ABSTRACT
What happens when a discipline like biblical studies – not just any discipline, mind you, but the one largely responsible for the shape of university liberal studies – what happens when the ideologies that shape that discipline become, for those who work in it, virtually indistinguishable from the ideologies of the materials they work upon? Examples are rife: somehow, we see in nineteenth-century women’s novels the same feminism that gave rise to the discipline of women’s studies in the 1970s; somehow, we find in English documents from the sixteenth century the same left politics that shaped the new historicism in the 1980s. Epistemological humility dictates no less – after all, we can only inquire into the objects of our investigation through our own tinted lenses, but if we are not careful, what begins as epistemological humility can quickly turn into the special arrogance that mistakes the biases undergirding an influential discipline for the only biases ‘discernible’ in its materials. With the advantage of some historical hindsight (and newly tinted lenses) we can investigate the politics of a discipline and see how its reading of a text differs from a reading of the same material from another vantage. The case of the Bible is particularly pressing because it has been authorized by the west not only as a spiritual guide and a handbook of truth, but also as a manual for politics. As if that doesn’t make biblical interpretation hazardous enough, the authority attached to the Bible also ‘bleeds’ onto the discipline of biblical studies and the political assumptions that have formed it.
