Believe All Things: An Ode to the Hermeneutic of Trust

I recently listened to a debate (here and here) between Dr. Richard Bauckham and Dr. Bart Ehrman on whether the Gospels were eyewitness accounts and, if so, whether they were reliable. Bauckham had written a whole (and revolutionary) tome on the question, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, and answers in the affirmative on both counts. Ehrman, his advocatus diaboli and something of an ex-evangelical bugbear, answers both in the negative. Listening to the debate, it's incredibly frustrating how obnoxious Ehrman is in offering sheer negativity. The problem isn't that Ehrman is a skeptical agnostic or something, but that his hermeneutic for reading ancient texts is trash.

In other words, all Ehrman could ever do is offer infinitely deferred skepticism. Bauckham offered a very reasonable reconstruction about exactly we got the texts we have today, why they survive while others (like the gnostic gospels) in the main did not. Ehrman can really on waive his hands and unleash waves of shoulder-shrugging. Unlike Bauckham, who takes up the historical task of explaining why what came about came about, Ehrman defaults into nearly Nietzschean irrationalism, as if the gospels that survived were due to simply power-struggles between different Christian traditions and communities. And thus Ehrman has no explanation for anything, only taking shots at efforts to intelligibly reconstruct the historical timeline. One example is when Ehrman not only casts doubt on the traditional names of the gospels, but on them having any names whatsoever. Exasperated, Bauckham rebuts: "well they had to call them something! gospel a,b,c, or 1,2,3, something". Ehrman takes irrationalism to a new level: the obvious human need to categorize documents is rejected because we don't "know" and so can't say anything. Ehrman's kind of history is the kind that shuts the door on all historical enquiry as fundamentally unknowable, unintelligible, and worthless. He's a Reddit atheist with a PhD and teaching post.

Ehrman takes the critical posture, sniping from his tower, because he's got nothing. In contrast, Bauckham's opus not only blew apart Bultmannian form-criticism, but restores the historic value of the Gospels as texts. While such may not seem strictly theological (it's not), I would argue Christianity operates along this axis. God makes Himself available in historically verifiable, even contestable, ways. As St. Paul says, in regards to the crucifixion and resurrection: these things did not happen in a corner (c.f. Acts 26:26). Of course, the historic circumstances in themselves do not automatically render a theological judgement. Yet the theological judgement itself depends upon these historical circumstances. As the Apostle wrote: if Christ did not rise from the dead your faith is in vain (1 Cor 15:14).

In contrast, Ehrman stumbles over himself in his inability. He concedes Bauckham is right about form-criticism, but he can't justify his own account of faceless people and communities playing telephone with the stories of Jesus. Ehrman presumes the bearers of these stories (not a few who suffered for them) simply mixed and matched these accounts as they repeated them. Ehrman presumes an anthropology of ahistoricism and oral history as fanciful and loose with details. Bauckham counters that such an approach is not the case, giving examples of tribal people who discriminate between stories that require strict detail and stories that allow more creative play in retelling. Ehrman offers uncertainty and a universalize ambiguity about "premodern" people, whereas Bauckham presses in historical specificity in defining the actions of people. Again, the point is Bauckham aims for intelligibility and Ehrman for obscurity. The different results aren't only because Bauckham is a Christian and Ehrman is not, but they have fundamentally different approaches to texts. Ehrman's skepticism leads him to the irrationality of unlimited skepticism of Nieztscheanism, the hermeneutic of suspicion. Bauckham (as a trained historian) offers a hermeneutic of trust.

The hermeneutic of suspicion is an acidic approach to source reliability. Every primary document we pick up we should scan for biases, agendas, blind spots, neurotic fixation/avoidance, etc. History is reduced to a power-play (Nietzsche/Foucault), crude material interests (bastardization of Marx), or psychological fixations (Freud). This hermeneutic interrogates every text as a creative lie that needs to be reconstructed from the bottom up. I don't deny some practical benefits from this approach, but suspicion for its own sake is dangerous. It would be madness to assume that every other person out there is only ever speaking to advance their own interests and everything is a power game. A math teacher writing "2 + 2 = 4" on the board is part of an elaborate psyop to control the masses. Again, suspicion isn't wrong per se, but its wrong as the motor driving all reading. All texts are not secretly about material advance, the triumph of the will, or sexual dysfunction. To assume such is to stop reading and rewrite texts in your own image. Its a fundamentally destructive and solipsistic hermeneutic if applied everywhere.


In contrast, a hermeneutic of trust doesn't eject suspicion, but grounds it upon broken faith. In other words, you only become suspicious of someone when you've caught them in a lie, and you begin to wonder what other lies they told. This approach counsels patience: sometimes an error is an honest mistake, sometimes a seeming error is actually the truth but requires additional reflection to see it. The only way to find these things out is to follow a text according to its own narrative and logic. Its only once you understand a text on its own terms (including its historical context) that you can then gently probe it for flaws, errors, or deceptions. To do otherwise is to read the text according to an artificial mold of someone else's design. A historic hermeneutic requires one to situate a text, but one can't do that if one's already reading the text according to an automatic suspicion that everything is (always) about power, sex, or wealth. To pursue a text this way is to become a hermeneutical inquisitor: beat the text into a form that conforms your own suspicions. Its not only horrible history (making history fundamentally unintelligible or mirroring the contemporary moment we find ourselves in). Its literary terrorism.

Suspicion is only, reasonably, warranted when the trust between author and reader is broken. But this breaking of trust presumes trust. And to have trust requires a developed relationship with the text. Such requires time and effort. Nietzschean genealogy and skepticism, in contrast, allows the reader to be lazy. Its quite sad that many literary scholars are essentially illiterate (meaning they're historically ignorant), incapable of reading the texts they proffer to teach. What they're interested in is not understanding, but manufacturing propaganda. However, at the very least, they're aware of what they're doing. I think most literary scholars recognize they are operating with a hermeneutic (even if its something stupid like queerness or blackness, or some other contrived individualistic bullshit). The problem is that their hermeneutic has no attachment to the texts as texts, as created manifestations of intelligence. Instead, like thieving monsters, they ransack the texts looking for the bits and pieces that advance their argument. Ironically, for as much as these academics like to tout being radical, such is only the mirror image of a Whiggish hermeneutic of "the classics". Shakespeare, for example, is reduced to a "timeless" classic that confirms modern (usually classically liberal) American values. The New Testament paved the way to "rational religion", which confirms capitalism and bourgeois ethics. Nietzsche was a reactionary within this same mold, and hence it makes sense that genealogy simply turned liberal progress on its head. But in both cases (even if latter is more self-aware) the historicity is obviated and the text is silenced on its own terms.

The point of the hermeneutic of trust is not to advance a radical historicism (as if history has no meaning and every event can be made unintelligible through infinite complexity). Rather, the point is that any metaphysic, metanarrative, or theological understanding of time must pass through historic specificity. Despite the bastardization of both Hegel and Marx, it was this point they tried to advance through their critical approach. It was through this specificity that one approached visions of the universal. For a Christian, the same is necessary: one discovers Jesus of Nazareth as none other than the Logos made flesh. I'm not saying such is inherently dialectical, but it is only through historic specificity (understanding the literary conventions in the Gospels) that one understands the point made. In the Christian case, the universal is unveiled through an appearance (not necessarily through contradiction, though that's not completely wrong). Nevertheless, attention to texts (listening to them, pouring over them, contextualizing them, engaging in dialogue with them, etc.) is a necessary element to understanding them. The alternative is to be a rapist like Nietzsche.