I want to tell you about something I have been observing for a while now, and I do not know how to talk about it without sounding either paranoid or judgmental. But I think it matters, so I am going to try anyway.
I see a movement toward totalizing explanations. A tendency to interpret everything through a single lens. An intellectual pattern that divides the world neatly into categories: correct and incorrect, truth and lies, us and them.
And I see it everywhere. Not just on the margins. In the mainstream. In credentialed voices. In people I respect.
Let me give you some examples.
I have a friend who is very intelligent, well-read, deeply committed to his faith. But over the past few years, he has begun to interpret nearly everything through the lens of "the spiritual battle." Every political movement, every cultural shift, every news story is evidence of demonic activity or divine protection. There is no room for complexity or ambiguity. There is only the battle between good and evil, and everything is a manifestation of one side or the other.
I have another friend who is a social justice activist. Deeply committed to racial equity and systemic change. And yet increasingly, she interprets nearly everything through the lens of power and oppression. Every interaction is coded. Every sentence is analyzed for what it reveals about the speaker’s positionality. There is no room for innocent mistake or good-faith disagreement. Everything is either perpetuating the system or disrupting it.
I have a relative who is very into political analysis. He sees the world through the lens of economic systems and power structures. Everything is Marx. Everything is late-stage capitalism. Every problem has a structural explanation. There is no room for human agency or moral choice. Everything is determined by the economic base.
And I have a colleague who is a biblical scholar. Very sophisticated, very learned. But he interprets nearly every biblical text through the lens of ancient Near Eastern parallels and redaction history. Every miracle is a mythological borrowing. Every authorial claim is a later interpolation. The text cannot mean what it says because it must mean what his framework says it means.
None of these people are stupid. All of them are intelligent, educated, well-meaning. But what they share is this: they have adopted a single interpretive lens, and they are now looking at the world through it. Everything fits. Everything makes sense. There are no loose ends, no contradictions, no moments where the framework fails to explain.
This is what I have been calling "totalizing explanation." And I think it is a form of idolatry.
Let me explain what I mean.
The Totalizing Impulse
Human beings have a deep need for comprehension. We want to understand how the world works. We want to make sense of complexity. We want to reduce chaos to order. This is not bad in itself. This is how we learn, how we build knowledge, how we navigate reality.
But there is a temptation that comes with this need: the temptation to complete comprehension. To the idea that you have finally figured it out. That you now have a system that explains everything. That there is nothing left to discover or revise because you have found the Truth with a capital T.
And this is where totalizing explanation lives. It is the moment when a useful framework becomes a prison. When a lens for understanding becomes a substitute for understanding. When a map is mistaken for the territory.
In religious language, this is called idolatry. It is taking something true and making it ultimate. It is mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
God is complex. Reality is complex. Human beings are complex. But a totalizing explanation is by definition not complex. It is a net that catches certain truths and lets others slip through.
The problem is that once you have adopted a totalizing explanation, you cannot see what it is not catching. You have adopted a lens that makes certain things visible and certain things invisible. And you have no way of noticing what is invisible to you.
The Hidden Assumption
Every totalizing explanation rests on a hidden assumption. A foundational claim that is so basic that it is never questioned.
For the spiritual warfare person, the hidden assumption is: "Demonic activity is the primary explanatory principle for understanding the world."
For the social justice activist, it is: "Power and oppression are the primary explanatory principles."
For the Marxist, it is: "Economic systems and class struggle are the primary explanatory principles."
For the biblical scholar, it is: "Historical-critical methodology is the primary way to understand biblical texts."
Now, each of these has some truth to it. But none of them is the truth. And the moment you make one of them ultimate, you have created an idol. You have taken a partial truth and made it total.
The really insidious thing about totalizing explanations is that they are partially true. They do explain some things. They do offer real insight. And that is what makes them so seductive. They work just often enough to convince you that they work always.
But reality does not work that way. Reality is genuinely complex. It has multiple dimensions. It cannot be reduced to a single principle.
The Cost of Totalizing Explanation
What concerns me about the totalizing impulse is what it does to the people who adopt it.
First, it produces arrogance. If you believe you have figured it out, if you believe you now understand the deep structure of reality, then you are no longer in a posture of learning. You are in a posture of teaching. You are no longer open to being wrong. You are closed.
Second, it produces contempt. If you believe that people who do not share your framework are either stupid or evil (and there is no in-between), then you cannot have genuine encounter with them. You can only have debate. You can only try to convert them. You can only see them as obstacles to enlightenment or victims of false consciousness.
Third, it produces paranoia. If every event is explained by a single principle, and if that principle is always working, then everything becomes evidence of the principle. The absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence. The absence of the demonic becomes evidence of demonic hiding. The silence of oppressed voices becomes evidence of internalized oppression. The difference of opinion becomes evidence of false consciousness. You create a system that cannot be falsified. And that is not knowledge. That is ideology.
And finally, it produces despair. Because if you have figured it all out, if you understand the system, and if the system is fundamentally corrupt or fundamentally threatened or fundamentally evil, then what? What is there to do but fight the system? What is there to do but despair that change is possible?
This is why I see so many people who have adopted totalizing explanations living in a state of low-level panic or rage or despair. Because their explanatory system, by its nature, offers no way out. No hope. No redemption. Just an endless cycle of the same dynamic playing out forever.
The Alternative
So what is the alternative?
I think it is what the Kabbalists called tzimtzum — the idea of divine contraction. The idea that God withdrew Himself to create space for creation. That God accepted a kind of ignorance in order to allow for genuine otherness.
What if that is the model for human knowing as well? What if the path to wisdom is not toward total comprehension but toward accepting the limits of comprehension? What if genuine knowledge includes the knowledge of what you do not know?
The biblical tradition seems to recognize this. Listen to what the book of Ecclesiastes says: "I said, 'I will become wise,' but it was far from me. That which is far off, and deep, deep— who can find it out?" (Ecclesiastes 7:23-24). Or listen to Job, who spends 38 chapters arguing with God about why suffering exists, and God's response is not to explain the system but to point out how little Job understands about the natural world.
There is a form of knowledge that comes not from having an explanatory system but from relinquishing the need for one. From learning to see the world as it is, rather than as your framework says it should be.
That is harder. It is also more honest.
Because the truth is: we do not understand the world. Not really. We have partial frameworks that illuminate certain aspects. But we also have vast areas of genuine ignorance. And the moment we accept that, the moment we become comfortable with mystery, we become free.
Free from the need to defend the system. Free from the need to interpret every new piece of data as confirming what we already believe. Free from the need to see people who disagree with us as enemies or idiots.
Free to actually learn.
I think about Yeshua (Jesus) a lot in this context. Because he seemed deeply uncomfortable with systems. He was constantly subverting the categories that people had built. The Pharisees had a totalizing explanation: the Law. And Yeshua (Jesus) did not attack the Law. He just kept breaking it in ways that forced people to think about what the Law was actually for.
He did not offer an alternative totalizing explanation. He offered something more humble and more radical: the Kingdom of Heaven. Which is not a system to be understood but a reality to be inhabited. Not a principle to be applied but a presence to be encountered. Not a framework that explains everything but a mystery that invites you to let go of the need to explain.
That is what I am learning to do. To hold my frameworks lightly. To notice when I am totalizing. To ask: what am I not seeing? What does this explanatory system make invisible?
And to accept that some things cannot be explained. Some things can only be lived.
Shalom,
Sergio
