My first visit to the AAR’s national gathering last weekend, combined with reading another State of Formation post, got me thinking again about the purpose of religious scholarship. The word schole means “leisure;” a scholar is one who has the leisure time to read books and think about things. So what, exactly, are religious scholars and academic institutions for? As a Christian scholar, what should my task in the church be, and what should it expect of me? How does scholarship relate to the spiritual and ethical lives?
As part of my own reflection on these questions, I offer for your consideration seven types of religious scholarship, neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive: priest, scribe, gnostic, revolutionary, rabbi, scientist, and contemplative. I am reflecting primarily on types I know from the Christian tradition, though I would guess many of these recur elsewhere.
I would love to hear your opinions on the relative merits of these types, refinements of my descriptions, additional types, or some comments on their interrelations.
Priest
The priest’s activity mediates the divine and the human or the holy and the profane. If a scholar is a priest, then the intellect is a holy space in which the divine and the human may meet. In this view, study is a profoundly holy and spiritual activity. The labor of a scholar makes her more holy than the laity — indeed, she may ascend through study to the divine. But she does this so that she can draw the rest of the community up with her. In the ancient church, it was Origen who first made reading a spiritual activity and the scholar a kind of priest, helping the “carnal literalist” ascend to God. I find it hard to think of modern exemplars of this type, since the idea of scholarship as priesthood sounds elitist. At least in the evangelical church, it seems to me that musicians have largely adopted the priestly role.
Scribe
The scribe performs a technical service for the church. As the church needs carpenters to build its buildings, it needs scribes to manage the technical dimensions of its literary activity. In the ancient world, this meant especially copyists and translators. Nowadays, I think of translators and textual critics. There is no sense, I think, that the scribe is holier than the non-scribe. It is simply that the church’s spiritual works require certain earthly and material instruments, in this case books. Practical expertise is required for this literary activity to be possible, particularly the knowledge of languages. In this view, the scholar is a technical craftsperson whose task is as earthly as any other job.
Gnostic
In her studies, the gnostic discovers divine truths that the masses do not understand and, for the most part, will never understand. So like the priest, for the gnostic scholarship is itself a path to God; unlike the priest, the gnostic does not engage in scholarship with or for the community. Nevertheless, the gnostic does not leave the community altogether — for whatever reason, the gnostic needs her connection to the non-gnostic, although she may also have gatherings of her own with like-minded gnostics. In the ancient world, the Valentinians exemplified this model. In today’s church, it is hard to avoid the sense that most academic scholarship has a gnostic element: wherever the scholar holds her tongue though she knows better, wherever she speaks critically of the simpleminded masses rather than engaging them constructively, she enacts the gnostic type.
Revolutionary
For the revolutionary even more than the gnostic, scholarship shatters the illusions of ordinary religious practice. Study enables the scholar to identify what is broken in the world or a community, which gives enlightened revolutionary action the hope of being effective. Revolutionary scholarship is coupled with burning intensity and moral seriousness. Thus unlike the gnostic, the scholar engages in the community; but unlike the priest, she does so primarily to upend it rather than uphold it. In the early church, Marcion exemplifies this type. In the contemporary church, one thinks of crusaders on the right and the left: evangelical theologians who stand against liberalism in the mainline denominations, and liberation theologians who see the gospel as empowering the radical transformation of church and world.
Rabbi
The rabbi does what everyone else ought to do, only more intensively. In the rabbi’s community, scholarship is the ideal for everyone, and so there is no absolute difference between rabbi and layperson. The rabbi does not, like the priest, mediate the divine to the community. His scholarship is, rather, the product of the wisdom of the elder or the grandparent. He goes ahead of the community, and the community depends on his wisdom. So unlike the revolutionary, the rabbi will change the community incrementally — if he seeks change at all, he does so as a reformer. Like the scribe, the tasks and mechanisms of scholarship are earthly and technical — language, grammar, questioning — but these tasks themselves are not merely instrumental. Indeed, study is part of the spiritual life itself. In the ancient world, I think of the rabbis we know from the Jewish tradition, but also of early Christians like Irenaeus and Augustine. In the modern world, perhaps the evangelical Bible scholar is an instance of this type.
Scientist
In exercising her scholarly vocation, the scientist aspires to describe empirical realities of religion objectively, with the help of rigorous methodologies and the criticism of a community of other scientists. Her own religious commitments (like other particular commitments) are likely to get in the way of this task, so her scholarly vocation is mostly separate from her religious life. Like the scribe, the scientist is concerned with the earthly realities of religious life, but her task is not to perform a specific service to the church. Instead, she generates tested knowledge for its own sake, although such knowledge may prove useful to the church. I am not sure if this type existed in the ancient world — perhaps in the work of some of the philosophers. In the modern world, most academic life remains governed by this paradigm.
Contemplative
By the contemplative scholar, I do not necessarily mean the scholar who prays, although it may include this. Rather, I mean the scholar for whom the scholarly vocation has no external purpose, because it is an intrinsic good. One studies because it is a delight, for its own sake. Scholarship, uniquely on this model, is not really a labor at all. It is more like a kind of play, although this “play” may be as serious as the life of prayer or the experience of grace. Religious scholarship in this view is a liberal art. Thus it is liable to remain the province of individual elites or a leisured class in the community, unless a community that fosters this kind of scholarship can “democratize” this liberal art as a delight that ought to be available to all. It is exemplified by Aristotle and his followers in the ancient world. In the modern world, it is not clear to me if anyone explicitly pursues scholarship in this way, since we feel so strongly the demands of utility and equity; but sure many scholars are highly conscious of the intrinsic pleasure of the scholarly life.
By way of conclusion, I will briefly put my own cards on the table. I suspect that for most scholars, the besetting sin is pride. So I lean towards conceptions of scholarship that do not inflate the importance of the scholar, particularly the scribe, rabbi, and contemplative types. Accordingly, despite my affection for Origen, I am most suspicious of the priest, gnostic, and revolutionary types.
This photo was accessed via Creative Commons and downloaded in accordance with its Creative Commons license from Flickr Commons. It was taken by Melanie Hughes on December 16, 2009.