Monthly Archives: February 2026

Intellectual Dishonesty and Bad Hermeneutics

education, interpretation, Jesus, Paul, science and religion, theological education, women,

People frequently ask Sophia faculty and trustees what we intend to prepare our students to be and do. This entry is the fourth and final installment in answer to that question. With thanks to my faculty colleagues, Drs. Melissa Jackson and Jon Barnes, it continues our statement concerning how Sophia seeks to prepare individuals and a community for having the mind and doing the work of Christ more authentically today.

Intellectual dishonesty – The science vs. faith dichotomy that predominates in much of the church seems to require that one divorce one’s mind from one’s belief. The result is two distinct realms of discourse, two distinct worldviews, or, as Stephen Jay Gould has put it, two “non-overlapping magisteria.” In such a situation, no communication whatsoever can occur across the boundary between faith and reason. The systems produce completely incompatible understandings of the world, of humanity, and of the “criteria for human flourishing.” Looking ahead, then, neither of the two options regarding the relationship between theology and empirical science—denial or divorce—has proven to be healthy or helpful. The former inevitably results in stances such as contemporary climate change denial; the latter forestalls any communication between faith and science in an untenable epistemological dualism. Thomas K. Johnson laments the direction of Christian theology that resulted in a false dichotomy between faith and science and, ultimately, in the diminishment of Christian influence on decision-making in the public square. As he put it, “We theologians disarmed God’s people on the eve of the battle with exclusive secularism, so our people did not know how to address the public square . . . without giving the impression that person or a society must follow Jesus to know the difference between right and wrong.” The problem reaches even deeper than the somewhat arrogant and exclusivist claim that Christian ethics has roots in a sphere of truth inaccessible to non-Christians. Disdain for empirical science subjects Christian ethics to charges that it is esoteric, blindly ideological, and anti-intellectual or at least intellectually dishonest. Christian anti-intellectualism eliminates any possibility of speaking a common language with non-believers. Vibrant faith does not deny reason and experience.

Bad Hermeneutics* – Intellectual dishonesty, in turn, contributes to the ignorance and misunderstanding of the tradition rooted in Scripture that pollutes the thoughts and actions of much of contemporary Christianity. Often, the problem manifests itself in the supposed conflict between biblical faith and modern science. The biblical authors did not have, could not even anticipate, and therefore could not incorporate into their writings, the vast knowledge about the universe revealed to us by modern science. Indeed, the Bible nowhere claims that it reveals the summation of knowledge about the world. This circumstance is not a problem for believers unless they are unwilling to “harmonize” the ancient and the modern, so to speak. The Bible intends to tell the story of God’s relationship with a community of faith, not to teach science. Worldviews change continually as people acquire more information and understanding. The need to harmonize modern and ancient worldviews does not always apply, however. On many questions, especially regarding matters of wisdom, faith, and righteousness (cf. 2 Tim 3:15-16), the worldviews of ancient Israel and the early church stand against modern understandings and practices. The Bible that commissions God’s people to be “light” to the world and that calls for loving others, even Samaritans and those who hate us, as we love ourselves, does not support protectionism, isolationism, or any actions that manifest lack of empathy – personally, communally, or nationally.

Bad hermeneutics fueled by intellectual dishonesty surfaces in hyper-emphases on certain texts, read without regard to cultural contexts, literary contexts, or the empirical evidence that the world surrounds us with. One example involves the patriarchy that functions as a substrate in both Testaments because it characterized the cultures of the world in which Israel and later the Church came into existence. As early as Genesis, however, the Bible undercuts the idea that gender hierarchy conforms to God’s will. God created humankind in God’s image; both male and female reflect God’s likeness (Gen 1:26-27), for example. A range of other texts about prominent women in the Hebrew Bible contribute to a critique of the notion that gender hierarchy represents God’s intention:  Deborah, Jael, Huldah, etc. Good biblical interpretation does not shoehorn the stories of these women into a construct of the “submissive woman.” Arguably the clearest example of a text dangerously misinterpreted through selective emphasis and intellectual dishonesty is 1 Tim 2:8-12:

I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; also that women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire but by good deeds, as befits women who profess religion. Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. (RSV)

Perhaps the first thing one should note in this text involves the fact that the author reports his own position and practice: “I desire,” “I permit” (cf. 1 Cor 7:25-26). He makes no claim to be proclaiming a divine mandate. Second, the text notably expresses as much concern for women’s appearance as it does for their silence. The description of a well-dressed and well-coiffed woman speaking before a group of men calls to mind the hetairai or “courtesans” known in the Hellenistic Mediterranean world. Paul elsewhere expressed concern that Hellenistic converts who came from unsavory backgrounds (“And such were some of you,” 1 Cor 6:11, RSV) take care to distance themselves from their pasts. Notably, those today who emphasize the idea that women should “learn in silence” rarely also decry expensive clothing, fashionable hairstyles, pearl necklaces. Third, 1 Tim 2:8-12 should also be read in the literary context of the entirety of scripture, including and especially Paul’s statement concerning the equality in Christ of Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female (Gal 3:28).

Sophia intends to focus on reading scripture honestly and taking seriously Jesus’ mandate to “love the Lord your God…with all your mind.”

* (Portions of this discussion have been adapted from entries dated to February through April of 2025.)

Cultural Captivity and Inhospitality

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People frequently ask Sophia faculty and trustees what we intend to prepare our students to be and do. This entry is the third installment in answer to that question. With thanks to my faculty colleagues, Drs. Melissa Jackson and Jon Barnes, it continues our statement concerning how Sophia seeks to prepare individuals and a community for having the mind and doing the work of Christ more authentically today.

In addition to addressing the fundamental inauthenticity that infects American Christianity, Sophia’s curriculum and pedagogy must confront the idolatrous cultural captivity – in an extreme form in Christian White Supremacism, but also in the normativity of middle-class values. As Robert Jones writes in White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,  “The historical record of lived Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and the institutions that have been the central cultural tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy.”)  Allegiance to a particular culture or to the nation-state is idolatry and reflects a pseudo-soteriology. It is idolatry because it involves a penultimate entity calling for ultimate devotion. It is pseudo-soteriology because it confuses the state with the source of all blessing. Sophia’s response: rigorous and unflinching study of the scriptural witness and of the church’s historical struggle with the relationship between faith and political power (Constantinianism and the [ana]baptist insistence on the wall of separation, for example).

This cultural captivity also includes a chauvinism with regard to non-Western expressions of Christianity. Outsiders see the body of those called Christian as a social entity comprised of like-minded, like-race, individuals who value the maintenance of the status quo, the entertainment quality of worship services, and the attainment of middle-class security.  Nothing in this vision bespeaks the radical change Jesus brings to human lives. Nothing in it announces the call to Christ-like servanthood. Nothing in it points beyond the egocentrism of modern consumer culture. American Christians too easily identify a certain version of American culture as an expression of God’s will: American exceptionalism, which often means “America first” (both in terms of supremacy and priority, as it seems to right now) and often suggests an “America, love it or leave it” attitude.  American Christians tend to baptize market forces, even within the church, and to idolize the American system of government. As Philip Jenkins has noted, “[if] we want to visualize a ‘typical’ contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or a Brazilian favela” and not a white, middle-class family living in suburbia. Sophia’s curriculum will place special emphasis on developing critical awareness of one’s own culture and open-minded appreciation of the cultures of others.

This cultural captivity, along with the perceived normativity of Western forms of faith, often finds expression in a stark inhospitality that keeps us from being able to experience (and indeed celebrate!) the many ways Christian faith is lived in our world and the many gifts that can be shared and received. First, many do not feel welcome or valued because large swaths of US Christianity have made it clear that they don’t belong. Members of the LGBTQI+ community, the differently abled, and the immigrant are just a few examples. These beloved members of God’s family (and our family members and neighbors) are being told that, despite being created in the imago Dei, they are not worthy of being part of the church (contrast Isa 56:7 and Acts 8:26-40). Second, when looking at migration, our cultural captivity has made us unwilling or unable to recognize the gift of different understandings of God and expressions of faith that exist in our communities. The exponential growth of Christianity in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America is not just being experienced “over there.” Jehu Hanciles writes that, “new immigrants have transformed America into the most religiously diverse nation on the planet…. [The] majority of … new migrants (at least 60 percent according to one survey) are Christians (from Africa, Asia, and Latin American) who are expressing their Christianity in languages, customs, forms of spirituality, and community formation that are almost as foreign to Americans as other religions. The new immigrant Christian communities are effectively ‘de-Europeanizing’ American Christianity.” While American Christians have the opportunity to worship, build friendships, and find common cause on issues of justice that affect all of us in the communities in which we live, the narrow understanding of faith by many in the US inhibits our ability to receive, learn from, and be transformed by these gifts. Sophia intends to broaden its students’ understanding of the rich diversity and complexity of faithful expression.

An Anti-Dote to Inauthenticity

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Honest Study of the Bible and the Tradition

With some clarity regarding the thorniness of the term “church,” my faculty colleagues at Sophia Theological Seminary, Drs. Melissa Jackson and Jon Barnes, and I have attempted a rough analysis of the negative forces pressuring the body of believers today.  Each element of this analysis, in turn, evokes as a response how Sophia seeks to prepare individuals and a community for embodying the ministry of reconciliation in today’s context.

First, a fundamental inauthenticity, even a profound hypocrisy, plagues the broader community that identifies itself as the body of Christ. The Gospel is clear concerning God’s love for everyone, concerning the fact that, in Christ, there is no gender, ethnic, or social hierarchy, and concerning the clarion call to make peace, to do justice, and to facilitate reconciliation.  Unfortunately, however, the history of the church is too often the story of being on the wrong side of affairs:  resisting civil rights advances, endorsing unjust wars, and perpetuating components of a social and economic structure that silently oppresses minorities. Currently, for example, many in the US who identify themselves as followers of Jesus support government actions apparently designed to intimidate, denigrate, injure, and even kill indiscriminately.  This attitude that divides and demeans contrasts sharply with Jesus’ congratulations for the “peacemakers, who will be called the children of God,” who have been charged with “the ministry of reconciliation.”

Sophia addresses this inauthenticity through careful study of the Bible’s (both portions) staunch insistence on the value of being human, on the notion that doing must be consonant with being, on the recognition that faith and action are but sides of a single coin. At Sophia, students and faculty together honestly examine and acknowledge the history of Christianity’s impact, negative and positive, on human history, human societies, and human beings. At Sophia, students and faculty together will explore avenues and means for redressing the plague of inauthenticity through an audacious commitment to following Jesus.

“Church”: Interrogating a Word

church, reconciliation, theological education, vocation, , , ,

People frequently ask Sophia faculty and trustees what we intend to prepare our students to be and do. In order to answer that question, in part, my faculty colleagues, Drs. Melissa Jackson and Jon Barnes, and I have attempted a rough assessment of the state of affairs prevailing in Western, particularly American, Christianity today. This will be the first in a series of the elements of our analysis. Each will include a statement concerning how Sophia seeks to prepare individuals and a community for having the mind and doing the work of Christ more authentically today.

First, of course, we need clearly to identify the entity/ies for whom we are educating leadership. In so doing, we must interrogate the word “church,” and we must seek clarity regarding the Gospel (“God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self”) and regarding the key function of believers in relation to the larger world (“the ministry of reconciliation,” peacemaking).

Because of its associations with denominationalism, with buildings, and with institutions, the continued use of “church” presents difficulties for some of Christ’s followers, including ourselves, who wish, rather, to focus attention on communities of people actively seeking to encourage and assist one another in the ministry of reconciliation. By implication, then, a Sophia education will not aim at preparing its students to fulfill denominational or institutional roles. Its students may certainly choose such a trajectory, but Sophia recognizes that any number of new incarnations of communities of faith, ‘para-church,’ or non-profit settings may be appropriate contexts for “the ministry of reconciliation.”

What term, then, can best serve as an alternative to “church” that can communicate primarily the idea of the gathered community, rather than of the structures that contain it, both physically and systematically, and too often stifle it. Kyriake (oikia), kyriakon doma, “house of the Lord,” used beginning in the third century CE suggests structures;  Hebrew qahal and Greek ekklesia, the origins of words used in Romance languages (eglise, iglesia, etc.), resonate with the idea of a “body convened for a purpose,” but quickly came to focus on institutional entities (as in usages like ‘the Catholic Church,’ ‘the Methodist Church’); German baptists refer to their congregations as Gemeinden “communities/fellowships,” an option that does not imply hierarchical structure or expectations of rigid doctrinal conformity, but that also does not point to any purpose other than togetherness. The recent coinage, the “kindom” of God, or the biblical image of “the body of Christ” may come closer to describing the entity for whom Sophia seeks to prepare servant leaders. A major factor influencing the erratic trajectory of Western Christianity today is a Christendom mindset that sees Western forms of faith as normative. The fact is that there is no normative, universal Christian faith defined as a set of doctrines or system of structures. There is no one way to live a “Christian life.” As Lamin Sannah has noted, the Christian faith is “infinitely translatable” and each manifestation is faith being lived and believed in a local, cultural idiom. This recognition implies something about the need for theological education to be honest about its limitations: it does not involve requiring assent to a set of answers – doctrines – concerning questions of faith, but engagement with the Christian tradition’s efforts at “faith seeking understanding” (Anselm’s definition of theology). Just as Sophia does not understand the body of Christ as a hierarchical human institution, it does not understand Christian faith as a structure of doctrinal statements. Along the lines of Orthodox apophatic theology, Sophia finds wisdom in acknowledging that, no matter how true a statement concerning God may be, it is also profoundly inadequate.