentally truthful—truthful not as genuinely “specially revealed, sacred sources” but as on one point or another confirmable by independent metaphysics/science/moral theory, etc.—then you simply are not a theologian. You are in that case a philosopher or a historian or an anthropologist.
Only if you participate in a religious tradition by accepting its texts/prophets/institutions/rituals, etc. as uniquely revelatory of information about God and the world which would be inaccessible to human reason without these sacred revelations, are you a theologian. So, that’s why, by definition, theology requires belief. Theologians may make some arguments that only appeal to philosophical/scientific/historic/etc. evidence and premises and in those cases functionally they are not acting as theologians but as philosophers, scientists, historians, etc.
Another issue: Theologians are not always or exclusively engaged in apologetics. Theologians may cover any large number of topics with no reference to defending their faith beliefs against outside challenge. They may be constructive, systematic theologians simply trying to develop their views on soteriology or ecclesiology or eschatology, etc. Or they may be doing hermeneutics to understand the (alleged) truth of what God is trying to reveal in a particular biblical passage. As participating in their faith tradition and contributing to it, they do not in these cases necessarily defend that tradition so much as help define and improve its beliefs from within it, as members of it.
Finally, your analogy to the non-French studying French or the contemporary person studying the ancient Greeks does not apply to theologians since if you study theology from the outside the way classicists study ancient Greece, you are doing history of religion rather than theology. But, nonetheless, there is room for one other possibility. It is conceivable someone could do theology from within without believing it is veridical. It is possible, for example, to engage theology as a form of literature. In that case, you may try to give an account of what a sacred text or sacred tradition “really means” and give passionate arguments as to proper and improper interpretations of the texts or tradition without believing that those texts or traditions are at all truth-conducive in describing reality.
So, the same way that you might argue about what Homer really means to say and how best to understand Greek thinking through that, there may be an attempt to get within the mind of a theological tradition to understand what it “really” means through working within its categories as though they were true but without genuinely believing in it.
But that still to me sounds like you are studying religion from a literary, philosophical, historical, anthropological, and psychological mindset rather than an actual theological one. In such cases, you are adopting theological categories only provisionally to see what they tell you about a tradition but not with belief with the hopes of finding the truth about the world or God outside of that idiosyncratic tradition.
On your “other line”, Roland: Noll needed to use such a definition of “theology” in order to engage at the level of the theologians who describe their activities as an explication of what is already known. But what you say takes the critique to a whole new level: why let them get away with defining the field in such a narrow way?
The narrowness is for specificity. There is a difference between philosophy of religion and theology and it’s whether you take a specific religion (or even multiple specific ones theoretically) to be genuine sources of truth QUA religious traditions, as actually capable of mediating special truths to those who belong to them. To say that theologians can do more than reason with reference to a faith tradition in which they are practicing is simply to say that theologians can do more than theology—they can sometimes make philosophical arguments defensible to anyone who can do philosophy. But when they do tradition-non-specific philosophy they are not being specifically theological. To be theological is to reason from within acceptance of a tradition. That distinction makes things clearer without confining theologians too “narrowly”—they’re not in any way limited from being philosophical or literary or psychological, etc. Those just are not the specifically theological tasks they perform.
Unless the narrowness you question is a different one—can there be atheistic theologies? So, is it still theology when a Buddhist reasons from within their tradition? It might still be religious, since it shows a willingness to elevate the practices and rituals of a religious tradition in their reasoning such that these can help serve as the basis for judging other possible philosophical conclusions as correct or false. But it’s weird to me to call it theological if there is no God involved. Where’s the “theo” in theology in that case?
Love to hear your thoughts and/or response to this post and clip:
http://loga-abdullah.blogspot.com/2009/11/10-reasons.html
He doesn’t. But unfortunately he normally is which makes it such an unacademic discipline – normally. It’s a Zeus believer teaching ancient Greece and an artist reviewing his own art. And so true “only in theology is this defence of so much of what is already believed held up as a virtue.”
Deane said: It’s not enough to just point the finger and say, “You’ve got presuppositions too!”
I absolutely agree! Unfortunately, I still hear this kind of argument. I guess the idea is that after foundationalism, we’ve discovered everyone has assumptions, and no set of assumptions is better than any other, so there’s no room to criticize other people’s ideologies/worldviews/etc. Of course, the error is in the idea that assumptions are out of bounds, which is what you point out brilliantly when you say: “Instead, the salient question is this: “What kind and how many presuppositions aren’t you willing to challenge?” Sure, in practice, our willingness to change our presuppositions and paradigms might be slow. But only in theology are too many such changes prevented on a priori grounds, and only in theology is this defence of so much of what is already believed held up as a virtue.”
Brilliant lines!
those were the exact perfect lines weren’t they … I’ve cut and pasted them with the link and I’m going to quote Deane on this blog at some stage. I hope he doesn’t mind :-)
I think the other key thing to point out to the presuppositionalists is that for reason, the dependence on an assumption is a limitation to be overcome rather than an opening to be celebrated. In good reasoning, when one discovers that an assumption is at work, a position is held tentatively to the extent that it relies on that assumption. And then assumptions are tested to see if they themselves can find justification through corroboration with other evidence that they did not depend upon. In these sorts of ways our assumptions are open to challenge, revision, and even reclassification as no longer assumption in some cases. And whatever is held only on assumption is held with some due tentativeness because of the assumptive character of the belief.
All of this differs from a faith commitment to believe in something and always to conform evidence to that committed belief rather than ever subject that belief to critical tests of evidence itself. This is what makes faith “presuppositions” irrationalistic, prejudicial, and dogmatic. Sure, we all work with assumptions, but when you make them rigid, when you close them off in principle from challenge or revision, when their positive content itself is palpably at odds with the rest of one’s knowledge (e.g., by presupposition you posit a supernatural realm when all of our experience and knowledge are of natural realities with natural explanations), and when you deliberately try to close off the roads of cross-paradigm communication by insisting that you and your enemies are fundamentally doomed to incommensurable paradigms because of your contrasting “presuppositions”—you simply are an enemy of the constructive project of reasoning itself and not at all concerned with truth.
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If we start with the answers – whether the answer is ‘Jesus saves’, ‘Marx was right’, or ‘the problems with history are all due to the actions of wealthy blue-eyed white European men’ (like me, except for the wealthy part) – and then look around for questions that will yield those SAME answers, we are in trouble.
In terms of the study of religion, Roland, the question, for me at least, always come down to this: why would anyone who is not deeply invested in their own tradition practice theology?
Academic objectivity is by no means a realistic expectation, but it certainly makes for a compelling goal for which to strive, knowing always that it is impossible.
It has been my professional experience (such as it is) that being even moderately sympathetic towards religious belief and practice makes one open to charges of apologia. This at times goes as far as to label any argument that points to the vitality (or, dare we say it, flourishing) of religion in modernity as motivated by faith concerns. As a reasoned and committed atheist (though one with a moderate supernaturalist bent), this can be deeply frustrating.
Much of this seems to come down to semantic arguments (what, exactly does one mean by ‘theology’?) that are endless and endlessly distracting. Though there is a real need for self-examination and scholarship that is rigorously aware of its own presuppositions is the best kind of scholarship, there is no need to spend as much time as we do in professional navel-gazing. In this, the academy seems to be dangerously close to participating in the sort of self-obsession that is reflected in the continuing dominance of reality television (and, to be frank, in websites like this one). If we spend too much time on ourselves and our problems with ourselves, we leave too little time for anything else.
Let’s just acknowledge that there is no pure point of view from which to view the world and that we all work with certain blinkers, whether we know they are there or not. Why not just get on with the work we’re all supposed to be doing?
Eric, what is this “work we are all supposed to be doing”? This “work” we’re supposed to do is actually what is being contested. Your comments seem to want to dodge the debate like a copy standing by a wreck saying “move along; move along.” But move along to where? That’s what we were arguing about!
Let me ask you this question: if, as I presume, you don’t think “anything goes” as far as academic scholarship is concerned, where do you draw the lines and how do you justify them?
Missives,
Fair enough.
Really the only point I wanted to make is that all of this hand-wringing about who we are and what we’re doing should be a part of the work we do, not the ONLY work that we do. I, for one, would much rather read a solid analysis of a text or a statistical study of attitudes towards Hinduism in Indian immigrant communities in Canada than read a debate about what to call our textual analysis or what discipline such statistics are meant to serve.
Any real intellectual work is going to be contested, and that in an important sense is its beauty, as it gives us substantial things to argue about.
Of course, anything doesn’t go, but drawing lines in the sand probably isn’t the best way to go about figuring out what does and what does not count as scholarship in the religions. All of the over-specialisation of the academic disciplines has really been harmful to the overall project of the liberal arts and we end up – again just like on much the Internet – squabbling over small things amongst people who hold very similar ideas to our own.
I realise of course that there are institutional reasons behind this, many of them tied to the frankly idiotic application of the business performance model in the tertiary education setting. I suppose in such a world, we do need to be very specific about all of this. God forbid we do anything that falls outside our own discipline.
As for justifying these lines (or lack of lines), it may be as simple as doing the work and seeing how it holds up to scrutiny from as non-confessional and as neutral as possible a position. Doing this is of course a matter of collaboration, given that we are all wrong, but we’re all wrong in slightly different ways.
This may all sound a bit imprecise, but the social sciences all call for imprecision, as the social world of humans does not like to conform to strict divisions and straight lines. However, arguing for a certain fluidity in our work and in our understanding as to the purpose and worth of that work does NOT mean that are free to do anything and pretend that it’s good enough. A good deal of scholarship across the disciplines is rubbish and we must be willing to admit that and have standards for determining this. These standards need to be a matter of constant negotiation.
On second thought, maybe I am being imprecise for the simple reason that I don’t really have any good answers.
The analogy of the cop standing by a smoking auto accident is so good that I may have to borrow it some time. Where do we move on to? The next piece of work, I suppose.
Hmmm. I agree with much of what you’re saying: we shouldn’t ONLY be navel-gazing, and when we do our answers should be tentative or “fluid” rather than absolute (at least for the most part—there are some things I think are non-negotiable). I suppose I’m willing to draw more lines than you want to.
I think those who are reflecting on the nature and limits of the discipline are doing it best when it is related to their work. It’s most obvious in people doing theory & method stuff. But take someone like Said: his work was on the east/west binary, but the work on that binary ended up being circularly related to the nature of the field.
Missives,
Again, well said.
The best reflection on the field of study does indeed take place in the context of other, more solid kinds of research. If we could all do our hand-wringing like Said does it, the academy would be a better place.
There are things that are non-negotiable, even for someone as fuzzy as I am. Off the top of my head, two things that have no business in serious research: 1) publishing books or journal articles under a pseudonym to avoid the flak from airing controversial views (though there are places in which shielding your identity, such as informal websites and the like, is permissible); 2) refusing to look at reputable evidence because it makes one uncomfortable.
OK, this one has certainly rolled on since I last had a chance to have a look. To be frank, I think the Anselmian position – fides quarens intellectum – is bunkum. I know many theologians assume this position, but for theology not to be akin to tea-leaf reading is ot give up the game. On that score theology should stay within the churches and not dare to speak to anyone but the faithful.
However (and this is the seed of a post in response to Missives from Marx), I would suggest that belief in God or commitment to a religious tradition is one smallish part of theology, not its centre. Take the analogy with intention in biblical an dliterary interpretation. Too many biblical scholars assume that the key to meaning is the intention of the supposed author. This is highly problematic for reasons that have been well-rehearsed: identifying the author, the sub-conscious elements, the restriction of meaning to such a small area etc. But in biblical interpretation, intention really means what Paul or Jesus meant, aka God. Instead, intention is one part, and by no means the most important one, of interpretation.
So also with theology. Belief in God is one element, not necessary or central. There is also a tradition of highly complex argument, modes of engagement, assumptions, challenges, socio-economic and psychological factors, and so on. A theology that operates with fidens quaerens intellectum is a poor, pale version of what theology could be.
I’ve posted a full reply at http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2009/08/theists-and-atheists-and-theology-or.html
Kurt Noll is american and lives there and works in a university there surrounded by other americans and americanised furrunaghs. The end.