Objectivity...

There are parts of me that lean toward fervent acts of faith and other parts of me that learn toward hard, rational and objective study and critique of religion.

I mean to an outside observer religion can look like lots of things, a tool for establishing community, a system of rules and paradigmatic stances which are designed to "enslave" a people, or just plain ludicrousness. But to one who believes it is all encompassing. History, life, choices, the future, everything can be interpreted through ones beliefs. The Objective/Critical view and the Subjective/Interpretive view are at odds, at least for me. I do not hope to justify my faith with a rational explanation of what I believe. If anything, I am more likely to use rationality as a tool to serve my faith rather than a tool to verify it. If rational thought were more fundamental, and capable of explaining faith, then faith would not be needed, we would have a clear explanation through reason. Reason then becomes not a power in itself, but a method subject to use by Faith.

Anyway, before I spiral too far into non-sense. I am taking a class about the Dead Sea Scrolls. I am trying to understand the sect that created the scrolls in an objective sense. I am trying to look at them as themselves, not with the baggage of history that followed them. As I do so I cannot help but see some of the thoughts of their theology born forth into Christianity. I end up seeing them as a precursor, or at least a stepping stone toward what I believe. In the lens of history there are two ways to view this. One is to say that God, in his wisdom was paving the way for Jesus, his Christ. These sects in the desert were mere foreshadowing of what was to come. This is a highly subjective view, where I view history with a purpose, and see the work of a personality which is steering history. The other view is that intellectually the DSS sect probably affected the development of Christian thought either directly through interaction of members of the sect with the founders of Christianity or indirectly through associations and coincidence. The objective view might see the link between the two belief systems, but would not see the link as part of a direction in History.

So which is right? I would say neither is wrong, or right. The second view describes what we can physically ascertain. We can verify the tenets of a sects beliefs and compare them with another sect. We can find textual similarities that point to similar religious idioms and thought. We can not proximity and draw conclusions about sectarian interactions. All these things are verifiable, and clear. When we start to see the workings of a guiding hand on historical events, it is not objective, it is an act of faith. To assign purpose to history is faith, faith in something which is capable of shaping history, i.e. God.

To stop short of proclaiming God's hand in history is safe. It is verifiable(in a shallow sense). It is not blind or daring. It is a commitment to a fragmented understanding of life, and humanity. I don't mean "fragmented", in a derogatory sense, but if there is no purpose in history, then it is just an amalgam of events strung together in a weakly causal sense over a spanse of time. While later events depend on the occurrence of earier events, those earlier events did not occur in order for the later events to happen. There is no "telos" to time for an objective viewer.

So here I am, beginning to formulate thoughts regarding our first papers for this class and I find that I need to be careful to keep my tendency of reading history in an inspired sense and to stick to what can be documented/explained using the evidence at hand.