The Oldest New Idea

In 1545, the world’s Catholic bishops gathered at the Council of Trent in order to address the growing problem of the Protestant Reformation. Reformers had many objections against Catholicism, but there was one central point of contention that was at the heart of all others. Sola scriptura (Scripture alone) was the Protestant position on authority. Neither the whims of a local priest nor the consensus of the world’s bishops could supersede what was plainly written in the books of the Bible. Nor should any type of proclamation from the church ever be given the same standing as Scripture: that of being infallible and binding on all people.

The principle of sola scriptura also implies that anyone can and should read the Bible for guidance directly. But this leads to a problem of interpretation. If Martin Luther and John Calvin both take guidance directly from the clear meaning of Scripture, they should both arrive at the same beliefs and practices. But they do not. As Vincent of Lérins had observed 1,100 years earlier, Scripture is "capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters." The text does not wear its meaning on its sleeve to be neutrally observed without any presuppositions. This is the argument accepted by the bishops at Trent against sola scriptura: Scripture cannot be the sole authority because of the nature of texts themselves: Texts do not interpret themselves. The words on the page do not come with built-in instructions for how to resolve their own ambiguities. Without a living tradition to adjudicate among competing readings, there is no plain meaning. So according to the Catholic argument, the sole authority of Scripture actually leads to no authority at all. By the time the Council of Trent convened, Catholic theologians had long since digested the idea that reading a text is an inherently interpretive act, and there is no plain meaning outside of interpretation.

At this point, one probably recognizes what the oldest new idea is. It has been wielded ad nauseam by American leftist political activists since around 2012. Defending the 1619 Project against historians who disputed specific factual claims, Hannah-Jones wrote: "while history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened." Instead of arguing that certain events did or did not objectively happen, she attacked the notion that the archives of history could ever offer up objective facts. Reading the archive is an act of interpretation, and Hannah-Jones was issuing her church’s interpretation, one whose legitimacy is based in the authority of the church, not some objective reality of what happened. “We” (The New York Times, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, New York University) “choose to remember” this interpretation. One's individual reading of history is as invalid to this cathedral as one's individual reading of the Bible is to the Vatican. Because the current cathedral of journalism and academia is committed to denouncing its predecessors, it does not realize that its favorite idea is merely one half of an old theological dispute. As far as it knows, the idea came from turtleneck and cigarette enthusiasts in 1960s Paris. It is one of the most important ideas in the history of Western thought. But almost nobody recognizes its recurrence for what it is.