Losing Faith?

Faith and scholarship are discussed in a recent BAR article, Losing Faith: How Scholarship Affects Scholars: 2 Who Did and 2 Who Didn't. In this article, Hershel Shanks, editor of BAR, interviews four scholars to probe the effect of their sholarship work on their faith. Did it help, hinder, or destroy?

Several interesting themes resonated among the participants.

• Is the Bible inerrant? If the products of scholarly research conflict with a literal reading of the text, how does a person's faith deal with it? Does it shatter or take it in stride? They discussed the approach (and brittleness) of typical Protestant fundamentalists and the flexibility of a typical Jewish approach. Shanks--"Well, then your scholarship did destroy your faith?" Dever--"Absolutely. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of my first trip to Israel. I worked there for 49 years and let me tell you something: Seeing Judaism and Christianity and, God help us, Islam up close and personal does not help."

• Many of their faith struggles dealt with the evil in the world. If God is good, and he interacts with the world, how does evil still exist? Schifmann--"Any person who says that he can give an explanation for the Holocaust is crazy. So the bottom line is that we all go along living with the fact that this horrible thing happened and we can’t explain it."

• Faith is a process, a journey.

From the article, here are a few quotes that will linger for awhile:

Strange--Faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition has a God who intervenes. That's what the Exodus event is, that's what the crucifixion is: its a God who intervenes, and when I look around this world, I don't see a God who intervenes.

Dever--Right now the Christian tradition does nothing for me and the Orthodox Jewish tradition does little for me. In my own experience, I find this God so distant that it doesn’t make any practical difference. And, for me, I guess the final straw probably was the death of my son five years ago. If I had believed in God, I would have been very angry, but I didn’t and I survived.

Schiffman--In Judaism there is actually a commandment to believe. What does that mean, a command to believe? Well, it wouldn’t be a commandment if it were so easy. There has to be a struggle that a human being goes through in this complex world, in which we don’t really know what’s going on.

The article ended with notes of humility that are worth humming now and then.

Strange--I think I would say that faith/unfaith is sort of a false dichotomy. I think faith always contains elements of unfaith and vice versa. So in a way, we can’t avoid it.