The Interpretation of the Bible in a Postmodern World: Part 1

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical interpretation in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

I should warn you that this first day or two will be fairly depressing. If you want to leave now and wait for the good stuff, come back in a couple of days. For most Christians, in fact, the study of postmodernism, how it actually came about and so forth, is fairly depressing. I will try to be as realistic with as many concrete examples as I can possibly be.

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My aim over the four days is not to be depressing but then to show how there are some Christian ways back into the discussion. What I intend to do today is to define postmodernism and explain a bit of how we got here; then tomorrow to show what is going on in biblical studies and in evangelism and in discipleship, both within evangelicalism and outside it, because of the impact of postmodernism; and then in the last two days to start working at ways back toward a more biblically faithful approach.

Nowadays, everybody is using postmodern. I didn’t count the number of times Roy Clements said postmodern or some form of it this morning, but a casual guess, about 20. In the “New Lists” selection of the latest Blackwell’s catalogue, one-third of the volumes have postmodern or some form thereof in their titles. This is everywhere.

Most of us by now are familiar with the fact that postmodernism has something to do with an increase in subjectivity, a preference for image over proposition, subjectivity in truth as opposed to objectivity, a willingness to allow competing systems and claims to truth, even if they are mutually contradictive, an insistence that at the end of the day all truth is either person related and, therefore, not culture-transcending or interpretative group related and, therefore, not culture-transcending.

This over against a modern heritage that insists truth is the same for all people everywhere if they’d only wake up and see it. I want to say in advance that as a Christian, I do not myself wish to align with either the modern world or the postmodern world. There is a sense in which a Christian must say, “A plague on both your houses.” Yet there are some things to learn from both as well.

Although there are many descriptions of the way postmodernism works in our culture, there are not many descriptions of where it has come from, how we have gotten here. Let me try to outline a bit of the history of postmodernism, at least as I understand it. The term itself is pretty ugly. Postmodern? How can you be post modern? If modern has to do with the contemporaneous, then you can’t be postmodernist unless you’re a futurist.

But in fact, the term was first coined in the realm of architecture in the 1930s. There was a style of architecture that was called modern. Then, of course, the style changed. What could you call it? More modern? Well, they settled on postmodern. As soon as modern is attached not to whatever it is that is contemporaneous, but to some specific thing that happens to be contemporaneous now, then of course you leave yourself open to some barbaric vulgarism like postmodern as soon as that thing changes.

Now eventually, the same sort of change took place in a number of different realms, in economics and then in the realm of intellectual ideas. Nowadays, it is used about a major shift that is going on in Western culture, not now only in the West. To understand postmodernism in this sense requires we think a little about modernism.

What is of the essence of modernism, and how did we move from modernism to postmodernism? How did the change come about? I will argue in this session that postmodernism has to do above all with the field of epistemology. That is to say it has to do with claims for how you go about knowing truth, how you claim to go about knowing anything. How do you know what you know? That’s what epistemology is about.

At the risk of simplification, in the Middle Ages and up through the Magisterial Reformation, epistemology was grounded on the assumption that God knows everything. Therefore, all of our knowing is, by definition, a subset of his knowing. He knows everything without exception. He knows all of the truth. If we know anything truly necessarily, it is part of what he knows. Therefore, how we know is bound up with the question how information God knows can become our information. Inevitably, that’s a question bound up with revelation.

From that point of view under the assumption that God knows everything, the move in epistemology as far as we’re concerned is the move from the communication of some part of what God knows to us who are his image bearers and who may know some things truly even if they are only a part, a very tiny part, of what God knows exhaustively.

In this regard, for example, a medievalist like Thomas Aquinas and a Reformation leader like Calvin are at one. They say (both of them) God discloses himself in nature, God discloses himself in Scripture, God discloses himself in the Son. They may disagree about how much you can know about God from nature. They certainly do disagree on that point, but that God discloses himself by these various means and that we may know some things truly because God has disclosed himself, they have no doubt at all.

In other words, epistemology throughout that period was grounded, first of all, in a God who knows all things. Thus although we may not know what God knows, there is at least one being who serves as the test of all knowing. All true knowledge as opposed to false claims to knowledge must be a subset of his knowing. Now how you know what he knows, that’s another matter. But that there is someone who knows everything, that at least anchors all knowledge in one being.

There were a lot of changes that gradually moved the Western culture away from that perspective, but most people who work in this area use Rene Descartes as the chief transitional figure. In 1619, Descartes set himself to doubt everything. Not because he was a doubter; he was a profoundly committed Roman Catholic.

He set himself to doubt everything just because he was discovering that as he tried to talk to rising numbers of people in the intellectual circles in which he lived on the continent, he was finding more and more people who were rejecting this inherited epistemology with God at the center of the universe. They were skeptics of one sort or another.

Therefore, they did not share his assumptions, his presuppositions, in approaching the truth claims of Christianity or any other subject. He thought, “If I could form some common basis of assumed knowledge with them, then perhaps I could build up a whole system of reasoning and arguments that would lead them to the truth of Catholicism.” He wanted to convert them to become Catholics. He gave himself to think this over and eventually came up with his famous formula, cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”.

Now philosophers have been arguing about that one for almost four centuries, whether or not it really is a good argument or not. At one level, it makes no difference at all. It is what it introduced into the whole realm of Western epistemology that made it important. He thought this up in 1619. The book that came out to explain it came out in the 1630s. He himself was so pleased with his discovery as he thought of it that he went to offer prayers at St. Ann’s monastery. He was, in fact, a devout Catholic.

Now he wasn’t the first person to have said something like this. In the fourth century, for example, Augustine had said, si fallor sum, “If I err, I am”. In other words, you might doubt all kinds of things, but if you make a mistake, well, at least you’re the one who is making it. So you can’t doubt your own existence. But when Augustine said that, he said it just on the fly, on the way by. It was not a big part of his argument, and it played no part in his epistemology.

What Descartes did, however, was to establish his famous, cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am” as the basis of an entire epistemology. We will now forget the existence of God. We will not assume there is any being who knows anything about anything, except for this basis which surely you cannot deny, he says. “I think, therefore I am.” Even if I’m busy thinking I don’t exist, the fact that I’m thinking proves I must exist, because somebody is thinking!

Even if you’re thinking in a dream, somebody is dreaming. You see, you can’t escape this. You think; therefore you are. Now whether you think that’s good philosophy or not is irrelevant. What he was doing to escape God in form of argument was extremely important. What it meant now was that there was a new foundation laid on which to build systems of thought. Because of that new foundation, this approach to things became known as foundationalism.

Foundationalism then took many, many different forms over the centuries, but in essence, it’s this: In every field of knowledge, you have to lay an appropriate foundation, a foundation appropriate to that field of knowledge. Once you’ve laid that foundation, then if you use the appropriate methods to build on it, you can come to an agreed corpus of truth. Now that is the very heart of modernism.

You can find believing modernists and unbelieving modernists. You can find Buddhist modernists and Christian modernists and Muslim modernists. You can find evangelical fundamentalist modernists. But if that is the basis on which you build up your knowledge, if that is how you understand human knowing (epistemology), you are a modernist, if we use modernists now as having something to do not with religion but having something to do with epistemology.

That way of looking at things largely prevailed in the West, with some exceptions. History is never neat. New periods never start on a certain date (July 13 at 5:46 p.m.), but they sort of slur over from one period to another. Nevertheless, by and large, from the beginning of the 1600s to about 1970 or 1980 … You find leaders long before that moving away from it.

In terms of a whole culture moving away from it, it’s really only in the last 20 years or so that that has taken place. That whole paradigm of modernism which really reigned in the Western world for close to 400 years has now started slipping away at a very rapid pace. What comes after modernism? Postmodernism.

Now if you think of postmodernism, therefore, in these epistemological terms (we’ll sort out the characteristics of each in a moment), then it is wrong to suppose that we are in a situation in which we may say, “Oh, you know, these fads come and go. For a while, it was ‘God is dead,’ Thomas Altizer. Now Altizer is almost dead himself, and God is still alive. These fads come and go. Don’t worry your head about it.”

Then in biblical studies, “Well, you know, you have structuralism, and then you have narrative criticism. Somewhere along the line, you do rhetorical criticism. A couple of generations back, everybody was focusing on source criticism. They come and go. They’re fads. Leave it to the scholars. Don’t worry your head about it. Just get on with life in the church.”

The difficulty is is if what postmodernism refers to is not merely a fad that prefers images of the moment because we all have television sets but is describing the underground, the behind-the-scenes way of knowing, approaching all knowledge in the entire culture, this is not something that’s going to go away really fast.

I’m not predicting it’s going to hang around as long as modernism did. The whole set of cycles is so much faster today for all kinds of reasons. Although there are some individuals who have sort of dabbled in postmodernism and then come out the other side, yet in terms of where the culture is going as a whole, there’s going to be a lot of postmodernism around, short of a revival, for decades and decades to come, maybe longer.

I do not see anything on the horizon yet that is even beginning to peep up to claim a place in the sun to displace it. Not a thing. I can think of some things I’d like to see, but we’ll come to that on the last day. Now then let me outline rather briefly what Cartesian thought (that is, thought that stems finally from Rene Descartes) is like, what modernism is like. This is only a small miscellany of characteristics.

First, note that unlike the epistemology that comes just before it, modernism focuses on the I. “I think, therefore I am.” Not, “God knows everything. How can I know some of what God knows?” But, “I think, therefore I am.” This means there is no longer in the knower (“I think”) any basis in an absolute and exhaustive and omniscient knower. Sooner or later, someone starts knowing that although I say, “I think, therefore I am,” this gentleman down here also says, “I think, therefore I am,” and this lady over here also says, “I think, therefore I am.”

It turns out what they think does not always agree. Unlike the medieval and Reformation epistemology, then there was common recourse back to God who did know everything, even though there might be some doubts about how you could know what God knows. At least there was in principle a God who does know everything.

Now in this system of epistemology, there is no universal knower. Sooner or later, you start raising problems about what is called the subject-object tension in Western epistemology. There is no knower above the whole thing who can put it all in its rightful place. Now I am one knower, and I claim to know certain things. But there are other knowers who also claim to know certain things.

The question is how can these different claims to knowledge be reconciled? Now modernism, of course, claimed it could do so by establishing a proper foundation everybody agreed on and then establishing agreed methods. That brings us to the second characteristic of modernism. First of all, the I as the knower, the finite I as the basis for all knowing. Then second, an epistemology based on agreed foundations. Of course, if the foundations crumble, if people start disagreeing on the foundations, then modernism is in trouble.

Then third, this focus on method. This was true in every arena. It worked best, of course (at least in the first instance), in the natural sciences. There you established agreed controls, so you had experiments done in different laboratories under agreed conditions, and they had to achieve the same results or else the claim of what was discovered would be put into jeopardy.

Now obviously if you moved from something like chemistry or physics to another kind of science that has a historical dimension like, let’s say, geology, then there are some kinds of things you can’t do in the laboratory. There are some kinds of studies that have different dimensions to them. In that case, you have to establish different methods. Then you move to statistical controls, population surveys, sociological analyses, that sort of thing.

Then you have to invent the kinds of controls so you’re sure you have an adequate control group and what are called double-blind experiments and that sort of thing. In every field, the aim was to establish the right method. The assumption then in modernism was if you had the right foundation and the right method then turned the crank, it brings you to your fourth characteristic.

Out comes absolute truth. That is, culture-transcending, individual-transcending, language-transcending, race-transcending absolute truth. Foundation plus method, turn the crank: out comes truth. On the face of it, it seemed to work pretty well in the hard sciences, didn’t it? One of the reasons why so many of the soft sciences have tried so hard to gain respectability by attaching numbers and statistics and formulae in things is precisely because of all the respectability gained by the hard sciences.

But even in historical and biblical studies and things like that, the same sort of thing took place in the last century. For example, a German historian by the name of Leopald von Ranke in Germany. Although he had his own agenda when he said it, he said the task of the historian is to discover things, “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (as thing actually were, as they actually took place). No contemporary historian would say that.

The more old-fashioned conservative ones would surround it by saying, “Well, there are always limitations on what we can know. We can never get at the whole truth” and so on. The postmodern ones would say, “Inevitably, you do interpretation out of a particular model or out of a particular frame or out of a particular set of biases or prejudices.” Therefore, there’s a Marxist interpretation of the Reformation. There’s a capitalist interpretation. There’s a Lutheran interpretation. There’s a Baptist interpretation.

There are different interpretations of the Reformation. There is no truth at the Reformation. There’s only that kind of truth of the Reformation that belongs to a particular interpretative body. That’s not what von Ranke thought. Foundation plus method, turn the crank: out comes absolute truth.

So also in the area of biblical studies. You read the classic liberal textbooks of 30–70 years ago, all through that period and even beyond. They speak of the assured results of modern criticism, the things biblical scholars have now. The fact that they were changing their minds pretty often didn’t make any difference to their fundamental conviction that what they were doing was discovering the truth.

In this sense, both fundamentalists and flat-out liberals and everybody in between shared the same epistemology. In that sense, we are all modernists. That is, we thought if we just did get the methods right and then based them on a proper foundation and then turned the crank, out would come the truth.

Thus, for example, one of my great heroes in the faith in this century, J. Gresham Machen, the Presbyterian scholar who split off from Princeton and founded Westminster Seminary in the 1930s, wrote a book in 1934 called What is Faith? It’s quite a good book. I don’t think it’s the best of his books, but it’s a very interesting book. Somewhere along the line in this book, he says Christianity can be likened to a science such as chemistry. That’s his example.

In chemistry, you have a basis in reality. There’s a certain body you have to examine. There are certain things you assume, certain qualifications of the scientist, and certain methods that are appropriate. Then you work through those things and you come out with formulae. You come out with the way matter works. You learn what atoms actually merge with other atoms to form what molecules. You learn how organic synthesis works. You learn how to make polymers and so forth.

So also in biblical studies. There’s a given. Now not the given of the natural world but the given of Scripture. There are proper methods, hermeneutics, kinds of things I’ve been teaching in this course periodically at Word of Life for the last four years and principles of exegesis, of reading, of how to handle parables, and what you do with the Greek verb. Then there are principles of how to synthesize the materials together, the qualifications of the interpreter. Of course, they’re not quite the same as the qualifications for the chemist, but still they’re qualifications, you see.

At the end of the day, you turn the crank and out comes the truth. You build a scientific theology. Of course when he said that, he wasn’t a flat-out liberal. He was a modernist evangelical. It wasn’t entirely wrong, and yet you can see it is still based on the same kind of modernist epistemology that left God out of the assumptions at the beginning. It was Cartesian in orientation. The idea was, at the end, you would get this absolute certainty.

Then in the fifth place, modernism increasingly attracted naturalism. That is to say increasingly people working in this domain.… It took a long time before they became the majority, but increasingly people working in this domain adopted the assumptions of naturalism. That is, beyond what is there in the physical universe (matter, energy, space, and time) there is nothing.

Now because the world increasingly squeezed God out, there was less and less place for the kind of modernist who still in the back of his mind had a god presupposed there who would anchor things if a wheel came off. You see, Descartes, when he said, cogito ergo sum.… Yes, at one level, he was doubting everything. But he didn’t really doubt everything. He doubted everything for the sake of communicating the truth of Catholicism to others.

It was a methodological ploy, and at the end of the day, he still felt entirely secure because he still believed in God. He still believed in revelation. Do you see? As a result, the full fruits of modernism did not come out to full expression, because for many, many people using the assumptions of modernism, the epistemology of modernism, still behind the scene there was a god hiding back there, and he could anchor everything if a wheel came off.

Now with rising numbers of people being naturalists, then the argument became, “How do you move from any modernist base of epistemology to any knowledge of God?” People think so differently. There is no agreed foundation. All the I’s think somewhat differently. Gradually modernism was becoming more and more uncomfortable with itself.

Now there’s one more element I should mention in modernism before we see what happened after that. It is sometimes called ahistorical universality, which basically means nothing more than that. Whatever truth is discovered or claims to be discovered by modernism is the same truth for all people, at all times, everywhere.

If you’re a chemist, if you discover there are two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in one water molecule, then there are two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in one molecule of water whenever, wherever, at every time and space. It’s a universal truth. Because that’s the foundational epistemology throughout the culture, the same is judged to be the case in every area. If you write a systematic theology and you get it right, then that systematic theology is true for 1990s Britain, 1540s Geneva, and 2030s Nigeria. It doesn’t matter!

You might have to add a few bits people haven’t thought about and make some minor corrections because you won’t get it all right every time, but on the other hand, insofar as a theology is an accurate reflection of the givens … in this case, the Bible … it actually works through things properly, then this theology is as true as knowledge of what the water molecule is true, for all people, at all times, in every place.

The difficulty is increasingly people compared what they discovered in the realm of theology or in historical construction or in many, many realms and discovered, “Oh what the Latin fathers thought is not quite what Aquinas thought, which is not quite what Luther thought, which is not quite what Whitefield thought, which is not quite what Wesley thought.” On and on and on. All these people are claiming objectivity, claiming the truth, and they disagree!

The very claim of ahistorical universality (that is, of truth that is true everywhere, at all times, in every place, for every race) began to break down, even though it lay at the very heart of the definition of modernism. So much then for modernism. I’ve already hinted at how modernism began to decay.

Because it was no longer anchored in a being that knew everything, it had the seeds of its own destruction built right into its very core. It has been said modernism sired a bastard, postmodernism, which turned around and devoured its father. That is to say it sired an illegitimate child in the sense that what it sired was no longer modernism. It sired something else.

But it sired it all right because there were intrinsic weaknesses to modernism such that if the trends continued, eventually it would have to produce something like postmodernism. But it was illegitimate from any modernist perspectives. It was a different way of looking at things. Then when it was finished, it turned around and ate its parent. Now that is largely what is going on today.