It's in the Code ep 167: "Manhood Pt. 2"

Dan Miller: Welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you as always.

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I'm always mapping this out ahead. We're in this series right now, but it's going to wind down at some point, and we're going to go in different directions. So you're the ones who get to tell me how to do that, and that's how this series works.

I want to dive in and get started today. We are continuing to explore essentially how the concept of masculinity and the category of "man" functions within the contemporary right. And our guide on this journey is none other than Senator Josh Hawley and his book Manhood.

Josh will tell us how to be men, I guess, and the virtues of manhood and so forth. And again, we're not looking at Hawley because he has new or unique or insightful things to say. He doesn't really have anything all that special to tell us. We're looking at him because he gives us a window into a much broader cultural discourse—a cultural discourse that, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably aware of at present and the way that a conception of masculinity and manhood plays into this. He's going to help us understand that.

I'm reading his book essentially so you don't have to. You're free to read his book if you like, obviously, but I don't recommend it. And I have not read it all. I'm reading it as I go through this. So as I prepare episodes, what you're getting are essentially my reflections more or less as we move through the book. I don't know everywhere he's going to take us. I don't know everything that he's going to say. I've certainly got some ideas, but I don't know for sure. You're with me as I sort of map this out.

The past couple of episodes have looked into essentially chapter one of his book—his justification for writing the book, his sense that there's a crisis of masculinity in America, his sense that there's a crisis of masculinity that actively threatens America. He's called it the threat to America—that there is no bigger threat to America than the loss of masculinity.

A crucial part of his argument is that American men have no story, no way to tell them who they are, or why they're here, or what they're supposed to be doing while they are here. And he tells us in that first chapter that the Bible provides that story for him. The Bible looms large. The Bible is central. He's a Christian, a conservative Christian, and so the Bible is significant for him.

The rest of the book is going to walk us through that story. He gives a thumbnail sketch of it in that first chapter—we've talked about that. The rest of the book is essentially going to be him clicking on that hyperlink, so to speak, and going in for a deeper look.

What we're getting into this week, in this week's episode, is Chapter 2, which is called "A Man's Mission"—the mission of a man. This is where he's going to spell out for us, as the title suggests, essentially the mission that is given to men by God, according to the Bible as he reads it. So let's dive in here.

To start with, it's not surprising, given his insistence that the whole Bible, front to back, beginning to end, start to finish, is essentially focused on presenting the role and purpose of men—I mean, that's his whole point, that's what the Bible does, it tells a story about men—it's not surprising that he starts his reflections in the first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, and specifically the creation narratives there.

For those who might not be familiar, the very first book of the Christian Bible is the Book of Genesis. And there are two accounts—actually, we'll get back to that—of God creating the world and human beings and so forth. And this is where he starts us, right at the beginning of, as he would say, the story, the beginning of the story.

I wasn't sure what to expect when we first look at how he actually uses the Bible. And I have to say, I was actually impressed. There aren't very many things about Hawley that are probably likely to impress me, but this is one.

For those who've listened to this series for a while, we just finished a series on Allie Beth Stuckey and her book Opposed to Empathy. Unlike her and so many other commentators and influencers on the right, Hawley doesn't just make assertions about what the Bible says. He actually reads some biblical commentaries and some other scholarly works by people who study the Bible.

If you look at what he does, there are a lot of endnotes, and you go look at them, and they're actual, real, honest-to-goodness sources on Biblical Studies. Now, they are works that are written by evangelical and theologically conservative scholars. So they are, in my mind—and for reasons I can't fully get into here—texts that I still consider to be problematic. They're also texts that I would suggest are in many ways going to be outside the mainstream of Biblical Studies in a lot of ways. But he is using them, and in terms of evangelical scholarship, he's using probably the best that's available to him.

He also shows some awareness of the cultural and textual issues related to the Book of Genesis as he's discussing it—issues that a lot of conservative Christians just don't know at all, or simply ignore. Even those who claim to know the Bible well and who affirm that it's inerrant and so forth often miss, or are at least silent on, the kinds of issues he raises.

For example, he notes the fact that Genesis opens with two different creation accounts. And as I say, that's an important point. We're going to come back to that. But there are two different accounts of creation in the Book of Genesis.

He also references other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts, and specifically this Babylonian epic called the Enuma Elish. What's the point of that? He shows an awareness that the Genesis creation accounts didn't exist in a cultural vacuum.

So that's more than I expected, frankly, from Josh Hawley. So, you know, hats off to him. If I was wearing a hat, I could tip it.

He also offers an interpretation of the significance of this account. When you get into the level of, he says, "Here's what the Bible says," and so forth. But he gives us his interpretation of that. What does it mean? Why does it matter? What's the significance of it? He offers an interpretation that's relatively sophisticated.

So here's his account kind of in a nutshell. We're going to dive more into some of the nuances of his account over the next couple of episodes, but here in a nutshell is what he says:

God created the world, and specifically the primordial Garden of Eden, as a place for his presence. So the created order constitutes, effectively, a temple, a dwelling place for the divine.

Then, in tasking the man with caring for and cultivating the garden—so in one of the creation accounts, he creates the man and then tells him to take care of the garden and all that sort of stuff—in telling man to cultivate the garden, he gives him a purpose.

And in creating human beings—not just men here, he's got men and women in mind—by creating human beings in the image of God (well-known language in the Genesis account), and giving them so-called dominion over the earth, he effectively made humans his representation in this world.

So God creates the created order. The created order is essentially a dwelling place for God—it's therefore a temple. He then creates human beings and says that they're made in the image and likeness of God. And so he basically says they're like icons. They are the image of God. They are the representatives of God in this kind of earthly temple.

He emphasizes the care in God's creation of human beings as well, and the special status that they have for God, represented both in this caring creation of the world as the culmination of the creative process, and as the only part of the created order described as bearing the divine image. The only thing, when it goes through this list of things that God creates, the only thing that's said to be created in God's image are human beings. And so he emphasizes all of these points.

So the story he's going to tell is of the mission of men as coming from this account of being placed in the world as God's representatives. The world is God's temple. Human beings are his representatives in that space, and therefore the mission of man is to sort of carry out this role of representing God in the world.

As I say, we'll go into more detail about that as we go along, but that's the short version.

I want to be really clear that there are problems with this interpretive model for me in a lot of ways, and certainly with the direction Hawley is going to take it. And as I say, we'll get more into those in upcoming episodes.

What I want to do here is I want to kind of take a step out, and I want to talk about why this relatively sophisticated reading of the Bible—when I say sophisticated here, I just mean there are a lot of conservative right-wing people who cite the Bible, and the readings that they offer are beyond simplistic. This is more than that. This is better than that. I don't agree with a lot of elements of it, but it's better than that.

But what I want to look at is I want to take a bigger step back and show that this sophisticated reading he offers is actually undermined—or undermines, depending how you look at it—his and other conservative Christians' claims about what the Bible actually is.

In other words, in offering this more sophisticated reading, it actually goes against the basis on which he and other conservatives claim that the Bible is an authority in the first place.

What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is the only way that he can actually advance the argument he does is by undermining the claim that the Bible is inerrant and without factual errors.

Now, those of you who've listened to me for a long time know I talk about the concept of inerrancy all the time. It's one of the most central claims among conservative Christians. So if you're really familiar with all that, I promise I'm not going to relitigate all of that today. But if you're not familiar with that:

To say the Bible is inerrant is to say that it has no errors. Why doesn't it have any errors? Because God inspired the writers, and every word in the Bible is exactly as God wanted it. Every fact is as God wanted it, and therefore it is completely without error.

Here's the problem: I would argue that the Bible can't tell the story that he says it does if it's supposed to be inerrant.

And on the flip side, if somebody is going to claim that it's inerrant, it makes it so you can't interpret the Bible the way that Hawley is interpreting it.

And the reason I think that matters—he does not tell us this, but I'm quite certain that if you sat Hawley down and said, "Why should we care what the Bible says? You say it's got an important story and so forth. Great. I can find other great literature in the world with cool stories. Why should we listen to the Bible?"—I think Hawley, as a good conservative Christian, is going to say, "Because the Bible's inerrant. It's divinely inspired, and that's what divine inspiration means—it's without error and so forth."

You can't make that claim, in my view, and use it to make the kind of argument that Hawley is using.

So the first step in decoding Hawley is to take this bigger step back and to say, as I want to try to show here just for a few minutes: The argument he's advancing just doesn't work if the Bible is what he says it is, and vice versa. If the argument he makes is compelling, it actually undermines the basis of biblical authority that he depends on.

That's pretty wonky. Let me try to untangle this. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.

Again, as a reminder, if somebody says that the Bible is inerrant, they mean that it is without error, because every word in it comes directly from God as God intended. God has perfect knowledge. God doesn't make mistakes and so forth. I did a whole series on that. If you're interested in that and don't know what that is, I did a whole series on why I think the doctrine of inerrancy doesn't work. I'm not going to repeat all that here.

I am going to say, though, that the Book of Genesis is one of the primary texts in the Bible—just right at the beginning, literally the first chapters of the Bible—that completely undermine this understanding of what the Bible is and how it works.

So as Hawley notes—and this is the reason, he doesn't say that this is what undermines it, but this is the reason—there are two creation accounts in Genesis. And what he underplays, though, what he doesn't talk about, is how different those two accounts are.

And what he doesn't address is there is no way to harmonize their different factual and theological descriptions. In other words, there are two different creation accounts at the beginning of Genesis, and they are radically different, and there is no way to read them and make them say the same thing, especially at the level of fact. There's no way. So they are straightforwardly contradictory. It undermines the doctrine of inerrancy as articulated within conservative Christianity.

These two accounts—the first, if you're keeping score, if you want to look at this, if maybe you've never noticed this or whatever—is Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:3. So basically the first chapter of Genesis. And then Genesis 2:4 all the way through chapter 3, verse 24—those are the two different creation accounts.

They are so different that biblical scholars for well over a century have recognized that they represent not just two different accounts, but they were produced by two completely different authors, or communities of authors, and they represent two pre-existing textual traditions. In other words, there were two already-existent accounts of creation that have been edited together in what we now have as the Book of Genesis. Completely different accounts.

When I say that they're different, I mean they are really different:

The order of creation is different. In other words, it goes through the list of when God created the different things and so forth. The order is completely different. It cannot—there's no way to harmonize it. They just give completely different accounts.

The order of creation is different. That includes when human beings are created. That account is different.

The presentation of God is different. The names, the words used for God, are different.

The first account presents God as sort of distant and powerful, creating everything by merely speaking. This is the "God spoke and said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light," and so forth. You get this powerful being just speaking things into existence.

The second account features a much more anthropomorphic God, a God with much more human-like capacities and features, who is intimately involved and present to creation—not transcendent and far away and powerful, but there, present with creation. He forms the first human out of clay and breathes life into it and so forth.

The point is: radically different accounts. There is no way to make them say the same thing, which undermines the doctrine of inerrancy right from the very start. It's a huge problem for inerrantists.

On any reading—and I invite you to go take a look at those, read those first three chapters of Genesis—on any reading, the two accounts are just straightforwardly contradictory when it comes to the purported facts of creation—the things that inerrantists say the Bible is truthful about. And the theological presentation of God is also different in both of those.

And that's why, when people challenge the doctrine of inerrancy, this is one of the classic texts for doing it. And yes, inerrantists have responded to this for hundreds of years at this point, and well over 100 since the emergence of what's called the source-critical approach to the Book of Genesis—this recognition of multiple sources.

I'm aware that they've responded to this. I don't think that there is any adequate or compelling response. It simply undermines the doctrine right at the very beginning of the Bible. There's no way to smooth out the inconsistencies.

Now, are there ways around that? There are. And here is the most straightforward and obvious way of navigating these two different accounts. This is the way that I, as a non-inerrantist evangelical—I was an evangelical pastor, but I was not an inerrantist—this is the kind of reading I would have offered. And this is essentially kind of what Hawley is doing, though he doesn't lay it out.

What someone could say is: Look, yeah, they're two different accounts, and the orders of creation and things like that are different. But the point of the texts, their real meaning, their real significance, doesn't lie with details like the order of creation and facts and that sort of thing.

The real import of the text, this interpretation would say, is a broader theological and/or moral kind of vision that it casts. And so what it would say is: What each of these is trying to do—the first creation account, the second creation account—they each give us partial and incomplete understandings of who or what God is and what the created order is and how God relates to it. And when you put the two together, you get this kind of fuller understanding of God.

And so the point is to tell us that theological message, to get that theological vision. The point is not what happened on what day and in what order and so forth. To read at that level and to focus on that, to get fixated on that, is to miss the point.

That's the way to respond to this. And this is effectively what Hawley does.

When he puts forward his account of man's mission, he is blending those two accounts. He is drawing elements and emphases from each of those creation accounts and blending them. So he argues that God is both transcendent and powerful and also, at the same time, intimately involved in the creation and care of the world and humans and so forth.

And this is what I say when I mean that he's giving a somewhat sophisticated reading of Genesis. That's what he's trying to do.

He needs this kind of reading because neither creation account by itself gives him what he needs to tell the story of man and masculinity that he wants to tell. He needs elements from both of them, and reading Genesis in this way allows him to weave together this story that he wants to tell us.

Okay, so what's the problem? Well, here it is:

If you read the Bible in that more sophisticated way, you have to assume—and I said it just a minute ago—you have to assume that it doesn't matter if the Bible has contradictions about things like factual statements and the orders of events of creation and so forth. You are effectively saying those facts don't matter. The descriptions don't matter. Whatever the authority of the Bible is, or whatever the truth of the Bible is, if we want to apply that word, it's not at the level of facts and sort of data like that.

In other words, what that means is that you have to ignore or set aside the claims of inerrancy, because that's exactly what inerrancy says. When inerrantists say the Bible is without error, they don't just mean it gives a true theological vision. They mean down to the words and facts and data and information that are given, it does not contradict itself.

And so you effectively have to abandon the doctrine of inerrancy if you're going to read the Bible in this more sophisticated way.

And why is that a problem for Hawley? Because it means that your appeal to the authority of the Bible— when conservative Christians say, "Why should I believe what the Bible says?" they will say, "Because it's inspired by God." And to say it's inspired by God means that it is inerrant. That's the basis of its authority.

But then you advance a reading that undermines the doctrine of the Bible that makes it authoritative.

And I hope that that makes sense, because I know that sounds convoluted, and it's because it's a really complex interplay, and it happens all the time among conservative Christians. They claim and say the Bible's authoritative because it's inerrant, but then they go about reading it in ways that you can really only read it in if you set aside the dictates of inerrancy.

What they do then is advance readings sometimes that undermine the very basis of authority on which those readings depend. And that's what he's doing.

Here's the other problem for him: that way of reading the Bible—I say there's a straightforward solution. I know lots and lots and lots of Christians who would say, "It doesn't matter what days it said God created things on," or "Yes, we know that they're not actually days. 'Day' was symbolic," or whatever. Lots of Christians, probably most, are not actually what's called young earth creationists. They don't necessarily believe that God literally created everything in six literal days and so forth. Even a lot of so-called literalists don't believe that.

It's a straightforward response to say that's not the point—the point is these broader lessons, these broader themes and so forth.

Well, here's why this is also a problem for somebody like Hawley. This is why this is a problem for conservative Christians: This way of reading is actually typical of liberal and progressive Christian biblical interpreters—that is, those who are not conservative evangelicals, but adopt more liberal and progressive social policies and so forth.

And this is one of the reasons why conservative Christians argue against that kind of reading, and why they insist on inerrancy—because they know liberal and progressive Christians tend to read the Bible in this more sophisticated way.

To give an example of this: this is one of the reasons why, if you're talking to a liberal, progressive Christian that is in a queer-affirming community, and you come at them and say, "Well, here's this verse in Paul that says this about gay people," or "Here's this verse in Leviticus that says if one man lies with another, it's this and this and this"—

One response that you'll get from lots of more liberal or progressive Christians is: "Yeah, there are specific verses that say those things. But if you look at the overarching theme of the Bible as something like God's expanding redemptive activity and the continually expanding and inclusive nature of the divine community and so forth—yeah, there may be those passages, but read against the overall theological development of the Bible, those passages are not determinative."

Essentially what a lot of liberal and progressive Christians say is: "We're not worried about these two or three passages. We're worried about this overarching theological emphasis in the Bible."

Conservatives don't like that. They don't want that, so they insist on inerrancy.

So Hawley, when he reads the Bible the way that he does, when he gives this more sophisticated reading, he is actually opening up a huge can of worms for himself, and he's going to effectively undermine the very basis of authority for which he's going to say we ought to be reading the Bible in the first place.

And I hope that that makes sense, because this is what we find in Hawley: He's facing a dilemma that confronts conservative Christians when it comes to the Bible.

If you want to try to show that the Bible's inerrant, there's simply no way to engage the Book of Genesis the way that he does. He can't tell the story he needs to tell on strictly inerrantist grounds.

But by engaging the way he does, by giving a more sophisticated reading of Genesis, he actually goes by and undermines the basis of authority of why anybody should listen to him.

Right? He says in chapter one, "We don't have a good story. The best story is the Bible. The Bible is the best story. I'm going to tell you the story of the Bible."

Nowhere does he defend the notion of why we should listen to the Bible. Why should we care what story the Bible has to tell? He doesn't answer that. And in some ways he doesn't need to. He didn't write the book for me. If you're listening to this series, he probably didn't write the book for you. He's writing the book for other people who accept the authority of the Bible, and he doesn't need to defend it.

But another reason he doesn't defend it is because he can't, because he is not reading the Bible like an inerrantist. But he would claim that the Bible is inerrant.

So he is undermining the authority of the very text he draws upon. Because if you're going to engage the Bible the way that he does, you're going to engage other people who say, "Look, here's what I think the real theological emphasis is," or "Here's what I think the bigger overarching theological or moral lesson is," and so forth. And you can't control the reading the way that inerrantists want to do.

So that's why I think it's important to be aware of this as we come into this, because he gives us, as I say, a relatively sophisticated reading, but it's a reading that doesn't work on the grounds that he's also claiming as a conservative Christian.

A couple other points to be aware of here. We're sort of in Biblical Studies 101 here this episode, so one more point to make.

I mentioned that Hawley also references the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, and he does so. What he does is he emphasizes that there were other ancient Near Eastern texts and creation accounts and so forth. And he emphasizes the different presentation of the Hebrew God in Genesis as compared to, for example, this Babylonian account.

And this is true. There are significantly different emphases, and it is absolutely true that whoever wrote the Book of Genesis wanted to contrast their vision of God with other visions of God.

But what Hawley again conveniently fails to mention—and this has been another issue that's been a tremendous problem for claims of inerrancy—is he fails to mention that texts like Enuma Elish**, this Babylonian text he cites, were written first**.

In fact, the Book of Genesis as we have it—and how do we have it? It is this edited collection of older sources. The Book of Genesis as we have it was not written by Moses. That was the traditional Christian view—that Moses, this famous figure in the Hebrew Bible, wrote the first five books.

In fact, we know that Moses didn't. Instead, the passages that he's citing were written hundreds of years later, during a period known as the Babylonian captivity, or even a little bit after—it's referred to as the Persian period in Israel's history.

What happened? The nation of Israel was conquered. People were taken into captivity in Babylon. The Babylonians were the big regional power at that time. And while that Hebrew community was in captivity there, they were exposed to these Babylonian texts and so forth. And it's in that context that what we have as the Book of Genesis was compiled and put together.

Well, what does that mean?

It means that the Book of Genesis is neither as old nor as unique as Christians traditionally thought that it was. And it means that Christians of different stripes have reacted to this information in different ways.

But the way that conservative Christians have responded to this—again, for over a century—the way that conservative Christians have responded to this is just to deny it. To say that it's not true. To deny that it was written later. To deny that it was written in the period of the Babylonian captivity. To deny that it was produced out of different texts and so forth.

Why? Because it challenges fundamentally their claims of what the Bible is and why it is authoritative.

And when I say that they just deny it: in the world of Biblical Studies, denying these kinds of things—it's tantamount to people who deny climate science or something like that. It is so far out of the mainstream of academic Biblical Studies that it just doesn't register as a legitimate position to hold.

Only theological conservatives who are committed before studying the Bible to a certain understanding of what it has to be will advance those views, because it just can't be supported on textual or biblical grounds.

So again, Hawley acknowledges these other Babylonian texts and the significance of this to a degree, but he's silent on the parts that really matter, which is that these other texts, and the history of these texts, and their relation to the Hebrew Bible, undermine the claim to authority that he is giving to the Bible.

So this is another problematic layer in Hawley's account, sort of before it ever gets off the ground.

Now we've got to wind this down. It's a pretty academic episode today. I hope it tracks. Let me know: daniel.miller.swaj@gmail.com. Would love to hear more of your thoughts on this.

But what's the takeaway? What's the point of all of this stuff about different sources of Genesis and two different creation accounts and Babylonian blah blah blah? What's the point?

The point is this: Hawley says that the Bible gives the best story about men. But what we're going to see here is not the quote-unquote "Bible story." We're going to see Hawley's story.

In other words, what Hawley is doing by giving a more sophisticated reading that undermines the claims that conservative Christians make about the Bible is we're going to see that this is Hawley's reading.

And we've talked about this before: Conservative Christians will always cite the Bible—"The Bible says, the Bible says, the Bible says"—but we're never really talking about the Bible. We're talking about their interpretation of the Bible. And this is what we see.

What Hawley doesn't tell us is why this story, even if we accepted it as the Bible story—he doesn't tell us why we should listen to that story. What makes it the best story?

Other than, you know, if you happen to be male, it puts you in a pretty privileged position. But other than that, why listen to that story? Why that story?

He doesn't tell us. And part of the reason he doesn't tell us, folks, is that if he did, it would undermine the story he's telling.

And there's a deep irony here we might call a performative contradiction: In telling the story that he is telling about why the Bible is the best story, he's actually undermining the claims he makes about the Bible.

And I want to just keep that in front of us as we go along. We're going to dive more into: Okay, what is the actual content of the story that he's telling? What is the actual interpretation he's putting forward? We're going to explore that.

But as we look at what he's saying, I want to keep in front of us the way that he is appealing to an authority that he doesn't actually demonstrate and that can't hold up to scrutiny.

And I'm holding that up not just for Hawley, but for Uncle Ron or Allie Beth Stuckey, or anybody else we might talk to who just casually refers to the Bible all the time but never actually goes to the trouble of having to demonstrate why we should listen to the Bible as they understand it, or accept the authority of what it says.

And the reason why they don't do that, in my view, is it's an indefensible position.

And we cannot begin by sort of ceding the ground to them and saying, "Oh yeah, that's clearly what the Bible says," and granting that authority. We should always be pressing on that point.

As I say, I hope this made sense. It's a little more academic than some of the episodes. Let me know: daniel.miller.swaj@gmail.com.

If you're a subscriber, you can also post in the Discord. Would love to see you there. Again, any other thoughts, thoughts on other possible topics, series ideas, outstanding questions, places where you think I'm just way off base and got it really wrong—let me know. I respond to as many of those as I can. I also try to address some of those things in supplemental episodes. And more than a few of your ideas have spun off into full series of It's in the Code.

So always looking for new topics. Always love to hear from folks. Please let me do that. And once again, let me say thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting us. As I say often, I know that you could be doing a lot of things right now other than listening to this. So if you're here listening, thank you.

And as always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.