The enthronement of reason as paramount of course meant that anything super natural or miraculous was out of the question. If it couldn't be replicated in the lab it couldn't have actually happened.
So like a child who gets a hammer for Christmas and proceeds to hammer everything to death, modernist scholars went to work on re-interpreting the Christian tradition and the Scriptures.
The problem with this approach is not that it yields altogether unhelpful findings. The problem is that this way of doing Biblical studies is so incredibly narrow that it assumes a number of questionable things:
1. It does not take seriously that other peoples and cultures around the world understand history very differently. Put another way, ther is an arrogance about this way of viewing history that does not allow for voices other than western voices at the table.
2. Any approach to a text that a priori discounts the experiences of 90 percent of the billions of people who have inhabited the text seems to be a bit less than 'unbiased.'
Of course in many parts of our culture modernity is rapidly giving way to post-modernity. My hope is that this will lead to a genuine discussion and a real pluralism where all the voices are heard, not just those of white, modernist-biased scholars.
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The unfortunate thing is that many of the scholars from other backgrounds come get educated in the U.S. or Europe and some are more critical of our biases than others.
BUT I think issues of justice hav been increasingly leaking into evangelical theology over the past few decades, which just from my speculation, don't seem to have re-entered the conversation until voices like John Perkins and Tom Skinner were heard at a popular level and when some of the good of black and Latin American liberation theology was able to be extracted from the larger frameworks which still receives white evangelical suspicion. (Of course there were a few random evangelicals doing thinking on their own about Civil Rights and the Vietnam War and whatnot, but for the post part, I don't think it has been on the radar for the majority until you go back pre-fundamentalism.)
In that way, even though non-white, non-Western scholars are certainly still influenced by our schools and theology, something we need to be careful of... but they have already played an important role in "checking" white evangelicalism in various ways and will hopefully continue to do so.
It will be fascinating see where the discussion goes next!
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