Listen or read the following transcription as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Contemporary Theology in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
I started speaking on Scripture to university groups 25 or 30 years ago, and I have to say that when I began then, my approach was entirely different from the sort of approach I would take today, partly because at that time the kinds of presuppositions that most students brought to the discussion were very different from the kinds of presuppositions they bring today.
The chief difference is in this ambiguous area of modernism versus postmodernism. Those are appalling terms. The notion of postmodernism as a word is surely somewhat insulting. If modern refers to the contemporary, one would think that postmodern refers to the future, but, of course, it doesn’t.
The term first developed in the nineteenth century, believe it or not. Then it died and reappeared in the twentieth century in connection with architecture. There was a style of architecture called modern, and then it changed. What do you call the next one? They called it postmodern, so now there are obsolete postmodern architectural models. The terminology is enough to give anyone a headache.
From our perspective, from the perspective of our theme, I’m using both modernism and postmodernism not in a religious sense but in an exclusively epistemological sense. Let me define epistemology. Epistemology is merely the study of knowledge. That is, it’s the study of how you know things or claim to know things. That’s all it is.
Epistemology is one of the large determiners of various cultural approaches across a very broad sweep. At the risk of major oversimplification, we need to understand premodernism, modernism, and then postmodernism. If we’re going to study something called postmodernism, we need to know what the thing is post to, and so it’s worth having a bit of a sweep of intellectual history before we begin to see what bearing these discussions have on the doctrine of Scripture.
In the premodern period, that is the period before about 1600, and from our point of view, late Middle Ages through the Reformation, epistemology in the Western world largely adopted the following presuppositions: God exists. He knows everything. The vast majority of intellectual thinkers assumed those two points.
That means that all human knowledge is necessarily a subset of God’s exhaustive and perfect knowledge. Necessarily. If God knows everything, and human beings know only some things, necessarily our knowledge is a subset of his exhaustive and perfect knowledge. That means that all human knowledge is necessarily a function of revelation. That is, the question becomes how God discloses some part of what he knows exhaustively and perfectly so that we finite human beings, made in his image, may know anything at all.
If all of our knowledge is a subset of his, then all knowledge that we have has come to us because, in some sense or other, directly or indirectly, he has granted that it be so. That’s revelation. That point was agreed by figures as diverse, for example, as Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. They disagreed about how much of that revelation came through the various loci of revelation, but they all agreed that human knowing is a function of God’s knowing or, more precisely, of the revelation of God’s knowing.
Thus, God discloses himself in nature. God discloses himself in Scripture. God discloses himself in the life of the church. God discloses himself by the Holy Spirit. They disagreed about how much knowledge came through any one of those revelatory venues. For Aquinas, for example, he thought that there was enough revelation in what we would call general revelation, in the natural world, to finally lead people to a true knowledge of God.
Calvin did not think so. Calvin thought there was enough revelation of God and of truth in the natural world to lead men and women to be justly condemned, but it took what later came to be called special revelation … that is, the revelation that you find in Scripture, the revelation that you find in Jesus Christ … in order to have a saving knowledge that would actually enable you to escape the condemnation.
So they disagreed, in other words, about how much revelation came through any particular locus, but they all agreed that human knowing comes as a function of God disclosing his exhaustive and perfect knowledge in various channels and to various degrees. Now notice, in that way of looking at the world, you begin with the assumption of God. You begin with the assumption of, in fact, a monotheist Christian God. God is not someone whose existed has to be proved.
Thus, the frame of reference with which one begins these things is radically different from many of the assumptions that we bring to intellectual endeavors today. With the rise of the Erleuchtung, the Enlightenment, came a shift in a whole lot of intellectual circles, especially on the continent and eventually here.
Intellectual history is always messy. It’s never simply linear. Things develop in waves and then retreat. Some parts of the Western world advanced more quickly than others, retreated again and again, and so forth, but the figure that most people use as the crucial person, the turning point figure, is Rene Descartes and the beginning of Cartesian thought.
Rene Descartes was a Roman Catholic. He was devout. Although history has labeled him as, in some ways, the first significant doubter, in fact, when he set himself to doubt everything, it was not because he was abandoning his faith. It was because he was discovering that it was more and more difficult to communicate with the small but rising number of atheists, deists, and so on, in European faculties and convince them of the truth of Christianity.
So just as Aquinas’s Summa was written in large part to answer Muslims, so, in fact, Rene Descartes’ major volumes on epistemology were really written in the 1630s to answer the rising number of skeptics who were beginning to dot the landscape. When he had his major philosophical insight, he was so chuffed with himself there’s pretty good evidence that what he did to celebrate the occasion was go to Saint Anne’s monastery, have a retreat, offer prayers of thanksgiving, and so forth.
His major first point was something that every first-year student in philosophy is introduced to: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Now he was not the first person to say something like that. Already Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, had said si fallor sum, “If I err, I am,” but Saint Augustine didn’t build an entire philosophical system out of it.
Probably, in fact, back in his early schooling, Descartes had picked up this from Saint Augustine (everybody read Saint Augustine in those days), but as it came out in his writings, it was cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” He had set himself the task of doubting everything to see if there was some bedrock, some foundation, that no reasonable person could doubt, and that was his bedrock. If I am thinking at all, then surely there must be an I who is thinking.
From this, through various philosophical structures, he came to build up an entire argument that was designed to lead people to Catholicism. Nowadays virtually no one thinks that Descartes had that whole philosophical package put together very well; nevertheless, he became a turning point figure in what later came to be called foundationalism or foundationalist epistemology. Let me outline for you the six elements that characterize foundationalist, modernist epistemology.
1. Unlike premodern epistemology, it begins with a finite I.
Premodern epistemology begins by assuming there is a God who knows everything. That means that all epistemology turns on how God, who knows everything, discloses any part of what he knows to finite knowers, but now you are beginning with a finite knower. “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, the foundation that is introduced begins with a finite knower.
2. It was assumed by Descartes, and by all foundationalist knowers, that epistemological certainty is both desirable and attainable.
That is to say, to know something, to be able to know something with certainty, was seen as a good thing (desirable) and attainable (that is, you could get there, you could know certain things). How you got there was the point of dispute, but that you got there, no one disputed. That it was a good thing to get there, no one disputed.
3. It was profoundly foundationalist.
(Although foundationalist was a later term.) That is, the idea was that you had to establish certain foundations. You’d strip things away and strip things away until you came to certain axioms, certain foundations, certain self-evident truths, that any reasonable person in the discipline would agree stand. With these foundations in place, you would then start to build up various principles, methods, and so forth, until you came out to larger sweeping conclusions.
4. There was an enormous focus on method.
That is, you begin with proper foundations. Then you establish appropriate methods, turn the crank, and out comes truth. Now that worked admirably well in the hard sciences, but that’s also the way dissertations were put together in history, literature, and so on, for years and years. It’s somewhat different now, as we’ll see.
Certainly, when I was going through university, that’s exactly the way it was, and it still pertains in some faculties and some disciplines in some universities. So that if you are writing, in those sorts of universities, a dissertation in the arena of history, for example, it will be as important to establish the methods you use and follow them rigorously as it is to get answers “right.”
As such, when you’re being examined, people will say, “Well, what method have you used here?” or, “Have you been consistent in your use of sources in the approaches that you’ve taken? Are you pursuing the Annales School of historiography or some other school of historiography? If you’re choosing the Annales School of historiography, what does that mean, then, for your approach? Have you been consistent with your approach?” You must have the appropriate foundations in place, you must have the appropriate methods, and then you turn the crank and out comes the truth.
5. There was a deep concern for ahistorical universality.
That is to say, a deep concern for truth that was seen to be true, everywhere, at all times. So if you discover, for example, that a water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, and you discover this to be true in Lima, Peru; lo and behold, it also must be true in Toronto, Canada, or Lester, England. It doesn’t matter. The thing is always true at every time and in every place.
Now in the arena of the hard sciences, there were certain kinds of approaches in many of the sciences that allowed for independent verification under the controlled circumstances of laboratories, but it was judged also to be the ideal to which we were running in every discipline, whether you’re studying Shakespeare, you’re studying economics, you’re studying history, or you’re studying theology. In fact, that was one of the assumptions behind Marxist historiography, for example.
Supposing you had a student who wanted to go to some British university to study chemistry. He’d done A-level chemistry, but he could not be convinced that the water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. He had some strange notion that was very different from this. In fact, he was rather enamored of the phlogiston theory personally. Would he get in at any British university teaching chemistry? I don’t think so!
Supposing then, in a Communist world before 1989, somebody comes along with a non-Marxist reading of history. You see, there are certain common assumptions: materialist dialectic, certain views of how some communities interact with one another economically, group definitions of people, and so forth. If you couldn’t see the truth of this, then you were some sort of intellectual twit. So, of course, you’re not going to get a place in a Marxist university teaching history if you can’t see the obvious truths of history, because Marxist history is scientific.
There are certain foundations, certain methods, and you turn the crank and out comes truth. Of course, if there are stupid capitalists in the West who don’t see it, then that’s merely because they are so biased by their selfish greed, by their capitalistic impulses, that they haven’t really proved scientific in that arena yet. On that basis, all kinds of people were forbidden places in Communist universities precisely because they could not take on board a Marxist historiography in the first place.
Then, of course, we do the same thing in theology, don’t we? At the turn of the century, roughly 1900 to 1920 or thereabouts, there was this massive concern to support what came to be called die religionsgeschichtliche Schule; that is to say, the history of religion school in which you compare all phenomena in religion with other religions and their phenomena to try to provide whole taxonomies of development.
Eventually, that sort of dissipated, and it was replaced by other things that were of greater interest: source criticism, form criticism, tradition criticism, redaction criticism. I was brought up in the redaction criticism stage. If you didn’t see how important this was as a methodological tool, then you just weren’t in the front rank. Eventually that’s been largely superseded by interest in literary-critical concerns, in what came to be called the New Criticism, in the social science approach to various New Testament documents, and so on.
Then you throw in a certain kind of postmodern criticism on top of all of that, and there are new things that fall out to how we think about the Bible. We’ll come to them in due course. My point, however, is that during this modernist regime, the way that theology was thought to progress was you seek to establish certain common foundations, and then you establish your methods.
If your methods improve, then you get closer to the truth, but “the truth” is a universal truth, it’s an ahistorical truth that all biblical scholars certainly find convincing. There is a guild of agreed things that people find convincing. Of course, there are areas of dispute, just as there are areas of dispute in physics, there are areas of dispute in history, and there are areas of dispute in every discipline.
That’s why there is advance. Nevertheless, there is a commonality of approach, certain methods that are put in place, and you turn the crank and out comes truth. If there happened to be some fundamentalist twits amongst us, then clearly they’re not of the first theological rank because they don’t agree with the fundamental foundations and the methods that control the discussion.
6. There was, during the modernist period, a rising commitment to philosophical naturalism.
Now that’s not the way it was at the beginning. By philosophical naturalism, I simply mean that all that exists is in the natural world: energy, matter, space, time, chance. That’s it. Now that wasn’t the way it was at the beginning. Rene Descartes certainly did not belong to that camp, nor did the early scientists, people like Francis Bacon and so on.
Many of them were theists. Some of them were deists. Especially with the arrival of Darwin.… Huxley rightly said that Darwin made atheism intellectually respectable. So roughly from about 1860 on you have a rising naturalism that grows rapidly in Western intellectual thought. That means that the approach to Scripture is constantly downplaying anything to do with the supernatural world.
For example, from 1800 to the mid-1830s, in most European universities John’s gospel was considered to be more historically plausible than the Synoptic Gospels, where you did not have confessionalism operating. John’s gospel was considered more historically credible. Do you know why?
No one holds that today, but the reason it was held then was because, first, John’s gospel has no exorcisms; secondly, it’s got a lot more speeches, and everybody in intellectual circles loves speeches. They’re not too keen on all those little miracle stories, but those speeches are really wonderful; and thirdly, there was a certain view of a deist, semi-mystical spirituality that John’s gospel could be brought to support.
It really took David Friedrich Strauss and his famous book Das Leben Jesu, or The Life of Jesus, to overturn all of that because his approach to the whole thing was to say, “Look, in John’s gospel, Jesus is most clearly divine.” Because Strauss himself was an atheist by this point, he says, “That’s a load of bunk. Since John’s gospel is the one that most clearly makes Jesus divine; therefore, it is the least historically credible.” Thus, confidence in John’s gospel flipped over the next 20 years through the influence of Strauss, then the T¸bingen School, and so on.
That continued all the way down, one way or another, to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls a century later. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, then people started saying, “You know, some of John’s language sounds an awful lot like first-century Judaism. The same dualism: light and darkness, truth and error, and so on. Maybe John’s language belongs to first century Palestine after all, and it’s not late Hellenizing thought, and so forth.”
Then eventually you got, with C.H. Dodd, two strands of tradition coming down, a Synoptic tradition and a Johannine tradition, and so on. I need not rehearse all of that. All I’m trying to point out is that there are fads in scholarship that have been controlled, in large part, by an unrecognized commitment to philosophical naturalism. By and large, these things still pertain in a fair bit of Western thought.
These six points, I want to argue, largely constrain much modernist epistemology. (It begins with I, the finite human knower; it insists that epistemological certainty is both desirable and attainable; it is profoundly foundationalist; it focuses on method; it strives for ahistorical universality; and increasingly in modernism, especially toward the end of the period, naturalism is on the ascendancy.) What I shall argue is that postmodernism overturns or qualifies every one of those six points.
It’s very difficult to understand what postmodernism is in the area of epistemology without seeing that there is an overturning of those assumptions. Lest you feel that this whole thing is turning far too abstract, far too philosophical, far too quickly, let me warn you in advance that eventually I will come to the conclusion that thoughtful Christians, informed Christians, should be neither modernist not postmodernist in their epistemology.
That is to say, there are some things to learn from both schools and some things to reject from both schools if you’re going to be a thoughtful, consistent Christian, but you still have to understand the framework that has nurtured you and shaped your thinking. That is the world in which we live, the thought world in which we breathe.
Postmodernism did not arise overnight. Again, there are antecedents that go back a long time in history. Moreover, modernism itself did not progress with a straight line. The Romantic period, for example, was very suspicious of narrowly linear thought, mere logic, and so on. It wanted a place for Wordsworth’s dancing daffodils and things like that. That kind of Romantic thought also led to certain kinds of mystical emphases as well.
Moreover, existentialism is, in some ways, a forerunner of postmodernism. Immanuel Kant argued that the sense data that we take in all around us do not really tell us all about the world. The sense data themselves are put into some kind of order, they’re forced into some kind of order, by the human mind. The human mind imposes some kind of order on the sense data that we actually take in.
Do you see what that is doing? Implicitly, that’s saying that the sense data do not then give us direct knowledge of the world outside of ourselves. Rather, that material is then so structured by the human mind that our understanding of the world is some strange amalgam of the sensory input with the order that is imposed on the sensory input by the human mind. Now don’t misunderstand me; Immanuel Kant was not a postmodernist.
On the other hand, that is already making some sort of distinction between the actual evidence and what the human mind does with it. It is a step on the way to saying that we don’t have direct knowledge of what is actually out there. It’s controlled in some ways by our knowledge, by our finite minds that order things in certain kinds of ways, which may or may not be aligned with the truth. It is a step toward what came to be called postmodernism.
At the risk of oversimplification, however, postmodernism is really the fruit of three or four major cultural streams. From the German perspective, there was a large-scale focus on hermeneutics, which is simply the art and science of interpretation. If you look at older evangelical books on hermeneutics … the one by Terry, for example, that is more than a hundred years old, or even books like the first two editions of Bernard Ramm’s (it’s a bit changed in the third edition), or Mickelsen, or any of the sort of standard books up until about 20 years ago on biblical interpretation … they went something like this:
“What we’ll do is show you how to interpret parables. We’ll show you how to interpret Jotham’s fable. We’ll show you how to put your biblical theology together. We’ll teach you what a metaphor is. We’ll show you how biblical themes go together, let’s say the rest theme or the covenant theme or messianic prophecies. We’ll make sure that you understand Greek and Hebrew idioms, and so forth.”
What it was trying to do was give you rules for understanding the literature. You see, the assumption then was the Bible is the Word of God, that’s the foundation, and then the methods are all of these hermeneutical controls. So you have the foundation, then you have the hermeneutical controls, you turn the crank, and out comes truth.
So the whole point of studying biblical hermeneutics in a modernist frame of reference was precisely in order to understand what God’s mind is as disclosed in Scripture, but increasingly, especially in the 1930s and especially in Germany, you had a number of thinkers who began to question whether hermeneutics was quite as simple as that.
The problem, of course, is the finite knower who is studying this material inevitably brings his or her own biases to the text. I’m a white middle-class Canadian male. Inevitably that means I am not certain other things. Transparently, I’m not black. Transparently, I’m not female. Transparently, I’m not under 20, and so on. All of these things have an effect on who I am. I did my education in Canada and in Britain. I didn’t do any education in Saudi Arabia. I haven’t had a scrap of education at a Chinese university.
Inevitably that affects how I look at things. So the questions I raise, the questions I bring to the text, are a function of who I am, aren’t they? That means the kinds of answers the text will give back to me are shaped in part by who I am. So in the older models of hermeneutics based on a modernist epistemology, these German thinkers told us, then what you did was look at the text that was out there.
The text, it was understood, was a reflection of some author’s thought, and you could know that author’s thought by having the right rules. You ask the right questions and the text gives an answer back; thus, you know what Paul thinks or Aristophanes or whoever’s writing. You know because you ask the right hermeneutical questions and the text speaks back. The text, thus, becomes a way of communicating, or listening to the communication of, some ancient writer.
Provided your hermeneutics is good, therefore, you can know what they think, can’t you? That’s why you study hermeneutics. If instead you now think, “Yes, but the kinds of questions that I ask of the text will be shaped a bit by who I am. I will ask this question and not that question. I am not omniscient. I can only ask one question at a time, and that question may be a function of whether I had a good night’s sleep or what kind of education I had.”
My first degree was in chemistry and mathematics; it wasn’t in art or history. Maybe that shapes the kinds of questions I bring to a text. Then I may push farther. It may be determined by whether I’ve suffered, whether I’ve learned to cry, by the time of the month, how hungry I am. So many things shape how I raise questions, what I can listen to, what I can absorb, and what I can take back.
Therefore, sooner or later, the question arises, “Is the meaning really in the author at all?” You’ve got no way of questioning Paul directly. Did Paul say everything he really wanted to say and say it perfectly in Romans? Of course not. You can’t ever say everything you want to say. Then in addition, when you come to Romans, people interpret Romans differently because they bring different presuppositions to the text.
Is the meaning really in Romans at all or is the meaning really in the knower who is studying Romans? Or maybe in some strange tension between the stimuli of the Romans text and I, the finite knower, who’s interacting with those external stimuli to make me think certain kinds of things, which means ultimately that the knowledge, whatever knowledge is now, is not necessarily what Paul thinks at all.
For a start, I’m thinking in English, of a kind. I’m not thinking in first-century Greek, and I have no way of questioning him. So maybe, in fact, the real meaning is not in Paul, the real meaning is not even in Paul’s text; the real meaning is in what I come up with, and if I come up with something a bit different from you.… Well that’s the way it is.
In fact, when I approach a text on this model, I’m not coming with cast iron rules that give me straight talk back; it’s as if I sort of sideswipe the text. I sort of come in at some angle; somebody comes in at another angle. I sort of come in at a certain angle, and it tells me something back. It comes back to me, and by coming back to me with certain kinds of things, it reshapes me. Because I’ve had some kind of encounter with the text, I am no longer exactly the same person as I was before I approached the text in the first place.
That means that when I approach the text tomorrow, I will bring a slightly different set of presuppositions from the me that I brought yesterday. The same with the day after that, and the same with the day after that. Isn’t that in part true in your own experience? You first start studying some discipline; you don’t know anything about anything about theology except a few Sunday school courses.
Suddenly you’re introduced to strange multi-syllabic German words that have some sort of aura of special inside esoteric knowledge, and you’re supposed to know what they mean. After a little while, you’re throwing around terms like redaction criticism, as if there’s magic there somewhere. The more multi-syllabic German terms you can throw into one essay, the more impressive you are.
Suddenly now you’re able to read these texts with a different feel, a different understanding, and a different set of presuppositions than you had when you first approached those texts. Isn’t that our experience? So where’s the meaning? Is it really in the text or is it in you? Where’s the authority? Is it really in the text or in you?
So instead of a straight line going back and forth maybe, in fact, what’s going on is a hermeneutic circle. You sort of sideswipe the text; the text comes back and sideswipes you. You’re a little changed. When you come back, you sideswipe it again. It comes back and interprets you, as it were. In a sense, you’re interpreting the text, and the text is interpreting you. It’s doing a number on you as you’re doing a number on the text. You go round and round.
So Fuchs and Ebeling, for example, argued between the 1930s and the 1950s that the goal of reading text, or any interpretation, whether it’s art or anything else, is not the discovery of truth in some objective sense. Rather, they invented two words: Sprachereignis and Wortgeschehen. Sprachereignis is a language-event, and Wortgeschehen is a word-event.
The aim, in other words, is not to find out what the text says objectively but to have one of those serendipitous moments, an “Aha!” experience. You interact with the text, and “Aha! Wortgeschehen! Sprachereignis!” Thus, you understand as you didn’t understand before, and there is a dynamic that is created to enable you to gain insight in this sort of thing.
Now in all fairness, the best of the new hermeneutics people did not keep saying that the circle stays at the same level outside, around and around. We’ll come back to that in a few moments, but that was one of the intellectual streams that fed into what eventually came to be called postmodernism.
A second stream developed in France, and it really was a kind of distorted fruit from the rise of linguistics. The father of modern linguistics was Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure was brilliant, published almost nothing, but lectured voluminously. His students took notes at almost dictation speed and ultimately published his notes as a four-volume work in French that’s subsequently been translated to many languages all around the world. De Saussure was, in fact, brilliant, and much of his work really has stood the test of time.
He argued, amongst other things, that words don’t have intrinsic meanings. Words develop functional meanings in their polarities with other words. For example, take the word tree. What does tree mean? Does tree mean that organic thing growing outside the door with branches and, in the right season of the year, leaves? Does tree … that is either the written form or the oral form … intrinsically mean that? How is it to be distinguished from the, tea, see, or Rumpelstiltskin, for that matter?
Is there anything intrinsic in the word tree that means tree? He argued, “Absolutely not. It’s entirely arbitrary. Its meaning is established only by its usage. Its meaning is established by its distinction from the way other words are used.” You can prove that, for a start, by pointing out that when you go to another language, it’s not tree; it’s Baum or it’s arbre or whatever.
Moreover, there’s nothing that could stop you from understanding tree to be better expressed by shmookelblox. Provided everybody in the English language was referring to that hunk of organic material with branches and leaves as a shmookelblox, then shmookelblox means what we now mean by tree. There’s nothing intrinsic in either tree or shmookelblox to mean tree. Of course, he was right. He was right.
That freed up the approach to language that has produced all kinds of extraordinarily useful branches that have aided in Bible translation around the world and all kinds of things, but out of this have come some shoots that received their start in linguistics that de Saussure himself would not have recognized.
Perhaps the best known of these is the work of Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida used the same sort of approach to sentences, paragraphs, and discourses as Saussure used with respect to the word, ultimately concluding that there is an arbitrariness to these larger linguistic units with no extratextual referentiality; that is, no essential referring to something outside the text that was intrinsic in the text itself. This brought about a massive change in our understanding of how language works, at least for those who follow the Derridean school.
Now it has to be said that in France, Jacques Derrida is now largely passÈ. Although he is largely passÈ and becoming passÈ in other parts of the Western world now too; nevertheless, the impact of his thought in relativizing human knowledge has not passed away. They are part of a larger movement, often French in its origin, that includes large names like Michel Foucault, for example.
Michel Foucault argued for the totalization of all language. What he meant by that was every time you speak, you are in some ways making a claim, trying to establish an authority, laying out a frame of reference that is totalizing (that is, trying to control) the thoughts of others. All language does that. All discourse does that, including, he says, his own arguments about this. He says that’s part of the human dilemma.
So every time you have the simplest exchange, you are actually projecting a certain kind of authority. You are trying to bring people to a certain kind of perception, your shared perception. Sometimes it’s overt in arguments and philosophy classes or religion classes at the local university, but sometimes it’s just the way you try to impose a certain kind of order on things. If others are listening, you’re trying to convince them explicitly or implicitly that your way of looking at things is the correct way. It’s totalizing. It’s manipulative, including his own writing.
How do you escape that? You can’t. Therefore, the best you can do is to fight it all the days of your life. Be skeptical. Don’t believe anybody. Don’t trust anything, because you have no knowledge of the truth, and even the claim that you have no knowledge of the truth is a totalizing claim. It is part of the human dilemma. There is no way of escaping it; therefore, in a sophisticated way, do your own thing. This eventually came out of the offshoots of the developments of the linguistic school.
In North America, the approaches to postmodernism really came much more out of sociology: sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the like. Here there is a much greater emphasis on interpretive schools. You understand things a certain way because of the group that you were brought up in. My father was a Baptist minister. Supposing I had been brought up in Saudi Arabia and my father was a mullah. Chances are pretty good I’d look at things rather differently than the way I do now.
You’re socialized into a certain kind of frame of reference, aren’t you? You look at things differently because of who you are. It’s not so much a question of the finite individual struggling with the rules of hermeneutics (the German model) or the problems and quandaries of the very nature of language (the French model), but it’s a social problem.
That is, you are in part what you’ve been made to be by the interpretive community in which you were reared. You’ve been shaped by a certain kind of interpretive community. Isn’t there a certain kind of believability to that too? I will never look at slavery exactly the same way as the chap in the next office to mine at Trinity looks at it, because he’s an African American and his great-grandparents were slaves. Will I ever look at slavery exactly the way he does? I don’t think so.
Then I was brought up in the West, and the West is characterized by an approach to individualism that is very different from, let’s say, the stance of Confucianism or still different from Africa where there’s much more emphasis on the clan or the community. So when I interact with African biblical scholars, they’re seeing in all kinds of “polymetaphors” many, many communitarian sorts of models; whereas, I’m inclined to think individualistically right away. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who cares?
At the end of the day, he thinks his way and she thinks her way because of the particular backgrounds in which they were brought up. I think my way because of the backgrounds in which I was brought up. You can’t escape those things. Culture determines what you know. Now all of these things, then, lead to major revolution in thought. Therefore, let me now come back to these six points that were characteristic of modernism.
1. “I think, therefore I am.” Beginning with the I?
Maybe we shouldn’t begin with the I. Maybe we have to begin with the we of the social unit, the we of the subcultural group. Even the “I think, therefore I am” presupposition is a kind of linear conclusion that is surely not entailed by anything intrinsic in language. In any case, there is no way that you can move from what the finite knower thinks he or she knows to knowledge that is known only by an omniscient being, if he, she, or it exists.
2. Epistemological certainty is desirable and attainable?
It’s not attainable. Epistemological certainty is a dead impossibility because under this way of looking at things, we’re shaped by what we ate for breakfast, how much sleep we had, by what culture we were brought up in. We’re shaped by the language we use. We’re shaped by who our parents were.
We’re shaped by what kind of presuppositions we bring to a text. We’re shaped by what race we belong to. We’re shaped by what education we had or didn’t have. We’re shaped by how good we are at athletics or whether we know which end of a screwdriver to hold. We’re shaped by so many things. We’re shaped by whether we’ve had the flu in the last month.
Attainable? It’s not attainable. In fact, it’s not even desirable. It’s much more desirable to celebrate the diversity, isn’t it? Hence, multiculturalism. Anything else is mere totalization; some intellectual group trying to impose its way of thinking on some other intellectual group. Don’t you know that proselytizing is wrong? So the second one goes out the window entirely. What about the third?
3. If modernist epistemology was profoundly foundationalist, postmodern epistemology is profoundly anti-foundationalist.
What postmoderns argue is there are no agreed foundations. None. Every one of these ostensible foundations is, in fact, a social construct or a linguistic construct. It’s a cultural construct. If it’s a construct, then it is no more enduring, eternal, or transcultural than any cultural artifact.
If you’re thinking in English, language itself is a cultural artifact. Language itself is one of the functions of culture. If you’re thinking in Chinese, it might look a bit different. So it’s profoundly anti-foundationalist. Well, if you don’t have any foundations, then how are you going to get agreement?
You see, the foundation in premodern epistemology was an omniscient God who knows everything. So the whole question becomes then.… Where is the descent of revelation? Where is the locus of revelation? In modernist epistemology, really the ultimate foundation is a few axioms that fall out of the impregnability of the finite knower, but now you look at the finite knower as knowledge, and you say, “Sheesh! It is finite.”
Therefore, it’s not anchored anywhere. It’s not tied to anything immutable, certain, transcultural, or trans-anything. It’s just the perspective of the so-called foundation of a finite group. It’s no more foundational than the group itself. Thus, epistemological certainty is impossible. It’s not desirable, and there certainly are no foundations. That means …
4. Methodologically, there is no impregnable method.
There are different methods. You bring your method; I bring my method. Those of you who are reading in the theological literature, you know that’s going on all the time. Somebody writes an article on something or other and lays out his or her methodological bias. “In this essay, I’m going to do such and such.” Or, “In this essay, I’m going to approach John’s gospel from the position of a social-science critique.”
Thus, you’re not paying attention to source criticism. You’re not paying attention to biblical theology. You’re not paying attention to history. You’re doing a social-science critique, and so that method controls things. The writer is careful not to say, “This is the only way you can understand John’s gospel.” In fact, most postmodern writers using a social-science approach will be very quick to say that there are other approaches, but this sort of approach is fruitful.
Fruitful? Well, it’s fruitful for producing interpretations that depend on this particular chosen method, which is admittedly arbitrary. There are other methods, but it’s not going to produce something that sounds like what Jude talks about, “The faith once delivered to the saints.” So there is authority here only insofar as there is an agreed authority for this approach amongst a certain intellectual guild of people who think that this approach is fruitful. That’s as far as the authority extends, and that’s it.
5. Thus, the aim for ahistorical universality is just sheer myth.
It’s just sheer waste of time. Ahistorical universality is a myth, and the aim for it is futile. It is stupid, in fact.
6. Interestingly enough, the ascendency of naturalism is also in some ways under fire.
There are many, many contemporary biblical scholars who are still profoundly naturalistic, but there is also a rise in “spirituality,” whatever that is. It’s not necessarily what Paul means by “a life in the Spirit” or “walking in the Spirit,” but once you have overthrown the truth claims of anything, including naturalism, then you can be open to almost anything.
So you can be spiritual because you really are massively affected by the vibrations of crystals, because you join a Wiccan coven, because you return to an animistic religion from Africa, because a Confucian outlook is very helpful in enriching Christian traditions, or because.… Do you see? It’s all spiritual. That is to say, spiritual itself now becomes what I sometimes call a “cheer word.” It’s one of those words you’re not allowed to critique. It’s one of those words which, when used, prompts everybody to cheer.
Spirituality. “Oh, good, good. Spirituality is good.” Whether it has to do with esthetics, some alleged connection of you to some spirit being beyond the natural order, some finding who you really are in your inner self, some way of connecting you with the great pantheistic life force, or whatever.… It’s good by definition. So we explore spirituality in our various traditions and we bring in a little bit from here and a little bit from there, an eclectic potpourri a hotchpotch spirituality.
Then if I bring in a bit of claims about Jesus in all of this as well, it doesn’t matter, because the real aim is spirituality. It’s not Jesus. It’s not historical truth. That’s all relativized. The real aim is spirituality. You’re open now to spirituality precisely because you’re no longer locked into a narrow, naturalistic world anymore.
That, I think, is largely where we are in terms of Western epistemology. Let me hasten to add that there are all kinds of people who are not pure postmoderns. There are all kinds of people who are modernist in some dimensions of their lives and postmodern in other dimensions of their lives. There are a lot of people who’ve never heard the term postmodern who, nevertheless, are surprisingly postmodern.
There are all kinds of laypeople, for example, who wouldn’t know what a postmodern position is at all, who nevertheless watch enough television to become postmodern. Numerous people have seen, for example, that the development of the Star Trek series is a wonderful example of movement from modernism to postmodernism.
The early ones.… The grey beards amongst us will remember the early ones. “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Split infinitive: “To boldly go.” “Where no man has gone before.” Clearly male chauvinist language, but in any case, it was profoundly modernistic. The aim was to find the truth of things, to explore new horizons, and so on.
If you look at the latest series (which is the sixth), then you discover, either every program or every second or third program, they’re stumbling across some new culture, some new way of looking at things, which seems to be barbaric from our perspective. The whole aim of the program in terms of moral dimensions is to say that from their own perspective it’s entirely reasonable, and our job is not to interfere with their perspective. Isn’t that what is being said? That’s a postmodern worldview, do you see?
Thus, for example, the head of ABC News in America has given a major lecture recently in which he argues that he is not prepared to say that driving airplanes into large towers to kill thousands of people is wrong. He’s not prepared to say that because it all depends on your frame of reference. That’s a very postmodern way of looking at things, isn’t it? Regardless of what you think the America response should or should not be, it still is a very, very postmodern way of looking at things.
Stanley Fish, one of the most famous of the American postmoderns, has published numerous articles now on the web, the New York Times (which is a publication usually so far to the left you need field glasses to read it), and so on, which argues that the reason why we should oppose the terrorists is not because they are evil and we are good, not because we are right and they are wrong, not for any of those reasons, but just because from our perspective it looks bad and from their perspective it looks good. The two perspectives are bound to clash in the world, and we have to defend our own perspective. That’s what he argues. Read for yourself.
You see, the same voices argue that you really cannot say Hitler was wrong. You cannot. From his perspective, Aryan supremacy was a given; it was a scientific thing. You cannot say that Pol Pot was wrong. It all depends on the point of view. If you adopt a certain kind of Marxist historiography in the framework of Cambodian history, you can understand how Pol Pot got there. Everybody understands everything, and nobody condemns anything. You can never, ever say that anyone or anything is wrong.
Now in some ways these are more extreme voices, of course, but the impact of these things on us is inescapable, isn’t it? It’s unavoidable. You cannot duck the pressure of these things. So that when you start making truth claims about Christianity, you’ll be heard in your subculture to be narrow-minded, old-fashioned, bigoted, and right-wing, even while from your perspective, you may simply be trying to engage intellectually.
So then, what do we do? Well, what some of us do is just disengage. We just play the game by the rules of everybody else, but over the years, the acids of doubt begin to seep deep in our souls, and it becomes difficult to pray. It becomes difficult to witness. You first go off to study theology because you want to be an informed Christian who will engage in the culture and bear witness faithfully to Jesus. You end up as an insipid academic who couldn’t bear witness to your best friend. How has that been a great gain for the gospel?
Don’t talk to me about problems of biblical inerrancy until you see that the issue is a much bigger one. It’s a problem of epistemology. It’s a culture question. I don’t think you can address the questions of biblical authority until you’ve first addressed the larger questions of epistemology. I don’t think you can.
