The Interpretation of the Bible in a Postmodern World: Part 5

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

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Let me take three or four minutes to tell you where we’ve been. I’ve tried to define postmodernism, not in terms of aesthetics, art, impression versus expression, subjectivity alone, or anything like that but in terms of epistemology, a fundamental shift in Western culture in the area of epistemology.

We have moved from a medieval and Reformation perspective in which the knowledge of God, whose knowledge is infinite, operated as the control into the modernist period where it was thought one could build up entire systems of knowledge from human assumptions, from certain foundations and certain methods that would guarantee transcultural, transracial, and translinguistic truth that was eternally and objectively true, for all time, for all people, everywhere.

Then we moved into postmodern times, which have argued that because all human knowers are finite and are historically, culturally, racially, and linguistically determined; therefore, all human knowing is necessarily subjective (in some measure distorted). Even if there is such a thing as objective truth, which most postmodernists would deny, we have no access to it. So it comes out of the same thing as saying that it doesn’t exist; therefore, in this kind of world, the view of tolerance changes.

It’s no longer a question of saying, “I have strong views as to what the truth is, but I allow you to be wrong and to express your opinions.” Rather, it is now a question of saying, “The only wrong view is the view that says that other people are wrong.” That view is dogmatically wrong, and then it has a whole lot bearing on how you view proselytism and how you view truth claims whatsoever.

Truth now is either a personal thing or it belongs to the domain of the interpretive community. It has a lot of bearing even on the law of non-contradiction and things like this that we have not yet really gone into. So then I tried to show this has a bearing on how you go and handle texts. It has a bearing in almost every discipline.

Law is in a crisis in intellectual circles in this country, and most countries of the Western world, precisely because the question is whether or not interpreters of law (high court judges) should try to follow the intent of the original framers of law or a certain tradition or whether or not it should be reinterpreted to meet the contemporary needs. Is that the function of the judicial branch or is it the function of the legislative branch?

The same is true in the area of history, the arts, cultural anthropology, and so on, and it is in the sciences, at least in the philosophy of science. So this is an undergirding sea change in Western epistemology that many people today who understand postmodernism in epistemological terms think is as epochal as the dawning Renaissance.

In other words, the sea change is that significant, and because of that, apologetics changes a wee bit, for example. I tried to indicate how a postmodernist would respond to traditional evidentialist and presuppositionalist apologetics and so forth.

Now if I’ve used a whole lot of words that you don’t understand, don’t worry about it. That was an attempt to summarize really quickly. Just believe me. It’s a big problem. What we started last time, and what we’ll do this time, is try to argue our way back into things. Then tomorrow I will spend more time finishing that off and then showing how this has a bearing on interpreting texts, evangelism, and a number of other things.

I tried to argue, in beginning to argue back, that it is important to say that there are some strengths in postmodernism. A thoughtful Christian who really is familiar with the Bible and something of the history of Western thought will not want to be either quite a modernist or a postmodernist. There are some things to be learned from both heritages, but we don’t want to be locked into either epistemology. I tried to work that out a wee bit.

I also argued that practical experience shows that some accurate communication is possible. For example, someone who writes a book on deconstruction, which we looked at in the last two days as well, does not want to be misunderstood by book reviewers. The review may be fair or unfair, may be astute or not astute, but the writer of the book does not want to have his or her work misrepresented. Thus, at least in his or her work, the author is actually daring to connect authorial intent with text. “That’s not what I meant. It’s not what I said.” Do you see?

So although postmodernism has meant that truth has moved from the writer, to the text, and now to the reader of the text, so that it’s all in the reader bouncing off the text that the meaning now is located, in fact, once the deconstructionist explains all of this in a book which is reviewed, he or she expects his or her authorial intent in writing that text to be respected.

So the question has to be asked, “Why not extend the same courtesy to Paul or to God, if he is a talking God?” Now that is not a theoretical rebuttal in the slightest. It is merely an ad hoc response to raise a flag and say, “There has got to be something wrong with the system if it doesn’t work better than that.” Now let us attempt something a little closer.

1. Very frequently, postmodernists offer us antitheses, absolute antitheses, which in my judgment are indefensible.

They skew the debate. They offer us either this or that, and because they can show it’s not this; therefore, it must be that. You can’t really get back in the debate until you say, “Hey, wait a minute. That’s not an antithesis I buy.”

For example, if you can show that human beings do not have exhaustive, absolute, proportioned knowledge about some particular subject (or for that matter about any subject), does it necessarily follow that, therefore, they cannot be said to truly know anything? That’s the antithesis that’s offered. You either know wholly, exhaustively, truly, absolutely, or quite frankly you’re up a creek without a paddle. You don’t really know anything at all.

Now there are lots and lots of examples of that in the literature. One of my favorites that I’ve used before is one by Paul de Man. This one is drawn from American television, but it is such a good example I have to tell it to you anyway. Are you familiar with Archie Bunker? A few of you are but not too many. Well, this is probably a blessed relief.

Archie Bunker in American television was a character in a series of programs (now defunct or in reruns) in which Archie represents the sort of prototypical redneck: a blue-collar, right-wing, anti-everybody sort of person. This was a comedy, believe it or not. He was anti-black, anti-woman, anti-left … basically a blue-collar, sort-of funny, right-wing bigot. In part, the point of the whole series was to spoof this kind of attitude in every sort of way. It was really uproariously funny and very effective.

In the series, his wife Edith is a bit of a twit and is constantly setting him up for his one-liners. In one of these programs, she comes in, and she’s cleaned his bowling boots. She says, “Archie, do you want your bowling boots laced up or down?” He says, “Ah, what’s the difference?” She says, “Well, the difference is, Archie, that if you take the laces and you start from the bottom and you go up, then you’re lacing them up. If you start from the top and go down, then you’re lacing them down.”

Paul de Man takes this example, and he says, “You see? Even in so simple an expression as ‘What’s the difference?’ by which Archie means [this is Paul de Man’s quote] ‘I don’t give a damn.’ She has understood instead, ‘What is the difference between lacing up and down?’ and, therefore, has to explain it. Therefore, even in so simple an expression as this, we see vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.”

In case you don’t know what that means, let me explain. It took me years to figure out what these chaps were talking about. Vertiginous has to do with something that’s very steep, like a cliff. You can speak of a vertiginous cliff. So this is a high, steep cliff of referential aberration. That is, an aberration, something that’s out of kilter with respect to what is being referred to. So here is a steep cliff of difference, of what might be expected in his expression, as to what is being referred to.

Of course, this fits into his larger argument that, at the end of the day, communication in a clear, direct sense, understanding what people meant, authorial intent.… It’s impossible. Even in a three-word expression like “What’s the difference?” there are these vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.

I want to say, “Give me a break.” The only person who didn’t understand what was going on here was Edith. That’s why it was funny. Everybody else in the audience, millions of them all around the country, are killing themselves laughing because they do see both meanings and understand that Edith didn’t understand it. That’s why it’s funny! It’s awful to have to explain a joke, but that’s what you have to do. The only other person who didn’t understand it, as far as I can see, is Paul de Man.

So you’re offered these absolute antitheses. You either go this way or you go that way, and this is very common in this literature. Now part of the irony in all of this, it seems to me, is that a secure, mature postmodernist can be very, very slippery with the law of non-contradiction. That is to say, we are being offered extreme opposites, and you have to choose one or the other, yet the same people will want to argue that you don’t have to choose between A and not A at the same time and the same place.

The law of non-contradiction is one of the axioms of logic. That is, something cannot be simultaneously A and not A at the same time and the same place, and the law of non-contradiction is very important wherever you have any strong notion of truth. I would want to argue that Christians must maintain the law of non-contradiction, the law of the excluded middle, and two or three other things, not because they are revealed in Scripture but simply because they are reflective of the way things are.

They are reflective of any possibility of communication whatsoever. Now I would be prepared to justify that at great length, and perhaps we’ll push that a little farther in questions and answers later. What is somewhat ironic here is that many postmodernists are really quite sloppy on the law of non-contradiction, and yet when it serves them, they insist on a complete antithesis where you must choose one or the other! If you’re a consistent postmodernist, which is almost a contradiction in terms, then you surely could say both, couldn’t you?

Let me give you an illustration. One of the most important religious pluralists in the Western world nowadays is John Hick. John Hick has moved, over the last two and a half or almost three decades now, from a more or less evangelical stance on what the gospel means to a position of radical pluralism. Let me tell you the steps that he has taken to get there as judged by the succession of his publications.

He perceived that in the first instance, if you hold a high view of Christ with all of his claims for being the unique God made flesh, for offering a unique sacrifice on the cross, then you are necessarily excluding as equally primal truth claims the voices of Judaism, Islam, and so forth. Therefore, in the first instance, he reduced Christology.

He said that to have unity and parity among the religions, you must emphasize simply the godhood of God. Different religions have different emphases on God. Islam has a certain emphasis. Christianity has a certain emphasis. Judaism has a certain emphasis, but we all believe in the godhood of God at least. Do you see?

Then as time went on, he perceived that was going to raise problems, not only with polytheistic cultures.… Well, start with polytheistic cultures. Some cultures have more than one god, so now you must not simply focus on God. That’s fine for monotheism. Now you must focus on the realm of the divine, God(s), and so some of his books were coming out in that way for a while.

Then he perceives, as his vision of pluralism expands, that when you move into the most common branches of Buddhism, for example, there is no notion of a personal transcendent god at all, or even of a personal god. Buddhism, in most of its forms, is profoundly pantheistic. So you cannot speak of God meaningfully in that kind of dimension at all. The referent again is entirely different.

So now in his most recent books, he speaks of Reality. Now what he is looking for is a common denominator behind all the religions so that he can say that all of the religions are equally an avenue to Reality, because you can’t say God, so that in some traditions there’s polytheism, in other traditions there’s monotheism, in some traditions it’s henotheism, in some monotheistic traditions there’s a trinitarianism, and so on. Behind all of this is some profound Reality, but they’re all equally accesses to that Reality.

If you try saying to him, “Yes, but how do you have any notion of commonness toward this Reality when on so many fronts these different accesses are mutually contradictory? One says there’s only one God; another says there are lots of gods. One says that God is a transcendent being; the other says that he is finite. One says that he is transcendent and personal; the other says he’s pantheistic, and he has no personhood at all, let alone being transcendent.

One says that the primary problem is misplaced karma or you don’t know your identity in the universe; another one says the primary problem is rebellion and that sin has to be atoned for. What do you do with all of that?” These are mutually exclusive ways, besides the fact that within each religion there are (except in the synchronistic religions) exclusive claims inherent to the very structure of thought. “No one comes to the father except by me.” Or, “There is one God; his name is Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

You have structures of thought that are intrinsic to the various religions that are exclusive. What do you do with all of that? Well, he’s prepared to say that all of those things are merely reflections of the internal logic of those various systems, but the ultimate truth, the ultimate Reality, transcends all of that. We don’t have any direct access to it. We have no way of getting at it but through one tradition or another. Each tradition is equally true in whatever it’s claiming and saying within that interpretive community. None of them has a leg up.

Am I missing something? Sooner or later, doesn’t that invoke something about the law of non-contradiction? Well, not for him it doesn’t, because he wants to argue that behind all these surface appearances and surface claims is a deeper logic, a deeper mystery, a deeper Reality to which you have no access. Sooner or later I want to ask, “How do you know that?” It’s an epistemological question again. “How do you know that?”

It seems to me that the only thing that he knows from all of this is that this must be the case because he has already bought into radical hermeneutical pluralism. That is already his god, and everything else must be made to fit; if you strain things like the law of non-contradiction, so be it. Do you see?

In other word, not only does postmodernism tend to offer us indefensible antitheses, but in my view there’s a certain really rather sad irony in all of this. Many of the more extreme forms of this sort of thought are at the same time offering us such basic departures from elementary logic that their own antitheses don’t even stand up very well.

2. Models drawn from science are of some, but limited, use and it is important to understand why this is so.

I mentioned a day or two ago that Gresham Machen, who is one of the heroes of this century in my view, though entirely cast within a confessional Christian evangelical modernist frame …

For those of you who are new, modernist and postmodernist have to do only with epistemology as I use it. I’m not saying that a person who’s modernist in epistemology is modernist in politics, social dynamics, theology, or anything else. I’m just talking about epistemology.

A) Gresham Machen argued that Christianity is, in many respects, like science. Both have a certain basis, a source for information: the natural world and the Bible. Both have certain foundational axioms and methods that are deployed in order to come to the truth. So there’s a science of chemistry, a science of physics, and a science of theology. When you crank the hermeneutical handle appropriately, out comes “the truth” in some domain or another.

He actually draws an example with chemistry in this respect that he teases out at great length. In both cases there has to be a competent chemist or a competent theologian. The nature of the competencies are a bit different, but in both cases you have to have people who know the foundations, know the methods, are competent in them, and can turn the cranks and out comes the truth. So there’s a whole history in Western theological formation that compares what you’re doing when reading the Bible with a sort of modernist view of science.

Now what I’d want to argue is models from science are of some, but decidedly limited, use and it is important to understand why this is so. Let’s take an analogy. Chemistry will teach you, in any decent high school text, that the water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen.

The formation of the resultant molecule is so extraordinary that the orbitals form a kind of tetrahedron such that, as the temperature drops, there is actually a greater density at four degrees centigrade before these things come together in a solid mass that we call ice. The orbitals actually connect to form ice in such a way that they’re more hollow spaces, we might say. Therefore, this is actually less dense than at four degrees, when the greater density means that water goes to the bottom of the lake or the bottom of the river.

This means that water, unlike any other fluid (any other common fluid at least) freezes from the top down, which is very convenient for the fish. If this weren’t the case, we’d kill all the fish every year in fresh water sources. You can calculate your energy levels in the various orbitals and use the new physics to express this in complex mathematics and so on, but every chemist knows this. Everybody in A-level chemistry knows it. You don’t have to do advanced degrees and all of that.

Moreover, chemistry will say this is true. This is true in Ecuador, where they don’t have a lot of ice, but where they do, it works the same way. It’s true in Britain. It’s true regardless of your race. It’s true everywhere. The only people who might not think it’s true are people without any training in basic science. If they have any chemistry at all, they’ll know that it’s true. Won’t they? It doesn’t matter what language you’re in.

So we might say, “Similarly in Christianity, the resurrection is true. It’s true for every race. It’s true for every people. It’s true for every language group. The resurrection is a real space-time event. The tomb was empty. Christ rose in a resurrected body. There were witnesses, and this is true for all people everywhere. It is not true for just some people. Moreover, anybody who doesn’t see that it’s true is, quite frankly, incompetent in this area.”

Now if I tried to put forward that argument in a modernist university setting (not a postmodernist) what I would be told is “No, no. Wait a minute now. There are all kinds of people who don’t think that is true who are perfectly competent in interpretation of texts. They don’t think Christ really rose from the dead. They think that the witnessed lied, were deluded or mistaken, or hallucinated.

This is not true in the same way that the density of water at four degrees centigrade is denser than at zero degrees centigrade. It’s not true in the same way. The one is a fact. The other is just an opinion.” Isn’t that how modernists thought handles these kinds of things?

Well, if you were a Machen, you would come back and say, “No, no. What you must see is that what you mean by competence in each case changes the debate a little bit. You see, there are all kinds of illiterate pygmies in the jungles of Papua New Guinea who know nothing about chemistry. If you try to explain this to them, quite frankly, they’d think that you’re cracked. They’ve never even seen ice, let alone talking about densities and orbitals and things like that, and they would disagree with you.”

You would say, “Ah yes, but they’re not competent in the discipline.” “Right. Well, over here, you’re not competent either unless you’re genuinely a believer and have come to see the truth, because the truth is public truth. One of the competencies that is required is that you genuinely be a believer.” This side is going to say, “Wait a minute. If you’re a believer, then you’ve opted into the system.”

You come back and say, “Yes, but over here if you’re a believer, you opted into the system too. It’s a cultural difference, isn’t it?” “Yes, but everybody in every cultural believes this over here.” “Yes, but there are people in all kinds of cultures over here.… There are African Christians, there are Ecuadorian Christians, there are Papua New Guinean Christians. There’s probably a greater diversity of people on the face of the earth that believe that Jesus rose from the dead than there are people who believe in suborbitals for water molecules. So what’s the difference between a fact and an opinion?”

Now that’s the kind of apologetic I might have resorted to in a purely modernist setting 20 years ago. What would happen now in a postmodern setting? Now the postmodernist would say, “Look. Behind this whole theory of orbitals and everything else stands a whole lot of stuff that isn’t really all that nailed down yet between quantum physics and the new physics. The whole models of how these things work could change a great deal yet.

There’s nothing that’s all that solid. Oh, yes, ice happens. Yes, of course. We all agree ice happens, but the whole undergirding theory of how it all.… Yes you can fly a plane. Thermodynamics works, but the undergirding theory of how it works could change massively yet, and over on this side it still is only opinion. You know, you have some believers who think some things and some unbelievers who think other things. On both sides there is a measure of opinion.”

Then how do you respond to that? Well, there are some differences that have to be introduced here, it seems to me. Very important differences. The nature of the hard sciences is such that even though there may well be undergirding theories (that Polanyi calls tacit knowledge), undergirding things that are not testable (or not testable yet) or they’re based on assumptions and so on.… Despite all of that, there are on so many levels repeatable controls.

That is, the very nature of scientific experimentation in the hard sciences is that you can perform tests again and again in different laboratories around the world under controlled conditions to show that certain things come out certain ways. Now they will be nestled into larger theories, which may be disputed and occasionally overturned, but you can at least get that degree of agreement precisely because you can get that degree of repetition.

Now when you come to something like Christianity, one of the reasons why you can’t get that degree (it’s only one) of agreement is because what is at stake is the very nature of the discipline. Christianity, in this respect, belongs to the discipline of history. The historian can’t repeat things. There are no experimental controls.

There are rules for the discipline about how you use primary sources above secondary sources, how you try to read them within their own context, and so on, but at the end of the day, you cannot get the massive agreement between historians as to the meaning of the Reformation that you can among chemists as to the density of water. You can find out what the density of water is; it’s quite easy to do in a laboratory. One could do it in 15 minutes right here in front of you.

A Marxist historian like Christopher Hill can read the Reformation documents and feel that the Reformation is best explained primarily in terms of class conflict, economic injustice, social groupings, and so on. That was the dominant Marxist interpretation of the entire Reformation period until it came about that there are very few Marxist historians left or they’ve all become Trotskyites without admitting it, but that’s another issue.

So the intriguing thing in this respect is not a clash, it seems to me, between hard science (fact) and religion (opinion) but between repeatable tests in a domain of putative knowledge and access to things that happen in the past (history). You see, in that sense, Christianity is fundamentally different from Buddhism.

In Buddhism, if you could show that Gautama the Buddha never lived, it wouldn’t make a scrap of difference because Buddhism stands or falls not by whatever happened to Gautama. It stands or falls, finally, by the coherence, appeal, and believability of a philosophical system. With Christianity, if you could prove that Jesus never lived, if you could demonstrate on high order of probability that the resurrection never took place, Christianity is done. It’s gone. Finished.

Why? Because of what some people have called the scandal of historical particularity. That is to say, there is something scandalous about the eternal God invading space-time history and doing something once to which we have access only by witnesses. That is the nature of the Christian claim. It turns on historical witness.

Does that mean, therefore, we’re reduced to not knowing truly because we cannot know absolutely? Maybe the witnesses were drunk. Maybe they did hallucinate. Maybe our sources are a bit skewed. Maybe more radical critics are right. Because you cannot know these things absolutely and exhaustively are we, therefore, thrust back then to this sort of non-testable area where, in fact, things are open for grabs?

Thus it is important to understand that although models from the hard sciences have been drawn to support Christianity, in a postmodern world what is really happening is they’re undermining Christianity. You see, the conservatives were saying, “Look. There are some things in the religious historical realm that are epistemologically just like science. If you can be sure about science, you can be sure over here as well.”

Now we come to a postmodern world. The postmodernists are doing their best to undermine science, and so they’re saying there’s no support here, there’s no support there, there’s no support anywhere. You’ve got your absolute antitheses. You can’t know things absolutely; therefore, you can’t know anything at all. Now that’s the nature of the contemporary debate. Having said all of that …

3. There are some models, it seems to me, that glean the best of the new hermeneutic and of radical hermeneutics and so on, without destroying all objective truth.

There are some models that are very helpful. I have mentioned a couple of these models before at “We’re Alive” just briefly in passing where I was talking about the new hermeneutic. A couple of them I’ll mention briefly, and then I want to tease out another one, one that has been developed in other fields, at more length to show you what is at stake and some of the way back.

You’ll recall that I put on the screen the other day the hermeneutical circle, in which instead of having a subject asking questions to an object with the object giving straight answers back, you’re starting to strike glancing blows, which give slanting answers, until eventually it’s not quite sure who’s asking the question and who’s giving the answer. You go round and round. You have a hermeneutical circle.

There’s no place where there’s any assured truth. The kind of question you ask today may not be the kind of question you ask tomorrow. There is no eternal truth left. Well, the question is.… Can this model be turned just a wee bit so that you think of the truth, not so much at the periphery of the circle, at the circumference, but right in the center, so that, in due course, the circles become smaller and smaller, and you spiral in and in without necessarily ever hitting the center bullseye but getting in closer and closer?

We’ll leave the question of whether you can hit the center open for a moment. Now doesn’t that conform much more to our experience? You start reading a text in a new area, and you make all kinds of interpretive mistakes because you don’t know what the debates are about or what the categories are.

You make all kinds of mistakes, but as you read and reread, read the surrounding material, approach the material again and again, then you get in a little closer and a little closer. Each cycle around brings you in a little closer. Isn’t that the way things actually work in the real world? Now it’s only a model, but it surely is offering us a model other than the absolute antithesis. That is what is you must destroy in debate with postmoderns, the absolute antithesis: either you enjoy all knowledge or you have no knowledge.

In fact, can’t you get in closer and closer so that you have approximate knowledge? Now what does that mean? Another model that is sometimes used … this was developed in Germany in connection with the new hermeneutic … is called the fusion of horizons. They spoke of what is now called in English distanciation and then the fusion of horizons. Horizontverschmelzung. It sounds much better in German, doesn’t it?

What was meant by this was an analogy. All of your biases, all of your baggage, all of your prejudices, all of your assumptions, all of your knowledge, all of your claims to knowledge, and all of your presuppositions are likened to a kind of horizon that you see out there. When you look out, that’s what you see just because of who you are. That’s your horizon of understanding.

So when Paul writes, he has a certain kind of horizon out there. Now you come along and read, and you have a certain kind of horizon out there. The question is then.… How is it possible so to fuse your horizon of understanding with the horizon of understanding of Paul that you can move stuff from one landscape to the other with reasonable accuracy? Now it’s an analogical model, but it’s still a useful model for discussion’s sake.

The argument was that, to some degree, you can do this if you distance yourself from your own culture, if you distance yourself from your own biases so far as it’s possible, and read yourself into that culture, horizon, bias, or assumption so that, so far as it is possible, you effect a decent fusion. Then you can make some reasonably accurate transfer of information across.

So that, for example, when I read the New Testament, finally I’ve got to read something in Greek. Well, I can read it in translation, but if I want to fuse a little better, then I’ve got to learn some Greek. Then I’ve got to find out what Greek words mean, how syntax works, what the bias is, how the Old Testament is quoted, what kind of assumptions are there, the social structures of the day. That’s why we have seminaries and theology colleges, isn’t it, in order to help people to read back into that world in order to become better interpreters of the Word of God?

In principle we’ve all recognized this except that we haven’t always used the language of fusing horizons. Then when you start saying that this same person now goes and becomes a missionary, then he or she has to learn another horizon, don’t they? They have to learn another culture all over again.

I remember once in Cambridge, a young Japanese woman who’d been attending some meetings came up to me one Sunday afternoon and said, with charming courtesy in an accent I couldn’t possibly begin to imitate, “I would like you to explain to me sin and the Trinity.” I wanted to say, “In that order.” Now I could understand her problem with the Trinity. Yes. I mean, that doesn’t mean I could help her, but I could at least understand her problem.

I didn’t have a clue what her problem was with sin, until by probing, questioning, figuring out where she was coming from, and pushing a little bit, I discovered that in Japanese there’s no distinction in the vocabulary between sin and crime. So that every time you say in English, “All people are sinners,” she was hearing, “All people are criminals.” So then one has to start distinguishing for her criminal before the social system or criminal before God.

In other words, she was having a whole problem with something that I judged to be absolutely axiomatic, partly because of vocabulary, partly because of her Shinto background, and it wasn’t even possible to make any headway toward the cross until we made some headway on basic issues of fusion of horizons.

Now, in this case, it was my responsibility to fuse my horizon of understanding with hers, having already fused my horizon of understanding with the apostles, in order to bring the information across in two hops. We’ve recognized that for a long time. It’s only a model, but it’s a useful model.

The trouble is, of course, you can never get so inside the head of Paul, or anybody else, that you can make the transfer absolute. We may understand a little better than we did, but we may still have the odd question around, even after those expositions. In fact, one of the effects of good training is that you have more questions, just at a higher level, but does that mean we don’t understand Paul at all? It’s that antithesis coming back again, isn’t it? You either understand Paul exhaustively or you don’t have any knowledge of Paul at all.

Now let’s try another example. For the non-mathematicians amongst us, this illustration is an XY axis. X is the horizontal line; Y is the vertical line. The purple stroke in the illustration with a little arrow at the end is an asymptote. That is, it is a line that is approaching the X-axis and gets closer and closer to it but never touches. That’s called an asymptotic approach. All of contemporary calculus is based on it. Without calculus, you can’t put people on the moon.

All the theoretical formation of the branch of mathematics that we call calculus that deals with all the complex problems of time-space-motion turns on taking little bits of things, little differences … hence, differential calculus. Then you add them all up again by various tricks. That’s integrating them. That’s integral calculus. So one speaks of differential and integral calculus, and all of the mathematics that we use to put people on the moon depends on.… You can’t put people on the moon (and get them back) without calculus.

The intriguing thing is that all of this turns, in effect, on approximations because that wretched asymptote never touches the line, but it’s so close that it’s as good as. That’s the way calculus works. Now then, with this still in mind, picture Johnny. Age 7, from a fine Christian home, steeped in an early catechism, parents who’ve taught him Scripture, memorizing chapters of the Word of God, family prayers at night, good Sunday school.

Now you’re a visitor in the home, and you want to know just how much this kid has really learned about the Bible. So you say, “Johnny, do you believe that God loves you?”

“Oh, yes. We sing it in Sunday school. ‘Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.’“

“What do you mean the Bible tells you? Is there some place in the Bible that tells you, ‘God loves Johnny’? How do you know God loves you?” Now this kid has been well taught. So he thinks there very pensively for a moment, and he says, “Well, my Sunday school teacher says that, ‘God so loves the world that he gave his only Son,’ and I’m part of this world.”

Now then, the question is this, “Does Johnny understand John 3:16?” Before you answer, reflect on the fact that Johnny, whatever theological acumen he may or may not have, doesn’t know a scrap of Greek. He doesn’t know, for example, that the word world in Greek is kosmos, and that in Johannine usage in John’s gospel, it primarily has to do, not with a big world or the fullness of the world, but the world in rebellion against God.

In John 3:16, when we are told that God so loved the word we’re to think of God’s love as pretty wonderful, not because the world is so big but because the world is so bad. Despite the fact that this whole world is in rebellion against him, yet God loves it anyway because he’s that kind of God. Moreover, Johnny doesn’t know anything about the verb agapao, the verb to love. He’s never done any word studies, never entered any debates about the connection between agapao and phileo or other terms.

Moreover, the rest of it, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” “Only begotten?” Or, “One and only Son?” Is this referring to the “eternal generation of the Son,” to use the language of the ancient creeds? Or is it talking about the virgin birth? Or maybe the NIV is right. “God so love the world that he gave his one and only Son.” We don’t even know which Son!

Then that “son” language, it’s awfully ambiguous, isn’t it? I mean in some parts of the Bible, angels are sons. We’re all sons of God by adoption. Jesus is son. What does “son” mean anyway? Does God have a son? You know what Muslims think? Street Muslims now, not educated ones. Street Muslims think that Christians think that God had sex with Mary and produced a son. That’s the Trinity: God, Mary, and the son. They think it bizarre, and they’re right. It is.

The Hindus have sons of god too. What kind of notion of son.… Does Johnny know anything about Hindu belief on the son of God? Does he know whether or not son of God in the Jewish categories in which this book was written can actually have reference to a messianic apocalyptic figure? So we could go on. Now tell me, does Johnny understand the text?

You see, if your name is Paul de Man here, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Stanley Fish, or a whole lot of others, you are going to say resoundingly, “No. No. No,” but I think you have to say the answer is, “Yes. He does understand.” He does not understand deeply. He does not understand without some distortion. He does not understand exhaustively. He does not understand with an adult mind, but he does understand, in some measure, truly.

Or, to use the X-Y axis illustration, if the X-axis represents the absolute truth, he might be close. Now if he thought that John 3:16 were really talking about thermonuclear physics, then he’d be very far from the X-axis. In other words, you can be right off the scale. If you are only 2 years old and thought of God’s love entirely in terms of a sort of grandfatherly image who gives him cuddles more or less like his mummy and daddy before he gets tucked in at bed at night, then maybe he’s just barely on the graph.

After he’s done a PhD in a British university on “John’s Theology against Jewish Background” or something, well maybe he’s a bit closer or, on the other hand, he might be all the way off the chart. Now stretch forward about 40 billion years into eternity, if I may speak of eternity in the categories of time.

Has Johnny now, after 40 billion years in eternity, touched the line? Nope, because to touch the line, to touch it absolutely so that on any subject you know the truth, not only truly but exhaustively and absolutely … that is, all that is connected with it in all of its connections, overtones, undertones, all the things that it might be related to, and so on … that requires omniscience, and you will never have that kind of knowledge. You will not have omniscience. You would have to be God.

Surely we want to say that Johnny understands the text truly, don’t we? In other words, when the Bible says things like (as it does to Theophilus at the beginning of Luke and at the beginning of Acts), “I’m writing these things to you that you may know the certainty of the things …” Do you see? Or when you read in 1 John 5, “I write to you that believe that you might know that you have eternal life.”

It’s not promising the knowledge that belongs only to God. What it’s promising is existential certainty. That is, certainty where you are in your own existence right now, based on very good reasons because the stuff that you’re supposed to know is, in fact, true. It is not promising that kind of knowledge that can belong only to omniscience.

What we are being offered in postmodern debate is, in fact, an absolute antithesis between omniscient knowledge and ignorance. Prick that bubble every time you can. It is folly past belief. You see, the reason why it exists is precisely because we have moved from a stance back in history where the assumption of all human epistemology was an omniscient God!

Having abandoned an omniscient God, if you try to build up an entire system of epistemology based on finitude, you are left with finitude, and if, at the end of the day, you then try to extrapolate onward to God to make absolute truth claims, you will always be left with some measure of finitude until, eventually, the pretentiousness of modernism gets pricked, and somebody reacts the other way and says, “This proves that there is no real knowledge at all. It’s all subjective,” and then you’ve got postmodernism.

Now let me pause there for question and comments. That is one of the most important points I will make in these four days. It’s still got to be worked out in a number of areas yet, but it’s an extremely important point.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don Carson: Yes. I tried to say those sorts of things in the opening day. That is to say, in the modernist world, there is still a vision of truth out there to be gained. You see, you can read modernists like John Henry Newman, who can say things like, “Sometimes in my darkest hours, when I read the arguments of a Socinian [one of the local heretics at the time], I am not sure that his arguments are any worse than mine, and I’m not sure who’s entirely correct. The only thing that keeps me going is the sure and certain knowledge that there is a truth, finally, to be perceived …” and so on.

That’s still a modernist world. In a modernist world, you may admit that people have differences of opinion, that there are limitations on human capacity, that in some areas you’re going to have to leave some question open, but there is always, in a modernist world, the assumption that there is an absolute truth to be gained. Either OJ Simpson is guilty or he’s not, regardless of what the jury says. Either Christ rose from the dead or he didn’t, regardless of what various critics say. There’s truth to be gained.

In a postmodernist world, even if there is truth, you’ve got no access to it, and most would say there is no absolute truth in any case. Truth is bound up with a category that is tied to the subjective or to the interpretive community, but the underlying philosophy in all of that is still the assumption that you’ve got this antithesis that you’ve got to work with. Either this or that. You can’t have this; therefore, you’ve got that. That’s the way it works.

So you have to use models, explanations, and claims again and again to prick those pretentions. You have to do it. You cannot get into the debate without debunking that one.

Male: On the model of the spiral, what sets it spinning? Why start? You could stay stationary on the outside. What gets you going into the inside?

Don: First a general comment. All of these models are only models. Like all models, like all analogies, they only work in some dimensions and not in others. That’s true for all analogies. In this particular case, if you’d abstract it from debate about Christianity for a moment, then I would want to argue that all human experience tells you that all humans, without exception, who think at all (except those who are in a vegetative state) do some spiraling in. It is inevitable. It is part of growing up, increasing your exposure to a tactile world, and so on.

Now if you’re asking what gets people spinning into questions about Christian truth claims, that’s a slightly different matter because, in the first instance, I’m not talking about Christian truth claims but about epistemology generally. What I am saying is that all human experience means that people are familiar with spiraling in. That is, in fact, what we do. We cannot help it; therefore, to claim that you’re sitting on the outside is just outside of all human experience.

Now if you say, “What gets some people to actually go into the center on a particular issue?” that’s another whole set of questions, and I will be dealing with some of those things in due course. I will come back to that question.

Male: Hasn’t the model of the spiral assumed that there is a truth to spiral into? In point of fact, you find people spiraling toward it and away from it in all kinds of directions. Haven’t you merely assumed the existence of the truth in the first instance?

Don: Yes, of course. I have, because my concern here is not to prove the truth by that model but merely to show that people do have ways of approaching things. They’re not left at an infinite distance. In other words, the model is not meant to be a fundamental response to all forms of doubt whatsoever. That’s not what the model is aiming to do. It’s merely trying to show that there are alternative models to hermeneutical absolute antithesis between complete ignorance and complete omniscience. That’s all it’s attempting to do. If you’re asking for more than that, I’ve got more to say.

Male: Haven’t you taken postmodernism at its extremes? Are there not, in fact, forms of postmodernism that insist there are certain immutables … certain rights and wrongs, certain truths and errors? For example: Green is good. Damaging the environment is bad. Not listening to other people is bad, and so on.

Don: Yes, but I would say that the most sophisticated treatment of those sorts of things by someone like David Tracy, for example, who’s addressed all of those question at great length and is a self-avowed postmodernist.… His treatment is among the most sophisticated I have seen in this area.

He has questions to say, “Now what makes you decide that green is good, damaging the environment is bad, not listening to people is bad, or genocide is bad, as opposed to a Nietzschean view, for example, that’s essentially nihilistic and that argues that power is the only reality that really makes sense of anything? Why do you choose this as opposed to that? What is your foundation? Where do you stand? For what reason do you stand there?”

He says, quite openly, in a long exposition.… I give the references for it and interact with it in my book The Gagging of God. One of the reasons I like arguing with him is because he’s honest. He’s a really honest postmodernist and sees the limits of the system.

He says, “Look. The fact of the matter is this is where we stand. If we’re intellectually on the front end and honest, arising out of modernism and of the liberal heritage of the West we cannot help being concerned about these sorts of things. With our heritage of the Holocaust, with our perception of the problems of green and the loss thereof we cannot help but take these as our stances, and therefore, even in the deconstruction of texts, we must deconstruct texts so as to reinforce those values.” That’s what he says.

I don’t think I’ve twisted his argument in the slightest. In other words, his argument is we stand here because we stand here. This is where we are in history. We choose this sort of path. But then I want to shove him back and say, “But supposing you stand in a different path at a different time in a different place? Maybe you should stand with Genghis Khan. Maybe you should stand with Nietzsche.”

That is why the most honest postmodernists, in this respect, finally do admit that at the end of the day they are unwilling to say that there is an absolute moral difference between, on the one hand, sacrifice for the sake of a cause and, on the other hand, killing your baby in a pagan cult that might have profound meaning for the cult. That’s a concrete example from the literature.

Now if you say, “Are there all kinds of postmodernists, therefore, who do try to form one branch or another of utilitarian ethics?” Yes. Yes, all over the place, of course, but when you say to them, “What is the foundation for your utilitarian ethics?” they’re either extremely slim or, like David Tracy, they say, “This is simply part of the package and heritage of the West. That is where we live,” which is an entirely existential argument.

So I would be the last one to try to argue that postmodernists have no ethics. I would push them very hard indeed to insist that they don’t have any secure ethics. In fact, in a mission in Cambridge recently, where for a couple of days at noon hours I was talking on Christ in postmodernism and trying to present the gospel in this framework, one of the most interesting conversations I had at the end of the second talk was a young man …

It suddenly flashed in my mind, the text of Jesus when the young man came to Jesus, “Jesus seeing him, loved him.” There was a certain kind of openness and transparency to him, and as I heard him talk, I thought, “Man, I like the …” I loved the guy. There was a candor to him.

He came up to me at the end of this talk, and he said to me, in effect (I’m anticipating where I’m going a bit here, but I will do that), “Look, you’re offering me one whole worldview, and I’ve got another whole worldview that is, frankly, postmodern. That’s my outlook, my worldview. You’ve got another one, and you’re saying that your worldview is better. Your whole construction of reality is different from mine. Why do you think yours is better?”

I said to him, “First, because yours won’t work and because mine is true.” Now, of course, that got a laugh from him, and I said, “The tests and congruencies that we bring to that …” That’s part of what I’ve been trying to deal with in the last two days, and I will come back to more of that sort of thing here.… I said, “Let’s just take the first point for a moment. You see, I don’t think that yours works. I don’t think that it’s stable. I don’t think that it can stand up, and one of the areas, for example, where I don’t think that it stands up is in the moral realm.”

So we started talking about that, and he said to me (and this is when I remembered the text), “To be honest, the area of postmodernism that I have most difficulty with is the moral arena. I really don’t know well how to handle that kind of problem. I see that, at the end of the day, ethics in a postmodern world are finite, reductionistic, and utilitarian, and I’m desperately uncomfortable with that, so I try not to think about it.” He’s got potential to be another David Tracy, but I’d prefer that he’d become a Christian. He was an honest young man.

So I think that, in part, just as one is trying to do a courteous, Christian demolition job on the absolute antithesis between omniscience and complete ignorance, so one has to do a demolition job in a number of other areas because one is dealing with a worldview now that, from a Christian point of view, is fallacious, and not only fallacious but damaging. Before most people will consider another alternative worldview, they’ve got to at least raise some questions about their own worldview.

So much of Christian witness in the West (this is anticipating where we’re going tomorrow, but I’ll just say this much) in the past has presupposed that people have come out of a basically Judeo-Christian background, so they’ve basically got a shared worldview, and you just give them a bit more information and press them to Christ. When suddenly you’re dealing with people from another whole worldview, then all evangelism is a worldview clash. All of it, and you have to see that.

Male: You’ve given us a postmodern view of omniscience. What would you give as a postmodern definition of ignorance?

Don: What I mean by ignorance in this discussion, in this debate.… I’ve talked about postmodern omniscience. Now that’s not a word that they would use. I was trying to put it in categories that would be explained here.

Male: They would reject that comment. What would you mean by ignorance?

Don: Ignorance of any objective truth.

Male: How would they define it?

Don: Truth that has absolute extratextual referent.

Male: Is it possible to have a concept of ignorance without a concept of truth?

Don: Well, you can get rid of the word ignorance. It doesn’t make any difference. All they’re really saying is that you cannot know anything extratextually absolutely. That’s all they’re saying; therefore, any pretentions in that regard are, in fact, either a chimera, or worse than that, an arrogant false claim.

Those are the antitheses that are offered you in terms of epistemology. In other words, you have to look at it from within their perspective. From within their perspective, you either know something truly because you know it absolutely and exhaustively or, in fact, all your claims to knowing it truly are false, ungrounded, unsafe, or insecure. That’s what they’re claiming.

In other words, for you to phrase things exactly the way you do, in fact, betrays you as a modernist. What I’m trying to argue here is that, in my view, you cannot finally get back at postmodernists with modernist debates. They’ll always win. They’ll always win. I think that you can get back at them with an entirely different worldview … to which we’re gradually coming.

4. In this respect, then, the nurturing community does play an important role.

The nurturing community can play a role, and this can be a good thing. If you ask, “Does Miss Christian, who goes off to university, believe certain things because she comes from a believing Christian community?” The answer is, “Yes!” But why should that be viewed as a bad thing?

Now just assume for a moment.… I won’t argue how … that a particular community in this respect has the truth about God, the gospel, how men and women are regenerate, and so on. Then isn’t it a good thing that she comes from a community where that sort of thing is taught, passed on, and reinforced? Isn’t it?

What I would say, however, is that just because one comes from a certain community does not mean one is infallibly and irrevocably locked into a certain referential community or a certain interpretive community. There’re all kinds of instances of devout Christians from all phenomenological perspectives becoming atheists, and the reverse. In other words, they move from one community to another community.

Sometimes it happens because there is, in fact, a meshing of people, a meshing of communities, so that they’re becoming befriended by one community and moving to another community, but sometimes it’s simpler than that. They start reading. There’s a crisis that comes up in their lives. They begin to perceive some emptiness in their own interpretive community structure, and they raise questions and don’t find sufficient answers. Then they read some more, and they move off again.

Thus, the stories (to take one example only) of conversion to Christ are, in this respect, extraordinarily diverse. You find someone like CS Lewis becoming convinced, basically on intellectual grounds, first of all of the bankruptcy of the heritage in which he’s been raised, and then gradually of the truth of the gospel. Then he bows to Christ and says, as he bows to him, that he’s the most miserable man in all of England. He hates what he’s doing but thinks that it’s the truth. This is long before he gets integrated into any sort of new community.

So that, although communities are shaping and nurturing, and very strong communities are very hard things to move out of or into, in point of fact, they’re not all determinative. One of the reasons why it is hard for many respectable middle class Japanese to become Christians is because the community is so strong. There’s family solidarity. You don’t bring shame on the family. You honor your parents. You maintain the tradition.

If you’re the chief son, you’re going to have to offer honor to your father and mother when they’ve died, and so forth. To break out of all of that safe Japanese community and become a Christian is not any easy thing to do. Now gradually that’s breaking down in Japan, but that is part of the heritage. That’s part of what makes a stable culture, a stable society.

Now in exactly the same way, you can have communities of atheists (they’re not called a community of atheists but, in fact, it’s an intellectual community), a community of agnostics, a community of existentialists, a community of fundamentalists, a community of charismatics, or whatever. Most people belong to several different communities because the communities overlap, you wear different hats, and so on, and all of those communities shape you.

Now if, in fact, God has spoken supremely in Christ, in words which may be studied and learned, not absolutely and exhaustively but nevertheless truly, it’s very important for Christians to belong to communities of the Word. That is what reforms them. That is what transforms them. That is what shapes them.

If, instead, they belong only peripherally, for ritualistic reasons or traditional reasons, to some community called the local church where, in fact, there is no transformation of the Word going on in their minds and hearts, they become secularists, atheists, or whatever it is they become. The religious sort of thing is added in on the side, but they’re not thinking in terms of God’s thoughts, God’s outlook, God’s perspective, God’s values, or God’s worldview.

There is a worldview bound up with Christianity. There’s a storyline. There’s a metanarrative, which is precisely what postmodernists will not acknowledge. Now within that framework, I would want to argue that far from a community being a bad thing or a merely enchaining thing, if it is aligned with truth that God has given, in fact, it is a liberating thing. It is a helpful thing, and communities (unless you are a complete solecist and end up in a padded room in a straightjacket) are inevitable things. Human beings are social creatures.

So the question still becomes, from a Christian perspective.… Does the community to which you give your strongest worldview allegiances conform with what God has disclosed of himself, or does it not?

5. From these perspectives, the existence of an omniscient, talking God changes everything.

Now again, I’m not trying to prove the existence of God here. I’m just trying to show you how epistemologies work and the kind of way back into the discussion that must be deployed.

You see, if there is an omniscient, that is, an all-knowing, God who is not only all-knowing but who chooses to talk in languages that his image bearers speak even though those languages are necessarily culture-laden and, therefore, limited, that God, though he may speak truly in those culture-laden forms for that particular time and place in history, cannot convey knowledge exhaustively. It is something that not even omniscience and omnipotence can do. He cannot. Not because of limitations in himself, but because of limitations in us. We’re finite.

I still haven’t dealt with sin yet! Because of limitations in us, God cannot download all that he knows in his mental computer (namely everything) into our minds, the total package (namely everything). It cannot be done because we’re finite. In the very nature of the case, therefore, although God’s self-disclosure can be true precisely because it is anchored in all the he knows, it cannot possibly be exhaustive. It cannot be absolute in that sense. It cannot be, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true.

Moreover, this God can so superintend things that in the writing of Scripture, the hand is the hand of John, the vocabulary is the hand of John, the idiom is the hand of John, but God, in his omnipotent, sovereign grace, can so superintend things that what is being said is what John wants to be said and simultaneously what God wants to be said in the language that God knows is appropriate for that time, place, culture, and so on.

Now behind the mere signifiers on the page is the reality of the love of God, not simply, “God is love.” Three signifiers, “God is love,” but his image-bearers, who are language speakers, are capable of understanding the truth that God is love without necessarily experiencing all of the dimensions of God’s love or knowing all of the dimensions of who is this God who loves or all the dimensions of what is this love that God is doing. Do you see?

You’ve changed the whole course of the debate now simply because, for the sake of argument, you are assuming an omniscient, talking God. Now when I am asked by CUs and places like that, or churches, to go and lecture on the doctrine of revelation, inerrancy, or one of those naughty words, nowadays I never begin with the sorts of places that I began with 20 years ago, not because I don’t think that it’s impossible to be done, but it seem to me that what needs to be done nowadays more than anything else, is to constitute for Christians the doctrine of God.

The fact of the matter is that in the intellectual worlds of the academy, the overwhelming majority of theoretical work done on God in the last 30 years has moved toward process thought, which I don’t have time to unpack at length. In process thought, the result is that God is restricted. He cannot know the future in process thought.

A genuinely omniscient God in traditional terms is impossible, logically impossible for various philosophical reasons. God is diminished and diminished. When I look around and ask, “What evangelical theologian is there at the very front rank that is interacting with this stuff in terms of a biblical fidelity and so on?” I don’t know one.

Male: D.A. Carson?

Don: I’m not writing on the doctrine of God. It just isn’t happening. There’s no one that’s done it. No one. I only know half a dozen people in the world who are capable of doing it at the front rank. Kevin Vanhoozer is one. Gerald Bray has the potential if he wants to do it, but there aren’t many because most evangelical theologians inevitably are bound up with the epistemology of their training, which is modernist.

So it’s a question of retooling at an epochal change to mesh with the categories that are coming down right now. Whereas most theologians’ energies are bound up, let us face it, with interacting with other theologians, even other evangelical theologians sometimes.

So what I am arguing, therefore, is that in this model in which we may speak of knowing truth truly but not absolutely or omnisciently, in which there is no absolute pattern open to the absolute knowledge of truth, nevertheless, it is still possible for an omniscient, talking God to anchor truth truly. Yes, it is, even if we cannot claim to have a perfect, exhaustive, and absolute grasp of any part of it.

Yet for all intents and purposes, it’s an asymptotic approach where we may speak in language close enough to put people on the moon (in calculus), so in language close enough to save people from hell and put them into heaven! We may explain what the cross means, that Christ did rise from the dead, what the love of God means, what faith means, and what truth means. Do you see?

We may even dare to speak, in this phenomenological human plane of the “certainty of the things that you have been taught,” to use the language of Luke. Or we may speak of “the faith once delivered to the saints,” to use the language of Jude. Or we may speak of “that you may know the assurance of the things that you have been told,” and so forth, which in no case is claiming absolute knowledge but in every case is claiming that it is possible to respond with faith and fidelity to the truth of God.

Now I have two more main points here and about two minutes. I think I’d better save them for next day, and then I want to show how this works out in the realm of texts (some of the texts I introduce the last day; I’ll come back to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and those texts) and apologetics, and then, nevertheless, some of the positive things that we can learn, even in the realm of reading texts in the more-than-rational dimensions of textual reality.