Renouncing Completeness: The Rich Ruler and the Possibilities of Biblical Scholarship without White Masculine Self-Sufficiency

Abstract

Biblical scholars lack nothing. They have everything the modern academy requires. They have objects of study, texts. They have diverse and dazzling methods of study for their objects. They perform objectivity, thereby exhibiting the proper distance from their objects of study. They are, in effect, scientists (without lab coats) engaged in the work of producing new knowledge through deciphering and adjudicating between various and oftentimes warring interpretations of their objects. All of us in the humanities are textualists of one sort or another, but biblical scholars are first-order textualists, fused to an immediacy with their objects that positions them between archaeologists, on the one hand, and historians, on the other hand, with linguists in the dead center. Biblical scholars reign in the world of religious studies as our epistemic emperors, positioned at the very fount of all our work. They carry ancient claim given that theological studies began (and some would say ends) in biblical study. Yet they also carry pride of place in the configurations and constellations of knowledge(s) in the modern academy. They have chameleon power to position themselves along the continuum from hard scientists to literary theorists, from ethicists and social theorists to writers and poets. Their epistemic supremacy is not by accident. It grows out of the way textual study functions in modernity, as both a practice of retrieval and extraction and a practice of conceptual framing and cognitive mapping. Yet that supremacy also grows out of the formative accomplishment of cultivating white masculinist selfsufficient intellectual form. White male self-sufficiency has been a governing image for formation and intellectual development in the Western world since the beginning of colonial modernity.1 That image, embedded in the pedagogical imagination