What Counts as Christian Criticism

As the title of my article suggests, I am concerned to determine what Christians can contribute to literary studies that non-Christian critics cannot. It is not unusual today for some Christian literary scholars to assume because they are Christians the work they do is also Christian. But I will argue that most of the time when we are doing literary critical work, our Christianity makes little, if any, principled difference to our scholarly activity and, more strongly, cannot make any theoretical difference unless we are willing to adopt theophanic models of reading. Religion's return to the Academy is marked by conferences, special issues of journals and magazines, books, articles, and curiosity from scholars who are themselves indifferent to religion as a form of personal commitment. Outside the Academy, it has become a platitude to comment upon the rise in church attendance after 9/11, the prominence of faith on the national political scene, and the centrality of Islam and Christianity in the global south and east. These and other signs suggest that it is quite possible to explain the return of religion to English by reference to events that have occurred outside it: English has returned to religion because the world around it has. But there may be some more properly academic reasons for the new importance of Christianity in literary studies: the erosion of the rationalist and scientistic foundation of the academic enterprise. It is no longer clear that there are two distinct categories of knowledge: rational, scientifically verifiable beliefs (perspicuous and available to all who correctly apply their innate rational faculties and the appropriate methods) and faith-based beliefs (acculturated and requiring superstitious "leaps of faith" to be compelling). Instead many, if not most, scholars now work under the assumption that there are simply beliefs that guide the rest of a person's commitments, all of which are perspicuous to the person who holds them but which are not innate or guaranteed by the faculty of human reason. As a result of the rejection of the first category of knowledge, many recent epistemological conceptions repudiate the long held belief that religious conviction happens in a way distinct from other kinds of complex conviction. What follows from this move toward antifoundationalism (the epistemology most often referred to simply as "postmodern") is that the central role of conviction to the academic enterprise comes to the foreground and Christianity as well as other religions no longer seem at an epistemic disadvantage for having been based upon faith / belief. For instance, Catholic theologian and scholar of Indian Buddhism Paul Griffiths, in a review of Stanley Hauerwas's 2001 Gifford Lectures (subsequently published as With the Grain of the Universe), explains that "the demand [by some philosophical foundationalists/modernists] for justification (or vindication or support) of Christian conviction from any source other than itself is misplaced" (74) and this is because "Christian conviction is not epistemologically guilty until proven innocent; it is, rather, epistemologically innocent until proven guilty. And in this it is like every other complex conviction (Marxism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and so on) about the nature of human persons and the world in which we find ourselves" (74). Griffiths asserts that "it is ... an ordinary feature of human conviction that those who hold particular complex convictions may defensibly continue to do so without having or being able to give independent epistemic support for them" (emphasis mine, 74). Griffiths's point is that there is nothing about religion that makes its rejection of the "epistemologists' demand" for "independent epistemic support" more difficult because there are no such things as independent foundations, that is, no grounds which are not themselves beliefs. Griffiths concludes that we are "all sectarians, which is to say that we all inhabit a form of life whose central commitments neither can nor need be validated or justified or vindicated independently of assuming them true. …