Getting at the truth
There is a nasty temptation to which any thinker, writer, scholar, or speaker is vulnerable. It’s something I’ve observed in prominent theologians as they age but also peers who, though on the younger side, have amassed enough of a readership and output that they could plausibly be said to have “a body of work.”
The temptation I have in mind is this: A shift, subtle but clear, from seeking above all to get the matter right to clarifying how to get me right. That is, instead of aiming at the truth as such (regardless of what you or I now think or once thought or have written or whatever), aiming at “the truth of my position.” The latter project inevitably entails constant granular adjudication and exegetical niceties infused with, or motivated by, persistent and often grouchy defensiveness. “Ugh, are these critics even literate? Thank God this one other person can read; he got me right, and they should read him if they would understand me.”
This boundless self-referentiality not only creates an echo chamber. It not only moves the focus away from the subject of inquiry to the inquirer himself. It’s boring. Recursive hermeneutical obsessiveness about one’s own project, invariably framed as a necessary if toilsome defensive measure, is simply not interesting. Not least when the person is a theologian, philosopher, or ethicist—in other words, someone whose objects of interest are in themselves supremely fascinating and existentially urgent.
Don’t fall for it. Don’t be that person. Don’t assume your oeuvre is more attractive than what drew you to your discipline in the first place. Don’t substitute your own ego or career for the pursuit of the truth. If the cost is that people misunderstand you, or that what you once believed turns out to be erroneous, so be it. For intellectual work, that’s the price of doing business anyway. Best to accept it now and, so far as you’re able, affix your eyes to what matters most, refusing to look away—not to your CV, not to your reviews, not even to your mentions. Those are songs of the sirens. If they succeed in seizing your attention, they’ll keep you forever from arriving home.
