Abstract
This response to Jennifer Herdt’s paper, ‘Partisan Epistemology and Post-Truth Power’, looks to embodied intelligence for help in discerning integrity and truthfulness.
Thank you to Jennifer Herdt 1 for propelling us to take a good, hard look at our theological practice, and to grow in honesty about the dynamics of domination so often at play within us, consciously or subconsciously. Thank you for the care taken to help us not to demonize one another, nor to insulate ourselves from critique, and also for shedding the word ‘tribal’ and replacing it with ‘partisan’—this is important and respectful.
In exploring Christianity's relation to the rise of post-truth politics, Herdt mentions biblical inerrancy and suggests that post-liberal relation to the truth is similarly evasive. It would be pertinent, however, to look both more widely and more deeply. Commentators on American life and thought have long been interested in the question of anti-intellectualism in American life. Richard Hofstadter produced his Pulitzer-Prize winning book of that title in 1963, suggesting that an idealization of practical success contributed to an anti-expert strain in American culture. 2
Suspicion of experts is a problem beyond the USA too, of course. When he was Justice Secretary, Michael Gove infamously stated during the Brexit campaign that ‘the people of this country have had enough of experts’.
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The poet Geoffrey Hill sadly died in that year, 2016, and I was reminded of the prescient words he had spoken in an interview for The Paris Review: ‘if … simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning … [G]enuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And … tyranny requires simplification.’
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Hill was concerned with civic good, politics and power, and with the question of intellect. He was interested in the ‘sensuous intellect’, or ‘intelligence’: intelligence is, I think, much more true, a true relation, a true accounting of what this elusive quality is. I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself.
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The relation of intelligence to the emotions, senses and sensuousness, and therefore to the body and to expression, are wholly pertinent to our grappling with theological truth. Sensuously informed intelligence is by the same token pertinent to how we acknowledge lies, recognize an absence of integrity, perceive injustice, and seek to be prayerful in our theology. I will come back to this thought.
First, let us look a bit more at how Herdt relates inerrancy and creationism to our post-truth condition.
When the doctrine of inerrancy was formulated in the late nineteenth century, it was a scholarly position, worked out by intelligent and respected scholars of Princeton Theological Seminary, operating according to the sort of evidence and argumentation that Herdt may recognize. 6 Its architects, A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield, worked within a rational empiricist tradition, and had no sympathy for fideism. Warfield argued that faith and knowledge ‘rest equally on evidence and are equally the product of evidence’, 7 the only difference being that knowledge rests on perception and faith rests on testimony and therefore requires greater trust. Charles Hodge, father of A.A. Hodge, had insisted in his Systematic Theology in the 1870s, that ‘What lies beyond the sphere of knowledge, lies beyond the sphere of faith’. 8
Their formulation of inerrancy is an infuriatingly circular argument, and possible to unpick, but it takes a bit of labour to do so. 9 It is not obviously an anti-expert position and was not originally associated with creationism. B.B. Warfield, the biblical scholar behind the doctrine, came from a family that bred cows and he believed in evolution. J. Gresham Machen, its most intelligent defender in the 1920s, was appalled to be associated with creationists and the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Theologians who are part of the inerrantist tradition have reflected much on common grace; a Calvinist/Reformed concept developed in the nineteenth century. Common grace is understood as God's continual care for creation, and involves restraining the power of sin and enabling humankind to live in a morally orderly way, and to develop science and art. In Calvinist theology, common grace is distinguished from special grace, which is the grace by which God redeems, sanctifies and glorifies the elect. 10 In relation to Herdt's paper, common grace speaks to the concern Herdt rightly articulates, about theologians or Christians insulating themselves against criticism, on the grounds that we live in discrete semiotic bubbles.
Reformed theologians disagreed amongst themselves over how much common ground exists between believers and non-believers. The American defenders of inerrancy leant towards the view that all human beings have the same access to evidence and rational principles, whilst the Dutch School, led by Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck (and influential upon Reformed epistemologists) made a distinction between two types of people and two types of science: regenerate and unregenerate. The significant point in relation to Herdt's paper is that the Dutch school, rather than the American inerrantists, had more in common with what Herdt distrusts about the post-liberals. Warfield disliked what he regarded as mysticism and fideism on Kuyper's part. Kuyper began and ended with faith, and sought a rational form for this faith. Warfield insisted that the presentation of evidence is basic to a person's arrival at faith, while the action of the Holy Spirit is the catalyst for faith. 11
Interestingly, the motivation of creationists is probably not to safeguard the doctrine of inerrancy. When under pressure, creationists reject that doctrine in order to maintain creationism. Scholars looking at creationist-motivation regard it as more about the status of humanity, concern over moral degeneracy, and (in the USA) a wish to uphold American exceptionalism. 12 We might say that creationist concerns are about ‘human-privilege’ and ‘human fragility’, as acted out largely by white men, so they are perhaps another version of white male privilege and fragility.
Inerrantists can be (I think always are, even in the case of Warfield and Hodge) slippery in their scholarship; disingenuously circular in their reasoning. If they feel the lack of integrity in their position, it leads them to terrible suffering. The most high-profile instance of such suffering was the tragedy of Edward J. Carnell, who took his life in 1967. His death bears painful witness to how excruciating it is when we are not intact; when we feel pressured, internally or externally, to sign up to claims we do not believe. The relation of intelligence to sensuousness is pertinent here: our bodies suffer the pain of our being pulled in different directions. The lack of integrity—of intactness—shows in our body language, our speech, our mental turmoil. I have had pastors say to me that they no longer believe in inerrancy but that they cannot let their congregations know that. They suffer anguish, which shows in their posture and speech, and also shows in the body of their congregations, and so in the Body of Christ.
Herdt is right to ask whether lack of epistemic integrity is there for other Christians too, beyond inerrantists. Lack of epistemic integrity is ubiquitous, and not especially a Christian problem. There is a want of epistemic integrity in any of us when we are more concerned to show that we are right (given all that has been invested in a position), or to win approval within our settings, than we are to being open to the challenging, messy business of endeavouring always to be truthful.
The question arises for me, in reading Herdt's paper, whether Herdt has made less of a case for her theological truth claims than creators of the doctrine of inerrancy made for theirs. It is not clear to me how Herdt arrived at her interpretation of Jesus before Pilate, or to the final declarations made at the end of her paper; wonderful declarations as they are.
The scene of Jesus before Pilate is open to interpretation, as are all texts, but Herdt writes with great certainty about how we are to read it. There is something of the fundamentalist impulse whenever we assert an interpretation in a way that closes down other possible insights. As for the scene before Pilate, we could, for example, read Pilate's question ‘What is truth?’ as a moment of wavering and vulnerability on Pilate's part, which Jesus makes space for and does not interrupt. There could have been a momentary meeting of eyes, minds, hearts, before Pilate gets back to exercising his worldly authority.
I am not saying that this interpretation is the way to read it, either. Rather, I am holding open the possibility for multiple insights to arise from the text. It is not part of Christian theology to regard the Bible as only an historical text, such that only historians can guide our reading; nor to regard the Scriptures as passively open to our analysis. We have a living relationship with the Scriptures, mediated by the Holy Spirit. If we interpret the Scriptures prayerfully with the Holy Spirit as our guide, sometimes the insight that we get from a passage will be almost the opposite of what we get from it at another time. The Spirit gives us what we need in our particular contexts. I am reminded of the preacher at Nelson Mandela's funeral interpreting the parable of the talents in a way that gave most credence to the slave who had buried his one talent in the ground; the point being that this slave exposed the master's cruelty. The question to ask is not, ‘Is that reading right or wrong?’, but ‘Is it articulating something truthful that we need to hear, particularly regarding post-Apartheid South Africa?’
Herdt's paper ends with an inspiring flourish which I enjoy, but about which I want to ask: What would you say to someone who questioned your assertions that: ‘what has happened is that post-truth has been resisted, … not by way of domination or withdrawn insulation, but rather by way of free invitation’. And that ‘God's truth … is capable of embracing all truths because the life of God is communion, cooperative communication, shared life, and what it does is to extend that shared life’?
Is it OK for Herdt simply to declare all of this, without explanation for why she is asserting these things? How are Jesus’ silence and enigmatic comments an invitation to shared truth? And why is Herdt's saying so different from a post-liberal saying so?
We have always had fideistic strands within Christianity.
There are reasons for this, and it is worth keeping open the question: what is positive in the fideistic strands of our tradition? It is helpful to return to Anselm, who famously believed in order to understand: ‘Tell me what you are beyond what I have seen … I am clouded by my own smallness and overwhelmed by your immensity; I am restricted by my own narrowness and mastered by your wideness. It is indeed more than a creature can understand!’ 13
Arguably, it was the American inerrantists’ distaste for fideism that made them work so hard to persuade people that inerrancy is the rationally demonstrable and empirically verifiable doctrine to hold about Scripture. They slipped out of integrity in striving to line up the reasons and evidence. This was too much for Carnell.
I would like to return with Geoffrey Hill to the relation between intellect and sensuousness. Hill looks to Milton, Blake and Coleridge. We might also look to Dante, in this 700th anniversary of the year of his death, whom Robin Kirkpatrick describes as ‘unfailingly conscious of how words, honest, exact and finely tuned, are the best remedy against the Babel that sin and evil generate’. 14 As we walk with Dante through Hell and Purgatory, and pass with him into Paradise, we feel every bodily impulse. We hear through the structure of his poetry how in Hell ‘conversation is radically distorted’, in Paradise ‘conversation flows freely from tongue to ear’, and in Purgatory conversation is a negotiation leading to restoration of harmony. 15 Our bodies feel, and our manner and speech express, how intact we are, how in or out of integrity, how truthfully we are conducting ourselves. How fitting for the religion of the incarnation to acknowledge this.
It is not contentious within theological tradition, though it is contentious regarding the place of theology in universities today, to hold that theology must be grounded in prayer. If we are to get towards theology, that is, towards thinking God's thoughts, or divine logic, we need to do so prayerfully.
I am interested in how a view that prayerfulness is a requisite for theology relates to Herdt's account of ‘partisan epistemology’, and to her suspicion of fideism.
What criteria do we look for, in gauging truthfulness? We are not totally at sea. The body and emotions help us to navigate—hence the relevance of sensuousness. Christian theology has given this space over to teachers of generalized spirituality, mindfulness, and personal development, who give methods for appreciating embodied knowing, and for discerning within ourselves when we are in integrity or out of it. 16 We would rightly be wary of strong visceral reactions that turn us against ‘others’. Neither embodied knowing nor cerebral knowing indiscriminatingly regard all of our reactions or thoughts as furthering truthfulness. Rather, we learn to discern which bodily impulses and frames of mind are closed-up, reactive, tense and driven, and which are open, responsive, relaxed and in a state of ‘thy will be done’.
A bias of modern secular universities is that knowledge is a wholly cerebral matter. Over-emphasis on the cerebral has knocked us off course, and undermined our intelligence in knowing ourselves, relating to others, and understanding our connection with nature. It has perhaps rendered theologians atomistic in our own endeavours. Contemporary theology tends to cherry-pick among disciplines, taking bits it likes here and there (such as from quantum mechanics, neurobiology or socio-political theory) without really trying to understand the scholarship behind the bits it takes, much as creationists cherry-pick proof texts, and without clearly aiming for integration—for things being intact—and for an intelligent body of thought. That said, theologians who work with the passions, with moral knowing, and with the spiritual senses can assist us all in deeper integration. 17
Theology needs grounding in a sense of method and a manner of gauging truthfulness appropriate to its Subject; the Subject by whose immensity, quoting Anselm, we are overwhelmed. Perhaps we can explore more of that method and manner together.
