How Much Did I Bring With Me?

I have the certificate, or diploma, or whatever it was, somewhere to prove it.

That was where I first learned words like exegesis, eisegesis, hermeneutics and eschatology.

Eschatology fascinated me for a short while.

End times.

Prophecy.

What happens at the end of things.

It did not take long before I found myself disappearing into increasingly elaborate rabbit holes, each one branching into three more, usually populated by people who were absolutely certain they had finally arranged all the pieces correctly.

Eventually I climbed out and left most of it behind.

The other words stayed with me.

Or perhaps, more accurately, I understood them well enough to pass whatever needed passing at the time, then put them in a drawer in my head for the next few decades.

Recently I pulled them out again.

I remembered the definitions. What interested me this time was what they imply.

Sometimes education gives you the vocabulary years before life gives you the question.

Exegesis is the process of trying to draw meaning out of a text.

The word itself comes from Greek and carries the sense of leading something out.

That caught my attention in a way it apparently hadn't the first time around.

Because it suggests that the meaning is already in there somewhere.

My job is to find it.

Which immediately suggests another possibility.

What if I put something in?

There is a word for that too.

Eisegesis.

Reading meaning into a text rather than drawing it out.

It sounds simple enough when you put the two beside each other.

Exegesis: What is actually there?

Eisegesis: What did I bring with me?

But I am not sure human beings are ever quite that clean.

We arrive carrying things.

Culture.

Experience.

Language.

Assumptions.

Fear.

Hope.

Things our parents told us.

Things our churches told us.

Things our teachers told us.

Things we desperately want to be true.

Probably a whole bloody suitcase.

So the question becomes more difficult.

How much of what I think something means was actually there before I arrived?

And how much did I bring with me?

That leads to another word from my theological studies.

Hermeneutics.

Which sounds like something requiring a cardigan and a university office.

But really it is the broader business of interpretation.

How do we understand what something means?

How do history, culture, genre, language, intention and the reader themselves affect our understanding of the words?

Once you start thinking about it, hermeneutics is everywhere.

Take a fairy tale.

Little Red Riding Hood is, on the surface, a story about a girl, a grandmother and a wolf.

But people have found all sorts of things inside it.

Warnings about strangers.

Sexual danger.

Coming of age.

Obedience.

Predation.

The dangers of leaving the path.

The social expectations placed on young women.

Some of those readings may reveal something present in a particular version of the story.

Some may tell us more about the person doing the interpreting.

Probably both.

That does not necessarily make the interpretation useless.

But it does make me wonder where the story ends and I begin.

Law faces a version of the same problem.

A constitution or statute contains words written by people in a particular place and time.

One question is:

What did those words mean when they were written?

Another is:

How should those words apply to circumstances the writers could never have imagined?

Those questions can overlap. Even someone trying to preserve an original meaning still has to work out how it applies to a world that has changed.

And underneath the argument is a familiar difficulty.

At what point am I discovering meaning?

And at what point am I creating it?

Religion makes the problem considerably more interesting because now the stakes are higher.

If I misread Little Red Riding Hood, probably nobody gets hurt.

If I believe I am interpreting the word of God, things can get rather more serious.

Prosperity preaching is an obvious example.

There are passages in the Bible about blessing.

Provision.

Harvest.

Asking and receiving.

Faith.

Abundance.

A preacher can gather those verses together and construct a theology in which material wealth becomes evidence of divine favour.

The words are there.

That is what makes it interesting.

They have not simply invented every sentence.

But were those passages actually waiting to become a promise that if I give the preacher money, God will give me more money?

Was that meaning sitting quietly inside the text for two thousand years?

Or did somebody arrive with a conclusion and begin collecting verses until the conclusion looked biblical?

That looks to me like eisegesis in its more obvious form.

But I suspect the uncomfortable examples are not the obvious ones.

They are the ones I agree with.

Because I am much better at spotting another person's assumptions than my own.

Then there is the harder version of the same question.

In 2009, Christopher Hitchens took part in an Intelligence Squared debate on the motion:

The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World.

He argued against it alongside Stephen Fry. Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe argued in favour.

You can watch the debate on the Intelligence Squared website, or search ‘Christopher Hitchens Intelligence Squared Catholic Church 2009.’

His case was not particularly gentle.

He raised the Crusades, the Inquisition, antisemitism, the abuse of children, failures of accountability, the treatment of women and gay people, and the Church's opposition to condoms in the midst of the AIDS crisis.

A history of harm carried out, defended or tolerated by an institution claiming access to eternal truth.

You do not have to agree with everything Hitchens said to feel the weight of it.

I think every professing Christian should watch that debate and ask themselves:

What remains of my beliefs after this?

It is tempting to start preparing the rebuttal before the argument has even finished.

I would rather sit with the question first.

What remains?

And I can ask that while respecting the person who goes to Mass on Sunday.

I can understand finding meaning in the ritual, the music, the stillness, the community, or the faith itself.

Those things can matter deeply.

Someone's attendance does not tell me which historical actions they defend, what they question, or how they understand their place within the Church.

I am asking a question about belief that I also owe to myself.

After setting aside the institution's prestige, the authority I have inherited, the fear of questioning, and the behaviour I cannot honestly defend, what do I still believe to be true?

For some people, surprisingly little may remain.

For others, what remains may be something much smaller.

God.

Christ.

Perhaps resurrection.

Perhaps grace.

Perhaps simply the conviction that Jesus points towards something real, even though institutions built in his name have repeatedly betrayed it.

An argument about the Church's conduct does not, by itself, settle those beliefs.

But it leaves another question.

How do I decide which parts belong to Christianity and which parts are Christians getting Christianity wrong?

Because that distinction offers both a necessary correction and a very convenient escape.

How do I tell which one I am making?

An institution claiming access to eternal moral truth also has a particular problem when defending itself by appealing to the standards of the time.

Widdecombe made that defence during the debate, arguing that historical conduct had to be judged against the standards and knowledge then prevailing.

But if the truth was eternal, why wasn't it ahead of the time?

A believer might fairly answer that the truth was there, even when the people charged with living it failed.

Perhaps so.

But how often was the failure defended at the time as the right way to read and practise that truth?

And suddenly I am back where I started.

Exegesis.

Eisegesis.

Hermeneutics.

What did the text actually say?

What did the people reading it think it said?

What did their culture allow them to see?

What did they desperately need it to say?

And how much of it was already there before they arrived?

Perhaps that is the uncomfortable part.

We usually imagine interpretation as something that happens to a book.

But perhaps it also happens to a belief.

We inherit something.

We interpret it.

We discard some parts.

We emphasise others.

We explain away contradictions.

We find better meanings.

Sometimes we may understand it more deeply.

And sometimes, without noticing, we may simply be rebuilding it into something we can continue to believe.

That does not automatically make the rebuilt version wrong.

It might even be closer to the truth.

But I think there is a difference between arriving somewhere and pretending we were standing there all along.

Maybe intellectual honesty requires occasionally turning around and looking at the luggage.

What assumptions did I arrive carrying?

What conclusions was I already hoping to reach?

What am I willing to reconsider?

What am I quietly protecting?

Because there is a point where interpretation stops being investigation and becomes defence.

And perhaps that is the question underneath all of this.

What does this mean?

And then:

How much of this did I find here?

And how much did I bring with me?