Nearly a century and a half has passed since an extraordinary yet iconic meeting of minds took place at the Oxford University Museum. In June 1860 a range of renowned British scientists and philosophers gathered for a public discussion centred on the findings of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

It is said that during the debate Anglican leader Bishop Wilberforce asked Darwin’s advocate Thomas Henry Huxley whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he claimed descent from a monkey; Huxley allegedly responded by declaring he would rather be descended from a monkey than hold any connection to a man who used his intellect to obscure the truth.

If we were to hold a rematch and bring the debate about the meaning of scripture, the value of religious faith, the very existence of God, then what would the scene look like?

When evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens take to the pulpit – only to be shouted down in turn by Bible-bashing extremists – religious debate in the twenty-first century begins to seem like a crude sideshow. In her treatise The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, Karen Armstrong argues that the fire-and-brimstone Dawkinsians and the raging fundamentalists alike are blinded by their own “infantile” vision of God as ultimately a large, powerful, invisible man in the sky. To Armstrong, a former Catholic nun, faith is characterised by spiritual imagination, meditative humility and a sensitivity that transcends the dogmatic cannon battle of common religious discussion. Rather than theorising about the nature of God, she concludes that all we can do is respond to the spiritual with “silence, reverence and awe”.

Nonetheless even today there are scholars who remain committed to their study and to improving the popular understanding of God, and particularly of sacred scripture. Works such as Steven L McKenzie’s

How To Read The Bible demonstrate the literary quality of scripture, the importance of first recognising its genre, and how this is just as true with the Bible as it is with any modern novel.

McKenzie identifies several generic forms in the Bible and challenges fundamental misconceptions about each in turn. For example he places historiography in the context of ancient history writing, which was less about the impersonal recording of events but instead about writers themselves reporting what they had heard. Similarly prophecy in the Bible, McKenzie argues, is ultimately social criticism grounded in contemporary concerns rather than mystical foretelling of the future.

The importance of understanding scripture as a product of the historical, cultural and social world in which it was written is something thoughtful scholars well understand. When we assess texts today, it would be mindless to neglect this methodology. In the introduction to Good as New, a collaborative translation of the Bible into a modern-day “ordinary” prose style, John Henson recounts the story of when he asked biblical translator J.B. Phillips what the essential difference was between his colloquial English translation and the language of the then recently-published New English Bible: “I read the Daily Mirror; the translators of the New English Bible read The Times”.

Henson is eager to call attention to how the scriptures were written by real people, for real people: “We must assume a common humanity between the first writers and readers and ourselves.”

An interesting new play entitled According To..., written by second-year Catz English student David Ralf, to be performed at the Burton-Taylor Studio in fifth week, achieves just that. The play takes a historicist perspective on the writing of Mark’s Gospel. David argues that adverts on buses are emblematic of how contemporary religious debate has degenerated: “The media naturally polarises. Extreme statements sell papers. But I believe that debate is about more than throwing together extreme and opposite positions. True debate requires a culture of investigation.”

But if the scriptures are nothing more than a collection of books, written by authors who are influenced by their culture and historical situation, how can they have any more spiritual significance than a Hardy novel or a Stoppard play?

“Spirituality is ineffable,” David insists. “The writings of the Bible have influenced over two thousand years of world history. And they are good stories – they're great material, and its worth looking into what they do, and what they have done.”

David Ralf’s play proves that we have a great deal to remain optimistic about in the way we approach religious debate in our own times. The only tragedy is that Christian extremists in the States who claim to advocate the right to life but proceed to murder doctors who offer abortions, and even young Muslims listening to hatred in mosques in English inner-cities, will not come to Oxford and see it.