Just a couple of thoughts. First, I think we need to be very careful about charges of intellectual dishonesty in others (not that you do this here, it just reminded me of this). Too often “intellectual dishonesty” means “you don’t agree with what is obvious to me.” Objective mistakes and a subjective lack of integrity are two different beasts. I know people who hold things that I consider gravely mistaken, yet who I trust are genuinely seeking the truth. On the other hand, I know those who are very close to many of my beliefs, yet whose twisted motives seem increasingly clear in how they arrived at these same convictions.

Second, I would love to see you draw out more the so-often ignored sociological dimensions of all of this complicated mess. In a conservative environment (say, in the South), a plausibility structure is so deeply put in place, that it is sipmly obvious to people that evolution or higher critical views of the Bible are mistaken, a priori, before arguments are even examined. Here at a place like Harvard, the opposite holds: one of the primary problems is the sheer amount of self-evidence so many liberals now feel towards convictions (such as non-Pauline authorship of certain letters) that were hammered out a generation or two ago, and which most no longer really understand or grasp why is the case or the reasons given that led to it–let alone the strong evidence often mounted against it. I read this recently from Markus Bockmuehl, a leading NT scholar in Europe and no conservative American evangelical by any means:

“In spite of the historical rootlessness and fragmentation, contemporary NT scholarship is at the same time peculiarly beholden to intellectual juggernauts unmoved by reason or evidence…Too often such aging monster theories imperiously require the homage of countless young scholars until after a generation or three they may finally topple and wither away by themselves. Among this brood of dragons have been self-assured assumptions about authorship, hypothetical fragments and hymns, the so-called gospels of Thomas and Q; wandering charismatics and invisisble ‘communities’ playing hide-and-seek behind the text; grand power struggles between irreconcilably divided, ‘suppressing’ and ‘suppressed’ versions of faith; all manner of quasi-Darwinist speculations about ever-ascending christologies and descending eschatologies, early egalitarian radicalism giving way to late bourgeois patriarchalism; and so forth. The list goes on and on. Even unbelievers in these figments of intellectual fashion find that the attempt to ignore them is like trying to escape after stepping into bubblegum or dog doo: they are virtually impossible to dispel, and the aroma lingers wherever one turns.” (“Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study”, pp. 37-38

To be clear, Bockmuehl is not saying that all of the various modern theories are wrong, or not to be taken seriously–but he is questioning why they are so obvious and unchallengable in the highest academic levels of scholarship, and simply taken for granted, in spite of the often tremendous lack of solid empirical evidence behind them. One obvious answer: because you look ridiculous if you are the person who disputes them in class or published papers. Peer pressure! I think as Westerners, we have too long thought of ourselves as abstractly, ahistorically going about our objective search for truth, neutrally weighing the evidence on both sides of competing theories. In my mind, the most extreme fundamentalists and hard-core liberals have an amazing amount of common ground in their methodologies, and in the social factors that shape them and act to (practically) prevent them from ever changing their minds.

So maybe on top of “faith” and “reason”, a third factor needs to be brought into the discussion: “backbone”!