Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. 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 spoilations and enslavements that have marked the births and deaths of tribes and nations and empires. By the same token, however, it can also entrap us in a ceaseless cycle of impotent mourning whose emotional intoxications can relieve us of any real attention to the concrete moral demands of the present.
At its most perfidious, historical recollection can become a support for an aggrandizement of our prejudices, a reinforcement of the myths of racial pedigree or national destiny or imperial grandeur, or can soothe us with sweet sickly nostalgias for past glories and lost honors.
We see this also happening quite a bit in discussions of politics and what is currently going on. You know, a few years ago, the movement away from American history in the manner that we were taught it in the 40s, 50s, 60s, let’s say, to change the year that the nation was founded and by whom–these are conscious attempts to remold the thinking of people here and now.
I imagine that we people who are looking into Gnosticism think that quite often. We often think to ourselves, oh well, it surely couldn’t have happened that way. As a Christian Gnostic, one rewriting of history that I constantly indulge in is the notion that the Gnostic gospel was embedded within original Christianity—the original people of the first 300 years after Jesus—and that it was purposely stripped out of the religious and historical narrative by those who wielded power at the time, the Roman emperor and the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, in order to mold Christianity into a kingdom that they could control and that they could be the head of, the leader of.
So as a Gnostic Christian, I will say no, that was not right that they did that because they were wiping out the true history. And the true history from my point of view is that this was originally part of what Jesus taught and has been purposely stripped out and muffled so that only now, after the rediscovery of the Nag Hammadi scriptures and the Qumran scripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, can these original teachings be rediscovered and reabsorbed into Christianity. That is what this Gnostic Insights attempts to do in a Christian way.
But we know, just observing our modern culture, that people on the left and people on the right describe history entirely differently from each other in order to support their narrative, which then supports their belief structure. Okay, getting back to Hart, he says,
Even so, if we can keep the fact in mind, we can at least apply ourselves to historical studies with enough ironic detachment to be capable of discerning where what we really know of the past, which is always far less than we think, can be distinguished from the fabulations and interpretations in which the record is always inevitably wrapped. Then, when we choose to write or rewrite the past responsibly, or simply in reading consider what we are reading with sufficient diffidence, we can recognize the ephemerality and cultural contingency of past interpretations.
Let me jump in here to interpret some words. What Hart is suggesting is that we need to be able to tell the difference between what is being made up and what is merely interpretations of the facts when we write or even read. And that’s what responsible or discerning reading is—that we can recognize ephemerality.
Ephemerality means passing, it’s gone with the wind, it doesn’t last long. And the cultural contingency of past interpretations, that is what I was talking about a minute ago, that where you stand within the culture always determines how you interpret the pattern of events. Back to Hart now,
No doubt we are also in that very process imposing new equally ephemeral and contingent interpretations on what we think we know. But that too we can learn to do with some degree of critical distance from our own prejudices.
So Hart is suggesting that we need to have self-awareness enough to realize that the way we are interpreting events or the way we are interpreting what we see on social media, what we see from the talking heads, the influencers—we have to be able to not just absorb everything we hear, but have sufficient critical distance to discern what people are saying. Even if we tend to agree with that person, we still have to maintain some sort of distance.
See, what people often do is they have a point of view and they seek out other people who reinforce their point of view. And if you turn on some social media and this person is talking about things that you don’t agree with, well, you just want to turn them off immediately or you want to say rude things back to them on the screen. But if you can sit with it and truly consider it, you’d be closer to the truth.
Podcast host and comedian Bill Maher visits with President Trump and singer Kid Rock at the White House on March 31, 2025. Maher was surprised that Trump was so funny and congenial at the private dinner, and he left with a new understanding and appreciation for his political foe. (Image via X/@billmaher)
At least consider what their point of view must be for them to be saying these things. What assumptions are they making versus the assumptions you are making? And where do they conflict? And does it have to do with fact or does it have to do with opinions? So back to Hart, he says,
And we cannot really avoid the task because despite all I’ve just said, historical thinking is not a choice for us, but an irresistible call, a vocation as old as our consciousness of ourselves as human beings.
Skipping a little down, he asks, what is history after all? And I skip…
History is the consequence of an original alienation, a departure from the natural order of repetition and return. And no reconciliation with the world we left behind is possible in this life. It is a state of spirit knowing itself now as posed over against the organic substrate of its being in the world, which has become something separate, objective, other.
Okay, now that’s a very Gnostic statement. What he’s saying in the language as I interpret it is that our spiritual Self with a capital S is by its very nature alienated from the what he calls the organic substrate of being in the world. I would call it being melded to the mud level. Our self is melded to the material of the Demiurge and to its requirements and its memes. But we have the Self of our original spirit to show us what is true. Quoting Hart again,
And so we cannot help but reflect on this schism under the forms provided by philosophy or art or natural religion, even though we are generally too immediately engaged in history as an unavoidable and external problem to be solved to allow much time for deep contemplation of history.
And yeah, when certain historical events overwhelm us, such as the COVID pandemic, one side against another side and the claims of their narratives conflicting with each other, that would be the unavoidable and external problem to be solved. When we’re caught up in that, when we’re watching the news and reading the news feeds constantly and getting all worked up about it, well, now we can step back from that as a Gnostic and realize that that is part of the never ending war.
That’s the never ending war. The Demiurge wants us to be constantly balled up and upset and shaking our fists at other human beings for what they believe in. Whichever side you’re on, that is a Demiurgic plot. The Demiurge wants us to be immediately engaged in history, you see, caught up in it and impassioned by it and being all angry or righteous and virtuous against those fools. That’s part of the never ending war and we’re being played. We’re being played like puppets when that happens. This is where reasonable detachment comes in. Think of it as a play. Think of it as here we are at a very interesting point in history. Look at this drama unfolding. It’s Shakespearean. It’s of biblical proportion. It’s an amazing drama that we’re watching and a part of. But don’t let it bring you down because then you are succumbing to archonic influences. Then you are being used as a puppet by the Demiurge. That’s what I would say. Back to Hart,
And it seems to me, he says, there is a special calling of theological reflection with regard to historical memory, one that Christian thought has reliably betrayed throughout most of its existence.
For one thing, the call to contemplate the meaning of history is not merely an invitation to engage with an archive of discrete facts in isolation, but an imperative to attend to specific narratives, specific diegetic orderings of facts and memories. For another, every attempt to interpret the past is either, tacitly or explicitly, also an attempt to interpret the present and determine what is to come. In a sense, every significant historian is engaged in writing the future. And in the case of Christian historians, it is a matter of extraordinary theological moment.
Jumping down, he says,
To me, it remains a source of wonder that most histories of Christianity remain little more than attempts to tell the story of the church in such a way as to defend or advocate the reconstitution of this or that institutional practice, this or that style of confessional adherence, this or that doctrinal ideology, and little more. It is surprising how often, even if inadvertently, these histories are nothing more than the same old tales of pedigree, further recitations of the narratives of those blessed with enduring names by virtue of their having occupied stations of social power.
Rarely ever do they seem to emerge from an historical consciousness shaped by the radically different story told by the Gospels, which should be retold in every age regarding those nameless and disenfranchised souls whose world was invaded by the call of God in Christ, the crucified slave. This is a problem.
See, I really liked that section, because he’s saying that what Christianity has become by virtue of the histories written by it is another tale of those in power—those in power wielding Christianity this way or that, whereas the way Christianity started was a different story that needs to be retold in every age, because it’s about nameless people and disenfranchised people whose world has been invaded by Christ. We don’t hear from those disenfranchised people in history. We only hear about the big people. We only hear from the famous historians, the famous theologians, this king or that king, Emperor Constantine taking Gnosticism out of the Gospel for the sake of power. Back to Hart.
We have to remember also that the peculiar form of the entrance of God’s kingdom into time was not an integration of God’s story into ours, but rather a shattering act of judgment, of damnation, and of resurrection in a spiritual body untouched by time and death.
It is, in short, history as history’s overthrow. Christianity first entered the world of late antiquity not as an institution, nor as a fully developed creed, but first and foremost as an event that was without any known precedent and without any immediately obvious sequel. At its dawning, the Gospel appeared within history as a proclamation regarding the sudden and irrevocable disruption of history, one that necessarily entailed, for those who believed that proclamation, a subversion or rejection of many of the most venerable cultic, social, and philosophical wisdoms of the ancient world.
And the central event within the event that the Gospel proclaimed was the resurrection of Christ. All at once, according to Paul, for instance, all the firm configurations and demarcations that gave shape to reality had been altered, or transgressed, or erased. All religious, social, racial, and national boundaries had been effaced. All of natural history had been delivered over to the rule of Christ. All the spiritual and human agencies governing the cosmos, powers, principalities, thrones, dominions, the god of this age, had been subdued by the crucified and risen Lord.
Let me pop in there to say that the god of this age—that is the Demiurge, and the spiritual agencies that are overthrown—the powers, principalities, thrones, dominions—those are the archons in the rule of the Demiurge. And the human agencies governing, that’s the kings and emperors who were appointed by the Demiurge to bring order to these unruly humans. Well, he’s saying that was all completely overthrown with the coming of Christ. Quoting again,
The language of the book of Galatians is especially uncompromising with regard to the implications of this interruption. There Paul states that the event of salvation in Christ was a complete liberation not only from the elemental powers, and that would the archons, to which all peoples had been subject, but even from the power of the law of Moses. For holy though that law was, it could not save and was itself rendered defective by having been delivered under the angelic dispensations of the present age, revealed first through a mere angel and then further through a mere human mediator, and operating therefore only as a kind of provisional disciplinarian.
He’s talking about the giving of the Ten Commandments and bringing it down the mountain by Moses.
Moses and the Ten Commandments. (Gustave Dore, Getty Images)
In Christ, however, a new age of liberty from all government but God’s had arrived. In this sense, Christianity entered human consciousness not primarily as an alternative religious practice or creed, but rather as an apocalyptic annunciation of the sudden invasion of historical and natural time alike by a kingdom not of this cosmos.
Well, amen, I say to that. That is exactly the Gnostic gospel here. He’s saying that Christianity is not a displacement of Judaism or of other religions. Its purpose isn’t to have established, as it has by now in our modern Christian churches, a different set of creeds to recite every Sunday, a different set of hymns to sing, a different practice of dining together and what prayers to say. That was never the point that Jesus was making. That is merely substituting one set of ritualistic practices for another. But he’s saying that Christ actually came and destroyed all of that, that it was an apocalyptic annunciation by a kingdom not of this cosmos. It is an apocalyptic narrative that is wholly incompatible with what modern Christianity has become.
It was wild, you might say, and we domesticated it and put it into corrals, this kingdom that is not of the cosmos. Quoting Hart,
It was above all a profanation of sacred truths, the elevation of a crucified slave over all those duly appointed offices of religious and social order that had justly condemned him, and the blasphemous misconstrual of this criminal, not merely as an innocent victim, but as God’s only son. The pattern established in Christ, especially for me, Hart says, in the inexhaustibly suggestive story of Christ’s confrontation with Pilate in John’s gospel, was one of martyrdom as victory.
Of power as the willingness to become powerless before the violence of the state, and thereby to reveal the latter’s arbitrariness, injustice, and spiritual falsehood. And how strange the gospel is here, for Pilate is precisely the sort of man about whom history is meant to be written. He has a name, has a face before the law, stands in a station given him by the sacred authority of the empire, yet his story vanishes in the light of Easter. He is remembered today only insofar as he is written into the margins of the story of the slave and peasant God.
Pilate washes his hands to cleanse himself after condemning Jesus. Christ before Pilate by Ludovico Mazzolino, painting by Lodovico Mazzolino, 1530 (Museum: Fitzwilliam Museum)
Even in its most redoubtable and enduring historical forms, Christianity is filled with an indomitable and subversive ferment, an inner force of disillusion that refuses to crystallize into something inert or stable, but that instead insists upon dispersing itself into the future ever again, to destroy what confines it and to start anew, to begin again in the formless realm of spirit rather than of flesh, of spirit rather than of the letter. There is, simply said, a distinct element of the ungovernable and seditious within the gospel’s power to persuade, one that we ignore only at the cost of fundamentally misunderstanding the character of the gospel.
And hey, popping in here again, I say amen. That is exactly why I call this Gnostic gospel that I teach the Gnostic Gospel, and why I don’t shy away from saying that it is the basic form of Christianity. What we are teaching here at Gnostic Insights, and what I’ve written in my book,A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and in the other book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is to bring Christianity again into the formless realm of spirit rather than of flesh, of spirit rather than of the letter, the ungovernable and seditious within the gospel’s power to persuade.
And of course, this is what irritates conventional Christians who are constrained very narrowly by the narrative of the modern Christian church and what they’re allowed to believe and not believe. When we become so wedded to the inerrancy of the scripture, as they say, we are only allowed to read and believe exactly word for word the New Testament as it has been translated over the last 2,000 years, after the Nicene Council had already stripped out the Gnostic gospel. But that holds us within these corrals, like I say, as if we were wild horses that have been penned now and domesticated.
But we’re not. The freedom to run free through the eternal spirit of the Father and the Son, the Aeons, the Fullness, and the Christ–this is who we really are. This is the spirit that we’re all born with, that we forget, and that we need to come back to.
We’ll stop here today because this is going long. If you would like to read this in its entirety, I remind you again to go to the Substack app and look up David Bentley Hart’s site called Leaves in the Wind.
I’ll probably pick up some more of this again next week. I’m putting together a new Easter message, so I’ll see you next week.
God bless us all, and onward and upward!
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