Why can't I be you?

Five hundred years ago, there were things called “renaissance men”. These were people who were multitalented and made contributions to multiple fields of study, or the arts. Erasmus of Rotterdam, for instance, was a theologian, philosopher, teacher, fiction writer, poet, satirist and creator of the first critical edition of the New Testament used for the wave of vernacular Bible translations that surfaced in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. King Henry VIII of England was a monarch, songwriter, theologian and sportsman renowned for his fondness of outdoor and “indoor sport”, particularly of the young, perky redheaded variety (e.g. Ann Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and Catherine Howard, cf. Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleeves).

The ultimate Renaissance man, of course, was Leonardo DaVinci. He was a painter, draftsman, scientist, and inventor, was groundbreaking at all of those areas and even found time to be president of the Priory of Sion and hide all sorts of clues in his works that only conspiracy theorists and hack writers could truly understand. He enjoyed indoor sports as well, but played with a different team, apparently. Could this be the reason why his depictions of the apostle John look so “femme”? Nah.

The renaissance man was possible back then because most modern fields of study were in their infancy at the time, and it was possible to be a jack of all trades and actually master a few of them. Today, it’s different. Everybody has a specialty. We don’t just have Church Historians, Theologians, Biblical Scholars, and Pastoral Scholars we have Early Church Historians, New Testament Scholars, Historical Theologians, pastoral counseling experts, Celtic post-feminist exegetes, early medieval christologists, Tridentine eucharistic theologians, Romans chapter 8 scholars, marital diabetes pastoral studies, early middle Premonstratensian historians, et al.

Or at least that’s they way it seemed to be. But for the past couple decades a plague has been sweeping through divinity schools and departments of religion around the world. No one is content to bloom where they’re planted anymore, no no. Now everybody wants to be the other guy. The biblical scholars want to be historians, the historians want to be theologians, the theologians want to be philosophers, the philosophers want to be politicians, the politicians want to be scientists and the scientists want to be biblical scholars.

This first sprang to my attention in the “historical Jesus” fad of the 1990’s , thankfully now fizzling out. You may recall the Jesus Seminar, a coalition of B-list biblical scholars from such hubs of the intellectual activity such as Oregon State University (home to the fighting beavers, the most vicious aquatic rodents on the planet), led by the late Robert A. Funk, the P.T. Barnum of Biblical Literature. Based on self-fulfilling criteria, this veritable “who’s that?” of New Testament studies, traveled around deciding what Jesus did and didn’t actually say using multi-colored beads (with pretty much everything ending up in the latter category). This traveling circus was designed to a) keep newspapers from laying off their religion writers, b) get book deals and c) help them get tenure at a halfway decent university without having to do any real work.

The Jesus Seminar also marked the birth (or at lest the more rapid spread of) the plague mentioned above. Despite being New Testament scholars, the Jesus seminar claimed that they were actually doing history not biblical criticism. History involves reconstructing the past by letting the sources (written or otherwise) speak for themselves, evaluating them in (what should be) an unbiased way, and following the evidence wherever it leads. What the Jesus seminar did was not that at all. First they came up with a priori assumptions like “Jesus never spoke in apocalyptic terms” and “Jesus never predicted his own death” then crossed out everything Jesus is recorded as saying that didn’t fit the assumptions. They rigged the game so that it would come out the way they wanted. I don’t know that is, but it sure ain’t history.

The Jesus Seminar and the publicity and money it attracted likewise encouraged dozens of otherwise good, responsible scholars to jump in on the act, seducing even august figures such as E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, and Hendrikus Boers all hoping to cash in on the hype, despite that fact that their previous work far surpassed anything the Jesus Seminar had or even could do themselves. Even classicist Michael Grant, despite being an actual historian, wrote a historical Jesus book, although he wrote it in 1977 so he could make money off it then and have it already on bookshelves to allow him to cash in on the trend in the 1990’s. There was also the wave of anti-Jesus Seminar biblical scholars who donned historian hats and paraded around pretending they were doing history. N.T. Wright is the best example of this, which is all the sadder because he’s actually a fine New Testament scholar. He went on an extended tour of the U.S. with his friend and fellow Cambridge alum Marcus Borg, easily the least obnoxious member of the Jesus Seminar (although Crossan is more entertaining). They got up in front of starry eyed crowds of Volvo-driving NPR listeners and waxed eloquent about how they, as historians, view Jesus, never letting the fact that they aren’t historians get in the way of collecting thousands of dollars in honorarium (those cottages in the Lake District don’t pay for themselves)

If this plague has been running rampant in Biblical Studies, from where was it contracted? One possible carrier is the discipline of theology which occasionally does have contact with Biblical Studies. In fact, theology has had a chronic case of this disease for centuries, mostly centered on Central Europe and its German-speaking peoples. Despite the efforts of heroic antiseptics such as Karl Barth, German theology has been contaminated for centuries by philosopher-envy. From Melanchton on down through Schleiermacher, Lessing, Bultmann, Moltmann, Ratzinger and the whole gang, there has been there has been a longing, dare I say lust, for philosophers. In these past decades, the prominence of German theology has begun to fade, though, and hope has arisen that this plague of lust could be wiped out by a newer generation of American and British theologians. Enter Stanley Hauerwas.

Hauerwas, like his German predecessors, feels uncomfortable with the Bible. It’s messy, it’s contradictory, it isn’t in German, and it’s hard to understand. Church history is even harder to understand, what with its cast of thousands and all those synods, councils, creeds and whatnot. What a drag! So instead of trying to understand them, Dr. Stanley decides to keep them both at arm’s length and just do his own thing. The only times Stanley gets his Bible and church history books out is when he needs to make himself look pious when people who care about that sort of thing come around. Otherwise, he'll stick to his Aristotle, thank you very much. Aristotle is a much more likable figure than that Jesus or Paul. Aristotle didn’t make as many demands or get angry like they did. Who needs the hassle of having demands being made of us theologically? Or of having to interact with the outside world? Didn’t Jesus say at his ascension, “Go not into the world, but go ye into your churches and build a community of virtue there, and lo, the rest will take care of itself.”

As for the other disciplines of the Christian academy, I could go on and on. There is even a serious field called “Historical Theology” for Pete’s sake!

If people stopped commenting on stuff they knew nothing about, the entire blogsphere would break down, obviously (though that’s maybe not a bad thing). But the reason why the academy has become so specialized is that there is so much in those four disciplines that has been explored and has yet to be explored that it’s impossible for any one person to be competent in all fields at once. But the sum of all these specialized areas ads up to something much greater than the whole, something that is absorbed and processed (hopefully) by pastors and pastors to be, and makes God’s people a better people, a people which a richer understanding of their mission and ministry from the church secretary and the “little old ladies” to the Christmas-Easter attendee. This richer understanding leads to a greater faithfulness in spreading God’s love around the world until Christ returns and we are named his good and faithful servants