I think it would be fair to say that many Christadelphians, probably the majority, are sceptical and wary of academic study, particularly within the field of Biblical Studies. It has been my own experience, and the experience of other young Christadelphians, that the suggestion of pursuing a degree in Biblical Studies or Theology has been met with a sense of alarm in certain quarters. And alarm is not restricted to these fields, but also to Philosophy, Psychology, and Geology to name but a few. The reason for this concern is not hard to determine – many of the conclusions of scholars in these fields are inconsistent with biblical teaching, whether it be claims of pseudonymity of biblical texts or the explaining away of religious belief in Freudian psychoanalysis. Upon this analysis Christadelphians would do well to avoid all such pursuits.
However, one might sound a note of caution because such an attitude might appear to be akin to sticking one’s head in the sand. The Dawkins of this world would turn this into fuel for the cliché that religion is based on ignorance alone. Of course, the fallacy with such an argument is that academics are not unanimously atheist nor are they free from bias on such matters. Just because one zoologist (formerly) at Oxford University says that the findings of science are incompatible with belief in God (i.e. Dawkins) does not mean that all zoologists at Oxford University are of the same opinion (as a matter of fact, they’re not). The same is true of all disciplines. If one studied biblical studies at Sheffield or Copenhagen one would be told that the Bible is a myth without any relation to history (despite the inconvenient historical correspondence). But a similar course taken at a number of other universities would have a radically different approach to the Bible. Unfortunately the veil of intellectual respectability obscures the fact that academics are as open to bias as the rest of us.
And this is the real problem with the Academy: the unwary might take its conclusions as definitive when actually they are matters of open dispute. On the topic of modern biblical scholarship H. A. Whittaker rightly urges “a postponement of a consideration of any critical approach to the Bible until you are better equipped to assess its value”.[1] This does not mean, however, that Christadelphians should ignore or remain separate from the Academy. Indeed the need could not be more pressing for some at least to engage with modern scholarship to as aid believers in assessing its value. If a believer read, for instance, the claim that Colossians and Philippians were written long after Paul’s death and heard no dissenting voices he might conclude that this was a matter of historical fact rather than, at best, a conjecture based upon outdated assessments of doctrinal development. In a modest way this is the purpose of the Christadelphian EJournal of Biblical Interpretation.
[1] H. A. Whittaker, Exploring the Bible (3rd Ed; Wigan: Biblia, 1992) 115.
Analysis of the eschatology in 1 Thess 4:13-5:11 and 2 Thess 1:5-2:12