Can Believers Be Bible Scholars?
A Strange Debate in the Academy
Albert Mohler
Monday, March 20, 2006

Michael V. Fox doesn't believe that faith-based scholarship of the Bible is possible--and he wants to see such scholars marginalized in the larger world of scholarship. In an essay posted at the Web site for the Society of Biblical Literature [SBL], Fox argues, "In my view, faith-based study has no place in academic scholarship, whether the object of study is the Bible, the Book of Mormon, or Homer. Faith-based study is a different realm of intellectual activity that can dip into Bible scholarship for its own purposes, but cannot contribute to it."

That is a shocking claim, but Fox is simply asserting what many others in the academy have thought for a very long time. Even if the secularization of the larger academy is a fait accompli, Fox and many others are concerned that the majority of scholars studying the Bible are believers of some sort, mostly Christians and Jews involved in the serious study of the Bible.

Fox teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and he is unsparing in his denunciation of what he calls faith-based scholarship. In reality, what he means is that scholars who study the Bible as believers forfeit any claim to scholarship. Could there be any more telling evidence of what the secularization of the academy has wrought? The rest