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Why philosophy needs the Bible (and vice versa)
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Jul 14, 2025
Philosopher Meghan Sullivan challenges the idea that religious texts can’t be taken seriously in modern philosophy. She explains how parables, scripture, and debate have always been connected to asking life’s biggest questions:
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Many contemporary philosophers shy away from using religious texts as philosophical sources
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of evidence or inspiration. They think that because these traditions believe that the texts
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are inspired by God, they're not capable of interpretation and debate. And that's just a
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mistake. The whole tradition of Jewish and Christian ethics is a tradition of debate
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You have Jesus or Mohammed or Moses engaged in asking a philosophical question to followers
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that followers are meant to wrestle with and think about. And these kinds of texts are asking philosophical questions that many people find profoundly interesting
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And in fact, one of the best ways to engage with that idea and to live out that teaching is to engage with the debate
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There really shouldn't be this sharp division between quote-unquote secular philosophical texts
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and quote-unquote religious philosophical texts. All of these texts ask philosophical questions
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and philosophy doesn't know those boundaries. There are plenty of instances in the Bible that
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are in exactly the same genre as the Socratic dialogues, which are the bedrock of how we have taught philosophy
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for 2 years The Republic opens with Socrates on the road taking a walk He runs into his cousins and his cousins start asking him questions about what it really means to be a just person And that
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sets off the whole rest of the book, which gets into so many really deep and important philosophical
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questions about how we should design society and how we should educate young people. These really
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profound questions come from that simple question. We see the same dynamic with Jesus and his
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disciples, especially in the parables. There are people who are curious about how they should be
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living their lives. They want Jesus to share a story. They want to ask a follow-up question
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That curiosity, that kind of conversation, this is how we cultivate our inner lives. This is how
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we work on our souls. This kind of debate, this kind of thinking, it's not meant to turn you off
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to the ideas in the tradition, but quite the contrary. It's meant to make you really, really
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interested in understanding what these moral traditions ask of you. Philosophy cuts across
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secular and religious genres. It's an invitation for us to be a part of a discussion where that
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discussion itself is something that, frankly, we're meant to enjoy. It's meant to help us answer
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really deep questions that are hard to wrestle with if we don't have philosophical interlocutors
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and in the process of having the debate and discussion, we're promised that we're going to uncover
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some really important philosophical truths that we can use to live our lives