Michael V. Fox has written a thought-provoking article "Bible Scholarship and Faith-Based Study: My View" over at the SBL (Society of Biblical Literature) web site. Fox's post has generated a lot of talk in the Biblioblog world and Codex has some interesting comments on Fox's remarks and some links to other sites. Fox writes that:
Any discipline that deliberately imports extraneous, inviolable axioms into its work belongs to the realm of homiletics or spiritual enlightenment or moral guidance or whatnot, but not scholarship, whatever academic degrees its practitioners may hold. Scholarship rests on evidence. Faith, by definition, is belief when evidence is absent.
On the other hand Codex comments:
While I would agree that any scholarship that presumes its conclusions is methodologically problematic (and borders on disingenuous), faith-based scholarship does not necessarily have to fall in this category (though some certainly does).
While the discussion was originally about Biblical studies, I think that the question is salient to the study of rabbinic literature and also to that of any religious tradition or culture. The questions raised are not alien to Wissenschaft des Judentums for many of the first practitioners of the critical study of Judaism were also involved in religious communities (e.g. Zunz, Frankel and Chajes). Another issue is when the same person aims to produce both critical and "religious" scholarship. Sometimes you are the critical scholar of Talmud, while at other times you are delivering a devar torah or trying to get someone excited about Jewish learning and Torah (not that critical scholarship can't be inspiring). With regards to this last question the following quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose critical scholarship I don't think was ever devoid of kedushah, always resonated with me. "Too often, so-called explanation kills inspiration." (Man's Quest for God
, p. 80)Apropos Purim, one of Michael V. Fox's many writings is the critically-acclaimed book Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther
.For some reading on Wissenschaft see Ismar Schorsch's From Text to Context: The Turn of History in Modern Judaism
and one article which I found very interesting, Michael Meyer's "Jewish Religious Reform and Wissenschaft des Judentums: The Positions of Zunz, Geiger and Frankel" in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 16 (1971) 19-41.
|