Everybody likes to think they’re objective. We all like to think we’re capable of rendering opinions or judgments completely divorced from any external influence or personal bias. We don’t like the suspicion that we’ve failed to weigh all possibilities about what a passage might mean before landing somewhere. That would make it seem like our position on some point of interpretation is somehow premature, careless, or unfair. We can cherish the thought, but it’s a delusion.
Absolute objectivity about anything we enjoy thinking about or are forced to consider is an impossible standard. We can’t hope to completely jettison every past sight, conversation, or experience from our minds that might nudge our opinions in a particular direction. Even if we’re thinking about something or someone with which we have no prior experience, we have our own presuppositions. We weren’t born with those. They are the cumulative result of all our life experiences, especially how we were raised as children.
Scholars aren’t immune to this struggle. I recall one day in graduate school our professor lapsed into a mini-lecture on what it meant to be a scholar. One of his points was that “real” scholars approach the Bible with no biases or presumptions. Specifically, they bring no prior belief about the Bible to their analysis of the biblical text. Ideas like inspiration and anything else “confessional” had to be eliminated for real scholarship to occur.
I appreciated the spirit of the advice. We ought not filter what we see in the text through any theological grid. But I also had to shake my head. Absence of any religious or theological thought about the Bible is not only impossible but is itself a theological statement. The intellectual denial of the idea of inspiration (however defined) will indeed influence the way we process the data we glean from the text.
The honest thing to do is to acknowledge the beliefs we have. Every Bible student needs to own up to the fact that they might “believe” something only because the thought was handed down to them. Being up front with that possibility and letting people know we’re trying hard to not filter the Bible through our beliefs fosters accountability. We shouldn’t pretend we’re immune from the experience we’ve acquired through past study or our interaction with others interested in the Bible. That’s a façade.