Abstract
Since the rise of biblical studies as a modern-critical and independent discipline divorced from its relation to theology and piety, Christian students and scholars of the Bible have wrestled with how to relate and integrate their academic research and conclusions with their theological-faith convictions. The result has been the opening up and reinforcing of a chasm between how one studies the scriptures and how one lives the Christian life. David Crump seeks to correct this false dichotomy by re-asserting the primacy and determining authority of faith for the one who desires to be faithful to God and critically engage with scripture. Crump’s goal is to re-unite head and heart under the reality of faith, which is a passionate subjectivity by which one leaps and risks not only one’s eternal destiny but also one’s temporal vocation and scholarly findings.
Crump employs two interlocutors as evidence of how faith, as an inward subjective passion, will disrupt and mould one’s intellectual endeavours as a Christian: Rudolf Bultmann and Søren Kierkegaard. In the introduction Crump narrates how his epiphany over the indispensible role of faith for critical study of the scriptures arose from his engagement with Bultmann, which eventually led him to Kierkegaard and the appropriation of his theology of faith as passionate subjectivity. In chapters two to five Crump unearths this paradigm of faith from the Synoptic Gospels (including a protracted exegesis of Mark 10:17-27), the conversion of Saul of Tarsus with a sampling of the apostle Paul’s hermeneutics as determined by his new faith, and the nature of offence in the Gospel of John. In chapter six, Crump recapitulates the previous five chapters and then dethrones, re-situates and resurrects the role of reason in the Christian life.
Crump’s work is a sustained, impassioned plea for Christian scholars to allow their faith in Jesus Christ to determine the beginning, end and every point of their academic work. Through his apt distillation of Kierkegaard’s theology of faith Crump argues well for the necessity of faith in Christian scholarship without slipping into naïve anti-intellectualism. The work’s greatest strength is, however, its greatest weakness, as Crump’s wholesale appropriation of Kierkegaard’s theology of faith is, at times, uncritically asserted as exclusively ‘biblical.’