Intellectual humility is a terribly underappreciated virtue.
A fun exercise is considering how intellectual humility and and dogmatic faith interact. I’ve recently been entertaining myself by considering this interaction in the case of the recently resurgent Catholic integrallism.
Thanks Chess Jurist I hope I’m one of them (even if I’m still many years away from becoming a scholar never mind a great one!) I guess its just a matter of somehow reconciling my faith with the thousands of intellectual questions I’m struggling to answer. (Would sure be interested if he were still alive to see how he would answer them.)
At the core of all this is the requirement for faith. With faith, no story will be too unbelievable, no act too horrendous, no thought too vile and reprehensible. However without faith, the biblical collection does not answer the questions of why we are here, why we suffer, why we die, and where we go in death. A critical look at life seems to lead us to be resigned to an unknown fate that seems no different than the bug you squash under your foot. Faith gives all things religious a ‘pass’ from critical analysis even though you may be the most aware, educated person in the world. To do otherwise would be returning to stare at the abyss and have no answers. So you can live the dichotomy of scholarly critique and unshakable faith as long as you never try to reconcile them with each other. It only leads to being an ‘atheist’ if you try.
I know this post may be long dead but being new to the Blog I found this post interesting.
My answer to the presenting question is “No”. Developing a broad and in depth knowledge about the Bible, Christian history, or any subject need not necessarily lead to unbelief or atheism. I attended a secular university as a history major. My ancient history professor, not a believer, prior to his lectures on the origins of Christianly required the class write down his introductory statement to the series of lectures. I still have it today. His statement was: “If my views and interpretations of Christianity lead you to lose your faith be assured you have lost nothing. What you have lost is a facile faith formed on a shaky philosophical construct and rooted in a naïve historiography. However if you subject all my views to careful study and analysis many of you will leave this class with a renewed faith and belief.” How true this was for me. My faith began like Barth via a born again experience where I was “nurtured” for years in a fundamentalist evangelical milieux. I attended like Barth a “liberal” mainline divinity school and ultimately entered Christian ministry. But unlike Barth’s challenge with the problem of evil, which kept me in an almost clinical depressive state through my middle year in seminary, this problem did not contribute to a decision for me to leave the Christian faith.
Let me also add that I am a big fan of Bart and his work. Most of what Bart teaches is what I was taught in divinity school though like all disciplines various teachers might differ with him on specific subpoints of interpretation or historical judgements. Forgive me for this but I don’t think Bart’s intent in his publications, lectures, and Blog is geared to providing bullets to gun down believers or necessarily arm unbelievers. That’s not how I read him. Nor do I think Bart is unchristian. Barth is more Christian than many I know who profess to be such. God, or creation or whatever, bless Bart.
Welcome Jack.
Sure, all the smart people are atheists, right? Not!
I’m a card-carrying nonbeliever who has a best friend who is a Christian minister. He studied at Oxford, not me.
I will say that in my experience historical/critical study of the Bible does undermine fundamentalism. And of course my study contributed to my atheism. For me it wasn’t one facepalm-like moment but the result of a long process of thinking (and living). I did not become an atheist so much as I realized one day that I already was one. I stopped calling myself a Christian when I realized that I did not believe that Jesus rose from the dead. (Paul’s criteria.) Later I asked myself in my heart of hearts whether or not I truly believed that a “god” existed. When the honest answer was “no” then I became an atheist.
Jack, you are under no obligation whatsoever to explain yourself to me, but I am genuinely curious how you define a non-facile faith.
JackRR is in error: Study [of History} does lead to Atheism for the biblical notion of god.
vs the God of Moses, Jacob/Israel, King Saul, and Jesus
a god who let his son die, who let his temple get destroyed, and who gave his Holy City to the Gentiles [Romans]
The God of Moses did not move the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt’s zone of influence.
Historical King Saul was Labayu.
He wrote: I fall at the feet of my king, my lord, my Sun 7 time and 7 times.
Labayu’s king was a New Kingdom pharaoh who’s monotheistic god was the Aten.
As for King David, the 23rd Psalm’s subject matter is an amduat and it references the god, Osiris, which brings us out of Aten monotheism since Osiris and the Aten are separate Ancient Egyptian gods.
Well, that leaves the God of Jacob/Israel (and his son, Joseph, God of Joseph)and the apocalyptic God of Daniel and Jesus.
Write off God of Jacob/Israel and Joseph as tribal god.
Write off the apocalyptic God of Daniel and Jesus as a failed hypothesis with Jesus stealing the concept of Son of Man from the books of Enoch.
If you go with the God of Jesus in the gospel of John, that is Hellenistic with
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Ask Philo of Alexandria.
Jesus primarily came for the lost sheep of Israel not for the crumbs that fall to the dogs.
Gentile Christianity is an insignificant accident that Paul blew up into a religion.
How successful was Jesus given, the Jews of Europe 1939-1943, Gaza 2023?
How successful was Jesus and his Father God given the three Jewish-Roman Wars?
And Father notion of God is so Roman.
Gods were called Pater (“Father”) to signify their preeminence and paternal care, and the filial respect owed to them. Pater was found as an epithet of Dis, Jupiter, Mars, and Liber, among others.
– List of Roman deities (Wikipedia)
Father Notion of God SUCH an innovation of Jesus?
No.
Greek-speaking authors of gospels assigning Roman values to Jesus.
Hi was just wondering Bart Ehrman talks in How Jesus became God about a criterion of independent attestation and was just wondering from memory he only seems to relate it to whether we can know a saying of Jesus is historical or not however can this also be used for historical details in the gospels in general or just sayings?
The criterion of independent attestation would apply equally to all historical details–not just sayings.
The problem with independent attestation as a criterion is determining which sources are actually independent. Also, independence isn’t necessarily binary. If we have two sources for some claim, even if we know that neither copied directly from the other, there are a bunch of possibilities ranging from them reporting traditions that are genuinely independent all the way back to the event itself, on the one hand, to them both getting the report directly from some recent (to them) common source. These are serious problems with anything you get in the NT. So while in theory independent attestation is a good criterion of historicity, when applied to the NT it has very limited value as a criterion of historicity.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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Robert
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