Preachers pick up the Scriptures every week and engage in "exegesis ", which is to take from the text, a spiritual truth to nurture and strengthen disciples of Jesus.  Now, to be honest, to be truthful, sometimes the temptation for "eisegesis" is overwhelming; this is the exercise of starting with a presumed truth and working to fit it into the scriptural text.  And this is not as clear-cut as it may appear.  Truth is also gleaned from human reason, from tradition, and from experience.  So "eisegesis" is not as bad as it may suggest, at least not when we confess to our listeners the process that has engaged us.  If we say we have done exegesis, when in fact our process as been eisegesis, we approach the line of lying.

 

I am struggling with juxtaposing this ecclesial reality with the legitimation of "alternative facts" and the acknowledgement of living into a "post truth era".  The explosion of responses to Conway's interview last week, may indeed, to use Conway's own words "been a little too dramatic."

 

Who is up in arms when we turn on a television station that reports to be "reality television"?  We know it is not, but we conspire with the illusionists to make it real for ourselves.  Who then, if anyone, is really lying? 

 

In his January 15th article in the New York Times, Adam Kirsch writes: "The problem is that, more and more, people seem to want to be lied to....That is why the lie is so seductive: It allows the liar and his audience to cooperate in changing the nature of reality itself, in a way that can appear almost magical...People who can turn a lie into a truth have the power to shape reality; they are poets of the real. And the audience that gives them its willing suspension of disbelief is a co-conspirator in this uncanny transformation, just as novel readers conspire in their enchantment." ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/15/books/lie-to-me-fiction-in-the-post-truth-era.html?_r=0)

 

So, while I am deeply troubled with a normalizing of presenting "alternative facts", I am also conscious that this is not something new under the sun.  And while my knee jerks when this is highlighted in the political sphere, I also am cognizant that the temptation arises in the pulpit as well as the podium.  This is not to say "it's all good, don't worry."  Rather it is a confession of the daily need for every human being to look in the mirror and discern what is fact and what is a lie.

 

David