Biblical theology for a secular society - Presenting the Issue

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Spring, 2001 by David M. Bossman

Like religion (transcendent), secularity (immanent) may get a bad name from its abuse rather than for itself. Those who oppose religion are able to cite ample examples of how religion has been a divisive and destructive influence in society. In its better days, however, religion serves noble ends and motivates great achievements in the higher reaches of human capabilities--moral, cognitive, artistic. In its worse days religion provides the basis for prejudice, discrimination, violence. Similarly, secularity has achieved great benefits for humanity--scientific, technological, humanistic. But in the wrong hands, secularity can fix on the shallow, exploitative, egoistical. How can there be religious thought for a secular society without calling down the worst of each?

First, although the modern age did not invent secularity, it did enable secularity to flourish. In turn, moderns were freed, by secularity, from non-rational bonds that had too long restrained human endeavors through lack of accurate knowledge and the imposition of substitute fictions. The Bible's own brand of secularity may be a distinguishing characteristic of some of the Wisdom Literature that has frequently discomforted some religionists for its this-world realism.

The modern age, nonetheless, added a particular dynamism to its secularity in the form of personal and intellectual freedom as well as a re-orientation of authority as deriving from the consent of the governed rather than coming from on high. This combination of liberations made democratic liberalism a context for enormous growth in personal development as well as for societal advances.

On the other hand, secularism played a role in attempts to destroy religion. The National Socialist fascists of Germany and the Soviet Socialist communists of Russia, constituting a right wing and a left wing extreme and united in their totalitarian modalities, employed the tenets of radical atheistic secularism in programs that destroyed rather than advanced human freedom.

To condemn either religion or secularity because of its extreme position does disservice to vital components of human personal and social resources. Reinhold Niebuhr signals a the crux of the conflict between secular sciences and traditional religion:

   It is the contradiction between the legends of religion and the sobering
   historical realities discovered by an empirical science that introduces the
   primary problem of the relation of religion to modern secularism.

The legends of religion are precisely those pre-scientific components that secularists found so quaint, so controlling, so destructive. On the other hand, religionists found in secularism an all-too-ready executioner's sword eager to eliminate those higher realms of human imagination that seemed so apt for knitting together the fabric of human aspirations, bonding human relationships, regulating human excesses.

When biblical theology enters into the mix, we encounter a strangely interactive message: that religion and secularity meet on the field of history as well as in the halls of the religious institutions. Religious institutions were often precisely where secularity took form--in the monasteries, the seminaries, the universities spawned by the inquiring intellects of theologians whose expertise and pursuits led them into the very heart of everyday life in the real world of science, economics, politics. Already latent in the medieval mind, what the Enlightenment brought explicitly into play was a radical quest for intellectual freedom, freed from the exploited resources of legend and myth. Among the many things those early moderns found were their own invented assumptions and predispositions, casting long shadows upon their intellectual exploits.

Take, for instance, the question of race. How long did it take for the scientist to be freed from the assumption that one race was naturally inferior to another, much as one religious truth is less than another? In the quest for objective truth, objectivity became as elusive as a common religion. In the end, even scientists discovered their limitations, and they schooled the metaphysicians in the actualities of limited knowledge. So much depends upon the mindset of the scientist: the context of the viewer. Intellectual freedom came full circle back to recognize dogmatism despite secularity.

Today, the charge once again can be heard: truth is in the eye of the beholder, whether secular or religious. And the agenda once again can be shared, for the pursuit of truth is neither exclusively religious nor exclusively secular.

Biblical theology is thus reborn in an atmosphere in which dogmas carry little force. For the Bible itself is much too comprehensive a tale of human experiences to be taken only as religious or only as secular. It, like humans themselves, comprises both, knit together by irregular seams. In a secular age, religion can again become plural, for like the poet who fantasizes reality, no religion can say all that is. Secularity then can become a context for the rebirth of biblical theology, since the many strands that constitute the Bible as a living record of a dynamic human complex, will themselves be understood as one among many yet each binding together the parts into a rough-hewn whole subject to change when circumstances dictate.