"Gatekeepers"

Brendan says:

June 17, 2012 at 4:29 am

It’s not just evangelicals that have the sad cycle; it’s liberals too. And it’s been this way for a long time.

My grandfather was a bright scholar who wanted to teach in the schools of his liberal denomination, but when they found out he believed the Bible was God’s inerrant Word, the denominational seminaries branded him an “evangelical” and refused to offer him a job. So he worked at a conservative evangelical seminary for a few years, because they were training missionaries and doing some good to advance the gospel, until they decided he was too “liberal.” He taught at several places, including Wheaton for some years, and certainly proved his mettle as a scholar without giving up on his evangelical faith, but found that there are always some gatekeepers on both evangelical and liberal sides that put ideology above scholarship.

In general, liberals often hold to long since disproven ideas like the Documentary Hypothesis, which just doesn’t make sense in light of ANE research of the past several decades; it was founded on assumptions long since proven wrong by scholars 100+ years ago who knew nothing about ANE writing conventions and projected what they knew about the Brothers Grimm onto the Pentateuch’s composition. Yet if you breathe a word against the Documentary Hypothesis, or argue that it’s bunk based upon faulty assumptions (which it is), then you’re regarded as “unscholarly.” Liberal gatekeepers have many other sacred cows that they don’t like to be tipped, just as some evangelicals have.

I myself graduated from an evangelical seminary and found that some of the professors equipped me well to respectfully and critically engage with liberal scholarship, while others went the easy route with “safe” evangelical books. I’m impressed that Wheaton College, observing the vicious cycle that Dr. Enns has noted, has been teaching NT Criticism for the past 15 years or so. I pray other evangelical institutions will follow. I find engagement with liberal scholarship fruitful (if sometimes frustrating for its assumptions), but I do not agree with the implicit assumption in Enns’ article that bright students can’t hold to evangelical beliefs. I certainly believe evangelical scholarship can not only stand its own but, done right, is a lot better than liberal scholarship, much more convincing. I just wish more evangelical institutions would see that they win on a level playing field and let down their gates more — and more liberal institutions would let down their gates, too. But until both liberal and conservative groups open up, we’re unlikely to see an escape from this sad cycle, both in evangelical and liberal scholarship.

    (on Documentary Hypothesis (DH): to clarify, the “by scholars 100+ years ago” and following refers to the founders of the DH, not those who disproved it; the DH has been proven wrong since 1941 by Umberto Cassuto’s essay of the same name, which sadly was not translated into English until 1961, well after Cassuto’s death, apparently due to the academic arrogance of those who thought any attack on the DH was not worth translating into English).

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2012/06/if-they-only-knew-what-i-thought-the-sad-cycle-of-evangelical-biblical-scholarship/#comment-9920