03-25-2018, 01:57 PM
Perhaps it will help if I provide some background. This thing has a history of its own and I saw some of it up-close and personal. I'll oversimplify to avoid having it take too long.
Western academic biblical studies is not all one thing. There is a small core of secular/Jewish academics who have little to do with the politics that dominates everything. They are allied to a much larger group of church-related "liberal" Christians who are almost as academic, but it is expressed in a distinct social and political liberalism. Sometimes their conclusions are quite visibly liberal, too, but the research doesn't demand such answers. These folks are the PhD track in seminaries, gearing up to become researchers and professors. The effect is only partially dampened in seminaries owned by conservative denominations.
There is another group of Divinity (ThD) track that is truly massive in size, dominated by political and social conservatives. This is more of a professional track versus academic; these are guys planning to be pastors and such. Even when exposed to liberal professors, they tend to react with varying degrees of scorn, clinging to a conservative brand of academics. They have their own vast lore of conservative scholarship that they insist is equal in academic rigor (but it isn't). They never quite understood the mindset of the Hebrew people, and seldom studied wider ANE history and literature.
When I was at Oklahoma Baptist University in the mid-1970s, there was a raging fire of debate typically referred to as the Infallibility Controversy (as in, "The Bible is the verbally inspired, infallible Word of God"). It splashed big on our little campus in Shawnee, OK. Okie Southern Baptists are almost uniformly conservative to the point of fundamentalism. Our professors were mostly "neo-orthodox" -- influenced but not quite owned by German higher critical theories of Bible analysis. It was a pretense to strong academic study, but with a predetermined goal of thinly veiled communist revisionism. This controversy didn't end so much as fade away. Too many of the neo-orthodox theories were thoroughly debunked, and those professors retired or died off. The newer generation of professors and students are both more liberal in social outlook, yet more conservative in theology.
But there remains a very heavy residue of conservative/fundie evangelical theology out there still fighting that old battle. You'll find it in the libertarian political movement, which stands firmly on the classical Enlightenment model of morals. Even Catholic libertarians tend to be highly influenced by this conservative outlook that filters their reading in Church History and Bible History. If they have any clues about the Hebrew people, they insist that God was forced to deal with feudalism because that's where His Chosen Nation was at the time. However, it was only so long as it took for God to reveal His divine preference for libertarian politics, doncha know? This belongs to a much wider, only secretly acknowledged, Germanic culture defense. Not the regimented socialism of the Nazis, but the old romanticism of the German Volkism.
To this day, almost nobody in academia takes seriously the notion that God built ANE feudalism as His choice. That's because nobody in academia takes seriously the heart-led approach to understanding the Bible within ANE History.
Western academic biblical studies is not all one thing. There is a small core of secular/Jewish academics who have little to do with the politics that dominates everything. They are allied to a much larger group of church-related "liberal" Christians who are almost as academic, but it is expressed in a distinct social and political liberalism. Sometimes their conclusions are quite visibly liberal, too, but the research doesn't demand such answers. These folks are the PhD track in seminaries, gearing up to become researchers and professors. The effect is only partially dampened in seminaries owned by conservative denominations.
There is another group of Divinity (ThD) track that is truly massive in size, dominated by political and social conservatives. This is more of a professional track versus academic; these are guys planning to be pastors and such. Even when exposed to liberal professors, they tend to react with varying degrees of scorn, clinging to a conservative brand of academics. They have their own vast lore of conservative scholarship that they insist is equal in academic rigor (but it isn't). They never quite understood the mindset of the Hebrew people, and seldom studied wider ANE history and literature.
When I was at Oklahoma Baptist University in the mid-1970s, there was a raging fire of debate typically referred to as the Infallibility Controversy (as in, "The Bible is the verbally inspired, infallible Word of God"). It splashed big on our little campus in Shawnee, OK. Okie Southern Baptists are almost uniformly conservative to the point of fundamentalism. Our professors were mostly "neo-orthodox" -- influenced but not quite owned by German higher critical theories of Bible analysis. It was a pretense to strong academic study, but with a predetermined goal of thinly veiled communist revisionism. This controversy didn't end so much as fade away. Too many of the neo-orthodox theories were thoroughly debunked, and those professors retired or died off. The newer generation of professors and students are both more liberal in social outlook, yet more conservative in theology.
But there remains a very heavy residue of conservative/fundie evangelical theology out there still fighting that old battle. You'll find it in the libertarian political movement, which stands firmly on the classical Enlightenment model of morals. Even Catholic libertarians tend to be highly influenced by this conservative outlook that filters their reading in Church History and Bible History. If they have any clues about the Hebrew people, they insist that God was forced to deal with feudalism because that's where His Chosen Nation was at the time. However, it was only so long as it took for God to reveal His divine preference for libertarian politics, doncha know? This belongs to a much wider, only secretly acknowledged, Germanic culture defense. Not the regimented socialism of the Nazis, but the old romanticism of the German Volkism.
To this day, almost nobody in academia takes seriously the notion that God built ANE feudalism as His choice. That's because nobody in academia takes seriously the heart-led approach to understanding the Bible within ANE History.