Twice last week I heard a phrase that I cannot remember hearing before: bias toward coherence. Both uses of the phrase were by journalists, and both journalists were covering the presidential campaign. Jamelle Bouie talked about the idea in a TikTok video (it wasn’t this one, but this one makes largely the same point), and Tom Nichols discussed it in this article for The Atlantic. In both cases, the journalists were pointing out that presidential politics is mediated through a professional class of journalists whose career is devoted to making sense of politics and politicians. Most of us learn things about candidates and issues through journalists and their work, either directly or indirectly. And because journalists’ job is to produce coherent thoughts and ideas about the race, they tend to treat the ideas of the candidates themselves as if they were coherent—as if the candidates’ ideas conform to the kinds of logical structures that we expect in communication. Both Bouie and Nichols were talking about Donald Trump, who is the great example of our time, but the idea could apply across the political spectrum. (Arguably, a surprising amount of incoherence helped sink Joe Biden’s reelection bid). Donald Trump stands up and says objectively incoherent things at his rallies, jumping from one topic to another mid-sentence and jumbling ideas together until they are unrecognizable. He is not coherent; his words don’t make any sense. This is especially evident if you read a transcript of his remarks, where his affect and mannerisms can’t smooth over the actual words he’s saying. He’s incoherent.
But because Trump is a major party nominee who is running a campaign for president, Nichols and Bouie say, political journalists treat his ideas as if they were coherent. Presidential candidates typically have proposals for tax policy, foreign policy, border policy, and education policy, so journalists take Trump’s incoherent words with the assumption that he is saying something about those things—even if he is not. (Watch Bouie’s video above for a good example). They distill policy statements out of gibberish, and they give Trump the benefit of the doubt when he speaks, assuming that there is a coherent message in there that is simply getting a bit garbled in the delivery. They clean Trump’s language up for him, and they make him seem more like a normal politician than he really is, because the norms of their own profession push them to do so. Journalism is a coherence machine, Bouie and Nichols are arguing, because it gives order and decorum to words that are neither orderly nor decorous. Both Bouie and Nichols were speaking to a question of journalistic ethics, and asking what responsibility journalists have to make the public aware of the actual incoherence of Trump’s words—the non-normativity of what he’s saying.
I wouldn’t be the first to compare Trump to Jesus, but I’m going to do it here—and maybe not in the flattering way either Trump or Jesus might hope. The gospel reading from the lectionary for August 25th comes from the latter part of John chapter 6—a chapter that the lectionary has been moving through and returning to for a while now. This whole chapter is an extended meditation on bread and eating, beginning with the feeding of the 5000 (John 6:1-14), moving to a discussion of God’s provision of manna in the wilderness (John 6:25-34), and Jesus’ metaphor of himself as the bread of life and others’ reaction to it (John 6:35-55). The reading for this week picks up there, as Jesus is riffing on these themes of bread and eating. And Jesus is saying some strange stuff.
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them,” Jesus says in 6:56. “This is the bread that came down from heaven,” Jesus continues in verse 57, “not like that which the ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” If someone said something like this to you in the course of your everyday life, you would probably pause for a moment to ask yourself what kind of person you were speaking with. If a friend said this to you when you bumped into each other in the dairy aisle of the grocery store, you would probably leave the conversation with plans to check in with one of their loved ones to ask whether your friend was ok. If we take Jesus’ words here out of their context as part of the Bible and part of the theological world of Christianity, we are left with some very strange statements. Jesus is talking about people eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and he is claiming that the people who do that will live forever. It’s not a normal thing to say.
The disciples say as much in verse 6:60: “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?” This is the polite biblical way of expressing shock and maybe even revulsion—a way of registering the fact that what Jesus has just said is very weird. And Jesus doubles down; he rhetorically asks whether his words have offended them, and then proceeds to say more strange and offensive things. Jesus might be trolling a little bit here, in 21st century internet parlance. In verse 66, we are told that some of the disciples left Jesus at that point…they had simply had enough of the weirdness and offensiveness of what Jesus was saying, and they walked away. That exchange shows that Jesus’ words about people eating his flesh and drinking his blood sound weird in hindsight, but that they also sounded weird in the moment. For some of his followers, that moment was a line they couldn’t cross.
Christianity is a coherence machine. In the same way that the profession of journalism and its norms and values can make incoherent words seem coherent, Christian theology assumes that bizarre statements like the ones Jesus makes in John 6 are actually profoundly meaningful. Because many of us have spent our whole lifetimes hearing and participating in communion liturgies, we have been conditioned to think that Jesus’ statement in 6:56, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them,” is a normal thing to say. We have been shaped by Christian ideas and practices to understand this as an unremarkable statement that is obviously pointing to an ancient and ongoing ritual that’s undergirded by lots of normative Christological reflection. And because many of us have been shaped by a view of the Bible as a repository of wisdom and truth, we are inclined to give the Bible the benefit of the doubt, and assume that whatever it says has deep spiritual meaning. We hear Jesus talking about cannibalism and we think, ah yes, the Eucharist.
In this case, pastors and theologians and Bible scholars and all Christians are playing the role in religion that journalists play in politics: we are taking an array of disparate and strange statements and ideas and understanding them in a long tradition of interpretation that imposes coherence. Aside from Jesus’ cannibalistic musings here, the Bible contains a lot of very weird stuff—a race of divinely-bred half-giant heroes (Genesis 6:1-4), a talking donkey (Numbers 22:21-39), a zombie lamb at its own wedding (Revelation 19:6-9), and a teleportation (Acts 8:39-40), just to name the first four examples that came to my mind. But all these strange things (and many other strange and awful things that can be found in the Bible) can be fit into a scheme of interpretation that makes sense of it all, more or less. That’s why many traditions insist that their adherents learn catechisms and canons and orthodoxies, to ensure that people have internalized all the right forms of coherence. That’s why in most Christian traditions someone stands up and interprets the Bible for 15 or 20 (or 45) minutes every Sunday: because the Bible is not self-evidently coherent, and some coherence needs to be imposed on it. That’s why there are graduate schools where people like me will teach you how to read the Bible and even think theologically about it (if that’s your thing). It’s a full-time job—they give me health insurance and everything—and the work is about both understanding how to impose coherence on the Bible and understanding the ways that imposed coherence is already artificially masking the Bible’s primal incoherence.
I’m pretty invested in both things—both in making sense out of the Bible (hence this Substack) and in remembering that the sense we make out of the Bible is in some way artificial. I don’t go as far as some friends and colleagues, who think that it’s disingenuous or unethical to make theological sense out of the Bible, or to read it towards coherence. I think it’s legitimate to do that, but I also think that we should recognize that that’s what we are doing. To take back up Jesus’ metaphor of bread, I think it’s the difference between focusing our attention on the bread and focusing our attention on the act of baking. It’s fine to enjoy bread, and it’s good to work hard to try to make more nutritious and tasty bread. But it’s also worthwhile to remember that (contrary to what Jesus says) bread doesn’t usually just fall from heaven. Bread is made by people, and people make the Bible and its meanings too. We have bread because we bake it, because bread is better to eat than flour. And we have the Bible because we take ingredients and impose coherence on them, making strange statements like Jesus’ words in John 6 make sense.
And so we all become part of the coherence machine. We help to mask the incoherence (like the kind found in John 6) and we perpetuate the forms of coherence that help us make sense of things. We tidy things up and we make it all make some kind of sense together. Christians, like political journalists, take the strange statements and weird ideas we find in the Bible and we slot them into frameworks for making meaning, presuming that they all point somehow to some greater structure of belief and practice. And that’s fine—that can be good, even, to some extent, because that’s the only way any cultural system ever understands itself. But like political journalists, I think we ought to be thoughtful about what’s at stake when we do that, and how much of the meaning we think we find in the Bible is actually our own creativity and artifice. We should notice, in all this talk about bread and eating, that we are the bakers, that we are the ones working in the kitchen, that we are the ones imposing coherence, and we should reckon with the ways we can turn something like “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them” into a noble, normal, and coherent theology. And maybe, every once in a while, we should stop to notice that the Bible can be strange, and we should just let it be weird.
Thanks Eric. Very nice and illuminating analogy. I don’t think journalists are unethical when they try to provide coherence, but their attempts at coherence are inherently biased. You always take special care to discuss bias in Biblical interpretation, which I so appreciate. I wish more journalists followed your example.
Truly… so much help for a new pastor muddling through a bit and hoping to make sense of some bizarre texts!!! This new path is made smoother and more meaningful because I get to read your weekly comment on the lectionary… last week I took Mz Wisdom to a place of Lectio Divina to let people make their own meaning through teaching the parts of LD… this coming week will be a tribute to my mum as it would be her 82nd birthday and our sheep raising days followed by fellowship and Shepherd’s Pie…
This week’s essay to correlate current events and biblical text really gives words to my own opinion… now that I have a lectionary experience on a weekly basis and not just as a theoretical future, I’m working hard to make sense of it, always. It’s a weeklong prayer in scripture. And sometimes the prayer is, “Dear God, what in the hell do I do with this?”
So far, it’s coming along pretty well. The process is to read the upcoming lectionary on Sunday afternoon and your Substack ASAP on Monday morning. Sometimes it spawns another connection that completely different and sometimes I follow your lead and then some…
Either way, A Lover’s Quarrel gives me a brilliant step in Lectio Divina that not even John Wesley could have imagined! Thanks for doing it! Thanks for sharing your insight, like Mz Wisdom asked folks to do:)
Why was Solomon referring to Wisdom as a woman preparing for serving the misfits of the community? I am grateful for the outliers!
Have a Nizhoni Day! Peace🙏🏼