Cherry-Picking
My first year of college I participated in a program called “Directed Studies” that was aimed at exposing students to as much of the Western Canon as possible in a single year. The curriculum was divided into three two-semester courses, each focusing on one topical area (Philosophy, Literature, or Politics). Classic texts were read on a weekly basis in roughly chronological order, starting with Plato and Homer, ending with Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt.
The Bible, being a historically significant “Great Book”, was shoehorned into the first semester Literature class, and discussed (as I recall) somewhere between Homer and Ovid. My professor for this class was from the Classics department, and his specialization was Roman Satire. The mandate from the program was to treat the Bible as literature rather than as a sacred text, and the selections we read were discussed from that standpoint.
During one session of the class, a particularly outspoken classmate started lambasting the text of Exodus, claiming it was absurd and outrageous, and expressing disdain for anyone who could take it seriously. As the son of a pastor, with my own strongly held religious convictions, I was mortified and offended, and tried to push back. Things got heated. At some point our professor entered the fray, and his take on the matter stuck with me.
He addressed my classmate’s complaints by pointing out that, with texts like the Bible, the book itself wasn’t really what mattered for people’s beliefs. He claimed that, whenever you see the Bible invoked as authoritative or theologically meaningful, it’s always through the mediation of some other interpretive lens. “There’s always another book explaining how to interpret this stuff,” he said, “and that other book is the one that determines what people see as important and how they read it.” That ended the conversation, and the next week we moved on to something else.
In the moment, what my professor claimed about the Bible seemed like a dismissive cop-out, but on reflection I realized it was something I had noticed myself growing up. My dad’s church believed that the text of the Bible itself was the first and last word on Christianity. Despite this, I saw again and again that certain injunctions in the New Testament were flatly ignored. Certain statements about what Christians were supposed to do or how we were supposed to live were treated figuratively, while others were read with a fierce literalness. Some of the moral rules we followed were conspicuously absent from the actual text of Scripture.
While there was no literal “other book” that explained how the congregation I grew up in interpreted scripture, it became clear to me over time that there was some kind of extra-biblical tradition that informed the overall theological perspective. One could trace this tradition through the history of that particular church, the particular theological positions held at the seminaries the various pastors attended, etc. The bible wasn’t enough on its own to get you to what that congregation called “Christianity”. To get there you needed some added interpretive lens.
Later on, when I became Catholic, one of the ways I thought about my denominational commitment was that I had found the “right” lens. Or, to put it in the terms of my literature professor, I’d found the “other book” that made it all make sense. Once again that “book” wasn’t really a single book, it was instead the idea of a tradition extending from the Apostles through the Popes and Councils down to the present day. It was a constellation of texts, authorities, pronouncements, which together formed a picture of Christianity that I believed expressed the divinely revealed truths taught by Christ in the first century.
Through the years of my catholicism, the specific texts that formed essential parts of my lens or “other book” changed. At first there was a lot of reference to various Catechisms, handbooks of dogmatic theology, and papal encyclicals. As time went on Thomas Aquinas took on a more and more important role. At some point I got really into the decrees of the Council of Trent and the Denzinger-Hünermann Enchiridion Symbolorum, an anthology of authoritative pronouncements of Popes and Councils on topics related to faith and morals.
Through all of this, I believed that my lens was the “true” lens, and that other Christians, even other Catholics, who read things through some alternative set of texts and authorities, were somehow mistaken about what Christianity “really” was. I was confirmed in this during my graduate studies, and by various friends and priests I knew. The conservative circles I ran in had a lot of disdain for “cafeteria Catholics”, people who “pick and choose” what to believe out of the integral whole that makes up orthodox Catholicism.
With time, I slowly realized that the idea I’d been taught—that there is some single, consistent tradition of Catholic doctrine, some “single subject church” at Ratzinger put it, which maintains the same faith from age to age—was demonstrably and laughably false.
The discontinuities in Catholic doctrine on matters previously held to be immutable are many: usury, divorce, capital punishment, the liturgy, the interpretation of scripture, the nature of the mass, the essential elements of certain sacraments, the fate of the unbaptized, the authority of the pope, the the very concept of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, etc. In other words, my “true lens”, which was meant to reflect the authentic faith passed down from the Apostles, was just as much a “cafeteria Catholicism” as the ridiculous innovations I’d had so much disdain for among progressives and other Catholic subgroups.
What I realized was that every Catholic, from the Pope to the most hardline traditionalist, constructs their own “Catholicism” through some kind of cherry-picking, some habit (conscious or no) of ignoring large swaths of information, vast strands of tradition and doctrine, and favoring others. Just as the Bible on its own is a vast and incoherent jumble of disagreeing texts, the religious tradition I believed in was a sea of contradictions, innovations, and ruptures. It didn’t hold together on its own, and it was up to each person to figure out how to stitch together as much of a coherent whole as they cared to find in it all.
Once you accept the truth of this, it’s somewhat eye-opening. This morning I read a blogpost in which a Catholic writer attempts to turn the feast of Corpus Christi into the occasion for a pro-LGBT reflection on embodiment. From the perspective of a Catholic like the one I was, such an undertaking is so disconnected from the idea of Catholicism as a revealed religion, that it boggles the mind. But again, once you remember that there is no “real” Catholicism and start asking “What is the other book here?”, you can start to see how it might work in that person’s head. Catholicism ends up being less about a historical tradition and more about certain key thinkers. Herbert McCabe is cited prominently. A range of pious, homiletic clichés are trotted out. Certain vague appeals are made to Christian narrative tropes and metaphysical schemas. Etc.
In other words, once you drop the idea of there being a “true” Catholicism, it becomes much easier to see how people make up the random beliefs they present as “true Catholicism”. Often it’s all right there in the footnotes. They may point to Thomas Aquinas, Richard Rohr, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Rahner, or maybe even some key family member or idea that motivates their religious thinking. But usually you can find it. And once you find it it becomes a bit easier to understand the prejudices, blindspots, and arbitrary preferences of the person whose “Catholicism” you’re encountering. It doesn’t make any of it less absurd, but at least you can see how it came to be.
There’s more I’d like to say on this topic. I didn’t even get to the thing I originally had in mind for this post, but I’m going to leave this one here and pick up the thread another time.