Yes, my comment was aimed to some degree at the minimalist camp and their ilk.

More, though, I was trying to tease out the nature of things like public/private information, minimalist/maximalist, secular/fideistic, etc, etc. These oppositions have always rankled me, if for no other reason than that each of the epistemological presuppositions involved in these dichotomies preclude discussion of the other.

And of course, partly you’re getting caught in the web of what I’m reading, which at the moment includes the Zizek/Milbank debate, which involves significant critiques of the philosophical project that creates some of these dichotomies that we’re talking about.

And thanks for keeping my spot on your blogroll . I’ll be back to blogging at some point I think, but probably not for a couple of months still. Doctoral coursework is winding down, comps and dissertation phase are coming up, and baby #2 will be here in about a month. But I’ll still be reading your stuff, just with a tiny little girl in my other hand while I type my responses with one finger .

I’m happy to admit I never got that first ’graph where I want it. I could only find really *long* ways to say what I wanted, but didn’t want to bog down at the outset. Not least, I judge that “fideistic” may not serve as the right shorthand term for what I mean to be saying.

What I do mean to say is, that a peer-reviewed work in the discipline of history should avoid relying (or appearing to rely) on private revelation or sectarian faith-claims, and should further avoid the false “teach the controversy” rhetoric that you get (for example) in a Creation “museum.” If one is going to say that there was “probably” a world-wide flood—and if by that one means an instantaneous global catastrophe—then that “probably” cannot be argued to hang on the balance of publicly available evidence. It can only hang on private revelation (including a revelation-based privileging of a particular reading of Gen 6–8) or on an intentional or unintentional torturing of the physical evidence.

In considering your last question, I am trying to imagine what the “other” impropriety would be. I don’t know what it would mean to rely *too heavily* on publicly available evidence over against private revelation or sectarian faith-claims. Perhaps a better “other side” would be the stance that is sometimes called biblical “minimalism,” in that they can be considered not to “give the Bible its due.” There, though, I think the real problem is *not* that they don’t give enough weight to private revelation or sectarian faith-claims, but rather that they fail in their treatment of *some* of the publicly available evidence (the biblical texts, cognate languages, pre-exilic extra-biblical data, and so forth).

Let me know if that all sounds more like it, or if you think there is more to consider.

Always glad to see you commenting here and elsewhere, Colin. You can see I keep a space in my blogroll available for you! :^)

In a culture where writing on the Bible will always be too secular for some people and too prone to apologetics for others, published works in biblical history might seek to more carefully emulate Caesar’s wife, avoiding even the appearance of (fideistic) impropriety.

So it’s only “fideistic” impropriety that’s to be avoided?

Perhaps this olive site was the official oil merchant of Noah’s Ark (TM) and he cleaned out their supply before the waters hit.