Ode to Foucault

A fellow I worked for in college, Tommy Blanton, asked me, “You’re an English major—what are bibliographies for?” I had been around Tommy long enough to know he had the answer. And anyway, I had not really given it much thought. I suggested they were to document sources and point to areas of further investigation.

“Wrong!” he thundered. “The purpose of a bibliography is to obfuscate reality!”

I knew he wouldn’t let it drop so I kept working. He proceeded to explain that something gets published. Then someone makes reference to the previously published work. It ends up in a bibliography. A third work comes along, adding the second to its bibliography, and now the original source is enshrined in the literature, beyond reproach (this phenomenon is part of what Thomas Kuhn talks about in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Aha! A bibliography is developing…

So, imagine my chuckling to myself when I had to do an annotated bibliography to be ordained as a United Methodist Minister. No problem; I had contemplated doing a bibliography as my Master’s Thesis, and had started on it, but changed my topic. It was easy enough for me to do an annotated bibliography. But what good will it do a pastor?

I know the ostensible answer; it shows that you can do research, dig deeper into the Biblical literature. And yet, I knew enough to know that I could cite one set of “Authorities,” someone else could cite another, and there might not be much discussion of the actual value of the bibliography.

There is a practical outcome of the bibliography’s subversive purposes to obfucscate reality: whole movements and “traditions” in the Church have cropped up around issues and ideas that no longer, maybe never did, have a coherent point of contact with Scriptural Christianity.

You always go back to the source. This is why Vincent of Lerins said that when it comes to determining what we ought to believe, we follow what was believed by all, everywhere, from the beginning. Vincent’s great work, The Commonitory, was an attempt to distill the method, the interpretive principles of the four great Ecumenical Councils, the councils that hammered out what it means to believe in Jesus.

In the work of the Councils, we find a remarkable challenge because so many things we prize as modern people will have to go—they simply cannot jibe with following Jesus. They will have to go unless we keep talking them to death and calling it dialogue, write books and articles with opinions, cite them in secondary and tertiary sources, teach them in seminaries… Kuhn’s analysis of “paradigm shift” is apt; if something is accepted long enough, even if it is not accurate, it is hard to dislodge, because the people who need to dislodge it learned it as truth, and all the problems they studied to be so learned were built around the inaccuracy’s being reality. There’s nothing like a bibliography to build community! It defines shared values, passes on knowledge; it is culture in the literal sense.

As Christians, we believe that Jesus is the fullness of the revelation from God. He is the Truth. Remember that it was Pilate who wanted to quibble and prevaricate about that. The discipline required to maintain orthodoxy is immense—our natural inclination is to have something to say, to add to the debate, to see things changed to our models, to get our way. If we follow Vincent’s model, we will have to accede (submit) to a wisdom that is timeless, not subject to the whims of the present. And yet, it was not Vincent’s idea, not his summation of the work of the great ecumenical councils. Rather, it was the Apostle John, the longest-lived of the apostles, who advised: “See that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you” (I John 2:24).

What we have heard from the beginning is in conflict with the world and its values. There are plenty who have tried to harmonize the faith with the world, and thus have abandoned the apostolic heritage. And they have many voices, and writers, and teachers, a sound bibliography to back them up. Again, John says, “They went out from us, but they did not belong to us. If they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us” (I John 2:19).

I know, I know, you don’t think it comes down to anything as simple as bibliography. Bibliography is a thumb-nail sketch of the problem. If enough people repeat an idea, it gains force, whether it is true or not. The bibliography is one way, seemingly objective, to perpetuate lies. Talk about something long enough, and before long you’ll start to think that maybe Jesus is not the only way to salvation, that homosexuality is ok, that abortion is ok, that we can let go of straight talk about sin. There are even books written to advance those positions, books with extensive bibliographies!