There Is No Woke Right, Part 3
Hegemonic Power and Lived Experience
Also be sure to check out part 1 and part 2
A major part of Shenvi’s dismissal of the so-called “woke right” is on the basis of their opposition to the “Global American Empire,” and his rejection of the possibility of social hegemonic power as described in Critical Theory, especially of the notion of Critical Consciousness. All he demonstrates, however, is that Wolfe and Isker do a poor job of articulating the nature of the current American elite and that he fails to understand the vast body of work in Philosophy of Consciousness dealing with the way the human mind filters information. I’m lumping these two together because hegemonic cultural power can’t be understood until we have a firm grasp as to why the claims of Critical Theory about consciousness are scientifically valid. People are, in fact, blind to certain truths due to their background, life history, and basic moral tenor, and are incapable of acknowledging these truths without a comprehensive worldview adjustment, or in Christian language, a conversion experience[1. Scheler, Max. Formalism in Ethics. p 116. Voegelin. NSP. p 69.].
A consistent theme throughout Shenvi’s works is that he doesn’t claim that Critical Theory is factually wrong, he claims that its consequences are undesirable. Replete through this section of his essay are quotes like:
In practice, these assumptions make appeals to reason or logic or Scripture nearly impossible because they require us to “see through” people’s arguments to discover the “real” reasons that they are making particular claims.
Again, I raised the same criticisms with the woke left: once you accept the idea that all truth claims can be dismissed as mere power plays, no claim will emerge unscathed. In fact, this reasoning devours itself.
Moreover, this approach to truth leads to a purity spiral. Once you accept the argument that you are blind to the ways your reasoning itself has been corrupted, there is no easy way to push back against any claim that the woke decide to make.
Also, keep in mind that wokeness admits of no ecclesiocentric (i.e. church-based) solution to the problems it discovers. Wokeness is primarily a political project. According to its proponents, the only solution to the marginalization of straight White men (or LGBTQ Black women) is the radical transformation of our nation’s government and culture. That is why woke churches eventually loosen their hold on the gospel to free up resources for sociopolitical activism. We saw this clearly on the woke left. We will see it on the woke right.
What if we do need to understand why a person is saying such a thing in order to understand their meaning? Take, for example, something as simple as a child’s ploy. On my last birthday, I told my wife to forget the cake because we’ve been eating too much recently. My children waited until I left and raced to their mother, to explain to her how birthday cakes are a tradition and it would be thoughtless of her to let me go without cake on my birthday. How thoughtful! My children must truly be devoted to the upholding of family traditions! In all four of these arguments, there is no substantial rebuttal of the facts that 1) people twist the truth in order to achieve ulterior ends, 2) power players use legitimizing narratives to secure their positions, 3) each of us possess unexamined biases and sinful self-loves that prevent us from aligning our will to that of God and to the truth, and 4) there is no place in Scripture where God promises an ecclesiocentric solution that eschews all political action to the problems of this world. Luther must sometimes go to the Princes. Instead, Shenvi fears that the consequences of these facts will be detrimental to the Church and its mission. That may be so, but denial is not a solution to those consequences. Facing the consequences is the only solution.
Despite this, I’m going to treat this argument as if he had asserted that the principles of critical consciousness are untrue rather than merely undesirable. I will have to borrow from another of Shenvi’s essays, Part 3 of his Social Justice and Critical Theory essays. In those essays, Shenvi is demonstrating a characteristic that Mark Noll identifies as a key feature of Evangelical thought, the stubborn adherence to obsolete scientific paradigms and the conflation of these scientific paradigms with the Christian worldview[2. Noll, Mark. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. p 84].
Despite my overall negative appraisal of the book’s effect on Evangelical intellectualism, Noll is correct in identifying a number of characteristics of Evangelical culture and their relation to 18th and 19th Century theories in epistemology and psychology. The notion that every truth is equally accessible to all people, that any text can be read simply and plainly to derive an objective meaning, and that human beings are essentially rational creatures who are open to changing their beliefs on the basis of a logical argument belong to a past paradigm of science that was readily absorbed by Evangelical thinkers.
First, it should be explained that there is nothing anti-Christian about the fundamental principles behind the idea of critical consciousness. Evidence of the basic phenomenon can be found right in Scripture. Take, for example, the second half of Romans Chapter 1, in which the Apostle Paul describes the consequences of ungodly and unrighteous life. In verse 21, it shows that the first thing to go in the unbeliever are their intellect and their moral compass. Those who stand against God are left to their own devises, losing their reason, degenerating into further wickedness, until finally they sink so low as to lose the inhibitions that are writ into human nature itself, glorifying in their evil and calling it good. This passage is certainly describing a person who is beyond reason, incapable of right judgment, and outside of the power of persuasion.
Augustine of Hippo reiterates this point in Book 1 of De Libero Arbitrio, in which he argues that it is only through the restorative power of the Holy Spirit that humans are capable of reasoning and judging correctly. If we were left in our sins, all of us would suffer the consequences of Romans 1, but because Christ redeemed us, we have regained the patrimony of reason which was lost. This is one of the reasons that I strongly reject both the arguments of Russell Moore as well as those of Wolfe regarding our ability to reason with and work jointly with unbelievers towards a common ultimate goal. While an unbeliever can be accidentally correct on an individual issue, it is impossible for them to be right about the right things in the right way. Alliances of convenience will always become inconvenient in time, just as Christians became inconvenient to establishment Fusionist Conservativism; Christians cannot rely on movements and parties that are not explicitly Christian in orientation to promote our principles and goals. Instead, Christians need to be prepared to take up leadership for ourselves, stand on our own moral, institutional, and political legs, and to assert for ourselves an “Evangelical Mind.” To paraphrase a theme from Hauerwas and Willimon’s Resident Aliens, if you agree with unbelievers on the same issues, for the same reasons, then how is your worldview Christ-centered[3. Hauerwas, Stanley and William Willimon. Resident Aliens. p 155]? If Christ hasn’t made you incomprehensible to the unbeliever, and doesn’t make the unbeliever incomprehensible to you, have you really been changed? Have you really embraced that which is a stumbling block unto the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks?
Let me use an example to illustrate a principle of modern philosophy of mind which illustrates a problem with Shenvi’s archaic epistemology. I grew up in the generation that ripped open PCs and rebuilt them, not the generation that rebuilt cars. As a pre-teen, I familiarized myself with the key components of a PC and built myself a computer from parts as soon as I had an independent checking account. When my father would ask me to help him work on his car, we would open the hood and I would merely see an undifferentiated mass of engine. Likewise, when my father would help me with my computer, I could see every component and piece, but he only saw a mass of electronics. I could no more “see” the alternator than he could “see” the RAM, because conceptualization precedes perception. I did not know what an alternator did or what it looked like, and so it was functionally invisible to me. Everything under the hood looked like undifferentiated engine to me. Explaining the workings of the engine to me, at that point, would have been meaningless because I had no conceptual basis on which to attach the concepts I was being taught. I was, in fact, blind to auto mechanics in the same way that my father was blind to electronics.
It would be long and deeply cumbersome to cite the mountains of proofs for the notion that conceptualization precedes perception. This concept is not even vaguely controversial in professional circles. We can only assimilate concepts to comparable concepts already in our possession because human consciousness works by means of metaphor. An unfamiliar concept can only be understood in its relation to a known concept[4. Husserl, Edmund. The Essential Husserl. p 287.]. In layman’s terms, if you wish to describe an object that I’ve never seen or heard of before, the only way you can describe it to me is through a comparison.
The fullaberry is a fruit – comparison to a known class
The fullaberry is sweet – comparison to a known sensation
The fullaberry is round – comparison to a known shape
The fullaberry tastes like a pear – comparison to a known taste
The fullaberry is purple – comparison to a known color
Based on this brief description, I’m sure most readers have a very similar image in their head of the kind of object that is a fullaberry. Let’s say, however, that one reader is blind, and therefore doesn’t know what “purple” means. His mental image is going to be deficient compared to others. If he has never tasted a pear, it will be even more deficient. If we have a series of five people, each of whom does not understand the meaning of one of the five terms, then each of them has a flawed mental model of the fullaberry that differs along a different essential attribute. Finally, if we had a hypothetical person with no understanding of the concepts of fruit, sweet, round, pear, or purple, then my description of the fullaberry is meaningless. Without these essential points of similarity, this person is utterly incapable of comprehending my description of this fictional object.
When we perceive reality, all perception is inherently intentional. Nobody is a passive observer of reality, but each of us is embedded in a particular project through which our perceptions of the world are colored. When we act, perception highlights for us the things most relevant to our goal. When we choose one of these available paths, new objects of interest are again highlighted that fulfill our intended ends, as well as objects that we did not expect to perceive as a result of our actions. Objects that are neither desired nor unexpected fade into the background and are not perceived because perception is essentially the act of sensing variations in the experienced lived-body state[5. Husserl. Essential Husserl. p 130. Scheler. Formalism. p 56.].
We perceive the variations we expect, and those we do not expect, but do not perceive that which we does not vary, relative to our intentional project. We don’t often recall the color of the grocery store wall unless someone was painting it. We don’t notice the color of the car three spaces down from our own unless it was particularly gaudy. Critical theorists point out that what achieves our attention is defined by norms, and it is only the breach of those norms that raises something to our consciousness. We notice these things because they’re out of order[6. Scheler. Formalism. p 130.].
Critical theorists rightly argue that our norms form the expectations we have of social phenomenon, and we do not perceive that which fulfills those expectations. I can’t, for the life of me, remember the last person to stand in line with me at a grocery store. If you were driving past a scene on the side of the road in which the officer was making an arrest, and the person was elderly, white, and wearing a formal suit, your attention would be held in a way that isn’t true if the suspect was young, black, male, and wearing street clothes. More often than not, you wouldn’t even notice the arrest.
Critical Race Theorists are correct to say that the latter fulfills the dominant normative expectations of our society. In order to perceive an act as unjust, we first must possess the conceptual frame that such an action is non-normative because our attention is a limited resource and our minds will naturally conserve that resource for our intentional ends. A person who expects to see such arrests on the side of the road doesn’t actually perceive them but permits them to fade into the generic background of one’s immediate goals, such as driving to work. This is the meaning of the “blindness” described by Critical Theory, whatever misuse that Kendi and DiAngelo put it towards. If we acknowledge, even implicitly, the normativity of an injustice, we will fail to recognize when it occurs because such things will be normal and possess a low priority in our minds as compared to the problems of our immediate situation.
For this reason, we are all blind to certain phenomena around us on the basis of our backgrounds, life experiences, and basic moral tenor. As someone whose house has been burglarized, I am especially aware of vulnerabilities to breaking-and-entering into my home that would be invisible to people without that experience. Women describe a heightened awareness of potentially dangerous places when walking alone at night which most men would not even perceive. A person with a strong moral character will not even notice an opportunity to steal from the till at work, whereas a person of weak character will be constantly tempted throughout his shift to steal. The claim of Critical Race Theorists is that black people perceive injustices in society that white people are oblivious to in the same way that a person bound to a wheelchair is aware of the small step at the front door that the rest of us don’t notice. It is not an unreasonable argument.
One of the reasons that Shenvi is so startled by the logical implications of this epistemology is that he has only read the popularized, politicized version of this science. In fact, this does not represent the full, scientific account because awareness can be trained and perceptual worldview limits overcome. The entire point of a great deal of modern philosophy is just this: to identify the techniques for expanding the scope of one’s perception and perceive that which had gone unnoticed before.
The problem is that many Critical Race Theorists deliberately misstate the science because it is politically helpful to artificially constrain the circle of people who are allowed to make truth-claims. The same argument which states that white people cannot see racial injustice would also imply that black people are blind to the ways in which they are treated equally, for example. On what basis can a black person tell the difference between a supervisor who is racist and a supervisor who merely treats employees poorly? Since a white person can never see things through the perspective of a black person, and vice versa, there is no valid standpoint from which one can determine that the black employee was mistreated because of race instead of some other non-racial factor.
Applying the theory fairly, to everyone, would imply that we should all be epistemically humble, realizing that none of us have the complete picture and all of us suffer from blindnesses that hide part of the truth from us. It is not the philosophical methods of Critical Theory that are to blame for the excesses of people like Kendi and DiAngelo, but the fact that they don’t actually apply them rigorously. These intellectual charlatans instead apply these principles selectively to their enemies on the basis of the Who-Whom Question.
However, in practice, there are techniques that permit philosophers to settle the question of what really exists despite the fact that we can only perceive reality in perspective. The hyperbolic reaction of “and now there is no truth” is a strawman set up by people who cling to older, invalid epistemologies that inadequately deal with perspective. While there are certain philosophers who want to assert a post-truth worldview, namely Richard Rorty, the abandonment of the idea of reality is far from a necessary consequence of an adequate, modern epistemology.
Even the consequences that Shenvi cites of accepting these facts are by and large overblown. Shenvi’s argument about Critical Consciousness destroying reason is predicated on a common epistemic fallacy, which states that cognitive biases are random in their directionality[7. Caplan. Myth of the Rational Voter. p 7.]. If he were true, people’s opinions would vary as widely as their interests, and the more diverse the population the less capable it would be of finding large-scale agreement on any topic. In fact, however, what we find is that cognitive biases are anything but random; they warp reason in predictable and comprehensible ways.
This is why Shenvi’s argument about Bulverism is incorrect. An accusation of bias is incomplete without an explanation for the bias which explains the directional attitude[8. Caplan. Myth of the Rational Voter. p 54.]. Nobody is merely randomly wrong, but the way people are wrong correlate to kinds of systemic biases found in society. For example, take two girls who are competing to be prom queen. When the first girl wins, the second girl states that the first one is a slut. Does Shenvi actually believe that we can determine nothing about the meaning of that statement from the context, or that it doesn’t fit within a well-known and well-defined set of behaviors and motivations? What does the factual question about the number of sexual partners have to do with the real, intended meaning of that statement as an expression of envy? I would point back to the section dealing with the Oppressor-Oppressed dichotomy where we mentioned Caplan’s principle that preferences trump beliefs.
Most ideas are highly correlated to a specific set of preferences that motivate people to hold those beliefs, regardless of their truthfulness. For example, how many times do we need to keep proving that Communism is an evil system of government before we simply admit that people who state those beliefs do so because they’re deeply spiritually and psychologically deficient? How many times do we need to determine that scapegoating behavior is unrelated to the actual guilt of the scapegoat before we can simply say that scapegoaters are expressing self-hatred and a deep envy of the scapegoat? The claim that one can never know the true motivations of another bump up against the fact that people exhibit the same behaviors over and over again in a way that is highly predictable against their personal characteristics. Systemic biases are predictable because social pressures act in reliable ways and human beings react in a predictable fashion to those pressures.
Bulverism is an accurate diagnosis when the interlocuter is trying to negate a factual statement with a diagnosis about motives. If I were to say that the box is seven feet long, and one was to responds, “that’s just because your truck bed is six feet and you don’t want to haul the box,” this is Bulverism. We can easily take a tape measure and verify that. On the other hand, if I were to say that this painting is ugly, and one was to reply, “that’s because you’re obsessed with neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David,” this is not a Bulverism.
The second is a value-statement which possesses an inherent subjective element which must be understood in order to get the meaning of my statement. You can’t understand subjective statements without understanding the mental processes that lead to their assertion. This is not to say that beauty is subjective, or that there is not also an objective element to value-statements, but because values lie somewhere between the objective and subjective, they cannot be judged entirely in objective ways. Every value statement carries in itself an entirely unique context derived from the “microcosm” of the human soul, which possesses in itself an entire universe co-created with God[9. Sandoz, Ellis G. The Voegelinian Revolution. p 96. Scheler, Max. Man’s Place in the Cosmos. p 38.Voegelin. NSP. p 61.].
Ethics in terms of abstracted statements are incomplete because it ignores the reality that it is never Man who commits an act, but a man, and never an Act that he commits, but a discrete choice within a social context. We recognize the situationality of unethical acts when we admit mitigating circumstances, but all acts possess such circumstances that are necessary to comprehending their full meaning.
Even political statements fall within this category. When people like Isker condemn the postwar liberal consensus as unjust, and others defend it as just, the meaning of those statements requires one to establish the subjective, intentional norms before you can even begin to engage meaningfully with those statements. Take, for example, the communist meme: “If someone says you need to earn your living, they are telling you that you don’t deserve to live.” Attempting to engage this meme on a factual basis is absurd, because you can’t get to the meaning of it without recognizing that this sentiment is the product of a particular intention: the resentment that a grown-up child has against the reality of entropy in the universe. In order to understand the meme, you have to get the mindset that sees the entire universe as simply given, that sees food show up in grocery stores and money show up in daddy’s wallet, without understanding from whence they came. It is a worldview that doesn’t comprehend the connection between natural entropy, work, and existence. It is right, then, to respond to this communist meme by saying “you just say that because you’re a spoiled child who never grew up and took responsibility for your own existence.” The meaning of the statement is an expression of the spiritual and psychological deficiency of the speaker, and is not an act of positive, factual speech.
Those people who are, in fact, speaking in bad faith due to corrupt motives are not going to be swayed by rational argument. What is the prudent way of dealing with such people? The prudent way is to embarrass them by exposing their bad intentions to others, who will be persuaded by the realization that the positions being advocated are advocated in bad faith. The plain, simple fact of the matter is that a significant number of people, maybe even a majority, are closed off to reason and use ideas as instruments to achieve their ends. Shenvi may be outraged by this “cynical” truth, but outrage is not a substitute for facts. The belief in the value of truth is not a universally human belief but a product of particular cultural and religious preference-systems, especially the spiritual descendants of Moses and the intellectual descendants of Socrates[10. Caplan. Myth of the Rational Voter. p 3.]. Shenvi is correct to point out that many Critical Theorists have no regard for truth other than what is instrumental, but then misses the logical conclusion to that thought: those who say that truth is a consequence of power are admitting that they only think in terms of instrumentality themselves.
In many cultures and communities, truth has no value in itself but merely what is instrumental for cultural-communal ends. As American society drifts further from these two poles of Western civilization, it is not only reasonable but necessary to assume that most people are not speaking in good faith but are making instrumental arguments to justify their pre-existing motivations. Christ declared that his enemies were liars, like their father the Prince of Lies. Why do we expect any different from the enemies of Christ’s Church? Philosopher Eric Voegelin argues that the gnostic retreat from the spiritual insights of Christianity involve a self-mutilation of the soul.
Just as Oedipus puts out his own eyes, the modern anti-Christian ideologue cuts away from his humanity to avoid having to confront the truths of his own nature and existence. As a result, the effect of long-term adherence to these movements is a progressive inability to access reality or comprehend the truth. He argues that the political ideologies which define the modern world are specifically designed to prevent people from asking questions about their legitimacy or coming to truthful conclusions about reality by denying its members the fundamentally human experiences that open our awareness to Higher truths[11. Voegelin. Gnosticism. Prologue. Voegelin. NSP. 62.].
Shenvi’s main objection is the way that people who defer to the institutionally-approved explanations of social existence are accused of being systemically biased on those questions. He seems to be denying a well-known sociological principle of cognitive bias: the irrational deference people give to institutional authority and the “conventional wisdom[12. Caplan. Myth of the Rational Voter. p 170. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. p 6.].” This mode of fallacious thought predominates when the interlocutor is ignorant, when he has significant emotional engagement to the topic, and especially when he suffers little-to-no costs to being proven wrong.
When people affirm agreement with the institutional norm or the majority opinion, this should not be treated equally with other opinions because there is significant reason to believe that this affirmation is inauthentic. Shenvi accuses Wolfe of saying that he participates in a conspiracy theory, but no conspiracy theory is necessary to explain conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom is the norm and default belief in society, and so it is the belief that people accept when they have no belief. For this reason, anyone who agrees with the majority or the institutional authority should be challenged far more rigorously than someone who has a diverging opinion. The dissident holds their opinion against the pressures of society, proving that their belief is at least authentically held, even if it is not valid. They have taken the time to actually think[13. Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. p 88.]. The majority is under a higher burden of proof to show that they actually thought at all, rather than being mindlessly adopted under the pressures of the hegemonic social power.
The fact that people are biased in consistent and predictable ways undergirds the notion of hegemonic power that Shenvi dismisses. Hegemony is the power to set the institutionally-approved norm, as Herbert Marcuse explains in his essay “Repressive Tolerance.” Shenvi’s argument misses the point entirely; norms are always set by human beings, not by God, at least not since the Mosaic Law. All human beings are sinful, all human beings are contextually situated, and so all human attempts to establish a norm will deviate from the partially-misunderstood Will of God. Even the best and most moral Christian leaders will fail to fully articulate and interpret God’s will and require critique from the historic tradition of Biblical interpretation and Ezekiel 33 Christian scholars. This is why hegemonic power must always be challenged, especially when it thinks that it represents the true Will of God.
The very notion of Reformation stems from the acceptance of the reality that social truths are enthralled to social power, and this requires a distinct act to re-form those powers. Luther and Calvin were not grassroots missionaries but appealed to the Princes and Republics to negate the power of the Pope and the Emperor, whose hegemony set the norms of Christian belief. The notion that modern democracy makes the fundamental principles of social order obsolete is a myth. Modern-day elites exercise no less power over peoples’ beliefs and consciences than the Holy Roman Emperor. Every society has an established faith, they only differ on the degree to which they allow heteropraxy.
When Shenvi asks how himself, DeYoung, and Doug Wilson can all be wrong in the same way about the so-called “woke right,” irrational deference to conventional wisdom fully explains the coincidence and justifies the argument about hegemonic power. No conspiracy is necessary to illustrate the power of a cultural consensus to dictate thoughts because it’s a common-sense observation available to everyone. It’s simply enough to illustrate that there is no rationale for people in this situation to ever question the conventional wisdom. In such a position, simply affirming the beliefs of high-status political actors is the rational choice.
Nobody challenges the conventional wisdom of society unless compelled to, either by a substantial ethical or religious commitment to truth itself or an experience which makes living with the lies of society impossible. Human beings are intentional creatures, meaning that every action we take has a purpose. As Voegelin says, “Truth is never discovered in an empty space,” meaning that we only differ from the opinions imposed on us by society when those opinions clash with a given project in which we are personally involved[14. Caplan. Myth of the Rational Voter. p 125. Voegelin. NSP. p 63.]. If the truth isn’t actively compromising our preconceived notions, it is not present. This is the core insight of critical consciousness: if we never directly confront a lie in society, we cannot expect it to suddenly appear, specter-like, before us. Hegemonic power functions through the peer-pressure of others, who do not find themselves in a situation where they need to challenge a social lie and use the opportunity to mock and scorn those who are attempting to flee the chains of Plato’s Cave.
Since Shenvi did not attempt to refuse any of the premises of Elite Theory, I don’t feel the need to go into any detail here. It need only be mentioned that there is no such thing as a society of political equals. Power is always unequally distributed between a small set of elites and the masses. DeYoung attempts to smear Wolfe by associating his work with people like James Burnham and Samuel Francis, but this is more a reflection of his ignorance of the field than an actual criticism of either man’s theories. When Wolfe or Isker assert that a group of elites who have outsized influence on society are systematically opposing the work of the Church in our society, this is not a conspiracy theory but an established fact of social science. DeYoung is using a tactic, wittingly or unwittingly, that the elite have always used to disguise their disproportionate power in society: denial of their existence[15. Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elites. p 17.]. We smirk at the line in The Screwtape Letters when Lewis’s Screwtape states that the greatest trick the devil played on man was to make him disbelieve his existence. The Power Elite had a good tutor.
Shenvi’s assumptions about the accessibility of the Bible’s standards to everyone represents an archaic epistemology, as we discussed earlier with Noll, but also flies in the face of simple observation and fact[16. Noll. The Scandal. p 140.]. Scripture tells us that the ability to comprehend the true meaning of the Word is not a rational feat of logical textual interpretation but a gift of the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit can determine the true meaning of the text through an act of divine inspiration, and logical textualists are a kind of atheist who denies that Scripture is the Logos and is one with the Living Christ.
This does not create any particular difficulty, as we already have traditions to deal with the difference between authentic and fake claims of divine inspirations. If you’re not befuddled by the claims of snake-handlers and babblers, then why would it be a particular problem when people falsely claim interpretive power and change the known meaning of a text to conform with the postwar liberal consensus? We can judge true and false expressions of the Spirit’s power in the same way we treat any other attention-seeker, by rightly dismissing claims to have interpreted novel meanings to Scripture that clash with those already verified.
In additions, we have historical proof that Christians have interpreted and misinterpreted the same Biblical texts in a variety of ways. It is absurd, and a logical fallacy (presentism and progressive fallacy) to assume that of all the people in all of history, we alone have full and perfect access to God’s Word. The fact of the matter is that we are biased in systemic ways, just as the people of the past were biased, and this has warped our reading of Scripture. It is true that certain pseudo-Christians react to this understanding by apostatizing and collaborating with this wicked world. However, when faced with uncertainly about bias, the best answer is to conform to the historic norm of interpretation, not to embrace the biases of the present-day.
It is not true that this reality makes Evangelical scholarship difficult. If the notion that everyone can read a text the same way and derive the same, objective meaning from it is false, it invalidates centuries of Evangelical practice, but perhaps in ways that should be invalidated. For example, it would mean that the practice of citing verses as proofs in ethical, philosophical, and scientific arguments as if they were self-interpreting is insufficient, and should be replaced by more rigorous comparison of historical patterns in Biblical interpretation. I get that coming to such a conclusion may be painful for some, but if we as Evangelicals are seriously committed to the inerrancy of Scripture and the perfection of God’s Word, we should see this as a challenge to improve on the half-baked readings of the recent past. It should mean a greater commitment to the works of the Church Fathers, whose readings of Scripture are superior to our own and demonstrate their validity in the fact that they survived generations of scrutiny. It should also lead us to seriously question the validity of innovations in theology which deviate from the accepted norms of historical Christianity.
It is certainly possible that a truth existed in the Bible to which every generation prior to us was blind. It is far, far more likely that we ourselves are blinded to the truth of that passage and have an obligation to accept the interpretive lens of our Church Fathers. Christians, knowing our ability to be self-deceived and to rationalize our desires out of any source (even Scripture) should be especially on guard to critically judge ideas that differ from the consensus of our equally-Christian forbears. This involves rejecting the liberal myth of progress that we are the most civilized, most wise, most pious generation in history, and acknowledging that our opinions are inherently no better or worse than those of past Christians. Spiritual insight is not a slow accumulation of wisdom (an attitude derived from a 19th Century philosophy of science) but a gift of the Holy Spirit that irrupts into the world in God’s own time, not ours. We must be willing to defer to those who have been granted interpretive insight in the past by the Holy Spirit instead of arrogantly insisting on our right to ill-formed interpretations of the Word based on wishful readings informed by personal motivations. While the “Miracle of Aggregation” might be false for a single point in time, it is a valid mode of reasoning when bias fluctuates across time because averaging the biases of two thousand years of Spirit-inspired interpreters is less likely to be askew than a single generation who are all subject to the same hegemonic powers.
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