If you live in the world of biblioblogs, you’ve heard about Paul Holloway’s criticism of N.T. Wright and (Holloway’s own) Sewanee, the University of the South, for giving Wright an honorary doctorate for his work in New Testament studies. Holloway’s attack was met with surprise by many and hurrahs by others. In light of the many criticisms of his criticism, Holloway has attempted to further justify his insistence that Wright is a mere apologist and not a scholar. One of his claims struck me as particularly interesting:
What I dared to say in my letter is that properly speaking Wright is not a “scholar” who comes to the evidence with honest questions to be puzzled out and whose conclusions are always subject to revision, but an “apologist” who comes with ideologically generated answers that he then seeks to defend.
Two points and a question are worth raising:
If ideological motivation an apologist makes, then everyone is an apologist. I thought we had all learned this grand lesson of post-modernity. Neutrality is a myth. There’s no such thing as objectivity. Everyone comes to the data with presuppositions, ideologies, perspectives, prejudices, and their own matrix of subjective experiences that drive the questions they ask and the answers at which they arrive. Does ideology somehow preclude honest questions? Is not the distrust implied in the historical critic’s maxim to “doubt everything” not also ideologically driven? And if ideology has no place in scholarship, then why are so many sections at SBL focused on narrow ideological topics? That Holloway frames his criticism of Wright in terms of the contrast between honest (and supposedly objective) questions in contrast to Wright’s ideologically driven research reveals Holloway’s own attempt to resurrect modernistic ideological presuppositions. The trick is not somehow to achieve objectivity; the trick is to be clear on one’s biases. And Holloway’s attempt to justify his critique suggests he may not be altogether clear on his ideological motivations.
Holloway criticizes Wright for holding to a sola scriptura presupposition. Very well. But it’s not as if Wright has gone around defending the traditional Protestant readings of the New Testament. He’s been roundly criticized by traditional Reformed folks for his work precisely because it shook up standard Protestant interpretation. They don’t call it the New Perspective on Paul for nothing.
And the question: Why must one choose between scholarship and apologetics? Shouldn’t we hope our apologists have done their research and submitted their findings to the wider world of New Testament scholarship as Wright has done? Perhaps Wright hasn’t published in as many of the journals Holloway would have liked, but this does not mean that his work has not been evaluated by the scholarly community. In fact, entire journal issues have been devoted to evaluating Wright’s work. Much of his work has been accepted while portions of it have been criticized more heavily. It seems to me that this is precisely how scholarship is supposed to work.
What do you think? Is defense of the faith mutually exclusive with scholarship?