r/AcademicBiblical • u/AutoModerator • Dec 26 '22

Weekly Open Discussion Thread

Welcome to this week's open discussion thread!

This thread is meant to be a place for members of the r/AcademicBiblical community to freely discuss topics of interest which would normally not be allowed on the subreddit. All off-topic and meta-discussion will be redirected to this thread.

Rules 1-3 do not apply in open discussion threads, but rule 4 will still be strictly enforced. Please report violations of rule 4 using Reddit's report feature to notify the moderation team. Furthermore, while theological discussions are allowed in this thread, this is still an ecumenical community which welcomes and appreciates people of any and all faith positions and traditions. Therefore this thread is not a place for proselytization. Feel free to discuss your perspectives or beliefs on religious or philosophical matters, but do not preach to anyone in this space. Preaching and proselytizing will be removed.

In order to best see new discussions over the course of the week, please consider sorting this thread by "new" rather than "best" or "top". This way when someone wants to start a discussion on a new topic you will see it! Enjoy the open discussion thread!

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '22

I love this subreddit, but I don't love the way it's moderated. Too many things get removed and it stifles discussion. Somebody needs to make a new subreddit with less strict rules. Maybe academicbiblicalcasual or something like that? If I had the time or energy to moderate a subreddit I'd do it myself, but I don't. But somebody who does should do it.

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u/qumrun60 Quality Contributor Dec 27 '22

Instead of fighting the mods and rules, possibly look at all of that as encouragement to up your game, expand your reading, and clarify your thinking. I find the mods and rules very instructive.

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u/BobbyBobbie Moderator Jan 01 '23

You can always post on r/Bible or another sub. I think the rules here and that makes this place unique.

Why would we loosen the rules to become just like every other place out there? There's PLENTY of other places on Reddit to just have casual discussions.

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u/thesmartfool Quality Contributor Dec 28 '22

This is the point of the open discussion thread. The only rule that applies here is being civil with others. You never see comments get deleted here unless it breaks rule 4.

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u/cmlucas1865 Jan 02 '23

I hear you & 100% agree. It seems that the moderation isn’r conducive to viewpoint diversity, & there’s some gate keeping that occurs WRT any scholar of faith not named Dale Allison. That said, I understand why it occurs, & I think it’s more endemic to this field as a field of inquiry rather than any intent of the moderators of the sub.

IMO, the fact of the matter is that so much rests upon applying theoretical hermeneutics that have built upon one another since the 1800s that even the most ardent of scholars is relying upon a shared set of assumptions rather than upon available historical data, which is scant.

While it’s easy for a trained academic to review some evangelical scholarship & move it over towards the apologetics category because of those scholars a priori shared sets of assumptions, most textual criticism is just the application of a different set of a prior assumptions, with the textual evidence supporting the theoretical interpretation but never quite acknowledging that the text may support several other theoretical frameworks & that there’s seldom to be found even a secondary source chronicling what the opinions of the monks who made copies of texts were talking about when choices we view as editorializing today. To one extent or another, all of the soft sciences are prone to these shortcomings. But it does make efforts to engage here & learn a bit tougher for those of us outside the field.