Is the Bible Important for Christians?

Jim West has posted a couple of links regarding an interesting debate on the significance of the Bible and biblical studies between scholars Helmut Koester and Hector Avalos.  With due respect to Avalos, who has certainly achieved a bit more in the community of religious scholars than me (which is rather euphemistic of me), I open rebuttal as well, but I fear that my response is but a speck of dust in the matter as it is.

Helmut Koester argues against Avalos that "The reality is that both Judaism and Christianity depend upon the Bible…The suggestion that the modern world does not need this book at the same time recommends the complete elimination of these Bible-based religions."

Hector Avalos argues in response, "Dr. Koester may not like the fact that academic biblical studies is dying, but it won’t make the reality go away. Biblical scholars must to do more than become defensive and assert that the Bible is “vital” if they are to survive in modern academia at all."

Avalos' response uses some data, top support the rejection of an affirmative answer to the question, Is the Bible "uniquely vital and essential for Christianity and the American religious life"?  Avalos seems to accept that 2001 census data hovers the percentage of Christians in the US around 80%.  What he ignores that might have helped his case are the various studies that argue that actual church attendance hovers around 40% and this is since 1920.  Thus identification and commitment must beheld as distinctive variables that point to self-identified religious affiliation and/or membership rolls and actual religious commitment.  Whatever this case might be, it does not predict how well the Bible meets the criteria of being "uniquely vital and essential for Christianity and American religious life".  Thus, regardless of actual commitment, we must ask how much of a role the Bible plays as such a source for that 80% of the population that identifies themselves as Christian.

Avalos argues, "At once, we are introduced to one of the most common defenses of biblical studies today. That defense rests on the illusion that 'the Bible' is uniquely vital and essential for Christianity and the American religious life." However, the bit about the illusion of the Bible being important misconstrues the nature of how social structures evolve.  It simply does not matter if you think it's a load of flying spaghetti monsters, boogey men, and Greek gods and therefore think in itself it is fictitious.  The issue is if it is nonetheless a vital life-shaping source for billions now and many billions fore and perhaps billions hence as the data regarding monotheistic religious belief continues to bear.  What is quite frankly annoying with the response from Avalos is how the social sciences that reveal deep seated faith convictions in the overwhelming majority of humankind since the Enlightenment are casually ignored on a theoretical level even though he calls Koester out on an apparent ignorance to these sources.

Avalos continues:

The reality is that few Americans actually read or know much about the Bible. In The End of Biblical Studies, I cited, as one example, the survey published in 2006 by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. It showed that 21.9% of Mainline Protestants and 33.1% of Catholics “never” read Scripture. So how “vital” is the Bible if a sizable group of Christians can get by without ever reading it?

Yes, one could argue that the Baylor survey means that the majority of Christians are reading scripture, but that also would be an illusion. Other studies show that even those who read scripture more than “never,” don’t read or apply much of it.

But what does this really mean?  For example, I don't read Scripture every day.  However, I have a lot of it committed to memory.  I would say that I read very little of it on a regular basis.  I would also say that I don't apply much of it as well compared to the corpus of it.  If I were to apply most of it, perhaps I should live "Biblically" like A.J. Jacobs.  I do try to apply the command to love my God and neighbor as myself.  But how much of it am I actually applying?  Why did others respond in the way they did?  Do we even know?  It is therefore not conclusive to argue that if people respond in the way Avalos frames the data that the Bible is simply unimportant to Christians since, especially without referencing these "other studies", he does not report the variance.  Perhaps it's there, but Avalos does not report it well enough for his argument to be conclusive, or convincing, at all.

The other piece to Avalos' argument is that Koester is, "clinging to religionist arguments for biblical studies".  Therefore, Koester is trying to keep his profession floating in a sea of academic rigor that is obviously, to Avalos, killing it.  But is this really true?  Let's back up a bit and look at the big picture.  To be sure, since the influence of Charles Eliot's elective curriculum at Harvard in the late 19th century, biblical studies and the study of religion have taken very different paths.  Many of these studies moved from the rapidly secularizing forces in the university to the seminary and even the Bible college which supported it's own branch of US Christianity.  Julia Reuben's study on this as well as books by Hart and Sloan argue this trajectory very well.  So there is some credence to what Avalos is suggesting at the level of the university.  But it is the motive behind the argument that actually damages it since it appears rooted in the notion that biblical studies is declining because more people are seeing as incresingly irrelevant to the world.  This is why he supports this with the aforementioned data on the reduction of influence of the Bible in Christian life.  So it is the movement of the university to a secular base that informs this argument on the bottom as it appears to be the case.

Now while there is something to that bit, the conclusion is rather a non-sequitur.  To say that all of that majority of people who persist in their religious belief are simply delusional is far too dismissive and as unlikely to prove as a designer who invented the structure of the universe.  Moreover, even if all of those billions of people are delusional (lest I be accused of an argumentum ad populum which atheists love to pull out in Latin as a red card on the field of play), it does nothing to dilute the reality that this is a powerful source of life-world construction independent of the relative percentage of the tome that people actually read as something regulative of that very same life-world structure!  Avalos claims that Koester is clearly ignorant of sociological studies.  I would argue that Avalos has missed foundational elements of social theory and has therefore misconstrued the data to fit his flawed conclusions even if his observation of the changing and the increasingly marginalized role of biblical studies in the university is absolutely correct.

The bit that is indeed problematic is this characterization of the Bible's influence on Christianity as an illusion.  Apparently Avalos has never met a Catholic?  There it is the teaching of the Magisterium that many follow as the ordained medium for revealed Truth which is still founded on the Bible.  This became a catalyst in the energy of secessionism during the Reformation.  It does not matter how much of the Bible one actively "uses" whatever that may mean.  It can still form a vital life-world structure constitutive of social relations and traditions that not only inform but subjectively create how one relates to the world.  Or, in Berger's theory, it is objectified and then internalized thus recreating social structures around belief that Jesus is the risen Lord.  This does not matter if it is rooted in five passages dealing with same gender sexual relations (see Fred Phelps) or primarily parts of the Gospel of John, Daniel, Ezekiel, 2 Thess., and Revelation (see premillenial dispensationalism).  Nor is it temporally relevant in terms of oral transmission of mythic structures that are constitutive of these same social relations.  There is a wealth of knowledge about oral transmission of myth and to say that this does not happen among Christians with the source of these oral transmissions in the Bible misses quite a bit.  Moreover, the authority of pastors and the role of worship and preaching in how those life-world structures are maintained is also a bit of social theory that Avalos has missed along the way (which are surely the case in the formation of cultic and sectarian structures).  Thus, he has built a rather fragile straw-man on bits of data without a sound social theory to inform how he is interpreting that data.

It is another argument of straw that casually ignores the processes by which social structures, traditions, and systems of belief that inform and create one's understanding of Truth as revealed in the Bible.  I think Avalos knows about this material, or I least I would assume so since he is clear about calling Koester on his ignorance of it.  However, if he knows about it, he would know as well that the claim the Bible is not "uniquely vital and essential for Christianity and the American religious life" is quite conclusively false and constructed on a foundation of straw (if you will forgive the Biblical allusion). These same structures drill down to one's own sense of identity and self-actualization.  That can all be done with one passage as a summation of revealed Truth in the Bible for an entire religious tradition.  Try John 3:16 or Romans 12:1-2 among evangelicals and you will have ample evidence of this truism.

Updated data: While Prof. Avalos indicates that the datasets others are using are incomplete, I offer this factsheet from AAR data which indicates that the number of applications for positions in the biblical studies continues to outpace available positions.  The truth is that it is a more rigorous and competitive field than ever before.  This is not a sign of its demise, but rather a sign of its health.

http://www.scu.edu/cas/religiousstudies/careers/upload/jobstats.pdf

Related posts:

1. becoming post-human christians