2010 - Конференция "Библия и библеистика: преодоление разрыва между церковью и академическим богословием"

Theme of the conference*



It is not a rare thing that students who come to university departments of theology and/or religious studies have been warned that studying theology at university level will be harmful to their faith. This is true also for the churches at large. Too often preachers are afraid to speak on difficult subjects or to ask questions hard to answer lest they disturb the faith of their congregations. Can the resources provided by scholarship be of any help in answering such questions? Or, to put it another way, can biblical scholarship be useful in the sphere of personal faith and church life?



On the other hand, is there any room for faith in biblical scholarship itself? Should a scholar be totally impartial and set aside his/her faith and church tradition in his/her academic work? Of course, theology can be studied as just another academic subject, with interesting intellectual puzzles to be solved, facts to be learned, and questions to be debated with like-minded intellects.   But isn’t such theology just a pale shadow of the real thing? For the real thing is dealing with the big questions of life and meaning and can only be tackled existentially, by those not only eager to ask questions of the subject matter, but willing also to be questioned by the subject matter.



So, in what way should academic theology (and biblical scholarship in particular) and faith relate to each other? Does scholarship provide support for faith or, rather, contains a threat to it? And can (or should) a scholar abandon his/her personal faith when doing research? Or, on the contrary, ought he/she to think of it as a source of inspiration, giving him/her a wider, spiritual perspective on purely intellectual work? Such are the questions which we would like to raise at the forthcoming conference The Bible and Scholarship: on bridging the gap between the academy and the church. In the course of the conference, the following problems will be addressed. In the course of the Conference, the following questions will be addressed.

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      Relationship between faith and biblical scholarship in Church history.
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      Is such a thing as ‘confessional’ biblical scholarship (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant) still possible today?
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      The Old Testament and modern science: how should Christians relate to the biblical stories of Creation, the Fall, the Flood, etc. in the light of modern scientific, anthropological, archaeological and other discoveries?
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      “Jesus of history” vs. “Christ of faith”: is this opposition still relevant today?
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      Academic theology as a means of opposing ‘popular’ scholarship (i.e. sensations spread by the mass media, books and movies like Da Vinci Code etc.).
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      Scholarship and tradition: can scholarship save us from damaging features of our own (Christian) traditions?
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      Scholarship and fundamentalism: can academic biblical scholarship resist growing fundamentalist tendencies in contemporary Christianity?