Guest Post: Luedeman on "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?"

Professor Luedeman has asked me to post this guest post contribution to the Blog Co-op.

"Why I'm a Secularist," by Gerd Luedeman

Secularism not only teaches us to base our lives and thinking on the findings of critical scholarship in both the sciences and the humanities, but also persuades us to apply critical investigative tools in every field of academic endeavor. My lifelong study of the Christian religion illustrates both of these principles.

Theology is a scholarly discipline when it observes the intellectual protocols of the modern university and bids farewell to deductive epistemological principles of any kind - including revealed truth and any privileged knowledge God. Theology becomes a valid academic discipline insofar as it employs the historical-critical method's three presuppositions of causality, the potential validity of analogies, and the reciprocal relationship between historical phenomena. But this adoption of the atheistic methodology of secularism demands that traditional religion undergo a Copernican revolution.

However it may disenchant the world, true objectivity means relinquishing the canonicity or sacredness of particular writings, any claims to a revelation, and all distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy except those found in historical discourse. This same even-handedness outlaws dogmatic and theological judgments unsupported by empirical evidence, and refuses to deal with questions of religious truth except to compare different truth claims. The scholar of religion must steer clear of ideologies, but it is obliged to use the methods and insights of the sciences and humanities, including those derived from such neighboring disciplines as sociology, psychology and ethnology, for their illumination of historical phenomena is often decisive. Its assumptions and conclusions must remain open to peer review and revision on the sole basis of best evidence.

Therefore petitionary prayer by academic theologians amounts to self-betrayal. As Huck Finn says, "You can't pray a lie." Still, though excluded from the ranks of true believers, we can be religious spirits without religion, hoping by critical secularism to make the world a better place.

(First published in Free Inquiry 25 (2005/6), p. 35.)

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? My perspective

How we answer this question depends upon where we stand, though this doesn't make it a "relative" answer.

If my task is to reconstruct history, than Athens can have nothing to do with Jerusalem. If we allow our faith issues to cloud the historical process, we cannot do the job of a historian. Why? Because faith agendas will control our history, even to the point of creating a history that looks like or supports whatever our faith is.

The question of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is a fine example of this as we have discussed on this blog and others in the past. As a historian, this is not a historical event because dead bodies don't rise. It is a faith event. Even the second century Valentinians seem to have understood this. What did the Valentinian teacher tell Rheginus about this? He said quite bluntly, "For, my child, 'the dead shall rise!' belongs to the domain of faith, not of argument."

If my task is to understand whether or not Athens has anything to do with Jerusalem as a believer, this is quite a different thing. Here each person must decide whether faith needs reason. This means that one must decide what "faith" is. I think that certain forms of Christianity have usurped the meaning of faith over the centuries so that today it is often tauted as believing doctrines that go against science or logic. When I study the ancient sources, however, "pistis" is something quite different from this modern definition. It is a person's relationship with "the holy," a relationship that is lived through imitation of saintly people and piety.

My own feeling on this issue is that faith without reason is futile, that a reasoned faith is necessary. This is not to say that reason is the entire realm of our knowledge. There is knowledge other than reason. But even this is supported by reason which is necessary in order to grasp and translate this kind of knowledge into something recognizable.

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Open Post

This is an open post space for those of you who wish to address Tertullian's age-old question. Please use the comment space to post.

Here are links to others who have already posted on the subject:

IHSOUS Blog by Solomon Landers
"This blog is devoted to translations from the Canonical Gospels, but I found your theme to be interesting, and made an exception by posting my thoughts on it there."

Overbeck Studies Blog
"In my study of Franz Overbeck, I have dealt with this question over and over again."

Sufficiency Blog by Bob MacDonald
"It is an excerpt from a longer story. The story in outline is in 365 parts of which this is pericope 21."

Exploring Our Matrix Blog by James McGrath
"Here's a link to my post for the 'blog co-op.'"

Merkavah Vision blog by Deane

Tim Ashcraft
"Here is a link to my post on the Co-Op. It's an attempt to briefly answer Tertullian's question from a conservative Christian viewpoint."

Jim West

Call for Blog Post Co-op on Wednesday, February 27th

Consider participating in a Blog Post Co-op on Wednesday, February 27th. Fellow bloggers and readers, the subject for a Co-op post on that day is the age-old question that Tertullian asked:

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?

If you participate in the Co-op by addressing this question on your own blog, I will collect links to your posts and put them up here as well. Just send me your link, adeconick@rice.edu.

I will also have an open post for those of you who would like to post something but don't have a personal blog space to do it.

I hope that this Blog Post Co-op will generate a healthy conversation among us!