Please, there's a long tradition of skepticism about the actual usefulness of theology, and what it really entails, and I'm hardly the first person to say any of this shit. Secondly, the discovery I cited (Enuma Elish vs. Genesis) was made possible by archeology, Assyriology, and German higher criticism, for the most part, not necessarily theology.Theology IS a form of scholarship, both historical and linguistic in nature. The fact that you think that it fails to produce any new knowledge (while, ironically, citing a discovery that was only made possible by close theological study of religious texts) shows that you don't actually know what you are talking about. In fact, that you think that hermeneutics and exegesis is purely the search for some nebulous deeper meaning indicates that you don't even know what those words mean. I suggest you actually do some research into the subject before you start spouting more nonsense. All of your arguments seem to be rooted in a deep ignorance of what modern theology actually entails.
As I mentioned in a previous post, all of your arguments against theology only hold if you also dismiss the entire school of close reading and literary criticism of which theology is simply a special case.
Secondly, you're really full of shit. The reality is that theology is a form of scholarship yes, but it is heavily tainted by a priori religious convictions, and your attempt to equate it entirely with serious Biblical scholarship is silly. A large part of theology is utterly useless musings about the nature of God, Christ, sin, Redemption, etc., shit which is utterly meaningless apart from religious convictions. Look at the entire work of someone like C.H. Dodd, who basically spent all his time "interpreting" the New Testament to fit his views about Christian eschatology. Or N.T. Wright, who argues about such subjects as dispensationalism or when the rapture is going to happen. Please. Are these not "real" theologians to you?
The actual useful stuff, like the whole German tradition of "Higher Criticism", combined with advances in archaeology and computational linguistics, is responsible for what we can reliably know about the Bible (JEPD theory/documentary hypothesis, Marcan priority/Q hypothesis, etc.). But for you to classify that as exclusively "theology", while ignoring all the bullshit that comes out of theology (i.e. the entire fucking field of Christology, which again is little more than the equivalent of Tolkien fans musing about the nature of Sauron or something) is absurd. I already said that theology overlaps with Biblical scholarship, but you keep ignoring the fact that Biblical scholarship is an independent field that exists apart from theology. You seem to be really trying to pretend that theology is all serious scholarship and shit like this doesn't exist.
