It's in the Code ep 188: “Where’s Jesus?”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to "It's in the Code," a series that is 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, and as always, want to say a special thank you to all of our listeners and to our subscribers — those of you who support us in so many ways, thank you. We can't do it without you. And as you know, if you listen to this series, this series is driven by you. The ideas come from you, feedback from you, insights on episodes, questions, what have you. So please keep those coming. danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. And as I've been talking about, when we finish going through Josh Hawley's book, I'm going to start a series on questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church — or questions I wasn't allowed to ask in church. The questions that got you in trouble, the questions that kept you up at night, maybe the questions that moved you out of the high-control religion you had been part of, whatever those were. Send those to me. I'd love to hear them. Put in the header "questions I wasn't supposed to ask," or something like that, so I can sort of figure out who you are. Looking forward to putting that together in the coming weeks.

So I want to dive into today's episode. Lot of recording today, and I think I'm losing my mind. We are, as I said, continuing to look at Josh Hawley's book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, where he teaches us how to be proper men — or, I suppose, if you're not a man or don't identify as a man, it teaches you, I don't know, what men are supposed to be like. At any rate, his vision of manhood. And we are in the second-to-last chapter, in which he lays out the roles that he believes men are uniquely called to play. We've been exploring these and looking at these for a while. These are the roles where men can develop and exercise those masculine virtues that he says will save America. And the theme for this chapter — I've been waiting for this one, I've been interested in it — is priest. Man as priest. And friends, I have a lot, a lot to say about this chapter, and as with so many of his chapters, it's hard to know where to start, because it's bad. It's really, really bad.

So in this episode, here's what I want to do. Here's how I want to start. It's going to take us more than one episode, as it does. Here's where I want to start. I want to start with this thesis. This is my claim: that there's actually nothing Christian about Hawley's book. Hawley understands himself as a Christian. I think he's certainly a full-blooded Christian nationalist, a very explicit Christian nationalist, MAGA advocate, what have you. He presents his whole account of manhood as a biblical account. He doesn't give us an account of what he thinks the Bible is and so forth — I've talked about that. He just presupposes that it's authoritative, and so on. And this is part of, for him, what makes it a Christian account. And I think he's happy, in many domains of his life, to extol his Christian credentials, to appeal to the fact that he's a good Christian man, good Christian husband, good Christian father. In his legal career, he will talk about advancing, quote-unquote, "religious freedom," which means defending Christian privilege for him. And so forth.

But there's actually nothing Christian about his understanding of masculinity. And what do I mean by that? Let me be clear about a couple of things that I don't mean. I don't mean that other kinds of Christians would disagree with him — they would certainly. You could have alternative Christian accounts, alternative accounts of masculinity or gender or whatever, and they would be different from his. That's not what I mean when I say there's nothing Christian about it, even though we can make that argument. I don't mean that his kind of Christianity isn't Christianity as such, that it's not the last word on Christianity. I've talked about that a lot. I think that is also true, but that's not what I mean. I'm actually making a stronger claim about Hawley's book. There simply isn't anything distinctly Christian in his presentation — full stop. Nothing.

And to reiterate: I have been reading Hawley's book as we go along. Each time we get to a chapter, it's my sort of first and initial reflections on that chapter. For those who are only listening and don't see me, I'm drinking coffee as I go, so if you hear me pause, that's what that is.

And as we move through the book, I have wondered when we're going to get to something specifically Christian. And I was glancing ahead and you've got this chapter on priest, I was like, ah, surely that's where we're going to get to the Christian stuff. What I mean by wondering if we're getting something Christian is: when are we going to get to any references to Jesus of Nazareth? When are we going to get to the Gospels — the Christian Gospels — or when are we going to get to anything in the New Testament, the portion of the Bible that was actually written by Christian authors? When are we going to get to that stuff?

And now that we're on the second-to-last chapter — and I confess, I have not read the last chapter, I'm purposely reading as we go, but I might have peeked, I might have skimmed a little bit — we're on the second-to-last chapter on the theme of priest, no less. I expected to finally get there, but we don't. And I don't think we will in the last chapter either. Maybe I'll be surprised. Maybe there's something hiding in the last chapter and he will suddenly tie it all to Jesus, and I'll have to acknowledge that. But I don't think so.

We don't get to anything about Jesus. When Hawley talks about man as priest — though, again, as with so many of his other things, it's not really clear what exactly is priestly in his account, we're going to get to that, we're not even going to get to that today — but when he talks about man as priest, we might have thought, if you know anything about the Bible, if you know anything about the Christian tradition: you might have thought he'd finally get to Jesus. Given that the book of Hebrews in the New Testament calls Jesus the great high priest. The fulfillment of the priesthood is Jesus, according to the New Testament. So you'd be like, oh, perfect place to finally talk about Jesus.

It might — you could go even further and be like: you know what, if you're going to write a Christian book about masculinity and masculinity as God defines it, you might think that Jesus of Nazareth would be a prime person to look at. After all, the central Christian claim is that God actually became a man. He became a person, embodied as a man, in Jesus of Nazareth. The central belief is that Jesus of Nazareth is actually the Incarnation — literally, the making flesh of God in human form. So if you're going to have an account about Christian views of masculinity, or the Christian view of manhood, according to traditional Christian thought, God literally became a man. Looking at that guy might be useful.

Christians have consistently confessed that Jesus of Nazareth is the fullest revelation of what God is — that if you want to know most fully what God is, where God has shown us the nature of God most fully, it's in the Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. So given all of that, you might think a Christian account of manhood: Jesus is going to loom large. We're going to be talking about Jesus all the time. So we would expect maybe eventually Josh Hawley is going to talk about Jesus as a kind of exemplar — again, especially when you get to a role like priest. Not only is Jesus a man that Christians say is divine, is like the ultimate revelation of what God is, and one would think then the ultimate revelation of masculinity, but he's also called the Great High Priest. So here we have the chapter on man as priest. So — ah, here we come, Jesus stuff.

But in this chapter, Hawley wants to talk about everything but Jesus. His biblical example is, again, King David — not Jesus. King David. We talked about David before. He talks about his high school football coach. He talks about Roman augury practices — practices in Rome that would augur the future, distinctively non-Christian practices. But he talks about those. He talks about ancient Greek practices of family veneration, where they would have little shrines in their home to the ancestors and stuff. He talks about that — again, a distinctively non-Christian practice, but that's in his Christian account of masculinity. He talks about the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who was a Christian, but not obviously Jesus. He talks about J.R.R. Tolkien — so he's got some Christian people in there, but there's no Jesus. Jesus isn't in there anywhere.

And even worse — like, if that wasn't bad enough — if you were a Christian person who thinks that, I don't know, given that "Christ" is built into the name "Christian," that something about Jesus Christ ought to be part of what makes something distinctively Christian. Not only does he not talk about Jesus, but he actually ignores passages that Christians, going all the way back to the earliest strata of the tradition, going to the New Testament itself — he ignores passages that Christians have traditionally, for 2,000 years, read as references to Jesus.

So for example, he discusses David's desire to build a temple for God. He's telling the story of David — David has founded Jerusalem, or rebuilt Jerusalem, all that. He talked about that last chapter. And David has this idea: he says he wants to build a permanent temple for God. And in the story, God's response is given through the prophet Nathan. So there's this prophet named Nathan, a messenger of God, who comes to David and communicates God's response to him. Nathan tells him that building the temple will be a task for David's son, not for David himself. And of course his son is Solomon. And Solomon does, in fact, build the temple.

And that passage — it's in the book of Second Samuel — there's going to be a lot of Bible verses and Bible passages referenced in this episode, so if that's not your thing, sorry. I'm going to try to keep it to a minimum, but I've got to make some points.

In Second Samuel, he cites a passage that is widely interpreted as God making a covenant, or agreement, with David — a passage where God makes a special promise to David. And Hawley quotes the first part of the verse. This is Second Samuel, and he quotes the part where God says of David's heir — so what God says about the son that David will have — "I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son." There's not just going to be David's son. God says he's going to be like a son to me.

And it's important to see what Hawley takes from this verse. So here's what he says — I'm actually reading. Let me turn to him here. It's on page 173 of Hawley's book. He quotes that, and he says: "A son. This is the first in the Adam stories, perhaps, where they had been leading all along." I have to pause. "The first in the Adam stories." We're going to come back to this — the Adam stories. There haven't been Adam stories. Josh, there are, like, a handful of verses in the book of Genesis that you talked about that reference Adam. Nothing else has been about Adam. You've created this whole thing like the whole Bible is about Adam. But they aren't Adam stories. Sorry, man, whatever. Okay.

He says: "A son — the first of the Adam stories, but perhaps where they've been leading all along. God calls men to build the world into a temple and to be His servants in that world. But that call to mission turns out, in the end, to be an invitation — the invitation to become a son." Hmm. Okay.

So Hawley's takeaway is that — here he calls it "the Adam stories," elsewhere in the chapter he calls it "the Adam saga" — his takeaway is that the Adam saga of the Bible is that God's promise to David's heir to be a son is a promise to all men. Men are called to be sons of God, I guess by being Davidic. That's his takeaway. The call to be a man is to be a son of God.

Okay. But this is a little weird. And to understand why it's weird, you've got to know a little bit about the Bible, and a little bit about the history of the Bible, and a little bit about Christian theology and the Christian tradition. So here we go.

To understand why that's weird, we need to read more of the Bible verse. So here's what God says — he says this later on. He says, I'll be like a father, he'll be like a son, et cetera. And then he says: "I will not take my steadfast love from him as I took it from Saul, who I put away from before you. Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever." So the "you" there is David. God tells David that your kingdom will be made sure forever, your throne shall be established forever.

Now, here's the issue. That promise to David — number one, in concrete, this-worldly terms, it doesn't happen. David's kingdom is not established forever. The Davidic kingship is eventually broken. The people of Israel are taken into captivity in Babylon. It's this huge kind of cultural trauma for the society. And so forth. Excuse me. Partially because you have this promise to David that your kingdom will last forever — and it doesn't. Okay.

So here's the thing. Over time, that entire promise to David — "your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever, your throne shall be established forever," together with that verse that says "he will be like a son" — that entire promise to David is interpreted by the earliest Christians not as a statement about masculinity, not as a statement that all men are called to be sons, but as a statement about Jesus.

Multiple passages in the New Testament — so in the Bible itself — and when I say "the early strata of the Christian tradition," Christian thinkers writing the Christian part of the Bible, they interpreted that passage as a statement about Jesus. They interpreted it that the promised offspring of David with this everlasting throne is Jesus — not just his son Solomon and other earthly kings, but Jesus. And so if you read the Gospels, there's a whole genealogical account where it traces Jesus' earthly ancestry, and it goes back to David. Why? Because it's making this point. So from a Christian perspective, in the New Testament, Jesus is the fulfillment of this promise — not men. It's not a promise to men. It's a promise fulfilled in Jesus. It's a prophecy. That's how it comes to be interpreted within the Christian tradition.

Here's my point. Okay, you don't have to believe in the Bible. You don't have to be Christian. That's not my point. Here's my point: Hawley, who does believe in the Bible and does call himself a Christian — his so-called Christian vision of masculinity is so not Christian that he ignores one of the central texts that Christians have understood as a messianic reference to Jesus. If you're a Bible-reading Christian and you come across this passage in Second Samuel, you know damn well that it's interpreted in messianic terms in places like the Gospel of Luke. This was his chance. This was his chance to finally bring in a Christian vision of masculinity. He even chooses a Bible verse that Christians say is about Jesus — but he doesn't take it. He goes a completely different direction and offers this weird reading that it applies to all of us. "I will make him as a son to me" — somehow that applies to all of us.

As a side note: it would have been interesting if he had chosen "son" as a role that men are called to play. That's not one of his key roles, where we develop virtues and things like that. I have thoughts, but it goes beyond the book. Point is, he doesn't take it. And I think it gets even weirder than that.

And again, I've just really been thinking about this. We come to the end of the book, I'm like, this is the chapter where I thought we were finally going to get to some Christian stuff. And here it is again.

I said a minute ago that he references what he calls the "Adam saga" in this chapter. And if you've been listening as we've made our way through his book, you know that his entire project is structured around just a few verses in Genesis — the first book of the Bible — about Adam. So as a reminder, here's the Bible story arc as he sees it. God created the Garden of Eden, his paradise kind of place, and it was to be a space for his presence, a place where he would dwell with men on earth — in other words, it was to be a temple. He creates Adam in his image. Adam is created in the image of God, and he tasks him with caring for the garden and extending it into the world, subduing the world, et cetera. And this means, for Hawley, that men are called to make the world into God's temple by being husbands and fathers and builders and so forth. But Adam messed it up by sinning. The call to Adam was to go and extend this kind of garden, to turn the world into the garden, to turn the world into the temple of God. Adam screws it up, introduces sin into the rest of the world. And so for Hawley, the rest of the Bible is a story of God raising up new Adams who make the world into his temple. And this is the calling of all men. That's the Adam saga.

So when he says, here again, "This is the first in the Adam stories" — David was another Adam, and now his son is another Adam, and so forth. That's the Adam saga.

Now, to reiterate one of my main problems with this Adam saga reading of the Bible that Hawley has: the Bible doesn't say any of that. If you read this book — if you'd never read the Bible and you read Hawley — you'd be like, wow, that's really cool, they've got this whole theme of God creating Adam and everything goes wrong and all these efforts at renewal and making a new Eden and making the world into a temple, and new Adams rising up. You would think that that's a major theme in the Bible. But if you hadn't read it, and then you went to the Hebrew Bible and read it, you'd be like, where's Adam? Word for word, the Bible hardly ever talks about Adam. It doesn't say very much about Adam at all, and it certainly doesn't present the Adam saga that Hawley puts at the center of his vision of manhood. Okay. So that's one thing. He latches on to just a handful of verses at the beginning of the Bible and sort of reads everything else through them in a way that just doesn't make any sense.

But here's the other reason why his fixation on Adam is weird. He also ignores the most significant place in the Bible where a Christian interpretation of Adam is offered. I said the Bible hardly ever talks about Adam, but the places where it does — where it sort of stands out the most — are in two letters written by the Apostle Paul, this early Jewish Christian who wrote like half of the New Testament. It's the letter of First Corinthians — his first letter to the church in Corinth — and his letter to the church in Rome, the book of what we call Romans. So in First Corinthians, Paul famously describes Jesus as the last Adam. Not all men. There's no reference to a bunch of other Adams in between. He says there was the first Adam — that was just Adam, the Adam from Adam and Eve — and then Jesus is the last Adam. And it's in a context where he's saying the last Adam offers the promise that those who trust in him shall be resurrected in imperishable bodies, that those who trust Jesus of Nazareth in faith will experience resurrection. And that contrasts with the first Adam, who is merely physical and not spiritual. So that's the first piece of it.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul basically sets up a contrast of what each of these Adams have to offer. He says that the first Adam brought death to the world through sin — it's not a positive reading of the first Adam. He brought death to the world through sin. But he says that Jesus — who, in First Corinthians, he calls the last Adam, or the new Adam — Jesus brings life. So that's the juxtaposition. Not a bunch of ongoing Adamses that we're all called to be, a big giant — I don't know — earthly Adams Family, where we all go about making the earth into what God wants. There's nothing like that. You have this Christian text, foundational Christian text, in First Corinthians and Romans, where Paul says Jesus is the last Adam, and he sort of fixes what Adam screwed up.

Now, we're not here to study Paul's teachings on Adam. If you know me, and you've heard me talk about this, I have a pretty conflicted relationship with Paul. I don't necessarily consider him an authority. But that's what he says. If you're looking for a Christian perspective in the Christian New Testament on Adam, that's where we get it. We find it in Paul.

So what's the point? The point is, again, that when Christians in the Bible talk about Adam, they're talking about Jesus — not some Adam saga, not a series of Adam stories, not David or Joshua or whomever else Hawley wants to talk about. There's nothing of the so-called Adam saga around which Hawley builds his whole theology of masculinity in the Christian New Testament or any of the Christian teachings in the Bible.

So here's my takeaway, just to reiterate it: there's simply nothing Christian in Hawley's development of his supposedly Christian view of masculinity. We're almost done with the book, and we haven't hit anything distinctively Christian. And I think that's pretty weird from a guy who has hung his hat on the fact that he's giving us a Christian, biblical account of manhood.

Now, I don't know — maybe Hawley's people will reach out. I'm behind on emails. Maybe they have — maybe they've sent me things at danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. Maybe they have emailed me there and I have something waiting in my inbox saying, hey, Josh Hawley would like to talk to you about his book. I doubt it. But if I could sit down and talk with Josh Hawley, I have a hunch that he probably does not recognize that this Christian account of manhood isn't really Christian at all. I think he probably doesn't recognize that.

Dan Miller: And the question is, for me: what's going wrong here? Why does somebody set out to give us a Christian vision of manhood, write an entire book about it, and then kind of fail to say anything Christian? And I think there are a few things going on.

One is, I think Hawley and all the patriarchs like him — all the bros, all the manosphere types, all the alpha bro masculinist guys — I think all of them benefit from this not really being a Christian account. And I'm going to get to that in the next episode. I think there's a sense in which they gain by having this not actually be a Christian account. Okay, I'm going to set that aside here.

I want to highlight what I think is another reason why Christians like Hawley go astray — why they can develop an entire concept of masculinity, pat themselves on the back for being good Christians and defending Christian masculinity, but actually fail to say anything Christian. And it's ironic, because I think one of their core Christian beliefs is what actually creates this situation where they develop Christian understandings of masculinity that aren't actually Christian. And here it is. It's the doctrine of inerrancy.

Now, I obviously talk about inerrancy a lot. I'm not going to repeat all that here. And if you listen to me a lot and you're like, God, Dan, you're always talking about inerrancy — sorry. But inerrancy is a core understanding of Christianity for these kinds of conservative Christians.

So what is that? Okay. As I was thinking about Hawley's book, a point that I don't think I really thought about with inerrancy sort of occurred to me, and that's what I want to talk about here. Inerrancy, to review, is the view that everything in the Bible is word-for-word accurate and true, and that it all says exactly what God wants it to say. Inerrancy would say the Bible has God as its author, so the Bible is without error. It's all true. It all says exactly what God wants it to say. And so when inerrantists talk about the Bible being God's word, this is what they mean. And they also mean that the Bible is God's revelation — that if you want to know what God is, you look at the Bible.

And here's the point: because everything in the Bible is God's revelation, everything in the Bible is considered equally authoritative, because everything comes from God and everything is a revelation of God. Everything in the Bible has equal value and worth. That's the view I grew up with. The view I grew up with in the church is that all Scripture has equal authority. That's why good Christians are supposed to know the whole Bible and read the whole Bible and not privilege some parts of the Bible over others — because the whole Bible is God's word. It's all revelation.

But what that means in practice is that if everything in the Bible is of equal value and worth, Christians don't actually need to make reference to anything distinctively Christian in the Bible. Instead, random passages in the Hebrew Bible, for example, or passages about Adam or something like that, they are equally authoritative to the teachings of Jesus, or to Christian thinkers like Paul, or the whole part of the Bible actually written by Christians. They all have equal authority. So the ironic effect is that because somebody like Hawley believes this about the Bible — and believes that every verse in it has equal authority — this defining conservative Christian understanding of the Bible makes it so that you can offer readings of the Bible that don't have anything to do with Christianity, that don't make any reference to anything distinctively Christian, which for me is obviously another reason not to accept the doctrine of inerrancy.

Now here's the deal. Here's why that's significant. If you're listening to that and maybe Christians like Hawley are the only Christians you've ever known — maybe you grew up in a conservative, high-control Christian context, maybe you're like me, and you grew up in a church that presented that view of the Bible — here's what you need to know. That understanding of the Bible, and how to read it, and what it is, is actually at odds with most of the Christian tradition.

Historically speaking, from early on in the Christian tradition, the conviction has been — and I mentioned this earlier — that Jesus, not the Bible, but Jesus is God's fullest revelation. People came to that view before there was a completed Bible.

And reflecting this, the church taught, and has taught for centuries, that Christ — Jesus of Nazareth — and the teachings about him, that that is the principle of interpretation for the rest of the Bible. Which would mean that the Gospels, where we learn about Jesus and his teachings and his ministry and all his miracles and all that stuff — it would mean that the Gospels, and to a lesser extent in my view the rest of the New Testament — the passages that talk about Jesus, and then all those teachings about him that interpret him and his significance — that the teachings about and by Jesus are the authoritative part of the Bible through which the rest has to be interpreted. They become the principle of interpretation.

It's exactly what we see when early Christians use their experience of who they believe Jesus is to interpret a passage about David's heir in Second Samuel. They are using Jesus — whom they understand to be a revelation of God — as the means of interpreting the other parts of the Bible. And that goes way back. But when the Reformation happens, that becomes a core teaching of theologians like Martin Luther. It's a core interpretive principle.

So here's the point. That understanding — if one says the highest revelation of God is Jesus, and that revelation, if you want to know God's truth, it's in Jesus and his teachings — and that full revelation of God is our principle for interpreting everything else in Scripture — that undermines the idea that everything in the Bible is equally authoritative because it supposedly comes from God. Instead, that's a principle that explicitly says we don't treat all parts of the Bible the same. We privilege the parts of the Bible that highlight the teachings of Jesus and tell us who he is, because we believe that that's where we learn what God is. And that becomes our interpretive key for the rest of the Bible.

So if you were to read the Bible that way — not the way an inerrantist does, but the way that Bibles have traditionally been read — you don't run into this problem of producing a supposedly Christian account of manhood that never actually makes reference to anything distinctively Christian, that doesn't cite the teachings of Jesus, that doesn't talk about Jesus himself, that doesn't cite any of the passages in the Bible that were written by Christians, and so on.

Okay. Now I've got more to say about this — and the significance of Hawley's book about manhood not actually having anything Christian to say. We're going to talk about how this mistake is — actually, it is a feature, not a bug, for patriarchs like Hawley. We're going to get into that next episode.

For now, I want us to just sort of stop and sit with this point, because really, as I've been reading the book, I've been waiting and waiting and waiting. I get to this chapter, like, when are we going to get to the Christian stuff? All we've talked about are passages in the Jewish Scriptures, and sort of broadly Jewish interpretations of those, or whatever. Been waiting. I'd be like: Hawley — Mr. Christian nationalist, Mr. Bible-believing Christian — when are we getting to the Christian stuff? When are we getting to the distinctive parts of Christian masculinity? We're not. And that stands out. That stands out to me.

As I say, we've got another chapter to go after this, but I don't think it's going to change. That stands out. That's what I wanted to highlight today. Again, kind of coming full circle: when the theme that he's chosen is priest, when the Christian teaching in the Bible is that Jesus is the great high priest, the kind of culmination of the priesthood — no reference to any of that in Hawley. I find it striking. It really strikes me that this entire account of Christian manhood has nothing distinctively Christian about it.

How does that help Hawley? How does that help patriarchs like him? We're going to pick that up in the next episode. What does he mean when he says men are called to be priests? We're going to pick that up. We'll continue other themes — when he says everything that's wrong with America is all the leftists who are atheists and so forth. We'll chase all that down in subsequent episodes.

For now, we're going to call it, and I want to again say thank you for listening. I say this a lot: if you're listening or watching, you could be doing something else with your time, and it means so much when you are here with us doing this. Thank you for everything you do. Straight White American Jesus cannot do it without you. Thank you. Please keep it up. Keep in touch, and as always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.