Earnest Lies of History

Welcome back to the Gnostic Reformation. Today I'd like to share with you an essay that David Bentley Hart recently posted to his Substack site. His Substack site is called Leaves in the Wind by David Bentley Hart.

And you know we use Hart's translation of the New Testament here frequently. He's a brilliant man, a wonderful writer. So I'm going to read for you a very good essay that he calls The Story of the Nameless, The Use and Abuse of History for Theology. This was posted on April 9, 2025. It was a lecture that he had delivered at Duke University in September of 2017 to theology graduate students. So if you find this deep and difficult to follow, well just imagine that you're a Duke theology graduate student and they probably didn't follow it any better than you do. So don't worry about that because he writes in a very highbrow manner. Also I'm only reading portions of this essay. I'm leaving out most of the small details that historians love so much.

Hart cites many different philosophers—European philosophers, German philosophers, historians from all ages, from Eusebius on up. And I'm leaving all of those details out. So if you like those sorts of details, because I don't—I get lost amongst the names, I'm not really good at sticking in names--I like concepts. That's where I dwell. And so I'm giving you the conceptual level of this essay. But if you want the details, go and look up Hart there on Substack and read for yourself. Even subscribe. He's always amazing. So here goes.

Most of the history we read and write is a lie, though often a lie told in earnest. We fabricate the past as much as we recall it, if not more so, and almost invariably in ways that reflect an ideology that we either consciously seek to promote or unconsciously absorb from the society surrounding us.

For the most part, this is nothing to lament as long as we remember to think of written history primarily as a species of literature. In truth, the greater the historian, the vaster and more ingenious his or her misrepresentations are likely to be. And the greatest of all, those who are the most accomplished masters of detail and style need not distort a single fact in order to produce an entirely fantastic image of the past.

Let me pop in here and say that there's a difference between facts—choice points in history—observable phenomena that occurred—and the narrative or the story that weaves those facts together. Narrative is not truth. Narrative is the story you tell around the facts and it is your truth. It's usually ideologically centered. So you can see this clearly in our political situation where you have a certain set of facts and then half of the people say blah blah blah blah blah as they weave together the facts into the narrative that they promote and the other half of the people say no no blah blah blah blah blah that's their narrative around the same exact facts.

So do you see how that works? It's not that what you hear reported is true or false. It's the story that people have woven around the facts as they stand. And of course, all of the news outlets and certainly the social media influencers are all about narrative. People tell the story from their point of view because we each have a unique and personal point of view and we always think that our version of what we see is the correct one because it's our point of view, see? So when we share that with others, we try to convince them to accept our narrative. So that is why the media outlets on the left have different narratives than the media outlets on the right, even though the facts may be the same.

And by the way, the facts aren't always there. Sometimes opinions or guesswork is promoted as if it were a fact, but it's not. Sometimes people lie to fill in the blanks of the narrative and so those are just outright lies. When we read history then, what are we reading? We are reading the narratives that the historians wrote, right? Sometimes we're reading lies.

It is said that history is written by the victors because they're the ones that survived to tell the story. Okay, so getting back to Hart now, skipping ahead, he says,

Moreover, we deceive ourselves if we imagine that there is such a thing as a specific and constant moral imperative that governs and animates the writing of history. Yes, on the one hand, we must never forget. But yes, also on the other, we must learn to forget. Historical memory can ideally make us aware of and so responsible for the sins of the past, the crimes of our countries and our forebears, all the wars and spo