The Bible and the Liberal Arts (reposted)

     Because the Bible God inspired is a historical and literary artifact, you can't understand the history and literature of the Bible unless you already have read and understood vast amounts of other history and literature.  That necessity yields this observation:  A prior revival of languages and literature is the precursor for a recovery or revival of Biblical understanding and Biblical truth.
          Because learning precedes theological recovery, the Reformation could not have happened until the Renaissance had re-discovered the classical tools of learning and culture, thus making a more accurate reading of the Bible possible.  Enlightened theologians like Erasmus, a Catholic, and Calvin, a  Protestant, thereby were enabled to transcend the blinding myopia and constrained techniques of the medieval schoolmen.  Those schoolmen were beholden to, and misguided by, slavish obeisance to Aristotle (among other things).  Fealty to Aristotle and his truncated methods is not the same as acquiring the wide-ranging historical, literary, cultural, and theological knowledge needed to read and apply the Bible properly.  That is the case whether you are a philosophical realist like Thomas Aquinas, or a nominalist like William of Ockham, or neither.   After all, you'll recall that Jesus and Paul, pretty fair theologians in their own right, were neither, and that neither of them employed Aristotle's methods or rubric in their explication or application of Scripture to life in a fallen world.  Nor should we, at least if we want to have the mind of Christ, as we are commanded.

          To be rightly educated for theology is be educated in a way both deep and wide.  Deep and wide go together and are mutually corrective.  You must not have one without the other.  Deep without wide is tunnel vision; wide without deep is peripheral vision.  Alone, neither one is full and integrated sight.  Even at their best, the medieval schoolmen were subject to tunnel vision.  They thought that Aristotle's shrunken methods, rubric, and conclusions were the key to understanding the Bible, theology, and apologetics aright, as if being ignorant of history, language, and literature were no small hindrance to insight, a failure Erika Rummel has detailed admirably in her The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge:  Harvard, 1995).  Outside the narrow confines of scholastic dialectics, the schoolmen were desperately under-informed.  Because they were, they did not know the damage they were inflicting upon theology by mainstreaming Aristotle and his pagan methods and presuppositions into western religious thought.  They did not recognize the vast difference, and frequent incompatibility -- in worldview, content, or intellectual technique -- between, say, the ancient Jews, on the one hand, and their ancient pagan contemporaries, on the other.  Put differently, you cannot move seamlessly back and forth between Isaiah and Aristotle, David and Avicenna, or Elijah and Averroes.  Nor, for that matter, can you do so between Plato and Moses or Epicurus and Peter, as if worldviews and their attendant implications in all directions were nothing significant.

          Evangelical Protestants, of all theologians, ought to be most grateful for the Renaissance breakthrough, for its movement back to the sources and its ardent embrace of the humanities.  But judging from their books, their class syllabi, and their lecture notes, they are not.  Almost immediately after Calvin, Reformed theologians reverted to the scholastic methods of their medieval predecessors, as the language, the structure, the arguments, and the content of their systematic theologies clearly indicate.   Gone is the narrative unfolding of God's mighty works in history.  The inspired words that reveal the meaning  and significance of those events, and the narrative and literary format in which we find those explanatory words, have been displaced by the wooden and alien framework of Greek metaphysics and its rubric of abstraction -- as if one could and should replace divine character (which captivated the Jews) with metaphysical characteristics (which did not).  The methods of the Protestant scholastics are alien to the the ways and means of Scripture, and distortive of them.  You might as well try to interpret Dickens' Tale of Two Cities with the methods of modern archaeology as to filter the Bible through the sieve of the dialectical method.  Thomism is not the key to sound Biblical hermeneutics.  It is sometimes its worst enemy.  Biblical theology is not simply philosophy you do about God, and its techniques and procedures are not those of the schoolmen, of either the nominalist or the realist stripe.
          Nevertheless, scholasticism endures even among the Protestants:  (A) If you follow their arguments and their nomenclature, you find they the are the arguments and nomenclature of the scholastics, not of Scripture, even when they quote Bible verses and claim the Bible only is the word of God and ought to be understood on its own terms.  (B) If you check the table of contents and the index of the most popular and widely used Evangelical or Reformed systematic theologies, you find no chapter or set of chapters, no extended explanation, and no precisely and systematically articulated implementation of either history or of literature within them -- as if theology could be well understood and wisely applied without them, and as if Christ were not properly the Lord of literally all things, theology and hermeneutical method included.  They do not do theology in His way, but in the way of the medieval schoolmen. Almost any allusion to history, literature, or art those books employ is tendentious, triumphalist, and polemical at the root.  Catholic systematics, of course, are no better, their invoking of a severely truncated and misleading version of Christian history and tradition being a case in point, especially as it entails a commitment to Thomist methods and conclusions.  In other words, the failure to which I allude is not limited to one church or another.

           Despite the characteristics of the Bible itself, systematic theologies are typically devoid of historical and literary expertise.  Their wooden and pedestrian articulation reflects that damning fact.  Nor do they have chapters on art, being artless themselves.  They are written by, and assigned as textbooks by, persons who are not historically astute, not literarily, artistically, or scientifically aware, and not impressively and memorably articulate -- even though the authors who write them and the teachers who assign them say they value the liberal arts and think we ought to require them.
        Judging from their theological textbooks and their methods, the liberal arts do not enter into it all.