“For a while now I have thought of this period as a great unraveling—the unraveling of the old truths, the old political consensus, the old order, the old conventions, the old guardrails, the old principles, the old shared stories, the old common identity.” Bari Weiss
A book is only a book if it is a certain length and bound, scrolled, or stacked beside you high enough to support a mug of coffee. It must require a bit of effort to be lifted, thumbed through, marked, laid back down, and left on a shelf. When someone releases a book, a drink is called for, a dinner is given, and congratulations are extended. This indicates a sustained effort that took perseverance and the ability to sustain an idea long enough for the many days and pages it took to finish. When someone says they are a writer or author, it implies that they have written and have been published.
In the good old days, the writer’s job was finished with the last paragraph. The publishing company took over. They would design the cover, edit, market, and release it for sale. The author would get paid royalties for the life of the book. And if the book outlived the writer, royalties would be paid to grateful descendants. The book had to be good enough for crusty, experienced editors to decide if it was good enough to make money. That old order is largely gone. But that is what a book used to be, and still is if you order the hard copy.
Digital and audiobooks are now easily accessible, with A.I. capable of quickly digitizing or generating written content. A.I. may get a syntax award, but it sucks humanity out. A. I. can show the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11 and conclude that the ultimate cause was gravity. The writer’s agony in the 21st century is the trauma of getting a marketing team together to launch your persona on various platforms, paying them out of pocket, and eventually writing off the loss on their taxes.
The only way unraveling of the culture is different in books than on phones, movies, music, and sports is that books are sustained thought. Phones are decadence in beeps, clicks, and likes. Movies depict the downfall of humanity in images magnified and in motion. Music is a spiritual force reaching human souls at a deep level, manipulating emotions and hearts. It can cause monks to dance and comedians to cry. Sport gives people a safe place to compete, to cheer, to be partisan—let’s face it, to get a lot of aggression out—a way for an entire family to bond, to have some fun.
Books are more substantial. They represent human thought sustained and deep. It is the long-form way of revealing what thinking people are thinking. It is estimated that the average American reads 12 books a year. But 42% of college graduates never read another book after college. Statistics like this can say what you want them to say and mean what you want them to mean. Mark Twain was known for saying, “There are lies, damn lies, and then statistics.” For example, a construction worker with a high school diploma may not read much, but college professors, writers, or lovers of words might read 100+ books a year. To be honest, even the best of minds can’t absorb, assimilate, and change behavior with more than ten important books a year. Those could be mystery novels or research studies, who knows? What we do know—society is unraveling through various forms of communication.
The point
Relevant here is the role books play in the unraveling process. Everyone reads, from the President of the United States to the night watchman at an industrial park. While the President may be reading Sam Spade detective novels and the night watchman Plato’s Republic, books keep them company in two lonely jobs. Books are a permanent record of history and essential to the National memory. Libraries still keep hard copies. The primary mission of the Library of Congress is to remember American history. The National Archives saves US government records. Now, we depart from all the books and get to the book, the Bible, and how to understand it.
One of the more interesting conversations I have heard lately was about the dangers of A.I. and its accuracy and reliability. For example, A.I., like “Hal” in 2001 Space Odyssey, gets a mind of its own and begins to improve or change history. Before you know it, George Washington isn’t known for leading the Continental Army and declining to stay in power and become a King after two terms as our first President but is known as a slave owner, et al. In an early A.I. attempt General Washington was shown as an African American black man wearing a white wig. A.I. can do a lot of the grunt work for humans but don’t bet against humanity; it’s like betting against the house in Vegas, you will lose.
The Book of Books
The greatest book is not among many Great Books collections or even among competing holy texts of the religions. The Qur’an, The Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, The Talmud, and The New Testament are in the panoply of holy books. The Book of Books—the document set apart—is the Bible. It combines several stories: the story of the creation, the story of the fall, the story of the creation of humans, the fall of the human race, the Jewish God who started it, cursed it, and who is now saving it. The story behind the story is God is a Jew, and his chosen people are slaves, meant to be a holy nation. The story gets bizarre. The Messiah—the route to redemption—comes through a Jewish man who happens to be God in human form. And—here it comes— that message was multiplied by a small group of Jews and a Greek-speaking Hellenistic Jew named Paul. The story is still spreading around the world today.
The story uniting the Creator God to the Jewish God and the person of Jesus Christ is the basis of the world’s most successful experiment in liberty and freedom, namely Western Civilization. It is the story of God revealing himself to his creation, of their alienation from him and each other, and of his plan to heal the rift and pull it back together again. How could God accomplish this? Become one of us and take our punishment—be condemned so we would not have to be. The greatest story ever told was inspired by God and written down in the greatest book ever written.
Hermeneutics
The Greek god Hermes is associated with the word “Hermeneutics” because he was the messenger of the gods who interpreted their messages to mortals. Hermeneutics is the art of interpreting and a template for understanding what an author is trying to say. There is no more important issue than this when you begin to read the Bible. Think of Hermeneutics as a filter to sort out what is being written.
When Jesus held up the bread in the Upper Room and said, “This is my body,” did his disciples turn to each other and say, “Huh?” Did Mary give birth to Jesus’ natural brothers and sisters? These matters, how we interpret these texts determines what church we choose, but more importantly, how we view our own body and blood, and how we treat women.[1]
The Bible is inspired by God, with four different accounts containing different events and even somewhat distinct perspectives on the same figure, Jesus of Nazareth. There are some real conflicts. However, if four different people gave you exactly the same report of what they saw, you would know they had conspired to lie.
I like what Andrew Klavan says about this:
“Saint Paul is a theological genius, but a man too, for all that. He is given to moments of choler. He calls St. Peter a hypocrite. He wishes Judaizers would castrate themselves… his differences with other saints are always matters of right and wrong. They emerge from a realistic Christianity that contains interpretive tensions, tensions that can only be resolved through living the faith. I believe that flawed humanity and point of view are traits shared by all inspired writers of scripture.”[2] The Bible contains many mysteries, the difference between Shakespeare and the Bible is that Shakespeare never writes himself into the play. But Jesus does and what happens is wonderful—the author of the story teaches us how to read the text.
Jesus Becomes our Hermeneutic
Jesus has a way of certifying all of scripture and at the same time challenging errors in how it was being understood. The first and most obvious example is the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus describes a new kind of living, life in God’s Kingdom. His first challenge to the then-contemporary interpretation was to make a declaration that would smash institutional religion and its power. “But I warn you unless your righteousness is better than the righteousness of the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” [3]
You can hear the pillars of the establishment crumbling as Jesus brings it down with words. It’s not good enough! That is what Jesus says—it doesn’t cut it. This religious business sits like an administration building attached to a great Basilica. It sucks all the Jesus out of the church. The religious law has been corrupted and misunderstood and now its champions, Scribes, and Pharisees, though scholars and politicians, have ruined it for everyone. Jesus came to open people’s hearts—the institutionalists have taught people to lie and to cover up. Jesus makes the most astonishing revelation and places himself in the middle of things:
“Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose.” [4]
Jesus sweeps in and retells the story and connects the law and righteousness to something higher and better than the religious establishment had to offer. He has come to unite it and to improve it. He has come to lead them into the Kingdom of God. He describes the good life in the Beatitudes and then resets the issue by rejecting the present system. He sets out to show what he means by a simple teaching device, “You have heard it said…. But I say to you…” He does this with six critical areas, anger, adultery, divorce, keeping one’s word, justice, and the treatment of enemies. This is a sample of the entire complex of life. The entire teaching from Matthew 5-7 is the Magna Carta for life in God’s Kingdom, starting here and now, a realm where God’s will is being done. What has Jesus done in this message to the world? He has interpreted all of the history and meaning of God and the pursuit of his creation from the beginning of time.
All this teaching of Jesus came while he was living in the conventional way of a human being living on earth. This could be, as Dallas Willard would say, the gospel of Jesus. Meaning the version of the gospel that Jesus lived and taught in first-century Palestine. He was a Rabbi without portfolio. The conventional Rabbis had portfolios but no real power. Jesus didn’t have the training, but he had the power, performed miracles, and fulfilled ancient prophecies given by Abraham, Moses, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah.
Another great document of Jesus’ later life and perspective was when his youngest disciple, John, was older. After Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension, and the church had a good twenty to thirty years under its belt, John wrote the story of Jesus in the Gospel of John. This could be called, again with a nod to Dallas Willard, “the gospel about Jesus.” This meant, like Paul had already written his letters, [5] John takes us back and looks at Jesus’ life from a different perspective. He tells the Gospel about Jesus, and what it all means. John’s statement of purpose is well-known:
“The disciples saw Jesus do many other miraculous signs in addition to the ones recorded in this book. But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God and that by believing in him you will have life by the power of his name.” [6]
Jesus is the logos, the word of God. He never wrote a book—he was the book.
In the beginning the word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He existed in the beginning with God. God created everything through him, and nothing was created except through him. The Word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness can never extinguish it.” [7]
Jesus is our hermeneutic. He skipped right over Hermes and explained it directly to us. Every book is about him, because of him, and made possible by him. Get on your knees world, you may be unraveling, but all of creation has been written so that you may have life and live it to the full.
Bill Hull
Living Large and at large
2024.
[1] On how we treat women see Mary Harrington. https://unherd.com/author/mary-harrington/ a young mother and stay at home intellectual who has revolutionary ideas about women in modern society.
[2] Andrew Klavan, The New Jerusalem, Essay #8 My Shakespearean Bible , September 3, 2024.
[3] Matthew 5:20 NLT.
[4] Matthew 5:17
[5] Paul’s letters to the churches along with the gospels are the most important written documents in the development of the church and of Western Civilization than any other writings of antiquity. Statement made by Tom Holland, author of Dominion. How the Christian Revolution Remade The World.
[6] John 20:30,31 NLT.
[7] John 1:1-5 NLT
New book coming soon:
