Belief in the Academy

Belief in the Academy October 16, 2015

In a spirited reply to Philip Davies’ Whose Bible Is It Anyway?, Francis Watson takes aim at Davies “call for a strict separation between theological and academic modes of biblical interpretation” (3). Davies complains that believers study the Bible according to an insider approach (emic), while academic scholarship requires an outsider approach (etic). When this separation is not observed, the academic study of the Bible becomes an “impure mixture” (Watson’s phrase) that must be expelled from the “sacred space” (Watson again) of the secular sacred of the academy. 

Believers are welcome to join in the game, so long as they play by the rules and pretend to be outsiders to the text they study.

To this, Watson replies: “This rigidly-enforced distinction between the perspectives of insider and outsider is not observed in other academic disciplines in the humanities or in the social sciences. If it strictly enforced this distinction, biblical studies would be an anomaly. In literary studies, there is scope both for activities such as the preparation of critical editions and for a literary criticism which, in its own way, poses ‘emic’ questions of truth and significance. In the study of music, there need be no tension between the technical analysis of a musical composition and its performance; music lovers and practising musicians (insiders) are not compelled to adopt an exclusively ‘external’ approach to music as an academic discipline. Philosophers may study the history of philosophy, but they may also philosophize for themselves. Historians and sociologists must take seriously their own embeddedness in historical or sociological processes as both the condition and the limit of their understanding” (6-7).

Davies’ academy would be a pure space. But it would also be a “cramped” space.

Watson does not think Davies’ approach violates the pluralism of the academy. Rather, it reveals the true nature of that pluralism: “His exclusion of Christian theology is therefore not an aberration inconsistent with his advocacy of interpretative pluralism—however obvious and pragmatically useful it might seem to identify it as such. On the contrary, Davies’ position discloses the fundamental decision upon which this so-called ‘pluralism’ is founded; for the decision to construe the text as a neutral site, upon which various groups of readers can engage in non-competitive constructive activity, is already a decision against the text as Christian holy Scripture. If this pluralism appears to sanction and encourage modes of theological construction, its license to build is dependent on a promise to conform to a prior condition: one is permitted to read the biblical texts as Christian holy Scripture, thereby adopting a broadly ecclesial reading-perspective, only on condition that one understands this as one among a number of equally-valid modes of interpretation, practised within a range of equally-valid interpretative communities. While an interpretative activity of this kind is at liberty to regard itself as ‘theological’ if it wishes, it should come as no surprise if, to others, its tacit reduction of the concept of holy Scripture to a possible but optional reading-perspective is an act of betrayal” (12).

(Watson, “Bible, Theology and the University: A Response to Philip Davies,” JSOT 71 [1996] 3-16).


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