WARD BLANTON AND YVONNE SHERWOOD
If we were to imagine a joke or parable beginning with a chance encounter between a religion scholar and a biblical scholar, then, in all likelihood, the punch line or lesson would be directed at the biblical scholar. In these late modern days, it is the biblical scholar who is on the back foot. She is likely to be seen as the red-faced exemplar of a parochially Protestant Christian understanding of religion—obsessed with origins and centered on scriptures. What starker incarnation of the sins of “scripturalism” than the anachronistic biblical scholar? One wonders whether her purpose is thus to remind us of a more hubristic age when we exported Protestant notions of religion and forced other religions to have “Bibles.” Perhaps biblical scholars linger as signs of past sins or as an encouragement to repent again.
Not so long ago, the alternative to the American Society of Biblical Literature was not the American Academy of Religion but its forerunner, the National Association of Bible Instructors, with the acronym “NABI”: Hebrew for prophet. In this context, under the dominion of Bible, religion was folded back into the Book as, parochially, “the beliefs, morals and practices encoded in Scripture.”1 Now it seems that we are witnessing an ironic return of that old scriptural motif of a late-born displacing the firstborn—now no longer safely contained in scripture but taking scripture as its target. For it is the American Academy of Religion that has the upper hand: so much so that it could attempt to shed its fusty older brother in a fraternal schism patched up in 2011. In practice the center of gravity in departments with names like “Theology and Religious Studies” still tends to be overwhelmingly Christian. But in theory (that is to say, conceptually) “religion” is a far more confident and respectable academic term than “Bible”—and for good reason. After all, the two terms work very differently in narratives of secular modernity and the politics of the modern democratic state.
Stories of what it means to be modern or secular have always passed through their religious other, on which they are dependent. It would be extremely difficult to tell a narrative of becoming-modern while abstaining from any mention of religion. Both the chronological watersheds on the way to the modern and the moral force pushing us toward the secular rely heavily on religion. It is a commonplace that the Reformation—understood as an individualist rebellion against the heavy hand of Church authority—set us on an inexorable path to more advanced or secular forms of Enlightenment. The need to protect ourselves against religious violence or fanaticism grounds the secular state.
One resilient mythology of the modern relies on the idea that once upon a time modernity slid off the edges of the Bible, becoming the mirror opposite of a point in time and space not seen as, precisely, not our own. Point zero for this epistemological break can be set at different times. We can date it from the discovery of the “Americas,” revealing a whole new continent that the allegedly omniscient Bible and its nabi’s did not anticipate, from John Locke’s quip that Genesis is not a document that carries much weight with the Chinese, or from freethinkers like Cyrano de Bergerac wondering how early Christian theologians and biblical authors could declare that “the Earth was flat as an oven, and swam on water like one half of a sliced orange”2 —or myriad other starting points. But the result is always that the Bible, as the emblem and mascot of Christendom, retreats into the space of the old time, the time of tradition—“tradition” being the very antithesis of the modern. It comes to signify a lost world: the time of our believing, our naiveté, our past. If the modern, the time of now, involves, in the memorable words of Francis Bacon, emancipation from “devout adherence unto Antiquity” and the worship of “infallible” authorities, suffering from sclerosis, frozen like statues,3 then the Bible becomes the ultimate sign of frozen antiquity. It is not just in the past; it is past per se. Even more significantly, by accepting that their task is essentially, and almost exclusively, the quest for nonmodern historical origins, biblical scholars tacitly accept and reinforce the identification of the Bible with and a more general cultural category of nonmodern pastness. By the same token, however, the parochialization of the Bible as the active making-past of the Bible was itself the testing ground of the viability of the “modern.” As Karl Marx put it, the way to modernity emerged necessarily with signposts and milestones like “Locke displac[ing] Habbakuk,”4 the emergence of one premised on the “antiquating” of the other. (The choice of that most foreign-sounding word “Habbakuk” perfectly illustrates the role of the Bible as an exotic theme park, Past Land, full of strange particularities and peculiarities. What could be less relevant than “Habbakuk” to the pressing concerns of Now?)
Given that “modernity” and “democracy” are slippery terms, it is perhaps no surprise that one of the clearest proofs of “modern democracy” has been imagined as the nondogmatic pluralization of religion to the point where it includes even the lack of religion, which is to say, atheism or Freethought as religion’s publicly recognized other. This openness or acquisitiveness of religion as a category has led to repeated attempts to accommodate all religions (plural) in so-called Western legal systems—while simultaneously setting firm boundaries around plurality, which becomes restricted to a limited set of “world,” or “world-class,” religions.5 Riding roughshod over some of the most elementary problems for first-year students of religious studies, legal criteria in England and Wales for the category known as “religion and belief” specify that in order to qualify a belief must be “genuinely held”; it must be a “belief” rather than an “opinion” or a “fact”; and it must be “serious,” “weighty,” and human-rights compliant.6 Two frequently rehearsed examples of forms of believing that do not qualify are political beliefs (Marxism is often cited) and nonserious imposter religions, particularly “belief in Jedi Knights.”7
While Christianity and its ever-plastic Bible are often seen as (vaguely and loosely) birthing and grounding democracy,8 it is clear that the term “religion” has a skill set far more suited to the self-consciously modern polity and its self-consciously modern universities than does the Bible. Historically speaking, “religion” is imagined as the more expansive, irenic, and tolerant term. Unlike the Bible, it has the distinct advantage of being able to take an “s.”9 In received disciplinary definitions, religion confidently proclaims its advantages over the Bible and the Theology that the Bible ostensibly serves. Religion, the modern story goes, is an “anthropological not a theological category.”10 It is integral to the humanities or social sciences. It is not a dubiously numinous or transcendent other belonging to “Divinity.” A central creed of Max Müller’s study of religions—“to know one is to know none”—consolidates these disciplinary virtues precisely around the imagined (in)capacity to take an “s.”
The confidence of the category of religion in comparison to the Bible is amply demonstrated in disciplinary parables told by religion scholars to stage an encounter between the Bible and Religion: “The Study of Religion and the Study of the Bible” (1971) by Wilfred Cantwell Smith or “Bible and Religion” (1999) by J. Z. Smith. Here, the Bible and biblical studies function rather as they do in myths of modernity. They serve as the figure of a limit that has been broken by modernity (and its disciplinary ally religious studies) and a ghostly specter of the past. Cantwell Smith’s parable—to which we are tempted to give the subheading “The Parable of the Lost Biblical Scholar”—almost consciously deploys old biblical tales of the elder being displaced by the younger, or the division between the goats and the sheep, (disciplinary) death and (disciplinary) life. One day, a very old biblical scholar (most likely with a long white beard) comes knocking at the doors of the newly founded department of Religion, in a Liberal Arts department of the “future.” He has an air of a ghostly anachronism and, relatedly, the aura of particularism or partiality about him. He represents the “questions, moods and methods of an earlier era” and is “bound to very particular sectors of the total religious history of mankind.”11 Triumphantly he pulls out his yellowing curriculum vitae to show that he can offer traditional Bible courses “on the whole calculated to turn a fundamentalist into a liberal” or, if he is a more sophisticated member of his species, even posttheological, purely historical courses, dealing in sophisticated contextual studies of the “ancient Near East or the first-century Eastern Mediterranean world.”12 The one who stands at the door is not impressed. The first option demonstrates the limits of an insider discourse: addressed by Christians to Christians, bouncing round and round in an echo chamber of internal positions and counterpositions. The second only loosely secularizes—and veils—this reification of the “Bible.” The assumption that we should study these particularly tightly circumscribed times and places—rather than, say, classical India or medieval China or modern America—translates the privilege of scripture into secularized and universal terms of study, while bracketing out the whole question of the assumed uniqueness of this particular scripture, now expressed at one remove in particular geographical and temporal cordon of time and place.
Like the numerous figures of the blind in the Bible, Cantwell Smith’s old Bible scholar cannot see. Specifically he cannot see the future: the importance of the futures or the afterlives of scripture. (He is no nabi.) About the ricocheting effects of the Bible as an “organized battery of symbols” and the “incredible ongoing career” of the Bible as an “agent,” he has nothing to say.13 Positively garrulous about antecedents, he does not see that the revelation of history begins once the parts are synthesized. This poor old lectured soul needs to be taught over and over again the fundamental truth that time’s arrow points the other way. In short, he does not know that the future of biblical studies lies in studies of the Bible’s futures—specifically in how the Bible has fired the imagination, and inspired the poetry, and formulated the inhibitions, and guided the ecstasies, and teased the intellects, and ordered the family relations and the legal chicaneries, and nurtured the piety of hundreds and millions of people in widely diverse climes and over a series of radically divergent centuries.14
Like the foolish bridesmaids who are too distracted to meet the bridegroom/messiah/future, he does not watch or pay attention.15 The punch line of the parable is that the curator of historical fragments is turned away from this department of the future and dispatched elsewhere, to “Orientalist” departments, presumably with weeping and gnashing of teeth.
In J. Z. Smith’s parable “The Bible and Religion,” biblical studies is presented as an introverted, largely confessional “insider” zone. What passes for criticism is “an affair of native exegesis.”16 The “sort of accounts that, for other religious traditions, constitute data for the student of religion” frequently constitutes the end product here.17 There is little space for translation, redescription, surprise, or any sense of difference from the phenomena in question. And since the only cognitive advantage of a discipline is difference, without the fresh air of difference, a discipline dies. Astutely, Smith observes that “The current, preservationist tactic of many biblical scholars to reduce any theory and its necessary entailments to a method, to a procedure for reading texts, contributes to this lack of effort at redescription.” “Adapted” and softened versions of literary and social theories seem specifically designed to allow biblical scholars to steal the cache of theory and yet escape the “cost.”18 In a sonorous conclusion, Borges’s parable “Exactitude in Science,” published in 1946, is used to evoke this disciplinary space of deference without difference, inside without outside, heavily insulated from surprise or shock. Borges imagines that once, for a brief moment, in an unspecified empire, “the art of cartography attained such perfection that the cartographers guild struck a map of the empire whose size was that of empire, and which coincided point by point with it.” However, the next generation, “who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forbears had been, saw that that vast Map was useless.” It thus became a “relic of the discipline of geography.” The “tattered ruin of the map” became a dwelling place for animals and beggars and howling winds in the “deserts of the west.”19 Borges’s and Smith’s imagery ironically evokes well-worn biblical tropes of devastation and apocalypse: glorious human reduced to dwelling places for jackals and howling creatures; uninhabitable spaces where no one can pitch his tent.20 The tattered ruin of a map seems to evoke the specific sins or myopias of scripturalism: the folly and fragility of a discipline built on flimsy paper/text.
Our response to these parables is not to perpetuate the split and stand for Team Bible against Team Religion, or defensively so style ourselves as a younger, revamped version of biblical studies that can take its rightful place in volumes on theory/religion/critique and futuristic departments of religion and liberal arts. The two Smith parables make incisive diagnoses. Similar critiques and self-caricatures have been echoing inside the highly fractured discipline of Biblical studies in increasingly concerted ways. Smith’s astute diagnosis of a “preservationist” tactic of “reduc[ing] any theory and its necessary entailments to a method, to a procedure for reading,” has recently been amplified in critiques of “methodolatry” and the domestication of theory.21 The campaign against the historical-critical has been so concerted that alternatives have been shaped (not always helpfully) by a dedication to being other-than-historical and breaking out of the museum.22 The recent explosion of interest in the afterlives or reception of the Bible means that Cantwell Smith would now have viable candidates for his imagined post in biblical studies, as he somewhat prophetically reconfigured it back in 1971. In fact, study of the Bible’s afterlives extends well beyond the limited regions he itemizes. No less than six out of eight (to “fire the imagination, and inspire the poetry, and formulate the inhibitions, and guide the ecstasies, and tease the intellects, … and nurture the piety”) are firmly individualistic. The other two—“family” and law, or at least (somewhat pejoratively) “legal chicanery”—gesture very vaguely to something just on the periphery of the vision of the individual: a vague ghost of law, politics, and society, outside the center of operations for religion in the individual heart.23 Cantwell Smith preaches a massive broadening out of the study of scriptures into “two millennia” and to “hundreds of millions of people” and urges consideration of the cultural force of scriptures. But then, bathetically, the punch line is that scriptures exert a rather gentle and private force on a limited list of domains, all set against a romanticized and exoticized backdrop of “diverse climes.”24
Without getting into crude interdisciplinary fist-fights about who has the biggest log in their eye or who really has their eyes wide shut (confessing or praying), we want to argue that Cantwell Smith’s strangely delimited view of scripture-as-religion highlights a far more interesting point lurking behind these parables: namely, that the perceived lacks in biblical studies mirror structural problems in religious studies. These are not simply minor issues such as, say, an insufficiently applied methodology, but major conceptual problems intrinsic to posing the question of “religion” (or indeed the Bible) in the modern world. When J. Z. Smith describes the domain of religious studies as “anthropological” and not “theological,” or when he defines the true task of religious studies (as he conceives it) against the foil of biblical studies, the caricature of biblical scholarship is being used to exorcize a not yet properly academic relation to the object “religion” within religious studies. By describing the undifferentiated field of the Bible as a place where map is territory and there is not yet sufficient difference, he is calling for more differentiation and turbulence within religious studies. The deferential-pious world of biblical studies mirrors what he sees as the placid world of Eliadean religious studies, presided over by what Smith calls the “ontic primordium” of an atemporal universal “sacred”—always stable, always itself, outside the vacillations of history and the profane.25 He wants to drag religion further “outside” its borders, to take it into forms more radically outside itself, more drastically alienated and demystified. By exorcising the ghost of a too-timid biblical studies, Smith seeks to recall religious studies to that which it has not been (yet) but which it really is. The effect is rather like the Hebrew prophets accosting the present Israel as an adulterous and syncretized version of a true self that is always yet to come.
For Cantwell Smith, in contrast, the contrast between Bible and religion works almost oppositely. As a site of historical fragments and simplistic and sterile “isms,” biblical studies is the other to the true study of religion: human, personal, and integrative. The biblical scholar poring over fragments echoes Eliade’s caricature of those history of religions scholars who “dream” of the “little speciality” and “would be satisfied with the smallest parcel”—to which Eliade retorts, in a strange fantasy of dismemberment evocative of the horrendous story of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19), “Indeed, what’s the use of having a whole woman? An arm is enough, or a breast, or a knee?”26 Unwittingly, Cantwell Smith also points to another major friction point within the field of religion. In his strangely circumscribed inventory of what is affected by that universal agent “religion”—imagination, poetry, inhibitions, ecstasies, family, law, intellects, piety—he provides a perfect example of a widespread liberal conceptualization of religion that has been increasingly under fire from scholars such as Russell McCutcheon, Tomoko Masuzawa, and J. Z. Smith. As his expansive and restricted list illustrates so perfectly, religion is often conceived, paradoxically, as a strangely protected and delimited universal, ubiquitous, yet confined to the private or the generic “human” (“human” as in the oft-rehearsed truism “human beings are spiritual animals” or “Homo Sapiens is also Homo religiosus.”)27 Structured around the human in this depoliticized, irenic sense, such a view positions religion as the New Theology, insofar as it promises to be a science of the “Total Man.”28 It allows the promising “s” of religion to fold back on itself in nothing more than an ecumenical theology of religious pluralism: myriad detemporalized and decontextualized instances of a fundamentally similar experience of “religion.” A form of religious studies that produces religion as “sui generis, autonomous, of its own kind, strictly personal, essential, unique, prior to, and ultimately distinct from, all other facets of human life and interaction”29—and yet, simultaneously universal and universally human—is extremely useful for the politics of liberalism. (We can see a clear connection with the legal criteria for “religion or belief,” pronouncing true religion to be “serious” and human-rights compliant: the perfect citizen.)30 Arranged deferentially and paraphrastically around the “nonfalsifiable contents of religious experiences”31 as “indeterminate or unmediatizable ‘stuff,’ ”32 it exactly replicates the work of the purely descriptive biblical scholar lampooned by J. Z. Smith.
The tendency of these two Smith parables to cast the Bible as religion’s other—arranged in dichotomies of confessional versus professional, insider versus outsider, past versus present, subjective versus objective—simplifies the fractures on the inside of both vexed and schismatic disciplines. It also obscures the fact that the Bible and religion occupy a similarly productive strange place in the university and the modernities this institution both fashions and represents. Modernity is constituted around a founding allergy to religion, no less than its subsections, such as theology or the Bible. As Ninian Smart puts it, “having been dethroned as the Queen of Sciences, the study of religion has now become the Knave of Arts.”33 Following a restructuring at the University of Glasgow in 2011, Theology and Religious Studies found itself in a curiously named School of Critical Studies. One alternative proposal—the School of Literature, Language, and Religion (named after the three major subject areas)—was rejected because some colleagues felt deeply squeamish about being associated with religion, with its dubious flirtations with the numinous and dubious things that go bump in the night. This slightly strange institutional positioning looks like another parable of the place of religion in modernity—one written unconsciously. In modernity, religion is masked or subsumed under the distinctly modern practice of critique or the “critical.” Religion can be included insofar as it bends over backward to translate itself out of “itself” into other terms entirely, insofar as affirms, constantly, that it is not simply “religious.” The perceived softness of the word “religion” is a potential liability to arts and humanities faculties striving to demonstrate, in an ever-tighter battle for resources with the “hard” sciences, that they are sufficiently robust. Religion does not have the same exchange value as a word like “literature” or “history.” It is possible to do a “literary” reading of the texts of religion or a “historical” reading of the archive of religion. But a “religious” reading of history or literature would suggest something weaker and dubiously partisan. It would imply something that belonged outside the university in a seminary or a “church.” As the (soft and flimsy) arts are to the (hard) sciences, so religion is to the arts. The fact that the academic study of religion has named itself history of religions or religious science and constantly affirmed its rigor in contrast to theology and the Bible can be read as an attempt to compensate for this strange place of religion as, in some fundamental sense, modernity’s outside or other. But this allergy should be critically analyzed, rather than defended against or overcome.
To cast the Bible as the confessional other to a more professional, essentially secular religious studies is to ignore how both disciplines awkwardly straddle both positions, legs akimbo. Religious studies is a conflicted space where religion appears as sui generis, utterly distinct—but also where it must be zealously hunted out of its privileged hiding place and translated into other terms entirely. J. Z. Smith portrays biblical studies as a place of excessive disciplinary piety without critical distance, whereas Wilfred Cantwell Smith portrays it as a robotic historicism or depersonalized science. This clearly demonstrates that biblical studies is in exactly the same position—a position fundamentally split from itself. Both fields are exceptionally expansive and interdisciplinary—but also exceptionally confined, folding back on themselves in a simple affirmation of the uniqueness of their object. Both open into myriad approaches, creating the impression that it is possible to say almost anything about religion or the Bible. And yet in both we find an aura of protective reverence hovering around the object of study that makes the object of study feel qualitatively different than, say, Shakespeare or the American Civil War. Both fields regularly erupt into laments that the modern discourse of religion or the Bible is inauthentic, alienated from its true object. (Ornithology is not flying; religious studies is a pale shadow of religion.) Both, equally regularly, issue clarion calls to return to the true work of demystification. J. Z. Smith’s insistence on religion as an anthropological discipline and Russell McCutcheon’s manifesto Manufacturing Religion find direct parallels in biblical studies in, say, Robert Oden’s The Bible Without Theology, Jacques Berlinerblau’s The Secular Bible,34 and the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, founded in the late 1940s as a Department of Biblical History and Literature (emphatically not Theology). Works with apocalyptic titles such as Hector Avalos’s The End of Biblical Studies35 graphically perform the disciplinary being-toward-death that Richard King diagnoses as the “iatrogenic” effect of the study of religion (or the Bible) upon its object. Iatrogenesis is the damage or ill health caused by administering medical treatment. Efforts to make the discipline robust and healthy destroy religion as such, by constantly reiterating the fact that there is no such thing as religion as such.36 This kamikaze dissolution of the very object of study only serves to draw attention to the strange place of religion or Bible in modernity, and the catch-22 in which they are placed. The devout secularization of the religious object attempts to deal head on with the perceived vulnerability of the category of religion as a place of special pleading or confession. It seeks to democratize, to generously puncture any residual haloes. But this only results in a more profound vulnerability—for it is surely time to close a department when the object of the discipline no longer exists.
Any caricature of biblical studies as “confessional,” in any simple sense, brackets out its historical function as a massive machine for translating the “religious” or the “confessional” into something else. Biblical studies is essentially a big institutional edifice constructed around the production of what the historian Jonathan Sheehan has termed “the Enlightenment Bible.” The Enlightenment Bible is a mode of understanding and working on the Bible that aspires to be a truly “catholic” or universal, appropriate for the university.37 With its origins in the eighteenth century, it responded to the pressures of a posttheological era by the translating the dubiously partisan “theological” into universal, human cultural domains. If the answer to the question “Why should I read the Bible?” had previously been “because it reveals the means to your salvation,” the Enlightenment Bible supplied a series of supplemental, even alternative, answers, meeting the challenge to the Bible’s authority by dispersing that authority across different domains.38
As the institutionalized protector and propagator of the Enlightenment Bible, biblical studies grew into a massive disciplinary machine designed to extend the relevance of the Bible into an exhilarating range of disciplines—ancient history, philology, archaeology, long-dead languages of the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman literature and philosophy, ancient geography, numismatics, botany, linguistics, and so on and so forth. Irrespective of whether they preached on Sundays,39 biblical scholars developed, and devoutly respected, a mode of discourse that displayed its critical credentials. Mutual mud-slinging between “insiders” and “outsiders” or confessors and professors masks the fact that all biblical scholars are constantly asserting—through great efforts of style and content—that their work is not homiletics but, emphatically, something else. The task is to write as if from the Kantian place of “philosophy” defined, in contrast to theology, as a vantage point from which one proves oneself “unintimidated by sacredness of the object.”40 One result is detailed articles examining various candidates for Jonah’s fish or plant, or the true size of the city of Nineveh, or the geology of the mountain on which Abraham almost sacrificed his son41—sometimes with a coda of faith awkwardly tagged on the end.
One of the functions of this assiduously and tenaciously “critical” scholarship has been to limit the realm of critique and provide a major distraction from questions of the (im)morality and (in)humanity (which is to say, nondivinity) of the Bible, as raised so rudely by the so-called Deists. The eighteenth-century critics who provoked the crisis that led to the Enlightenment Bible posed the question of “integrity” in a various senses—including, particularly, the integrity of the human and divine authors of the Bible, who often appeared as less than gentlemen, “blasphemously” drifting down the social scale. Historical-critical scholarship effectively closed down the question of integrity until it became nothing more than a question of compositional wholeness. This could then split into myriad subquests—for the true biblical autographs, for putative sources, for the authorial intentions needed to unify the texts and infuse them with coherent meaning, and so on ad infinitum.
Such questions could happily keep biblical scholars occupied for eternity while at the same time keeping their labors at tangents to some of the major cultural challenges to the biblical text. As Legaspi comments, once biblical scholarship was thoroughly disciplined, “philologists strove to become scientific saints and ascetics.” They “began to resemble the Wissenschaftlicher sketched so memorably by Max Weber: the socially alienated, science-intoxicated figure whose ‘personality’ is derived from intense devotion to his subject; his vocation internal because the old social and metaphysical dimensions of his work have largely lost their significance.”42 (Recall Cantwell Smith’s ghostly biblical scholar, bound to the “questions, moods and methods of an earlier era”43 without having noticed that his questions are no longer hardwired into questions of moral, existential, cultural, or political concern.) The work of translating the Bible out of specifically religious languages into solid disciplines available to all suggested that the new mode of Bible scholarship would be addressed to all, irrespective of a particular interest in religion. But at the same time, the relationship to confession was awkward, and biblical studies was never purely contentedly “secular,” nor entirely happy with its most determinedly nonconfessional practitioners, who have always been “outsiders” in a sense. The modern Everyman ostensibly addressed by biblical scholarship turns out to be a very particular and, in the twenty-first century, rather rare creature. He is someone who seeks, for nondevotional reasons, to devote himself to the minutiae of this very particular text.
In many respects, Bibelwissenschaft and Religionswissenschaft come from the same womb. If religion, as Derrida puts it, “circulates in the world … like an English word [comme un mot anglais] that has been to Rome and taken a detour to the United States,”44 institutionally it is born in the modern research university, with its doctoral seminar and the Wissenschaftideologie—a model exported to institutions like Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Cornell from Schleiermacher’s University of Berlin. As Legaspi argues, following the historian Thomas Howard, the very definition of the modern university was bound up with the transformation of theology: a transformation marked, not least, by the inauguration of the distinctly modern disciplines of biblical studies and history or science of religion.45
Striking a Faustian bargain with the growing power of the state, [the modern research universities] maintained their religious and cultural inheritance by folding the authority of the Bible and of the Protestant theological tradition into the later programmes of Verwissenshaftlichung (scientization), Entkonfessionalierung (deconfessionalisation), professionalisierung (professionalization) and Verstaatlichung (nationalization).46
The study of Bible and religion was placed under the auspices of the state. In a climate of “academic mercantilism,”47 the primary business of these disciplines became the production of peace and good citizenship. As Legaspi puts it, the task was “to head off religious extremism” —or, in Cantwell Smith’s words, “turn a fundamentalist into a liberal.”48 Hence a strangely universal Bible, Christian but also relevant beyond the Christian, and also in a sense secularized: hence religious studies as an ally of liberalism and the science of a depoliticized, irenic “human” spirit as a fundamental attribute of Universal Man. As a “new [emphatically] postconfessional mode of biblical discourse, one that remained open to religion while opposed to interpretation consciously shaped by particular religious identities,”49 the discipline of biblical studies shared in the same inaugural paradoxes as the study of religion.
It was through the gate of the Old Testament that scriptures first opened up to something like “religion” in the modern sense of an “anthropological” rather than a “theological” mode of study. And this was no accident. As well as forging connection through the transformative work of typology, Christianity has always dealt with the awkward appendix of the Old Testament by historicizing, localizing, and relativizing aspects of Old Testament “religion” (for example, sacrifice). Religious studies as the art of demystification or making-strange found a natural home in that portion of the canon that had, for centuries, been regarded as in some sense, tangential, alien, strange. The sixteenth-century Antwerp Polyglot (1569–1572) edited by Arias Montano contained an appendix volume, named, after Josephus, Jewish Antiquities (Antiquitates Judaicae), with treatises on translation, geography, architecture, liturgy, weights and measures, ancient coins, vestments, body gesture, artifacts, and relics. It looks like a veritable ethnography of the ancient Hebrews, particularly around the artifacts of sacrifice, displayed as in a museum. Crowded with different peoples and different gods, the Old Testament lent itself to serving as a forum for nascent “comparative religion.” Comparative religion was born, in a sense, with rudimentary comparisons between the contemporary “heathen,” the Greco-Roman “pagan,” and the Hebrews. Thus, for example, Thomas Godwyn’s Moses and Aaron: Civil and Ecclesiastical Rites, Used by the Ancient Hebrewes (1624) attempted the “clearing of many obscure Texts thorowout the whole Scripture” by showing “what Customes the Hebrews borrowed from Heathen people” and how “many Heathenish customes … have been unwarrantable imitations of the Hebrewes.”50 Origin stories of religious studies and Old Testament studies pass through some of the same founding fathers (as in the Bible, the power of generation is with the father) or institutional fraternities. Abraham Kuenen, author of The Religion of Israel to the Fall of the Jewish State (published in Dutch in 1869–70) was a contemporary of C. P. Tiele, the putative founding father of the science of religion. He debated with Tiele over questions of taxonomy, and declared in the opening to The Religion of Israel: “the Israelitish is one of [the principle religions], nothing less, but nothing more.”51 Pivotal in the history of both disciplines are those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century polymath “orientalists” who double in Hebrew and Arabic, from Johann David Michaelis to Julius Wellhausen to William Robertson Smith.52 Michaelis professionalized and “scientized” the kind of comparison in Goodwyn’s Moses and Aaron by comparing Mosaic law and Bedouin customs.53 He organized an expedition to “Arabia Felix” sponsored by the king of Denmark to shed light on the plants, animals, insects, language, and manners of the peoples of an Old Testament reconceived as a “remarkable fragment of Oriental antiquity.”54 Conducted by a six-man team including a botanist, a philologist, an illustrator, and an engineer/mathematician, the expedition was tasked with myriad quests, including the Arabic name for the ox-like creature in Job 39:9, the true botanical source of the “balm of Gilead” (Genesis 37:25; Jeremiah 8:22), and the tides at the outmost reaches of the Red Sea.55 The relationship to Robertson Smith and his late-nineteenth-century explorations in Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia or The Religion of the Semites is clear. As J. Z. Smith observes, whereas New Testament scholars seem allergic to the term “religion” even to the point where they would even chose “magic” over “religion,” Hebrew Bible scholars almost habitually use phrases such as “religion of Israel,” or “Old Testament religion,” or “religion of the Semites.”56 The Old Testament and its related territories seem to serve as a natural habitat for “religion” and appropriately primitive territory to which to apply foundational terms such as “totemism.”
Biblical studies and religious studies have a unique and important role in the modern university—not because of some dubiously essentialist sui generis status shrouding their object, but precisely because of the structural allergies between modernities and religions, and the unique and riven conceptual space for “Bible” and “religion” in the modern world. Tim Fitzgerald describes the university as the producer of rituals and liturgies designed to generate and sustain religious-secular distinctions:
Universities can be thought of more as ritual institutions in the economy of contemporary affairs, something analogous to the monastic chanters of medieval times. The difference is that the rituals performed in the humanities and social sciences faculties of modern universities are generating the myth of the religion-secular distinction as objective knowledge achieved through disinterested rational procedures, whereas biblical exegesis in medieval monasteries would have been considered illegitimate if divorced from a more general commitment to the truth of the Bible and confessional practices such as prayer.57
Religious studies and biblical studies have served as major arenas for the production and maintenance of religious and secular distinctions. Thus these disciplines are crucial to one of the key contemporary debates in the humanities and social sciences: the so-called anthropology and genealogy of what is loosely called “the secular” (or “the modern”) and, relatedly, the question “What is critique?”58 Contributing to this discussion will involve moving outside standard histories of our subjects focused on our own disciplinary telos. Biblical studies, certainly, has had a surfeit of self-serving, introspective works of disciplinary stocktaking: stories of the evolution of the discipline structured around the fundamental pivot of “Before the Historical Method” and “After the Historical Method,” with the baton being between the heroes and great men of Wissenschaft. Instead, as Cantwell Smith projects (albeit vaguely, through a mirror darkly, back in the 1970s), we need disciplinary histories that attempt to stand outside the “critical” movements they analyze and describe.59 Specifically, we need to look at how our disciplines have constructed and produced what might be thought of as secular effects, effects of being truly critical. Foucault gives a few hints as to the forms of these new genealogies of Bible/religion/critique. Offering a provocative preliminary definition of critique as “the art of not being governed so much,”60 he explores how critique, which always “exists in relation to something other than itself,” could only emerge in contrast to a state of submission to authority: iconically religious authority. Thus inevitably histories of critique lead us to the Bible and through the Bible. “Befores” and “afters” in different modes of relation to the Bible are used to define the very essence of critique. As Foucault writes:
At a time when the governing of men was essentially a spiritual art or an essentially religious practice linked to the authority of a church, to the magisterium of Scripture, not wanting to be governed in that way was essentially seeking in Scripture a relationship other than the one that was linked to the operating function of God’s teaching. To not want to be governed was a certain way of refusing, challenging, limiting … the ecclesiastic magisterium. It was a return to Scripture, it was a question of what is authentic in Scripture, of what was actually written in Scripture, it was a question concerning the kind of truth Scripture tells, how to have access to this truth of Scripture in Scripture and perhaps despite what is written, until one arrives at the ultimately very simple question: Was Scripture true? In short, from Wycliffe to Pierre Bayle, I believe that critique was developed in an important, but of course not exclusive, part in relation in relation to Scripture. Let us say that critique is historically biblical.61
The results of such studies may well prove surprising. We may expect to find “the acceptance of the Bible’s foreignness” presented as “an entry fee for modern subjectivity.”62 To be modern is in some sense to be alienated from the Bible: to be able to see the Bible (or at least parts of it) as exoticized, orientalized, repellent, strange. But more surprisingly, it seems that the Bible does not just give us an object against which critique flexes its muscles. Idioms and structures from the Bible and Christianity also provide the superior basis from which the Bible is criticized. It turns out that famous critics of religion such as Voltaire, Kant, and Heidegger presented their own critical thought as a kind of “purified” or “originary” version of Christianity, doing Christianity one better, as it were, in the polemical struggle to establish the parameters of religion itself.63 The domain of “philosophy” in the modern sense (more universal and critical than religion) was partly grounded by asserting the power of critique against groups in the Christian tableau that represent myopia or limit (for example, the Pharisees). A truly critical spirit could be produced and certified by extending Pauline rhetoric about the “spirit” that exceeds the “letter” or the universal category of natural religion or natural law.64 If criticism arises from the Bible against the Bible, this unsettles contemporary identities and “religious” and “secular” distinctions. It also helps us to understand why, in Western theories of “religion,” Christianity can still seem to persist as a larger category than “religion”—somehow presiding over discussions of religion from its putative “outside.” Until the results of such genealogies of our disciplines and modernities are in, we would be naive to assume that we know all that there is to know about hierarchies and relations between “Bible,” “religion,” and “critique.”
NOTES
1. Jonathan Z. Smith “Bible and Religion,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, ed. Jonathan Z. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 199.
2. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 243; Cyrano de Bergerac, Journey to the Moon, trans. Andrew Smith (London: Hesperus, 2007), 13.
3. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis and The Great Instauration, ed. Jerry Weinberger, 2nd ed. (Hoboken: Wiley, 2016). First published in 1620.
4. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International, 1963), 16–17.
5. Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 104.
6. See The Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003 at www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/1660/contents/made. For discussion, including a discussion of the strangely persistent Kantian distinction between believing, opining, and knowing, see Yvonne Sherwood, “The Persistence of Blasphemy,” in Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 9–98.
7. “Jedi” is a specifically British example, referencing the campaign to have “Jedi Knights” returned as a qualifying “religion” in the 2001 census: 390,000 respondents—0.7 per cent of the population—declared their religion to be Jedi, thereby making Jedi the fourth major “religion” and proving, as the comedian Dara O’Briain quips, that “there are more nerds in the United Kingdom than there are Sikhs.” Dara O’Briain, Tickling the English: A Funny Man’s Notes on a Country and Its People (London: Penguin, 2010), 67.
8. See, for example, Yvonne Sherwood, “The God of Abraham and Exceptional States; Or, the Early Modern Rise of the Whig/Liberal Bible,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (2008): 312–43; Yvonne Sherwood, “On the Genesis of the Alliance Between the Bible and Rights,” in Biblical Blaspheming, 303–32.
9. Of course the Bible can boast versions, even different canons—Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic—but this moderately plastic “s” still looks parochial compared to the fundamental commitment to plurality intrinsic to the very idea of religion, with an “s.”
10. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269.
11. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “The Study of Religion and the Study of the Bible,” in Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective, ed. Miriam Levering (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 19.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 21, 22.
14. Ibid., 21.
15. Matthew 25.
16. Smith, “Bible and Religion,” 201.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 206.
19. J. L. Borges, “Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, ed. J. L. Borges (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 325, quoted in Smith, “Bible and Religion,” 209.
20. Isaiah 14:17–22.
21. See Ward Blanton, “Escape from the Biblical Aura,” in Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), 31–41.
22. See, for example, George Aichele, Peter Miscall, and Richard Welsh, “An Elephant in the Room: Historical Criticism and Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible,” JBL 128 (2009): 383–404.
23. Cantwell Smith, “The Study of Religion and the Study of the Bible,” 21.
24. Ibid.
25. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jamestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 42.
26. Mircea Eliade, Journals III: 1970–1978, trans. Teresa Lavendar Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 329.
27. As asserted by Karen Armstrong, A History of God (New York: Vintage, 1999), 3. Armstrong writes: “men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human.”
28. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion, 38.
29. Ibid., xi.
30. See The Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, discussed above, note 6.
31. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion, 124.
32. Hent de Vries, “Introduction: Why Still ‘Religion?,’ ” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5.
33. Ninian Smart, quoted in Eric Sharpe, Understanding Religion (London: Duckworth, 1983), 2.
34. Robert Oden, The Bible Without Theology: The Theological Tradition and Alternatives to It (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987); Jacques Berlinerblau, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
35. Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2007).
36. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, Indian and the “Mystic East” (New York: Routledge, 1999), 42. King’s discussion of iatragenesis overlaps with Derrida’s discussion of autoimmunity in relation to religion. See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–78.
37. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 32.
38. Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, xii.
39. As any Jewish biblical scholar will testify, the genealogy of Biblical Studies is decidedly Christian.
40. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 53.
41. The analysis of the geology of Mount Moriah is, at this present time, a joke, as far as we know. The other examples actually exist. See Yvonne Sherwood, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 56–59.
42. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture, 31; Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftlehre (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922), 524–55.
43. Cantwell Smith, “The Study of Religion,” 19.
44. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 29.
45. Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
46. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture, 29.
47. Ibid., 35.
48. Ibid., 38; Cantwell Smith, “The Study of Religion,” 19.
49. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture, 7.
50. Thomas Godwyn, Moses and Aaron: Civil and Ecclesiastical Rites, Used by the Ancient Hebrewes (London, 1655).
51. Abraham Kuenen, The Religion of Israel to the Fall of the Jewish State (London, 1873–75), 1:5; Smith, “Bible and Religion,” 203.
52. For a rich and detailed study of German orientalism and biblical criticism, see Suzannne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
53. J. D. Michaelis, Mosaiches Recht (Commentaries on the Laws of Moses), trans. Alexander Smith (London, 1814).
54. Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, 189.
55. For an account of the expedition, see Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, 186–91; and Thorkild Hansen, Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761–1767, trans. James McFarlene and Kathleen McFarlane (London: Readers Union Collins, 1965).
56. Smith, “Bible and Religion,” 201–2.
57. Timothy Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10.
58. See, for example, Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
59. Cantwell Smith, “The Study of Religion,” 24, 25.
60. Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 385.
61. Ibid.
62. Blanton, Displacing Christian Origins, 8.
63. Ibid., 85.
64. 2 Corinthians 3:1–7; Romans 2:14–15.