Passage taken from: THE TENT OF MEETING Daniel W. Hardy, Peter Ochs, David F.

Ford With Basit Koshul Peter Ochs March 2003

As adherents of religious traditions engage with the practices of secular inquiry, whether through disciplinary guilds or through institutions of higher education, a variety of different relations between them emerge. Sometimes, identifying these different possibilities assists individuals those interested in scriptural reasoning, for example to develop ideals for critical engagement in contradistinction to other forms that have arisen in modern times. Consider, for example, the following five varieties of relations between religious and secular responses: Assimilation to the norms of secular criticism: Here, scholars of religion adopt various ways of understanding religion as normative: for example, historical-critical, sociological, political, or psychological studies of biblical texts and text-traditions. Any of these may be taken as the norm for evaluating the truth claims or moral claims of religious traditions. For those who follow this way, it is often construed as a move beyond the very traditional or fundamentalist practices in which they were raised, or a move beyond what they now consider the oppressive character of their childhood practices of worship. The religious interest they retain is typically only in the ethics or spirituality that remains once the traditions sources and teachings are deconstructed through the sciences considered normative for the study of religion. Reconstruction by reference to the presumed norms of secular criticism: In this case, scholars identify themselves with a dimension of monotheist or Abrahamic religion itself, perhaps what they suppose is its deepest or most evolved dimension. Modern Idealism Hegelian, Romanticist or more recent counterparts argues that the religion of Abraham, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, achieves its ultimate and true expression in the movement of history to a rational form of belief and sociality. Bultmanns position is a variant of this, in which the plain-sense of a demythologized scripture is regarded as its ultimate existential truth.

Parallelism of normative religion and science: Here, scholars argue that the academic disciplines and religion are equally valid but mutually independent practices, but in some cases allow unrestricted validity to the one and only limited validity for the other. Prototypes are found in the 19th century, in Jewish and Christian neo-orthodoxies. For example, the Jewish Samson Raphael Hirsch claims that Torah is true in itself and that science is also true in itself but in its bounded area; Torah rules the people and the home and all (or most) judgments of value; science and forms of liberal politics rules the public arena (apart from its ultimate values) and all (or most) judgments of natural or empirical fact. Or there are parallels amongst 19th century Christian liberals and their present-day counterparts, for whom religious insight occurs in the purely moral domain, and for the simple and pure, beyond the reach of the mundane sciences and their practitioners. Yet the followers of this approach make particular assumptions: they typically engage with the hard sciences, or the humanities, as if they are plain-sense and objective disciplines, establishing (and sometimes fiercely defending) a strict separation between such forms of objective, academic inquiry and the valuational, subjective or confessional life of the religious believer. (Of late, an increasing number of nonorthodox, or neo-liberal, scholars of religion appear to fit this mold as well.). And they are sometimes only one-sidedly critical: their historical-critical studies provide evidence for various criticisms of traditional religion, and what they consider errant readings or irrational claims made by traditional practitioners, but do not open their methods to comparable criticism from the side of religion.

Orthodox or traditional religious study: This variety is a logical contrary to the secular ones, assimilationist or reconstructive, since those who follow it argue that their forms of knowledge are governed, ultimately, by the facts, values and obligations offered in their scriptural traditions, and by the transcendent source from which these derive. Hence, such views tend to be exclusive, subordinating conventional academic disciplines and institutions to the truth established by these forms of knowledge (and their attendant socio-political forms), and thereby limiting the truths accessible through secular knowledge. Sometimes, they perpetuate their views by instrumentalizing other forms of knowledge and practice as means for more

accurately perceiving and responding to the created world in which God acts, or for their value in sustaining religious life and practice in the modern world. In this case, the exclusive character of the claims of orthodoxy and tradition is more attenuated, as other forms of knowledge are regarded as a suitable vehicle for religious claims. At the same time, the day-to-day practices of the adherents of this position are often close to those of the orthodox, in that they respect the integrity of both religious piety and academic discipline.