A while back, NT Wrong created a big list categorizing all blogs (s)he could find as some point within the continuum between “Very Conservative” and “Very Liberal.” I was originally labeled as “very conservative,” but upon protest, I was “upgraded” to “fairly conservative.” Even though Wrong gave some vague explanations of these categories, the problem of definition remained.
When the list appeared a little over a year ago, I registered my complaint about how the continuum blurred the lines between things like theology and methodology. For example, a conservative person appeared to be defined almost entirely based upon whether they were willing to accept the Bible as an inspired document of some kind.
In that previous post, I observed that “what makes one liberal theologically to some laypersons, may make one a conservative in terms of methodology to other scholars.” So, a serious historical-critical scholar will ask questions of the Bible that will often make your average church-going Christian squeamish (and would thus be thought of as a liberal). In today’s academic atmosphere, however, someone who is dedicated to historical-critical work over against ideological criticism would be considered a conservative scholar.
So, should the Biblioblog Top 50 take up this project again? I suspect that most bloggers will prefer not to be pigeon-holed into a label, but I also kind of suspect it will happen anyway. If it does happen, I think the list should be a little more responsible, even if it is in good fun. After all, some of us are on a very scary job market or are in the midst of Ph.D. applications. Not all potential hiring or admission committees who might possibly happen upon these sorts of labels will “get the joke” if it is a joke.
Theology and Inspiration. I agree with Jason and Loren that there should be some sort of multi-categorization. If one of the axes is “theological,” then it should explicitly state what about theology is in question. The previous list was interested in the issue of inspiration, which is probably what a lot of people would be interested in. For example, “very conservative” on this “theological” on “inspiration” axis would include a willingness to accept inerrancy (e.g., any member of the Evangelical Theological Society which requires agreement with this statement: “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.”).
The problem with this, from my perspective, is that many people say they believe in inerrancy, but really don’t. They qualify the term and water it down to something entirely different so that they can say that they still believe in inerrancy (and thus qualify to be good conservative Evangelicals in the inerrancy litmus test) when they really don’t. I am often shocked to find out when some very open-minded friends of mine feel they could accept the term inerrancy in order to remain within the bounds of a certain Evangelical community.
A further problem of this “theological” category is that it leaves no room for what one thinks about social issues. We learn nothing about where one falls on the issues of women in ministry, or homosexual practice, or nonviolence, etc. These are left to assumptions. But those assumptions might not line up. For instance, perhaps Michael Gorman would be fairly conservative on the issue of inspiration, I suspect (though I could be wrong), but he embraces the issue of nonviolence (typically not considered a “conservative” attribute).
Methodology. A second category of methodology seems appropriate. Summarizing Jason’s explanation, Loren describes this category as a “scholarly axis (one’s openness or resistance to new scholarly ideas).” I think “methodological axis” would probably be more appropriate than “scholarly axis.” As I suggested above, strict historical-critical methodology would probably fall in the “very conservative” side, while unadulterated “ideological approaches” of various kinds and an affinity to postmodernism might fall on the “very liberal” side of things.
Outside Engagement. Finally, Loren summarizes a third category of Jason’s as the “critical axis (one’s willingness or not to engage and interact with those outside one’s camp).” Loren also suggests a fourth category, but I’m a little unclear on it, so I’ll leave it be.
The Problem of Sophistication: How on earth do you analyze 300 blogs with such a sophisticated model? And without having all the data to boot. I’m sure that many bloggers protect many of their “radical views” (be they conservative or liberal) away from public viewing. How could you tell whether a blogger interacts with those outside one’s camp without being intimately familiar with that blogger’s camp and all occurences of interaction? As I mentioned in that previous post, when NT Wrong originally categorized me, (s)he used the method of searching for some posts about inspiration, scanning for a few out-of-context keywords, and quickly categorizing. You can’t do that if you have a sophisticated multi-category labeling continuum.
So, maybe it’s not worth the effort.
