Post-Liberalism as the Ultimate Safety Net for Classical Religion in the Modern World

  For further amplification, see Tamar Ross, “Religious Belief in a Postmodern Age”, in Faith: Jewish Perspectives, edited by Avi Sagi and Dov Shwartz (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), pp. 188-240

  In view of the complaints registered against Leibowitz and Kugel and their allegedly impoverished reading of scripture (see above), it is instructive to see how this combination of radical postmodernism and reactionary traditionalism plays out in the way that Christian post-liberals approach canonical texts.  In his book, aptly entitled The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), post-liberal theologian Hans Frei criticizes the often pernicious effect that modern Protestant historical-critical scholarship has had on the understanding and reading of Scripture. This type of interpretation, according to Frei,  becomes “a matter of fitting the biblical story into another world with another story rather than incorporating that world into the biblical story” (ibid, p. 130). As a result, the meaning of the Bible is rendered decipherable only to an academic elite employing highly artificial methods of harmonization in order to fabricate “solutions” not to be found in Scripture at all. What is lost, according to Frei, in the often over-accommodating apologetics of such interpretations is the traditional reading of the Bible as a “realistic narrative”. In Frei’s version of post-liberal understanding, while rejecting the notion of biblical inerrancy (i.e., that Scripture is completely accurate in all matters of history and science), the rationality and relevance or “truth” of Scriptural faith and practice is maintained, not by appeal to external evidence, but rather by skillfully using its internal grammar in an intra-textual manner to provide an intelligible interpretation on its own terms.  See also George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). pp. 79-84.

 Solomon, Torah from Heaven, p. 316-317.

  Solomon, Torah from Heaven , p. 313

 Solomon, Torah from Heaven, p. 346

  BT Pesahim 116b

See the comment section of the “Evidence and Exodus” featured on his virtual Association for the Philosophy of Judaism (supra, n. 70).  Rachel Adler provides poignant affirmation of this from a critical feminist perspective, when remarking (in “I’ve Had Nothing Yet, So I Can’t Take More”, Moment 8 [September 1983], p. 23):

“The woman hearing the Torah reading [on the festival of Shavuot, which celebrates the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Sinai] is not there to study social organization in the ancient Middle East. If she were, she would accept as a given that in the culture under examination, women held an inferior status. That would have nothing to do with her. But (accepting Eliade’s contention that every ritual is a re-enactment of a primary event), the woman’s purpose in being present this Shavuot morning must be to re-enact through this reading the first covenant of her people. And because the text has excluded her, she is excluded again in this re-enactment and will be excluded over and over, year by year, every time she rises to hear this covenant read.”

For a few such examples, contrasted with counter-examples bearing a more essentialist thrust, see Batya Hefter, “The term kivyakhol in Talmudic Literature” [Hebrew], in Michlol – Ktav et rav-tehumi, vol. 29 (Jerusalem: Michlelet Yerushalayim, 2013), pp.35-58

 Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed III, chapter 28; Abraham Isaac Kook, Shmoneh Kevatzim (Kiryat Arba: Dfus Bodner-Hebron, 1999), kovetz aleph, par. 155.  For elaboration upon the precise nature of R. Kook’s extension of the Maimonidian conception, see Tamar Ross, “The Cognitive Value of Religious Truth Statements: Rabbi A.I. Kook and Postmodernism”, pp. 491-492

For a similar view regarding the relationship between belief in Torah from Heaven (which because of its inherent unintelligibility might ultimately amount to no more than a phonetic commitment) and the “grip” of the halakhic form of life as product rather than cause, see Moshe Halbertal, ”Bein Madaei Ha-Yahadut le-dat Yisrael”, Machshevet Yisrael ve-Emunat Yisrael (Mosad Bialik, 2012), pp. 11-20.