Modernity, Meet Moses

In my last blog I urged you to consider the bigger worldviews that give a framework for understanding your studies. In part, this was to enable you to address another question: why would any Post-Enlightenment individual study our Scriptures? In fact, why would institutions dedicated to fostering a Post-Enlightenment view of the world (such as public universities and deconfessionalized private colleges) offer courses on the Bible?

The fact is that the Post-Enlightenment world is very curious about our Scriptures. Just as well read Christians are eager to know as much about the intellectual thought of the past three centuries, so serious Post-Enlightenment thinkers also take the Bible seriously. Both groups believe that a judicious use of their rival’s primary source material may well serve their own cause. Thus, secular universities have no problem offering courses on the Bible, because they believe that they can show how the Scriptures can be made to honor their Post-Enlightenment agenda.


In part, they study the Bible because they believe it is useful for people to know how human thought has unfolded. No one can appreciate fully what Immanuel Kant did at the end of the eighteenth century, if unable to speak of his predecessors, including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes. In the same way, to understand fully the modern world, one has to study the Bible to see how modern thought builds upon certain of its ideas while rejecting or altering others.

Thus, while Christians see all the books of the Scriptures as having a common theology and proclaiming a common message, Post-Enlightenment biblical scholars argue that the various books of the Bible have nothing in common and that there is a development of theology over the course of the centuries during which the Bible was written. Most commonly, they teach that the oldest patriarchs of Israel were polytheists (believers in many gods) and that their descendants underwent a development from polytheism to henotheism (the belief that there are many gods, but one god is superior to all others) to monotheism (the belief that there is only one god). Of course, if one thinks that the trend of human thought has been to reduce the number of gods over the centuries, it is clear why some would argue that the next step is to subtract one more god and turn monotheism into atheism.

But Post-Enlightenment educators are concerned about more than mere intellectual history. As I mentioned in my previous post, Post-Enlightenment educators are trying to get their students to be autonomous individuals, freed from the shackles of tradition, community, and transcendent authority. And thus a major reason that they teach the Bible in secular universities is to stop students from being deferential to the authority of the Scriptures and their church. The Scripture is praised for its poesy and vivid metaphors and fine sentiments, but in the process the Scripture is no longer able to be the voice of the living God. Those students who had previously been Christian and had heard the voice of God in the Scriptures confronting them in judgment and mercy now are taught instead to confront and judge the Scriptures. The voice of autonomous man speaks; the voice of the living God must keep quiet.

And that explains what seems to be a great irony to those who do not understand the Post-Enlightenment agenda: the highest percentage of non-religious faculty members is to be found in the Religious Studies departments of state universities and deconfessionalized private colleges. They love the Bible no less than Christians do; they just love it in the same way the wolf loves sheep.