Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the Foundations of Knowledge in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Before I turn to some preliminary responses to the questions I tried to raise in the first lecture I want to mention two corollaries to postmodernism. That is to say, they are not causes and they are not effects. They contribute to postmodernism, but they are strengthened by postmodernism. As soon as I mention them, you will identify them immediately.
1. There is, in the Western world, rising biblical illiteracy.
Fewer and fewer people know their Bibles. Now that doesn’t cause postmodernism, but obviously the fewer the people that know their Bibles, the easier it is to turn toward some form of relativism. Similarly, the more committed you are, self-consciously or otherwise, to relativism, the less important the Bible will seem to be.
The degree of biblical illiteracy now is remarkable. I’ve been doing university missions for about a quarter of a century, and nowadays I wouldn’t do a university mission without explaining the difference between the big numbers and the little numbers. The university students to whom I speak very often don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They’ve never heard of Abraham, David, or Isaiah. If they’ve heard of Moses, they confuse him either with Charlton Heston or with a new cartoon character.
The limited religious vocabulary they have (god, faith, truth, spirit, Jesus) in every case means something different from what I mean. In absolutely every case. That means evangelism is more of a worldview thing than it’s ever been before. In our seminaries, we used to train those who were going to serve overseas in how to communicate the gospel cross-culturally. Nowadays, increasingly, you have to do that at home. The inherited religious language is no longer the lingua franca of the broader culture.
One of my students at Trinity some months back was downtown with his fiancÈe, who was wearing a necklace with a wooden cross hanging from it. Some teenager stopped them on the street and said, “Why are you wearing a plus sign around your neck?” This is not some esoteric passage from Zachariah, you understand. If you don’t even know what the cross is, you’re a long way away from sort of an inherited Christian culture anymore.
This, I have to say, also affects us in our theology faculties. Now if you’re going to a confessional school, it might not be quite the same thing, but I have met many, many theology students in British and American universities who’ve never read their Bibles right through. They’ve taken some sort of cram course on Romans, then done something on Isaiah, and so on. They’ve had sort of “A verse a day keeps the Devil away” devotions and that sort of thing. On the other hand, systematic reading of the whole Bible with an understanding of how the whole Bible’s history fits together is not strong anymore.
2. The pressure of rising secularization.
Secularization does not mean the abolition of religion. It means the squeezing of religion to the periphery. You can be ever so religious; it just doesn’t matter anymore. That’s a return to ancient paganism. In pagan thought, you could be ever so religious, ever so spiritual, but it didn’t affect your ethics. They were separate compartments.
It was really Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the great monotheistic religions, that insisted on a much stronger connection between spirituality and ethics. The loss, however, is considerable where you start having a kind of approach to religion that is in aid of spirituality but doesn’t affect whether you cheat on your income tax, sleep with the wrong person, maintain integrity in family relationships, have courtesy, or elevate self-denial.
From a biblical perspective, you cannot know God without pursuing those things. You cannot, but increasingly, there is a kind of approach to the study of theology and the study of Scripture that makes no direct impact on how you live, what your values are, what you do with your money, whom you love, what you say, guarding of your tongue, or what you do with your time. There’s no connection, or very little connection, between textual commitment and how you live (ethics). This is immensely disturbing.
Enough of these cheerful thoughts. Let me turn now to some preliminary responses.… Perhaps one more thing I should say. In terms of the literature you read, especially in theology and religious studies faculties, let me mention some titles, all of the last six or seven years.
McKenzie and Haynes, To Each Its Own Meaning. Exum and Clines, The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible. Charles Mabee, Reading Sacred Texts Through American Eyes. David Seeley, Deconstructing the New Testament. Stephen Moore, Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspective and Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross. Christopher Rowland and Mark Corner, Liberating Exegesis. Francis Watson, The Open Text. Tomlinson, The Post-Evangelical, and so on.
Do you see? These things are everywhere. This is not something that’s done in a corner only for esoteric people, but quite apart from these sorts of titles, it’s a great deal of the literature itself that is anti-any authoritarian claim. It’s all right to argue for almost anything provided you do not say that it has a claim to be the truth. Now then, let me come to some responses. These are merely preliminary, but I hope they will help.
There are certain strengths in postmodernism, and it’s important to see what they are. I do not want you to interpret what I’ve said simply to be a sarcastic denunciation of postmodernism. Postmodernism is not all wrong.
1. Intrinsically we perceive that there is something to it.
Intrinsically, in our own experience, we do recognize how much of our backgrounds we do bring to all interpretive tasks, don’t we? For a number of years, I chaired a unit of the World Evangelical Fellowship whose job was to bring together Bible scholars and senior pastors from all the continents, from various countries, from different language groups, and we would work on particular texts, topics, and so on.
These were agreed in advance, and I assigned the chapters to everybody. Then they’d send them all back to me, and I made copies and sent them out to everybody. Then we all met in one location, and we critiqued everyone else’s papers. Then all of those critiques were taken down and written up as notes. They went back to the individual authors who wrote them up again. They revised them, and then sent them back to me. I edited them, and out came a book. This happened five times. It was on a two-year cycle.
It was a very interesting experience from my point of view. Just watching these people come into a room was an education. In would come the German and shake everybody’s hand. If he had to go out of the room to pick up a wad of chewing gum, he’d shake everybody’s hand, then come back in the room, and shake everybody’s hand. In would come the Indian and there was lots of bowing going on.
In would come the Japanese, and you get the bowing, but the hands are straight down at the side. How far down you bow depends on the relative perception of age, seniority, how much you know, who’s more honorable, and who’s a bigger cheese then somebody else. Everybody bows down a certain direction. Then in comes the Mexican or someone from Latin America, and there are bear hugs all around and kisses on both cheeks.
If it’s an Arab, probably three kisses, and I can never remember which cheek to start on. It just gets terribly embarrassing. Then the Brit, you know. I remember one Englishman. He only came to the conference once, but he was (if I mention his name, you would all know him, so I won’t mention his name) quintessentially English.
There in his tweed coat, standing bemused in the corner with his hands behind his back, looking very English and very pious, when this 300-pound Mexican started to descend upon him. He’d never met him before, and he was, “Ah! Brother!” He came ready to give him a huge bear hug, and the Englishman said rather quickly, “Have we been introduced?” Then in comes the Yank. “Hi, everybody! Sorry I’m late!”
Just the level of greetings, all these different cultural signs. Then you get the debaters. I’m supposed to be chairing this meeting. It’s going on back and forth, and I’m trying to be evenhanded and reasonable. I turn to the brother from Japan. “You haven’t said anything yet. Would you like to comment on this passage?”
He says, “Well, it seems to me that it might be appropriate to ask the question if perhaps we should consider if the apostle Paul might have meant such and such.” The brother from Norway or from Germany, one of the northern European countries, says, “No! It can’t possibly mean that! Clearly what it means …” The Japanese brother is now convinced he’s fallen amongst a hoard of barbarians.
I will not soon forget an exposition of 1 Timothy 2 I heard from an Indian brother who argued that woman means “she whose womb is open,” because that’s what it means in Hindi; therefore, the insistence in 1 Timothy 2:15 that a woman is saved through her childbearing, from his point of view, had a very obvious interpretation.
Of course, we had some unmarried 45-year-old women in the group from the West who had a somewhat different agenda. So intrinsically, in our own experience, we soon discover that we do bring different interpretations to our texts, don’t we? Postmodernism is not entirely wrong.
2. In some ways postmodernism doesn’t go far enough from a Christian perspective.
Postmodernism, at the end of the day, turns on the observation that we are finite individuals, and because we’re finite individuals, we cannot anchor our knowledge in an omniscient reservoir. Christian theology acknowledges not only that we’re finite but that we’re fallen.
In other words, we’re not only adrift in part because we’re finite, but we’re adrift in part because of what Reform theology refers to as the noetic effects of sin. That is, the effects of sin on the nous, on the mind. We are not only finite; we’re corrupted. We’re twisted. In that sense, the critique of modernism by postmodernism is insipid.
I would want to say that Christian critique of modernism will be more extensive. Not only are we finite; we’re crooked. So of course we twist arguments. Now I would love to bring in some other ways of considering the strengths of postmodernism. Let me mention just one more. There are half a dozen more I would like to mention, but I’m going to run out of time.
3. A lot of modernism, precisely because it depended so much on a view of autonomous reason, linear thought, and so on, was painfully narrow in its assessment of how people come to know things.
People come to know things for the strangest reasons, don’t they?
I remember the odd person that I’ve led to the Lord along a very rationalist line. I remember a chap called Fred Colburn. I was pastor of a church in Vancouver at the time. We had a lot of university-age young people in the church, and one was a vivacious young woman called Peggy. A real sweetheart. Thought intuitively, very quick, vivacious.
She came to me one day after one of the services and said, “You know, there’s a chap called Fred who wants to take me out. He’s not a believer. He doesn’t know anything about Christianity at all. He plays football for the University of British Columbia. Do you think there’s any damage if I go out with him? I’d really like to witness to him.”
I said, “Go on, Peggy.” You know, pull the other one. “This ‘bearing witness to you’ on the personal evangelism; it gets corrupted so fast. Just be very careful. If you really are trying to evangelize him, then fine. Fine. Go out with him and bring him to see me.” I was pulling her leg. I was trying to warn her, trying to tell her to be careful. She took it seriously.
Saturday night I was in my study trying to prepare.… You know, last minute cramming for Sunday morning. There was a tap on my door. “Hi!” and there was Peggy with Fred. So we went out to one of the local restaurants, got some coffee, and I began to get to know Fred. He was a big guy. He was about as linear, straight, deductive, and analytic as she was bubbly, vivacious, and intuitive. It was almost stereotypical.
They came back the next week, Saturday night, without warning. You can imagine what it did to my late-night preparation. They did this for 13 or 14 weeks, and every night we went out to IHOP (the International House of Pancakes) not too far from the church and had something barbaric for that time of night. By the second week on, he brought his list of questions.
He didn’t know anything. He brought his list of questions, and I would spend two hours over coffee and whatever else we were eating answering questions. He’d go, “Okay. Thank you,” and he’d go away. He’d come back the next week with another list of questions. After 13 or 14 weeks, he said, “All right. I’m ready. I’ll become a Christian.”
I baptized him two or three weeks later. This is 25 years ago. He is a deacon of a church now, brought up two kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. A wonderful family who have been quiet influence for godliness and good in secondary education and so on. Let me tell you, of the various people that I have seen converted in my ministry in the last 30 years, there haven’t been many quite as linear as that.
You preach your heart out, explain texts, and all of that, and then when you finally lead someone to Christ, he or she says, “Well, you know, my mother’s been praying for me for a long time.” Or, “Well, it was the third verse of that song that we sang today.” People get converted for the most screwball reasons on God’s green earth.
This does not justify screwball preaching. It doesn’t. You still have to explain the gospel. Some of these things are sinking in in all kinds of ways that you don’t know about, but at the end of the day, it’s the Spirit of God who converts people. He humbles us in our arrogance by using the strangest things again and again to bring people to saving faith in Christ.
In a sense, postmodernism has opened us up to the fact that we learn all kinds of things by relationships and knowing and observing people. Intuitively we’ve known that in the postmodern world when we’ve said, “It’s very important not only to articulate the truth but to watch the integrity of your life. Whether or not you love people is very important.”
Forty years ago Francis Schaeffer was reminding us of John 13:34–35, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” This is the mark of the Christian. So we’ve known this in theory for a long time, but postmodernism is integrating that much more than modernism did into the very area of epistemology. How we come to know things depends much more on who we are and how we live, whether we like it or not, than merely on analytic, linear thought. In that sense, postmodernism is surely not all wrong, is it?
Now let us come to some additional responses, because postmodernism from another perspective is, in my view, deeply mistaken.
1. Practical experience shows us that accurate communication is much more possible than postmodernists are likely to admit.
When I was writing the book The Gagging of God, in preparation for it, I read (at one level or another) about 1100 books and articles. The most of important of the books, I would start scanning the reviews as well just to see what was said about them. Some of the reviews, as you know, elicit responses by the authors who feel that they’ve been gypped somehow in the reviews or haven’t been well-treated.
Of these critical responses to the reviews written by postmodern authors whose books got negative vibes, not once, not once, did I find a postmodern author saying, “Well, of course, what this reviewer said that I said is not really what I meant, but I can’t expect him or her to say what I meant since we’re lost in this postmodern solipsism. What he thinks the text means is different from what I thought the text meant when I wrote it, but what else can you expect? It’s a postmodern world. So it’s not that I forgive him or her; there’s nothing to forgive. It’s just the inevitability of the postmodern epistemological crisis.” Not once!
Instead what they wrote, without exception, was, “Clearly this reviewer did not read my book very carefully! If he or she had, on 273, footnote 16, they would’ve seen that …” and so on. All very indignant. “They’ve twisted what I meant. This is not what I said at all.” Or, “They have taken one passage out of context and not seen that on page 473, I also said that …” and so on. Again and again.
What’s the assumption? The assumption is that texts ought to be interpreted fairly, and they bear the meaning determined by authorial intent. It was the postmodernists themselves that were arguing this, not in their books but in their responses to the critiques of their books! Now there are a lot of experiences that I could give along those lines, but I press on.
All I’m saying is that as difficult as communication is, accurate communication is far more plausible a phenomenon.… It happens more often and is assumed to be important by modernists and postmodernists alike much more frequently than people let on. My second point is extremely important.
2. Postmodernists, almost without exception, offer us an indefensible antithesis, either explicitly or implicitly.
That is, they offer us an either/or, an antithesis. If you buy into that antithesis (I’ll explain what it is in a moment), you will always lose your debates with them, every time. But the antithesis itself has to be questioned.
The antithesis is this: either you can know something truly, exhaustively, and omnisciently or you cannot know it in any absolutist sense whatsoever. That, in turn, opens up the doors to only relative knowledge. Either you can know something truly, exhaustively, and omnisciently or you must relinquish all claims to objective knowledge at all. That’s the antithesis.
Now if you buy into that antithesis, if you don’t challenge that antithesis, then in every debate, the postmodernists will show you that in whatever domain of ostensible knowledge you’re talking about, there are some things you don’t know, some things where you’ve got it wrong, some things where you don’t see it in proper proportion, some places where it’s distorted, some metaphor that somebody won’t understand the same way, or something.
Ergo, you don’t have the omniscient, absolute, and perfect knowledge, the only alternative (because you bought into the antithesis) is there is no objective knowledge or no knowledge of the objectively real at all, but is that a fair antithesis? Are those the only two alternatives? Are other alternatives possible?
It didn’t even dawn on me what was going on when I first started reading into this literature until I came to a passage in Paul de Man. In this particular book of his that I was reading, he brought up Archie Bunker. Are you familiar with Archie Bunker? Archie Bunker was a character in an American sitcom, a situation comedy. It’s gone now; it’s on reruns on obscure channels, but the show, for seven or eight years, was really a very funny comedy.
Archie Bunker was your quintessential ignorant, blue-collar, redneck, right-wing, woman-hating, black-hating, intellectual-hating ignoramus, but shrewd in his own way. His wife, inevitably, was a twit. A boot-licking oppressed twit. The daughter was off-the-walls, and the son-in-law was a screwball making a mess of his life.
The whole point was not to elevate this sort of style of family as a good thing; it was to poke fun at it. It was so stereotypical that is was outrageously funny. It was one of those sitcoms that had a pretty substantial social effect in the viewing audience in America. It was really very funny and very well done.
Well, Paul de Man reminds us of a skit that was shown in one of the episodes in which Edith, his wife, the twit, brings in his bowling shoes she’s just polished because, after all, in the Archie Bunker world, real men don’t polish their own shoes. The little woman does that. So she brings in his bowling shoes and says, “Archie, do you want your bowling shoes laced up or down?”
He replies, “Ah, what’s the difference?” as he sits in his easy chair watching TV and drinking his beer. “Ah, what’s the difference, Woman?” She says, “Well, Archie, the difference is that if you lace them up, you start from the bottom holes, and you put both ends down into those holes first. Then you come up to the next hole, and you go up in the next holes and back and forth that way all the way to the top. But if you lace them down, you start with the top holes but you go under, and you come down first. Then you go down to the next holes all the way to the bottom.”
The laugh track is going on at full bore at this point because everybody knows (in the words of Paul de Man) that when Archie Bunker says, “Ah, what’s the difference?” he means (I quote Paul de Man), “I don’t give a damn.” That’s what he means. He’s not asking for information. He’s not saying, “What is the difference, my dear wife, between lacing them up and lacing them down?”
So from this misunderstanding on Edith’s part, Paul de Man goes on to talk about the vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. Now in case one or two of those words got by you, vertiginous has to do with the steepness of a slope. A vertiginous slope is a straight-up-and-down slope.
A vertiginous possibility of referential aberration. That is, an aberration that is making a mistake with respect to what is referred to. What he is referring to is something different from what she is referring to. So there’s a misunderstanding, a miscommunication, between them. The difference is the difference of a vertiginous slope. Hence, vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. It takes you a while to read into this literature, you understand.
When I read this, I burst out laughing. In fact, I was sitting at the Tyndale House in Cambridge at the time, and I burst out laughing. People started shushing me. I never finished that book. I put it back in the UL. I couldn’t bear reading anything that stupid because, in all fairness, how many people misunderstood what Archie Bunker was saying?
Edith misunderstood, but she’s supposed to misunderstand; she’s a twit. That’s what makes it funny, but everybody else all around the country watching this is laughing precisely because they haven’t misunderstood Archie Bunker. That’s what makes it funny! The only other person who hasn’t understood is Paul de Man.
You see what’s going on here, however. There is this drive towards this antithesis. Every time you come to any little possibility of a joke or a miscommunication anywhere in the language, you’re driving to this antithesis, trying to prove that there is some level of misunderstanding. Hence, you’re driven to the vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration, i.e. you don’t understand a thing.
I don’t think that’s the way it works at all. I think there are degrees of knowing. You can know some things truly without knowing anything exhaustively. To set up as the criterion for knowing anything truly, absolutist and omniscient knowledge, is to demand that you have the omniscience of God before you can say you can know anything objectively. In other words, it is a definitional exclusion. The antithesis is a definitional exclusion.
The definitional exclusion in this antithesis that is everywhere in the postmodern literature is: unless you are God, you can’t know anything objectively. That’s really what it is saying, and then they can always prove that you’re not God. So if you buy into the antithesis, you can never know anything objectively. I’m saying that it is an irresponsible criterion. A massively irresponsible criterion. For we may know certain things truly without knowing anything exhaustively. That brings me to my third point.
3. There are some models, I think, that have developed over the last half century that help us to think these things through a wee bit and show us how it is that finite knowers may be said to know some things objectively (some objective things) without ever escaping the constraints of culture.
Let me explain. There are three models that are used most commonly. I’ll mention two of them very briefly. I’ll sketch out the third one in a little more detail. They’re only models, but they’re helpful to make the point.
A. The hermeneutical spiral.
You may recall that out of Germany came a model of the hermeneutic circle. Instead of this old-fashioned, modernist hermeneutics where you ask the question and the truth comes straight back, instead you sort of hit it a glancing blow, and it comes back to you and affects you. Then you hit it again, and you go round and round. Many people have pointed out that experientially that’s not the way it works at all. It’s rather more like spiraling in on something at the center.
When you start working in a new area, you break into a new discipline, you start studying something you’ve never studied before.… I don’t care whether it’s Greek or Nietzschean philosophy, when you first break into it, it just seems a bit daunting and everything is strange. After a while you get much closer in. You start with a little bit of Hellenistic Greek. “Logos, logon, logou, logo. Boy, I’ve got to memorize all that?” But pretty soon, the declensions are easy. Now you’re worrying about participles.
Then after you’ve got participles and the verbal structures under your belt, you’re worrying about the finer points of syntax. What precisely makes an aberrational genitive absolute, and what significance does it have for semantics? That’s about third-year Greek. Then you’re reading lots and lots of texts and so on. Now if somebody says, “What’s the second declension form?” it just spills out. You’ve cycled in so that the things that seemed so daunting and difficult at the beginning now are just part of your mental furniture. Isn’t that the way we learn?
Thus, it is argued in the spiral model, instead of going around and around, even in terms of coming to understand something.… You’re a devout Hindu, let’s say, and you first start reading Paul. Probably you’ll have a lot of misapprehensions about what Paul really meant, but as you read more and more, you do cycle in and cycle in.
There’s a great Bible translator theorist called Eugene Nida who has worked for many years with the American Bible Society who likes to tell the story of a Christian in Thailand who gave away a copy of the New Testament to a Thai monk who knew nothing whatsoever of Christianity. This monk read the New Testament. Sometime later, the Christian asked him what he thought of Jesus.
“He’s a wonderful man. Unbelievable. Just spectacular. Much, much better than Buddha.” Well, the Christian was really impressed by how fast this monk had got the message, so he said, “Well, why? What was it that impressed you about him?” He said, “Well, he came into the world. He lived, and he died. He came into the world. He lived, and he died.… Four times, and he was declared to be God. It took Buddha a thousand cycles. Jesus did it in four!”
Now probably from our perspective, we would say that devout Buddhist monk’s interpretation of the four gospels is a little off, but I would be prepared to say that if he continued reading them, read more broadly in interpretive literature and the nature of the literary genre gospel, and other kinds of things, eventually he would get by that point. He doesn’t remain out here all the time.
You do cycle in and cycle in, without necessarily saying that you ever cycle in and touch the center. You get closer, but you never have exhaustive knowledge, not of the Gospels, not of God, not of Jesus, not of anything. You never have the knowledge of omniscience. You never do. You never will.
B. Distanciation and the fusion of horizons.
This model was also developed in Germany. What it means is that when anybody is writing, he or she is writing (or speaking) out of a certain kind of mental frame of reference that is analogous to looking out and seeing a horizon. Your whole horizon, your visual frame of reference, is precisely what frames the individual tree, house, or person that you’re looking at.
To understand how that house, tree, or whatever is being perceived, you’ve got to understand how it’s being perceived against the broad horizon. Likewise, when Paul is writing Galatians, he’s doing so out of a certain horizon of understanding. Now the question is.… How can I, then, understand what Paul is saying in Galatians? Must I not somehow try to share his horizon of understanding?
My horizon of understanding is not his. After all, I was brought up in French and English in Canada, not in Greek or in Hebrew. I’ve lived all of my life so far, apart from the last year and a bit, in the twentieth century. I live in a technological age. My frame of reference, my horizon, is so different from his, but is there not a sense in which I can, in some measure, distance myself from my own horizon and read into his frame of reference? Not perfectly.
Although I will never think exactly like Paul and share exactly his frame of reference (that’s the absolutist claim of the second point); nevertheless, I can, by studying Greek and Hebrew; reading the kind of literature that Paul would read; knowing something of the history of the times, how the terms are used, and how Paul uses his language; and rereading the texts again and again, eventually so fuse my horizon of understanding with his … it’s not perfect fusion but in substantial measure … that I can actually make good transfers across.
Now in that kind of model, you’re not claiming to understand things absolutely. You are claiming, nevertheless, to understand some things truly. Not perfectly. Truly. Not omnisciently. Truly, so long as you’re not investing truly now with a knowledge of omniscience. Note in that model all the onus of responsibility for a fair reading of Paul is in the receptor, namely me, the reader.
If I now become a missionary, I have to learn another culture, and another fusion of horizons must take place. I must understand something about how the Thai language works in Thailand and how Buddhist thought works, its frame of reference, and its worldview. Now there must be another transfer. That’s part of what cross-cultural communication is about.
When you do that, now there is an onus of responsibility not only in the new receptor but also in the donor. Paul has no moral obligation to make sure I understand in English in the twenty-first century. He’s dead. Too bad. It’s gone. But I, trying to communicate this gospel now to the next culture, have a certain responsibility as the donor, and the receptor has a certain responsibility as well. That’s how communication goes on.
That’s why we can still talk about what Aristophanes thought, what Aristotle thought, the frame of reference of Plato in the cave, and so on. We can talk about that. We might not be in perfect agreement about all the jots and tittles, but in large-scale measures, we can say some true things about what Plato thought or Paul thought. But the model I like best is a little different; it’s …
C. The mathematical model.
It was first developed by Karl Popper in the domain of science, and I like to tweak it a wee bit here and there for our purposes. Imagine an X-Y axis. There is the X line and the Y line, an X-Y axis.
For those of you who’ve done all of your work from O Levels on in anything with mathematics, be patient; this will not be hopelessly obscure. What we’re really going to deal with is asymptotic approaches. There’s an X-Y axis. Along the X-axis, distance from the Y-axis, you’re measuring time (number of years). Along the Y-axis, that is distance from X, you’re measuring distance from the absolute reality.
Now then, picture Johnny. Six years old, a nice Christian lad, brought up in a Christian family at Knighton Evangelical Church. Johnny has been properly catechized, brought to Sunday school as well as church, family devotions at home. Now you ask Johnny, “Johnny, do you believe that God loves you? Do you believe that Jesus loves you?” Johnny says, “Well, yes.”
“Why?”
“ ‘Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.’“
“Oh? Does the Bible say that God loves Johnny or Jesus loves Johnny? Where does the Bible say that God loves Johnny or Jesus loves Johnny?”
He thinks. “Well, I don’t know if the Bible ever mentions my name, but ‘God so loved the world that he gave his Son.’ I’m part of the world, so God must love me.” Question: Does Johnny understand John 3:16? Well, let’s push this a little. Does he understand the meaning of the verb “to love”?
The long-standing debates, whether Lewis’ three-fold analysis of altruistic love, familial emotional love, and erotic love; the four-step system that others have developed since then; or the five-step system that has come out in the latest ethicist theories? Does he understand any of that?
When he says, “God loves me,” what does he mean? Isn’t his experience of love sort of cuddles from Mummy and Daddy before he goes to bed? “God so loved the world.” What does he mean by world? Does he recognize that in the Johannine writings, world almost always (not quite always, but almost always) means the whole moral order in rebellion against God? Does he think himself as part of the moral order in rebellion against God when he includes himself in the world?
Has he reflected on the fact that 20 verses on, verse 36, it says, “The wrath of God abides on those who disobey and disbelieve.” Has he reflected at all on how the love of God and the wrath of God have to be combined in Johannine theology? Or an apex, for example, in a passage like 1 John 2:2, which really speaks of hilasmÛs, propitiation. Does he understand propitiation?
“That he gave his only begotten Son,” in the Authorized Version. Does he know anything of the debates about monogenēs, and whether it means “only begotten” (and whatever that refers to)? Or does it mean only “one of a kind,” or “unique,” perhaps? Or NIVs “one and only.” What kind of vision does he have of Jesus anyway? What does a 6-year-old know about “only begotten” or even “one and only”? Does he understand?
Do you see what I’m doing? I’m pushing you on my second point now. I’m still working on the fourth, but I’m pushing you on my second point. That is to say, I’m trying to show that the argument of the postmodernists will always lead toward showing there are gaps in our ostensible knowledge to drive you to the conclusion that you don’t really know anything at all objective. You’re being driven to the antithesis. Either you have omniscient knowledge or you really don’t know anything objective.
On my scale now, he’s a bit far from the Y-axis. He’s only 6 years old. His knowledge is a fair bit away from the absolute reality of the meaning of John 3:16, but he’s in the right quadrant. He does not think that John 3:16 is talking about the virgin birth of Christ or the sex life of sea turtles. He’s basically understood the text. It is a fair answer to the question that was put to him.
How do you know that God loves you? “Well, the Bible tells me ‘God so loved the world,’ and I’m part of the world.” Didn’t he get it right? Of course he got it right. Of course he understands what the text means. Does he understand it exhaustively? No. Does he understand it perfectly? No. Does he understand it truly in an absolute omniscient sense? No. Does he understand it truly in a more general sense so that he’s got the basic meaning right? Yes!
Now we give him some more birthdays, and he goes to your theological college. He takes a course in Johannine theology, and he’s read classics at Cambridge or Oxford. He knows Greek and Latin well. He moves on and eventually does a post-graduate degree at Trinity. He does a dissertation on Johannine theology and discusses “The Notion of the Love of God in Johannine Thought against Jewish Background” and publishes it in Germany.
So, the line is coming closer to the Y-axis. Does he understand John 3:16 yet? Well, I’d like to think he understands it better than he did when he was 6, but he still hasn’t touched the line. He still hasn’t touched the line; it’s an asymptotic approach to the line. The line is always an asymptote. That is, you get closer and closer, but you never touch the line.
Add 50 billion years, if you can think of eternity in the categories of time. Has he touched the line yet? Nope, because omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God. He will never have an omniscient knowledge of John 3:16. Never. You say, “Wait, wait a minute. What about that passage in 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, ‘Now we know in part; then we shall know fully even as we are fully known’?” Doesn’t that promise absolutist knowledge? It does not.
In the context, what is being promised is unmediated knowledge. God’s knowledge of us is always immediate. Our knowledge of him in the context is “through a glass, darkly.” That is, at a time when they didn’t have clear mirrors like ours, it’s a kind of reflected glory. We see imperfectly. It’s a mediated knowledge. It’s mediated through the gospel. It’s mediated by the Spirit. It’s mediated by the testimony of others, but we do not yet enjoy the visio Dei, the vision of God. We do not have immediate knowledge of all of the things bound up with the gospel.
Thus, Peter can write to his readers in his first epistle, “Though you have not seen him, yet you love him.” That is, their knowledge is mediated, but one day it will be immediate. “We will know as we are known.” Not to the extent that we are known. We will never have omniscient knowledge, but our knowledge one day will be immediate, no longer mediated. But we will never, not in 50 billion years, ever touch that line. Omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God.
That means, therefore, that it is still possible … so long as you are not defining knowledge of the objective so as to exclude all reference to knowledge of the objective that does not include omniscience … to speak of finite beings knowing things objectively. Unless you exclude things in a definitional sort of way, there is a sense in which human beings come to know objective truth, but we never, ever come to knowledge of objective truth by absolutist means, by means of an omniscient patch or the like.
Let me explain this with another illustration. This one comes from a book written almost 20 years ago by Charles Kraft. Charles Kraft is a missiologist who teaches at Fuller. He was arguing in this particular book that the Bible is like a batch of case histories. So that, if you are going into Africa (he had been a missionary in Liberia for a period of time; this is his illustration, not mine), and you discover that in this particular tribe, polygamy is still practiced. Then you don’t start off with those passages that talk about monogamy. You don’t do that.
Start with David. Start with Solomon. The Bible has many different case histories, so why do you pick the ones that are going to clash with the culture, for goodness’ sake? Choose the part of the Bible that fits the culture as closely as you can. On this particular one, well, David had lots of wives. Solomon had even more. Rejoice.
Forget the monogamy part; that’s another bit from another case history. You can use that in some monogamous society. Meanwhile, you articulate what the Bible says from that part of the Bible that fits best to this particular subculture. That’s what he argues. Then he raises the question himself, “Wait a minute. Aren’t there some things that are transcultural in the Bible?”
He says, “Yes, there are some things without which it is impossible not to be a Christian. Those transcultural things include the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They include the confession that Jesus is Lord, and a few other things, but that’s it.” Now I would want to argue that Charles Kraft has gone much too far but also hasn’t gone far enough. You see, I would want to go farther that there is nothing in the Bible that is not culturally constrained. Not even the confession, “Jesus is Lord.” Not even that.
Supposing you go back to Thailand again. Let us suppose that you’ve studied Thai diligently. So that you arrive in Thailand already fluent in the language, and for some odd reason you park yourself outside a major Buddhist temple. As people come out, you say in fluent Thai, “Jesus is Lord.” What will they hear you to be saying?
Besides being thought very strange (“Funny-looking Westerner speaking our language with a bit of an accent, saying something stupid and confronting us on our way home”), that Thai will also hear you to be saying, “Jesus is inferior to Gautama the Buddha,” because in Buddhist thought when you reach the highest stage of exaltation, nothing can be predicated of you any longer. You are neither hot nor cold. You are neither good nor bad. You are neither lord nor un-lord.
If you are predicating Jesus is Lord, then obviously you haven’t reached the highest stage of exaltation. Obviously. Which isn’t probably quite what you meant to say. What’s the problem? Are they stupid or something? No, of course not. They’re hearing you in Thai, in another culture, in another language. The formal equivalence of words is not getting across what you mean at all.
It’s not that the Thai cannot understand what you mean by “Jesus is Lord,” but the Thai will only be able to understand what you mean by “Jesus is Lord,” will only be able to understand that if, in fact, you unpack enough of the Bible story, the Bible frame of reference, to deal with a personal transcendent God, the nature of creation, the nature of lordship, and a whole lot of other things, and then, within that framework, to understand what “Jesus is Lord” means. It’s not that they lack any intelligence. It’s that their entire frame of reference is different.
You can never understand anything apart from the tools of understanding that belong to finite beings. The only access you have to truth is cultural access. Language is a cultural phenomenon. It’s a cultural artifact, but that does not mean the truth that Paul means by “Jesus is Lord” … which we may articulate in English when put within a certain kind of frame of reference and which we may articulate in Thai when it’s put within a certain kind of frame of framework … is not transcultural.
It makes transcultural claims. That is, it is true in every culture at every time and in every place. Jesus is Lord. He will come back, the living and the dead will fall before him, and all will confess (in the language of Philippians 2), “Jesus is Lord.” All will confess that. I may not know everything about that, but I know that.
I cannot say that without saying it in English, in French, in German, in Thai, or in Swahili, but when I say it, provided I have taken the pains to understand it as closely as possible to what Paul means as it’s possible for finite human beings with a fusion of horizons, with an asymptotic approach, or whatever, I am saying something that is true. It is objectively true, but I cannot say it without saying it in acculturated terms.
In fact, the Reformers thought about this question long before we did. They didn’t think of it because of a postmodern epistemology. They thought about it in the doctrine that came to be called the doctrine of accommodation. How does an infinite, sovereign, omniscient God communicate to finite human beings in cultural terms (language)? The way they thought about it came to be labeled the doctrine of accommodation.
Now all of this is to argue that there are ways of thinking about these things that are far more helpful, mature, in conformity with reality, sophisticated, that absorb the good points of postmodernism without succumbing to the horrible antitheses of postmodernism, and that still leave us a place for talking about objective truth. Unless you get that far, there’s no point talking about the truthfulness of Scripture.
There’s no point talking about the truthfulness of Scripture, the truthfulness of the gospel, what inerrancy means, or what authority means, if you don’t already have an epistemological place carved out for the possibility of such things in the first place. It’s just a waste of time. If you start talking about the truthfulness of Scripture when the people you’re listening to don’t have a category for objective truthfulness in the first place, then all of your arguments are just terribly meaningless.
Let me end with three quick observations. These are all points that could be enlarged upon at length, but I will mention them just quickly, on the fly.
1. Many people have pointed out that postmodernism has, in some ways, tamed modernism.
It’s been a great critique of modernism’s arrogance about the autonomy and power of human reason. That’s true, but it is also important to say that postmodernism at its worst is also immensely arrogant, for it argues that even if God, an infinite transcendent personal God, had spoken, we could not know it. It is profoundly arrogant.
Instead of glorying in the autonomy of human reason and thinking that we can get hold of God by our reason or deny God’s existence by our reason, it now argues that a proper understanding of human beings necessarily excludes any human understanding of objective truth, including objective truth about God.
There are only communitarian agreed truths or individual perceptions, which may or may not conform to reality. That is astonishingly arrogant because it insists on this perspective as itself true! The only truth that is objective is the truth that you have no access to objective truth. That is astonishingly arrogant.
2. Everything in this model changes when you recognize there is a God who understands everything and who talks.
The God of the Bible is a talking God. Now you have to think through what the Bible says about how this God communicates with us who are finite, fallen, and whose language is necessarily culture constrained.
But if there is an omniscient God who talks and who will take the pains to communicate with us as fallen finite creatures, then there is a kind of reservoir of omniscience. You’re back to a kind of premodern model that recognizes that human knowledge is necessarily dependent in some sense on revelation.
3. I have said nothing so far, nothing at all, about the role of the Holy Spirit in human knowing.
A full accounting of human epistemology must have some place for the doctrine of the Spirit, otherwise what we do is try to develop full-orbed Christian models for understanding, for reason, for knowledge, without using all the categories the Bible says are necessary to the development in the first place.
In other words, we throw away part of our toolkit, as it were, part of the essential ingredients from a biblical perspective, and then try to do it out of a frame of reference that is more naturalistic. That is surely not wise, not faithful, not godly, and finally, not possible.
At this point, we have some time for questions regarding what has already been discussed.
Male: I wondered if you had a view on Noam Chomsky’s school of linguistics and his idea that basically, we think in “mentalese” and that language is something that is very much instinctive, and, therefore, that there is this possibility of communication between different language groups.
Don Carson: Chomsky is a deeply committed naturalist. In other words, his understanding of language as really being a brain function, at the end of the day, is deeply, deeply committed to a profound philosophical naturalism, which thus, by definition, excludes all kinds of things from discussion to begin with.
Chomsky, for all his brilliance, has really marginalized himself in recent years because of outrageous behavior in other ways, and so there’s really only a very small Chomskyan school that settles around Harvard and a few other places. The vast majority of contemporary linguists are not Chomskyan anymore. It’s becoming passÈ, and now that he’s aging, I cheerfully predict the Chomskyan school will be as dead as a dodo in another 20 years. I may be wrong, but I don’t think it’s going to last.
It’s not that he hasn’t done anything useful in Oak Lane or anything like that. Don’t misunderstand me. The kind of breakdown of language into components and so on that you find in the Chomsky model can have all kinds of bearing in other branches of linguistics, but his philosophical commitment to where language comes from, I think is not going to endure.
Male: Is anyone listening to our arguments, or are we just shut out as irrelevant?
Don: It depends who “they” are, of course. Some people really don’t want a debate. They don’t want to discuss. In which case, there comes a time in every witness situation, in every possible dialogue, where you have to make an estimate whether you stand under a passage that tells you, “Do not cast your pearls before swine,” or “Be ready to give an answer to everyone for the hope that lies within you.” That’s in part a pastoral reflection on what’s wise to do.
Sometimes the one situation will turn into the other by the quality of your life, by long-term patience or forbearance, or by continuing to publish. Then there will always be people who will dislike you. In one sense, this is no different; there’s always been an ongoing antipathy between the gospel and those who don’t like it. The reasons for it can be very complex and very many. It’s just that there are some new reasons that have developed with the rise of postmodernism.
So, yes. You will be shut out in some cases. In some cases, however, postmodernism has opened up a cranny for evangelicals. Modernism was pretty ruthless at excluding evangelicals, but when you get to postmoderns, the postmoderns (the best of them) are forced to say, “Well, we can no longer claim that you don’t have the truth.”
Suddenly there is a place for evangelicals in the larger academic discussion floor that they didn’t have some years ago, but you have to be careful because the price they want you to pay to belong to that club is often saying, “Yes, we will give you our perspective, and we fully acknowledge that your perspective is as valid as our perspective.” That’s too high a price to pay for any confessional Christian.
So by all means there’s a place at getting back in there, but one of the things you want to say as you get back in there is, “I firmly believe that we really ought to listen to one another with mutual respect, and in that sense, tolerance of views that we profoundly dislike or disagree with, but on the other hand, I have to tell you frankly that if my understanding of these things is right, Jesus is Lord, and you will give an account to him on the last day.” Otherwise, somewhere along the line, you lose what Christian influence you might have had by gaining access through this opening postmodern door.
Male: Obviously you’re saying that if people don’t have any belief in absolute truth at all, then they don’t like to even want to read the Bible, but how much of a responsibility do we have when we’re trying to encourage people to investigate the truth of the Bible to explain all the things we’ve been talking about this morning, and how much does the Bible do itself as they read it? What’s our responsibility in presenting these arguments to non-Christians?
Don: It’s very important in personal witness or in large-scale meetings or whatever, in my view, primarily to tell the truth, not primarily to do a cultural analysis. On the other hand, the way you articulate the truth ought to be shaped by your understanding of the culture. The smartest New Testament evidence for that is by listening to the different kinds of sermons of Paul in different contexts.
So when he preaches in Pisidian Antioch in a synagogue to Bible believers, whether Jews or Gentiles, but people who already share his understanding, in large part, of the Old Testament, he doesn’t spend any time on the doctrine of creation, what the fall is, what sin is, or anything of that sort. He spends all of his time in a very long discourse, or a long report of a discourse, in Acts 13 to prove that Jesus really is the Messiah, that the Old Testament rightly understood did insist the Messiah would die and rise again, and so on.
When he comes to Athens, however, there he’s dealing with people who’ve never heard of Moses, never read the Old Testament, don’t share the Old Testament background, aren’t monotheists, have a different notion of sin, and so on. So he spends much more time laying out that commonality. Now I’m sure if you pushed him, he could have also spent more time talking about epistemology and that sort of thing, but what he really does is lay out the Bible storyline.
So if you think of people like Ravi Zacharias.… I don’t know if that name means much, but Ravi Zacharias has done a lot of university missions and that sort of thing. Often when he begins a whole university mission, he begins with a rather interesting lecture, an amusing lecture, an in-your-face lecture, on the law of non-contradiction with almost no Christian references at all. What he’s really trying to do is open up a place for truth. I’m not going to throw stones at Ravi. He’s very effective; that’s the way he begins things.
My own approach is rather different. When I go in, I always print up copies of the Bible passage we’re going to expound. We always get people into the text right away, but I try to do it in such a way that people will understand the text, to make the bridges to people who are really profoundly biblically illiterate.
Then as the series goes on, inevitably questions of truth, rationality, and authority.… They all come up in any case in discussion, give-and-take, one-on-one, and so on, but I’d rather spend my public time articulating what the gospel really is, what the Bible storyline really is, so that becomes the agenda for discussion rather than the law of non-contradiction.
So I tend to be a little more in-your-face with getting the biblical material across and then save the apologetics for small groups, question and answer times, one-on-one, and that sort of thing; whereas, Ravi tends to do it the other way. I’m not going to throw stones at him. Sooner or later, both things have to be done when you’re dealing with people whose worldview is so very far removed from a biblical frame of reference.
Let me say this too. If I were tilting all of this material now toward helping you do evangelism rather than helping you understand what the Bible is, then I would want to say in the most dogmatic terms that in some ways you can get across what the Bible says, even to the most amazingly postmodern biblical illiterate, in 15 minutes, in an hour, in a series of 10 hours, and in about 20 years. Obviously, it depends on how thorough you are, how detailed you are, and so on.
So that part of this is not a question of, “Boy, have I ever got to be bright to figure out all this stuff.” I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that to get across the biblical material, you’ve got to know, first of all, your Bible, and then learn how to communicate things Christians just presuppose to people who don’t presuppose any of it.
It’s often not a question of becoming brighter and smarter; it’s often a question of learning how to get across what we’ve presupposed to people who have very different presuppositions. That’s often not a question of huge intellectual challenge but of careful listening, of loving communication, and of getting dirty in the actual give-and-take of listening, debating, talking, questioning, and the like. It’s not so much a huge intellectual challenge. It’s a love challenge.
Male: In your experience of doing biblical studies alongside people of other cultures and worldviews, do you find that in practice there are significant differences in the interpretation that you’ll reach, or in reality do you come to the same conclusion most of the time on particular passages?
Don: That’s a good question. It depends on all kinds of factors. There are many interpreters around the world nowadays who have received advanced training at a Western university and have, therefore, learned a fair bit of Western skepticism onto which they graft the frames of reference of their own culture.
So in Japan, for example, you get Kosuke Koyama writing Water Buffalo Theology, but underneath his Water Buffalo Theology is, in fact, a profoundly liberal view of the Bible he’s picked up in his Western training. You can find that in many parts of the world.
So obviously, if you already don’t believe the Bible is authoritative and coherent, yet it is somehow important, and your understanding of contextualization gives you warrant for interpreting it within frames of reference that are essentially alien to it, you can be highly diverse and no one can ever criticize you. There are many, many conferences nowadays around the world that glory in precisely that diversity, books that come out of them, and so on.
Where you get a surprising amount of agreement, however.… And this comes out of my experience of 10 years with WEF. We had people from every major race, many languages, different denominations, different cultures, and all the continents except Antarctica (we didn’t have a penguin). Over the times that we did this, what we discovered is we got large-scale agreement if we had certain things present.
First, a joint commitment to submission to what Scripture said. Very important. We all, in these groups, shared a high view of Scripture. That meant, therefore, if we perceived we were wrong, then in practice as well as in theory, we were willing to change and be changed by the text.
Second, reasonably high levels of training (in different countries) in terms of understanding Greek, Hebrew, language, and communication. If you get a person, let’s say, with a grade-six education from a bush-country Bible school and someone with a PhD, no matter how conservative they are there will be certain questions that are very difficult to share about because the level of understanding means you have just too big a gap. So you looked for people of more or less common levels of intellectual attainment but are from many different backgrounds.
Third, a willingness, not only on account of the authority of Scripture but out of a kind of personal humility, to admit you’re wrong. We had some people who could never admit anything. Even when they were pushed into a corner, the most they would ever admit was, “Well, I’ll have to go away and think about that some more.” You just knew by the way they said it what they meant was they were going to go away and think about it in order to bolster more arguments to shore up their position.
So there are some people who are temperamentally so profoundly committed to a certain kind of heritage they can never, ever be corrected, and so you don’t invite those people back. I did all the inviting, so I learned whom to eliminate every time, because they really are very difficult customers. There is so much ego involved, even when there’s a nominal commitment to Scripture, that they can’t ever be corrected.
Fourth, what you need (and this is what we always lacked) is time, because what you discover is very often that when A and B disagree on what the passage means, the reason they disagree is not simply over the meaning of a particular Greek verb or something but because that thing is nestled into their understanding of bigger streams in Scripture, which are connected with bigger streams. Then you’ve really got to start exploring all of those bigger ones. Do you see?
If somebody’s saying, “It can’t mean that because such and such a passage means something else.” Then you’ve got to talk about what that passage means. “Oh, but I think that passage really means …” “Oh, yes, but what about …” So suddenly you’re into debates that take quite lot of time and quite a lot of managing to sort of break them into their component parts to get agreement.
Now it was surprising to me (and I was chairing this) how often we did get agreement, but on some things we didn’t. In some cases, it was simply want of time. In some cases, it was not enough shared knowledge. In some cases, our group just didn’t know enough. We needed to learn more.
Granted those kinds of things, all of which are witnesses to our finiteness, to our brokenness, to our corrupt minds, to our indebtedness to culture, it was surprising how often, by mutual correction, mutual encouragement, mutual rebuke, mutual criticism, and mutual critique, we came out to common minds on what Scripture said on point after point. It was a very enriching experience, and it’s reflected in the five books.
Male: In your model about the asymptotic approach of knowledge, you said that you related objective knowledge with omniscient knowledge. I was surprised by that. I tend to think of omniscience as knowing all sorts of things, not knowing one thing totally. So you are actually saying you can’t know any single thing totally?
Don: I was actually using objective in a couple of ways. Most postmodernists deny the possibility of objective knowledge because of the assumption of the antithesis. That is, we cannot have exhaustive knowledge, omniscient knowledge; therefore, we cannot know anything objectively.
The point to concede in that, I think, is.… In terms of some small, discreet fact: two plus two, in a base 10 system where all the terms are defined, equals four. That’s correct. On the other hand, if you start throwing in other possibilities … what is the relationship, then, of that sort of statement to what two plus two means in a binary system or to all other systems and so on … so not only the fact itself, but the fact in connection with everything else that is possibly related to it, then no human being knows anything with that degree of omniscience.
What I’m saying, then, is it is still possible to speak of objective knowledge, despite the postmodernists, provided you are not tying the possibility of objective knowledge to the possibility of omniscient knowledge. I think that’s a huge mistake, but it is important to concede that we do not have omniscient knowledge about anything or absolute knowledge, in that sense, about anything, provided you’re understanding that the anything means not only the thing in itself but its relationship to all possible things possibly connected with it.
That’s the kind of argument that is brought in again and again. It really is. All you have to do is read the literature, and you see it. So the antithesis, it seems to me, has to be questioned and exploded again and again to open up a door for knowing some things objectively, knowing some things truly, even if nothing exhaustively.
