Course Intellectual/Theoretical Policy[1]:
Because this course’s primary text is one that has caused many a controversy throughout history, a stated theoretical lens for this course should be explicitly made. The ground rules for classroom conversation, academic research, and writing should be as follows:
- The Bible should be treated as a human document. Whether it is the manifest word of God is a query for each individual’s personal faith and should remain outside of this academic realm.
- The Bible is a collection of texts written, revised, edited and collected by different people at various periods of history. All of these collectors had their own contemporary aims and objectives, and all are distant in time and culture from the members of this course. We will not read the text in its original language but in an academic translation, and every translation is in some way an interpretation. To read and interpret the Bible as if its meaning were simple, clear and obvious to the casual reader, is to, according to Becker, “violate all that we know about language as well as all that we know about social and cultural change.”
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There is a long lineage
of scholarly writing/argument about the Bible that has lead to an existing
body of knowledge. It is a general rule of courses like “The Bible as
Literature” to introduce the student to such a body of knowledge. Some
may see a scholarly application of literary theory to such sacred texts as
sacrilegious and evil and practitioners of said theories as atheists,
pagans or enemies of God. This attitude does not help one pass a college
“Bible as Literature” course. However, as Becker reminds us “ it is also
true that most biblical scholarship is carried on by people who are
practicing members of the various biblical faiths, and that among these
scholars the Bible is no longer a source of religious division. There is
much general agreement among scholars, whether Protestant, Catholic,
Jewish, or non-believing.” See Becker’s notes on fundamentalism[2] - Being that this course is the rare instance where knowledge may confront religious faith, we will adhere to the “assumption that human knowledge may not only call religious faith into question but may enrich it as well. Thomas Aquinas defined theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’; in other words, a critical intellectual understanding of what one believes is a good thing."[3]