Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on The Emergent Church in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
To change the tone just a wee bit before the final heavy bit about which I warned you, somebody sent me this little bit from the Internet. I don’t know if you’ve seen it; it is so funny. It’s over the top, I acknowledge. It’s over the top, but it is funny, so I’m going to read it to you. It’s called “The Emergent Elijah” by a chap called David Green. It’s not quite fair, but it’s funny.
“What if the emergent church crowd could re-write some of the ‘mean’ parts of the Bible? What would it look like?” So this is the Emergent rewrite, then, in this author’s creation of Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Baal. “Elijah said to Ahab, ‘You have forsaken the commandments of the Lord, and you have followed Baal. Although I don’t agree with that decision, I can’t condemn it. After all, no one has all the truth.
I understand that Israel has some truth and so does the religion of Baal. We’re all seekers of ultimate truth. Therefore, let us unite with the prophets of Baal. Now then send and gather to me all Israel at Mount Carmel, together with 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of the Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table. And let us all have a conversation.’ (1 Kings 18:18–19)
So Ahab sent a message among all the sons of Israel, and brought the prophets together at Mount Carmel. And Elijah came near to all the people and said, ‘How long will we hesitate between two opinions? Forever, I say! The Lord might be God, or Baal might be God. We all have our own personal opinion as to who God is, but let’s face it: We might be wrong. So let us be open to Baal. Remember, Judge not lest ye be judged!’ But the people did not answer him a word. (1 Kings 18:20–21)
Then Elijah said to the people, ‘I alone am left a prophet of the Lord, but Baal’s prophets are 450 men. I’m not saying this proves that Baal is the true God, but it is a powerful argument for Baal, wouldn’t you agree? So let’s be open to what the prophets of Baal have to teach us.’ (1 Kings 18:22) ‘Now—I know that some of you have proposed that we put Baal to the test and see if either Baal or Yahweh will give us a sign from heaven. But this is wrong. Even if fire came down from heaven, that wouldn’t prove anything.
If we thought that fire proved that Yahweh was the true God, we would be arrogant. Our certainty would be based on evidence that could easily be explained by natural phenomenon. So instead of having the arrogance of certainty, let us instead have a humble conversation and unite in the unity of love with the prophets of Baal.’ And all the people answered Elijah and said, ‘That is a good idea.’ (1 Kings 18:23–24)
So Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, ‘We respect your beliefs, prophets of Baal. We Israelites do not have absolute certainty about the God of Israel. In truth, we might be wrong. We’re only relatively certain that we’re onto something when we worship Yahweh. Therefore we don’t judge you when you call out to Baal or when you cut yourselves with swords and lances until blood gushes out.
Additionally, we don’t believe that Yahweh is at war with Baal. God has not called his followers to gain victory or to triumph over his enemies. Yahweh does not want us to conquer the hearts of men through evangelism. “Conquest” is a trait of evil, white, European, male Christianity. We’re above and beyond such mean-spirited hurtfulness.’ (1 Kings 18:25–29)
Then Elijah said to all the people, ‘Come near to me.’ So all the people came near to him. And he repaired the altar of the Lord, which had been torn down. And Elijah took the same number stones as there are world religions, and he said, ‘To the prophets of Baal and to all sincere worshipers of deities, we unite with you in true love and unity. The lion is lying down with the lamb. Amen?’ (1 Kings 18:30–39)
Then Elijah said to the people, ‘Shake hands with the prophets of Baal. Hug them as your spiritual brothers.’ So they hugged them; and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and made them members of his church. (1 Kings 18:40)”
Not fair, but funny. It really gets to the heart of the more extreme forms of this even while I insist in the strongest possible voice that there are a lot of people who call themselves emergent in certain respects, who, nevertheless, are virulently evangelical and doing a good job planting churches.
The movement is diverse; I want to keep saying that. Yet, at the same time, I worry about the movement itself. If the Lord doesn’t come back for 30 years, nobody is going to be talking about the emerging church movement. People will still be talking about the gospel. Get your priorities straight.
Now at last, 15 minutes or so of technical stuff. If you want to quit now, quit now. What I’m going to do is interact for just a few minutes with James K.A. Smith’s, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church. Smith reads the contributions of these seminal thinkers in such a way they become helpful to Christians rather than ogres or demons. I’ll begin with Derrida.
Derrida’s unpacking of deconstruction is in some ways summarized in his much-repeated slogan, “There is nothing outside the text,” il n’y a pas de hors-texte in French, but Derrida is not a linguistic idealist; that is, someone who holds that there is literally nothing outside the text or that all the world is somehow nothing but massive text; rather, he is insisting that there is no access to uninterpreted text, to uninterpreted reality. As Smith puts it, “Everything must be interpreted in order to be experienced.”
“[Derrida] is what we might call—for lack of a better term—a comprehensive hermeneuticist [a comprehensive interpreter] who asserts the ubiquity of all interpretation: all of our experience is already an interpretation.” In fact, this stance, he says, “… can be considered a radical translation of the Reformation principle of sola scriptura.
In particular, Derrida’s insight should push us [to recognize and] to recover two key emphases of the church: (a) the centrality of Scripture for mediating our understanding of the world as a whole and (b) the role of the community in the interpretation of Scripture.” Of course, Smith knows that some might well respond that if we only have interpretations, including the interpretations of the gospel, we cannot know if the gospel itself is true. In fact, he charges me with maintaining a version of his criticism. This is his quote:
“Carson is clearly worried that because folks like Stanley Grenz, Brian McLaren, and other ‘hard postmodernists’ (as he calls them) reject modern notions of absolute or objective truth, they are giving up on truth altogether. But in his criticisms, it becomes clear that Carson simply conflates truth with objectivity. For Carson, one can only be said to know truly if one knows objectively.
While Carson rightly knows that human knowledge can never pretend to omniscience, this doesn’t mean we can’t claim to know in a finite but real manner. But his affirmation of finite knowledge always elides into an affirmation of objective knowledge. Although he does not define objectivity (quite an oversight given his project), Carson clearly means this to carry some connotation of self-evident givenness: if a truth is objective, then it is not a matter of interpretation.”
Smith has so completely misrepresented me I scarcely know where to begin, but I’ll have a shot. A few observations:
1. Absolutely nowhere have I affirmed, “If a truth is subjective, then it is not a matter of interpretation.”
I spent hundreds of pages in The Gagging of God denying this point, and even in the more popular Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church I repeated in various ways that there are only two kinds of perspectivalists: those who admit it and those who don’t.
We cannot escape our finitude. We cannot. In fact, Christians have an even more profound analysis of our limitations than do the most radical postmoderns because we confess not only our finitude but our fallenness.
2. I cheerfully admit that “objective” and “objectively” are slippery words.
In Becoming Conversant I did not take as much time as in Gagging to make some necessary distinctions. Nevertheless, I would have thought that an alert reader would get the point that I repeatedly made:
Human beings may know objective truth in the sense that they may know what actually conforms to reality; that is, it is objective outside the text, but they cannot know it objectively; that is, they cannot escape their finitude and, thus, this side of the consummation, their fallenness and, therefore, the limitations of perspectivalism. They cannot escape that. They cannot know anything completely.
What is this but another way of saying that all our knowledge is necessarily interpretative knowledge? That’s why elsewhere I’ve developed at some length the long-discussed nature of the hermeneutical spiral where you spiral in closer and closer, knowing what the truth is or asymptotic approaches to knowledge that I mentioned earlier that are discussed at endless length in Gagging.
We may know some things truly; that is, our knowledge of them can form to reality, not because we have omniscient knowledge of them (that belongs to God alone) but because the knowledge we do have of them, however partial, however mediated, however understood is predicated on the revealing words and acts of God. Human knowledge is still knowledge of the truth.
3. That is why the Bible so constantly emphasizes the importance and reliability of truth.
What we proclaim is the truth of the gospel. Of course, it’s possible, one more time, to insert all the footnotes and cheerfully acknowledge that apart from the grace and the work of the Spirit we would not have come to discern the truth and bow to it, that our interpretations are necessarily partial, potentially flawed, and all the rest, but if we spend all our time with the footnotes then we betray the massive biblical emphasis on truth and on proclaiming the truth and on bearing witness to the truth that is everywhere in the text.
4. Many of the leaders of the emerging church movement, though certainly not all, have begun with the true insistence (there’s some irony there) that all our knowledge is interpreted and drifted toward very substantial relativizing of all interpretations.
I do not see how that point can be disputed. The example I gave in Becoming Conversant of the college student who, as a result of reading their material, had become embarrassed by all that the Bible actually says about truth was merely one painful example. This is becoming a pastoral challenge of very considerable proportions.
So now we turn to Lyotard. Many postmoderns identify with his “incredulity toward metanarratives.” That’s Lyotard’s big expression, what he calls the grand rÈcits, the “big stories.” Smith argues that metanarratives have a peculiar meaning for Lyotard. They are “… a distinctly modern phenomenon. They are stories that not only tell a grand story … but also claim to be able to legitimate or prove the story’s claim by an appeal to universal reason.”
Thus, what Lyotard ends up proposing is one variety or another of the big story behind the modern science of modernism. Whether the grand narrative is Hegel’s dialectics of Spirit or Kant’s emancipation of the rational or whatever. These grand narratives, these metanarratives, these grand rÈcits, are meant to be legitimating. They constitute the basis on which other knowledge claims are built.
“Nevertheless,” Lyotard contends, “these grand stories have no independent status; they are themselves the product of certain people and cultures.” Smith says, “Lyotard very specifically defines metanarratives as universal discourses of legitimation that mask their own particularity; that is, narratives deny their narrative ground even as they proceed upon on it as a basis.”
“… the problem with metanarratives is that they do not own up to their own mythic ground. Postmodernism is not incredulity toward narrative or myth; on the contrary, it unveils that all knowledge is grounded in such.” All this, Smith contends, is a very good thing for the gospel. It is reminiscent, he says, of Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til. Lyotard was not trying to overturn Christianity; he was trying to overturn modernism, and Christians should be grateful for his effort.
This is both correct and naÔve. It is correct insofar as Smith rightly summarizes Lyotard’s thought. That is what Lyotard thinks, but it is also naÔve. Smith thinks that he has defined metanarrative so tightly that what he thought to be the biblical metanarrative turns out to be something else. But most Christian thinkers have seen in Lyotard’s incredulity toward narrative a destructive threat to the sweeping authority of the Bible’s controlling storyline, too.
In fact, Smith himself acknowledges that Christian thinkers such as Middleton and Walsh, Stan Grenz, Brian Ingraffia, and others detect in Lyotard very considerable danger for Christian claims. But Smith judges that these thinkers are worrying about nothing because “the biblical narrative is not properly a metanarrative.” Whoa! Isn’t it a great story that is trying to claim control over the whole interpretative grid?
Frankly, I doubt that were the question put to him, Lyotard would agree. Certainly popular writers like McLaren are now so suspicious of metanarrative in some comprehensive sense that they refuse to present Christ’s claims as grounded in the sweeping storyline of Scripture. Not once do they come out and say that the storyline is true.
Smith goes on to excoriate the many Christians who, he says, “… have bought into the modernist valorization of scientific facts and end up reducing Christianity to just another collection of propositions. Knowledge is reduced to biblical information that can be encapsulated and encoded.” He then returns to my list of texts provided in Becoming Conversant that have true and truth in them, a list that clearly irritates him. He mentions it several times.
“This chapter,” referring to my book, “is a collection of lists of proof-texts that are supposed to have the self-evident force of criticizing hard postmodernism just by documenting the texts, a sort of mini-concordance of Bible verses that use the words true or truth. Carson’s critique of McLaren on this score, particular on questions of narrative, is an epic adventure in missing the point.”
Whoa! I must be rebuked! Then he asks, “But isn’t it curious that God’s revelation to humanity is given not as a collection of propositions or facts, but rather within a narrative—a grand sweeping story from Genesis to Revelation?” Well, frankly, I don’t find it curious at all; it is glorious. I have emphasized the importance of narrative, this big story. Let’s call it a metanarrative. I’ve emphasized it again and again and again. I spent hundreds of pages in Gagging talking about the importance of the metanarrative.
Not once do I ever pit propositions against the biblical narrative. All I have done is insist that the sweeping narrative includes propositions that cannot be ignored by appealing to the narrative. Let me repeat that. It is absolutely crucial. All I have done is insist that the sweeping narrative, the metanarrative of Scripture, the Bible’s storyline, includes propositions that cannot be ignored by appealing to the narrative.
When truth is mentioned, McLaren is inclined to say that Jesus is the truth; and thus, the truth is personal relationship and relational. Well, yes, that’s one use of truth in one New Testament writer, but that same writer, nevertheless, uses truth in related terms to refer as well and more commonly to propositions.
My list of references was not provided to construct a list of propositions which together constitute the sum of Christian belief over against biblical narrative. Few have insisted on the nonnegotiable importance of the biblical narrative more than I have. I provided the list to show the extent to which biblical writers are happy to talk about truth in propositional terms (although these are not the only terms), propositions which accord with reality; that is, they are objectively true in that sense even though we can’t know them objectively.
I confess I’m sorely tempted to characterize Smith’s response as in epic adventure in missing the point. Well, I will skip what he says on Foucault. It just goes on and on and on here. Smith’s own proposal is that the emerging church align itself with the movement as radical orthodoxy. Now is that a category that is familiar to you? Radical orthodoxy began with two or three really distinguished theologians in Britain, but it’s going around intellectual circles in the Western world pretty quickly.
It’s really quite interesting. What it is really saying is we really ought to hold to the orthodox doctrines as a matter of confessionalism … the confessional of Scripture, the confessionalism of the church. That is where we ought to anchor ourselves. They call it radical orthodoxy. That is where Smith himself is; he’s written a book on radical orthodoxy.
Postmodern thinkers such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault, he says, have rightly taught us to be deeply suspicious of traditions that anchor truth, claim authority, or exercise coercive of power. Smith writes, “We must appreciate the sense in which many advocates of postmodern theology of religion are deeply critical of particular determinate foundations of religious confession.”
The entire Cartesian project is over, they insist. It’s a failed dream. These postmoderns, these emerging church types, they reject “the Cartesian equation of knowledge and certainty” (notice how they’re combining the two again: knowledge and certainty) and follow instead the wisdom of Derrida who once wrote, “I don’t know; I must believe.” Smith describes their position as follows. “In other words, the postmodern theologian says, ‘We can’t know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. The best we can do is believe.’
Why? Because to know would mean being certain. We know that such certainty is an impossible dream; therefore, we actually lack knowledge. We don’t know; we can only believe, and such faith will always be mysterious and ambiguous, but this isn’t a bad thing; quite to the contrary. It is liberating and just. It is precisely when we think we know something about God that we start erecting boundaries and instituting discipline.”
Smith doesn’t quite buy into this postmodern analysis, yet he is sympathetic enough to it that he says, “Much in this critique has been rightly affirmed by many who have tried to think through the shape of the emerging church in postmodernity.” He joins with this refusal of the Cartesian paradigm he says that characterizes radical orthodoxy. In other words, he likes this, “I don’t know; I must believe.” This is the direction, now, in which he wants to steer postmodern theologians. Human beings cannot finally live and make sense of anything without being grounded in some tradition, and that is the concern of radical orthodoxy.
In fact, he says there is some kind of connection between Derrida’s “I don’t know; I must believe.” and the famous adage of Saint Augustine, “I believe; therefore, I understand.” In that sense, postmodern Christians, he says, are properly dogmatic; they are rich in the doctrinal beliefs of earlier generations of Christians, even while rejecting Cartesian certainties. In this way of looking at things, Smith says, ancient Christians of the patristic period were perennial postmoderns.
Oh, now we even bless the patristics with being postmoderns. Of course, even this much dogmatism is offensive to many of the emerging church leaders, but at this juncture, Smith distances himself from postmodern leaders and tries to nudge them in the direction of radical orthodoxy. This is the last paragraph, now, from him:
“This is not to advocate a return to an uncritical fundamentalism or the triumphalist stance of the Religious Right. Rather, it is to affirm that our confession and practice must proceed unapologetically from the particularities of Christian confession as given in God’s historical revelation in Christ and as unfolded in the history of the church’s response to that revelation.
To be dogmatic then, is to be unapologetically confessional, which requires being unapologetic about the determinate character of our confession contra the Cartesian anxiety exhibited by much postmodern theology.” He’s got a bit more personal views from me in the footnotes. I’ll skip all that. So let me conclude with my response to that, and then we’re done.
1. Smith has described the classic weakness of all hard postmodernists.
That is to say, he sees it as just being too much bound up with subjective knowledge. He does see that, but he doesn’t refute it. He comes very close to adopting it. “We can’t know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” the postmodern theologian says. “The best we can do is believe.”
Why is that? Because to know would mean being certain. Then this postmodern theologian adds without a trace of embarrassment, “We know that such certainty is an impossible dream.” The harder the posmodernism, the more absolute the claim. We know that we can’t know. But if you know that you can’t know, then you do know, and there is something that you do know, so you can’t say that you can’t know. You can’t have it both ways.
On the other hand, if the postmodern theologian merely misspoke and really believes that such certainty is impossible, then perhaps he or she is mistaken. In other words, he really hasn’t answered the postmodern problem at all. Instead, he says it is precisely this refusal of the Cartesian paradigm that characterizes radical orthodoxy. Scary.
2. The notion that all Cartesians think that knowledge is tied to certainty is so easily falsifiable that it’s a little tiresome to see it trotted out again.
In fact, a very substantial number of soft postmoderns avoid this pitfall the way they would avoid an E. coli infection. Once we acknowledge that many moderns seek certainty in relative terms only and distance themselves dramatically from an implicit claim to omniscience, then the polarity that drives this whole argument breaks down.
3. Once again, it is important to return to the actual language of Scripture.
Biblical writers are not embarrassed to talk about truth, including propositional truth. Equally, they are not at all hesitant to speak about knowing people, knowing God, knowing things, and knowing truths. When Luke introduces the gospel, he tells Theophilus he is writing “… that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.” (Luke 1:4)
After his resurrection, Jesus presented himself to his disciples and “… gave many convincing proofs that he was alive.” (Acts 1:3) Of course, many biblical writers also stress the crucial importance of faith. My point is that they can talk about faith and truth and about believing and about knowing. Clearly this knowing is not the knowledge of omniscience. The certainty that Luke wants Theophilus to enjoy is not the certainty that belongs to God alone, but it is appropriate human certainty.
4. That brings us to Saint Augustine. “I believe; therefore, I understand.”
Since Smith does not tell us what he thinks the noun faith or the verb to believe mean, I’m not quite certain I’ve understood him aright. But in common with other theologians in the radical orthodoxy movement, I think he’s really skewed the meaning of these words from the semantic range found in the New Testament and in Saint Augustine.
Now this morning, for those of you who were here, I went through this in some detail with respect to 1 Corinthians 15. I showed there that in 1 Corinthians 15, this faith, this belief that Jesus is risen from the dead, is valid only if Jesus has risen from the dead. If Jesus has not risen from the dead, and you believe that he has, then, Paul says, your faith is futile, because part of the validation of genuine faith is precisely that faith’s object is true.
Moreover, if you believe it, and it’s not true, then, in fact, not only are you mistaken and your faith is futile, you’re of all people most to be pitied. We went through some of that this morning, so I worked out that argument here. In much of the Western world, however, faith is not at all tied to the truthfulness or reliability of its object. Faith is little more than personal, subjective, religious preference. Many people think that faith is utterly nonfalsifiable, and therefore, competing faiths cannot usefully or realistically be discussed.
Smith, mercifully, doesn’t go so far. Yet, for him, he says, “Faith will always be mysterious and ambiguous.” Well, yes and no. Faith is mysterious in that where it is true faith in the Pauline sense, it is not only something that we exercise, but it is a gift from God. I suppose we might say there are ambiguous elements in faith, and that we trust God and his Word even where we cannot clearly see the way ahead.
But the point to observe is that in the Bible, it is right to trust this God with the future, not because of what we do not see or because of what we perceive to be mysterious, but because of what we have come to know of this God, including such truth as the fact that this God raised his own dear Son from the dead for your justification. That’s the basis of our faith that enables us to trust him in the mysterious.
In other words, the basis of our faith is the certainty of faith’s true object. Faith enables us to have confidence in God where we do not see because it is grounded in the immutable character of God that we have come by the grace of God to perceive as utterly reliable. Smith doesn’t work any of this out for he is too busy trying to distinguish faith from knowing, introducing a polarity utterly unknown in Scripture.
When Saint Augustine writes, “I believe; therefore, I understand,” he thinks of faith in a biblical sense; not in Smith’s slightly woolly sense, still less in the street sense of much Western subjectivism. Over against modernism’s autonomous human thinker, Augustine knows full well that we Christians are finite, dependent, created, redeemed beings. The beginning of all understanding is faith in the God who has made us and redeemed us in Christ.
Neither in Augustine nor in the New Testament does this mean that we should abandon offering many convincing proofs, in Luke’s sense, or reason for the hope that you have, in Peter’s sense. We still follow Paul when he says, “Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade people.”
At the same time, we recognize that if anyone is, in fact, persuaded and comes to understand these things, it is because of the gracious work of the Spirit of God in their lives. Always we understand, we insist, that what we are urging people to believe is … the truth. Not because we claim to have gained access to this truth by an epistemologically neutral vantage point, but because it conforms to what God has actually given whether people acknowledge it or not.
If no one believed, it would still be the truth. Augustine’s “I believe; therefore, I understand,” is, therefore, a world away from Derrida’s “I don’t know; I must believe.” Augustine, like Paul, emphasizes the epistemic necessity of faith, but, like Paul, he insists that what he is talking about is the truth of the gospel, which is precisely what Derrida could not affirm.
5. Where Smith carefully distances himself from his imaginary interlocutor from the postmodern theologian, it is over Smith’s commitments to confessional orthodoxy.
What does he mean? Let me reread his last paragraph and emphasize one word that comes up again and again and again. You’ll see what I mean right away.
“This is not to advocate a return to an uncritical fundamentalism or the triumphalist stance of the Religious Right. Rather, it is to affirm that our confession and practice must proceed unapologetically from the particularities of Christian confession as given in God’s historical revelation in Christ and as unfolded in the history of the church’s response to that revelation.
To be dogmatic then, is to be unapologetically confessional, which requires being unapologetic about the determinate character of our confession contra the Cartesian anxiety exhibited by much postmodern theology.” Do you see the point? That is radical orthodoxy. You confess the truth because you confess the truth because you confess the truth because you confess the truth.
It isn’t very radical. If radix is referring to the root, it doesn’t go to the root of anything. It stops one stop short. It rightly applauds Christian belief structures and Christian conduct. Its actual belief structures are in line with historic Christian orthodoxy, and for this, we’re grateful. Yet, it cannot give a reason for this move other than saying that we affirm that our confession proceeds from the particularities of Christian confession. Unapologetically even. Well, yes, that is not exactly false.
Christian confessionalism ought to be in line with historic Christian confessionalism. But is the content of historic Christian confessionalism true? Do we believe this merely because early Christians have believed it? I don’t think that Smith would want to be so minimalistic. “This confession,” he writes, “is given in God’s historical revelation in Christ and is unfolded in the history of the church’s response to that revelation.”
Great! So is the revelation true or do we confess the revelation simply because others have confessed it? Both the New Testament writers and Augustine unambiguously affirm the truthfulness of this revelation and are prepared to give reasons for holding to it other than simply the fact that others have held to it before them.
6. Smith’s last sentence in that block quote should translate into a robust appropriation of the church’s language as the paradigm for both thought and practice is bound up with the so-called Yale school.
If you want to pick that up in Questions & Answers, we’ll pick it up then.
7. Smith’s title asks, “Who’s afraid of postmodernism?”
Well, not I, though I confess I’m getting a bit bored with it. Surely thoughtful Christians should avoid too close an alignment with either modernism or postmodernism, for both are too heavily dependent on the I or the we of Cartesian thought. Yet, there are things to learn from both modernism and postmodernism, though Smith seems only to want to learn from the latter.
It does no good to camp out with those moderns who demonize postmodernism, for in fact, whether we like it or not, we’re all perspectivalists. Equally, it does no good to camp out with those postmoderns who demonize modernism, for in fact, within the limitations of what it means to be a finite creature touched by grace, we can know and proclaim the truth.
Now I have tested your patience to the very limits, I am quite sure. If you didn’t follow that and want to, then it’s going to come out in a book shortly called, Christ in Culture Revisited. If you don’t want to understand more of that, then just forget the last 20 minutes of the afternoon, and after the end of the Q&A, go in peace.
Male: This morning you said that Christianity is an all-or-nothing venture and that it affects all of life, and as I’ve lived in the Netherlands and I’ve lived in the States, it seems to me that the church in many respects is failing to teach the people in the church a proper biblical worldview that affects all of life.
A recent example is where John Piper was mentioning something about retirement and how unbiblical a notion that is. We grow up in a culture where many things are assumed because for us they’ve always been that way. Could you perhaps recommend some books or articles that would help us to be better discerners of our culture and how it impacts us in our Christianity and how we can develop a better biblical worldview?
Don Carson: Part of the problem is, in my judgment, this one has dangers on two sides. Some Christians see the dangers only on one side, and other Christians see the dangers only on the other side. Well, let’s go to Holland. Let’s consider Abraham Kuyper and his famous (I’ve forgotten the exact words), “There’s not one square foot where Christ does not put forth his claim and say, ‘This is mine.’ ” I love it! I love it! It’s a great quote.
Out of this, then, comes his insistence in the domain of education and politics and all of these other domains to eventually have Christian parties or Christian structures or Christian self-structures of society that eventually you have this political and educational and other capital to sort of control the state. This was tied in his holistic understanding (he was a remarkable man, don’t misunderstand me) to such a strong notion of a Christian order being established that he bought into presumptive regeneration.
Thus, the movement gradually forgot to evangelize the next generation. I think it’s biblically and theologically a huge mistake. In the name of global thinking, in fact, Holland went down, when it did go down, very fast. In South Africa, likewise, where the same sort of views triumphed once the church, the white church, was disconnected from apartheid then the white church has gone down very fast because there is a whole new generation that has come along that really knows nothing of regeneration. I’m back in South Africa, again, this January.
So I worry about such an emphasis on the whole that people begin to forget the tensions between the already and the not yet. Until Christ comes back, we are citizens of two worlds, and there is still something that has to be worked out in this ongoing tension between Christ and Caesar, even though Caesar, likewise, is subject to Christ.
So that’s one of the reasons why, in fact, I have written the book to which I’ve just referred, Christ and Culture Revisited. Those things have to be worked out again and again and again. In my view, Niebuhr got it wrong. For slightly different reasons, and not as seriously in my view, Kuyper got it wrong. Those are some things that have to be worked out, but it’s tilted too far that way.
On the other hand, the side that you’re warning against is the side that has such individualistic forms of Christianity and such pietistic and merely personal regeneration forms that people don’t think through how to think critically about everything they do with their lives; and there, I’m with you. I’m thoroughly with you. Christianity must not be seen as an avocation.
Where to start in the literature? The literature is huge, and I don’t know a book that sort of gets the whole. There were three addresses that Tim Keller gave very recently out at the Resurgence Conference at Mars Hill with Mark Driscoll. Those can all be downloaded for free on the Mars Hill site. I might not word absolutely everything that he says there in exactly that way, but it’s a very insightful way of looking at the wholeness of life. You might start there.
Male: In reading some of the critiques of your work, I’ve noticed, and you would notice more than I would, two main criticisms. First, people have said, well, it just deals with McLaren, that’s too narrow. You sort of talked about that. You can’t deal with everybody, so you dealt with him and a few others.
But the second critique that I was wondering if you could comment on is I’ve read people say, “Well, Dr. Carson really didn’t interact; he didn’t join part of the conversation. He hadn’t talked to Brian McLaren personally, and will he do some of those things?” So I’m wondering if you could comment on any follow-up conversations you’ve had with some of the leaders in the movement, and if you’ve had, how fruitful you think that is for those of us who know similar people?
Don: Again, a very difficult question to answer in some ways. I visit some of these churches from time to time, incognito, if possible; it’s not always possible. In fact, there is one church in the metro Chicago area that shall remain nameless where they’re dividing over this. They started an emergent church service. The whole church is split over it. Their numbers have dropped 30%, and the leaders of the church have asked me to come and try to help sort the whole thing out.
So I am involved at a hands-on level in some of these sorts of things. Moreover, any self-designated emerging church leader who has phoned me or contacted me, I have always gotten back. I could give you their names, but I won’t because conversations like that are private. After the book came out, (I think it’s probably fair to say this) I received a fairly blistering approximately 20-page email from Brian McLaren accusing me of various unmentionable things, including distorting him, and wanting to meet up.
So I instantly emailed back, 20-pages, saying, “I’m more than happy to meet. When is the next time you’re in Chicago? Or I’ll give you my schedule and tell you where I’m going to be. Whatever, you know, that’s not a problem. But as for distorting what you’ve said, here’s the evidence in every case, most of it’s documented pretty carefully in the book, but if there’s any doubt about the rest of it, here’s the evidence.” Then I went through it point by point, point by point, point by point.
“If I have misunderstood you at any point, please show me where I am wrong, and I will be glad to recant it in the next edition.” He wrote back about a 10- or 15-line email saying he didn’t think that it was worth pursuing the conversation any further, but in all the blogs, I’m the guy that won’t talk to these guys.
I think one of the reasons why they’re a bit upset with me is because I don’t blog, and that is a judgment call. I’m not criticizing those who do blog. I know some really excellent blog sites, and I scan some blog sites. In fact, I’ve got an assistant who just checks site after site, and then the best of them he sends my way. So I’ve got the best of all possible worlds without having to bother myself.
But I’m suspicious of blogs. Partly, it’s the tension between journalism and writing a book. Journalism is so instantaneous, and blogging is even more instantaneous. It gives instantaneous response. Immediately people are typing back and saying how wonderful you are and how insightful. People start talking too much. They get sort of diarrhea of the mouth.
I can think of one New Testament scholar, a pretty good man who writes in the emerging church in all kinds of interesting ways, who was telling us the other day on his website how now he’s getting older, how he has to get up a little more often in the night to go to the loo, and I want to say, “Too much information.” If you tried to put that in a book, the editor would have taken it out, you know? I don’t need to know that.
I know myself that I can be fast enough with my mouth that if I were blogging, I could quickly get sucked into 2 hours a day of blogging and vent on all kinds of things that would neither be wise or charitable, and I doubt it would do much good. But 100 years from now, if the Lord tarries, not one of the current blogs is still going to be read. My commentary on John will still be read.
I’m not blaming all bloggers. We need some journalists, you know? But if you want me to blog for 2 hours, my schedule is now so full I have to take 2 hours out of something else. What is it that I’m doing you want me to stop doing for 2 hours? How about university mission? The next book? Time with my family? My PhD students?
I don’t have more hours to give, and I can’t think of a single thing that I’m doing that I judge to be less important than blogging so that blogging can take over. Moreover, I do get the impression on quite a few of these blog sites that because they’re being read … you know, they get so many hits per hour or whatever … therefore, they’re the center of the universe and unless people acknowledge it by answering their blog then we’re not really engaging.
The vast majority of criticisms that I have scanned, the vast majority of them, have been of the sort, “Carson doesn’t interact with us enough.” They just don’t interact at the substantive level. I honestly don’t see how they can. The first most consistent interaction has come from James Smith, which is why I took time to answer him, because there was some substance there, but I’m doing it in print. It will come out. What can I say? Oh, there will be more blogs.
Male: I wanted to know, is there a good one- or two-page article that you could know to refer people who aren’t going to take the time to attend something who don’t have a clue about the churches that they’re attending and, you know, the way they hang on philosophy and doctrine, to just warn people to think a little more, because people are going to look at a book like this and be like, “That’s not interesting to me,” but they still need to know. So, someone who would read a book like this, where do I find material to get them to be informed?
Don: Well, there are some materials referred to in the footnotes in that book that are brief. The trouble is that the issue is now so complex. One of the things they are criticizing me of in that book is that I don’t interact with enough people. The trouble is if you get some lay person who gets their one-page article and then thinks that he can handle the whole postmodern question, that’s probably not going to work either.
There are certain responsibilities for leaders, thinkers, and elders in the church that are more responsible than others. What can I say? They do have an obligation to learn a little bit more. My popularization only manages to work to a certain level, and after that, I will leave it to other people to do something more popular. I do know that your pastor here and Ted are interested in doing something in a more popular level yet. God bless them. Go in peace.
Moreover, I don’t want to spend my whole life on this subject. I really don’t want to become evangelical’s answer man. There are too many positive commentaries to write and devout things to write. These controversies I sometimes reluctantly get drawn into just because I begin to perceive them as needing somebody.
So far, although there are scores and scores of books pushing one form or another of postmodernism, so far, I think, mine is the only one that has explored the emerging church from a mildly critical evaluative stance. There are three others I know of now that are in the press. So I got on board because I was getting phone calls every week in my office from pastors in various denominations saying, “What do we do about this?”
I don’t want to give my life to it. I don’t want to write round two. I don’t even want to write a second edition. There are pastors and others who in this area, I’m sure, will do more of the popularizing of the popularizing than I will, but I’m not going there.
I want to write a commentary on the Apocalypse. I’ve got to finish my commentary on the epistles of John. I’d like to write a biblical theology, and I don’t want to get so snookered in either blogs or controversy. I’d like to write volumes three and four of For the Love of God. If the Lord gives me enough birthdays, I’d like to do that. On the long haul, that will be far more significant for the kingdom than one more book on the emerging church. That’s not a putdown at all; it’s just saying it’s not where I can go. It’s not where I want to go. I don’t have time.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: That’s a good point. Mark Dever is pastor of Capital Hill Baptist, and he started an associative sort of thing called 9marks.org, which is an associated nonprofit. There’s quite a lot of useful stuff there. Now the only thing that I would say about it is it’s almost universally negative. In other words, it doesn’t evaluate quite as evenhandedly as I’d like, but if you want to see some warnings along those lines, that’s a good site to go to. Some of the reviews there are really interesting.
That’s another church, incidentally, which is full of 30-somethings, almost all conversion growth in the last 10 years, where the church is anything but emergent in style. Some of the fastest growing churches for 20- to 30-year-olds in the country are churches like that rather than churches that are trying to be emergent. At least some of the churches that are claiming to be emerging are not growing at all; they are just busy talking about it.
Male: You heard Tim Keller last week in Minneapolis say that in his estimation that the types of evangelism that we’re doing now … things like More Than a Carpenter, beach evangelism, the Four Spiritual Laws, the Bridge Diagram, stuff like that … that in the future that kind of stuff will become ineffective.
I’m serving in campus ministry, and that’s kind of been kind of our staple for a long time now. I know when somebody asked Tim Keller, “What should we do practically?” he said, “You should ask some of the brightest theologians today,” and I imagine he was talking about people like you. So how can we effectively reach postmoderns, especially because I think Tim Keller is talking about an emphasis on the kingdom, like the kingdom coming, and that’s something that we haven’t really done in the past. So how do you think we should reach the next generation of postmoderns?
Don: In 25 words or less. What Tim said at the conference, you’re right, I was there. I was even listening. What Tim said is that the older generation, the sort of Four Spiritual Laws and all that, they’re a subset of systematic theology; that is, of a whole set of propositional things, really geared in the first instance for people who are still working in a Judeo-Christian heritage.
Some of the stuff coming out of the better parts of the emerging movement tend to think through dawning of the kingdom stuff, and sometimes with more reference to biblical theology but tend to downplay the cruciality of the cross and certain dogmatic structures that are really intrinsic to the Scripture at a deep level. He said what he does not know of is the kind of brief evangelistic key that melds together the best of biblical theology and the best of systematic theology in one useful structure. I think he’s right.
Now there are some tools that are better than others, on the other hand. Rico Tice’s Christianity Explored is very helpful, I think. It still presupposes a bit too much, but it’s on the right sort of track. There are half a dozen others that I can mention as well. I’ve sometimes used a modified form of Matthias Media’s Two Ways to Live and others. There are some of these as well.
What I think you’re facing here, however, is not just postmodernism; it’s the depth of biblical illiteracy, and because of the depth of biblical illiteracy, the problem is how to set up a frame of reference in which talking about believing in Christ and what he has done on the cross makes any sense. Supposing you come at it from the point of view of, let’s say, John 10. What Christ offers you is abundant life, life to the full.
Do you want abundant life? Come to Christ. He offers you abundant life. That’s why he died on the cross. Is that effective? Well supposing you’re a complete secularist? You don’t know anything about the Bible; you don’t know the Bible storyline. You don’t know what life and death means. You just hear the words. “Oh man, I’d like abundant life. That’d be really cool. Good job? Better sex? What is abundant life? I’ll try that. I’d like some of that.”
So you say, “No, no, no. I mean abundant life.… It’s in the context of John 10. It’s an extended metaphor about sheep and how Christ is the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep and they come that they might have abundant life. The sheep metaphor, that’s about having a lot of grass.” Do you want to tell students to have a lot of grass? You see right away that on every conceivable front, you’ve got things to explain.
Nowadays when I do a mini-mission at a university, people invite me to come for one or two meetings, but I still prefer to have seven, eight, or ten and actually take them through more and more of the storyline. The first one, when I get a crack at it, is The God Who Makes Everything, and it’s Genesis 1 and 2.
Then you’re talking about creation and the nature of God, imago Dei, the importance of human beings, the origins of things, that he made it all good. The next one is The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels. It’s the next position of Genesis 3: the nature of the fall, what’s wrong with the world, sin … all that kind of stuff.
Then the third one is.… Well, it depends on how many I can do. If they give me enough shots, the third one is The God Who Writes His Own Agreements. It’s the Abrahamic covenant. The fourth one is The God Who Legislates. I give them the Ten Commandments and chunks of Leviticus. Eventually I get to John 1, which is The God Who Becomes a Human Being.
Eventually one or two after that, Romans 3:21–26, is The God Who Declares the Guilty Just. Depending on how many I’ve got, I’ve got something in there for kingdom and for church, and all that, and then the last two, if I’ve got enough time, are The God Who Is Very Angry and The God Who Triumphs.
Now the advantage of this is that it does put things together following the Bible’s storyline, it provides a frame of reference, but it is also hitting enough of the crucial passages that nail down the unavoidable centers of Christian dogmatics. That’s the advantage. The disadvantage is I’m pretty longwinded. That’s 13. It’s not a giveaway tract.
I’ve never written this stuff up. It’s one of the things I’d like to do. I’d like to write it all up and develop it as a Bible study that people could use on campus and that sort of thing and have a go with you guys who are on the front lines all the time. Then you tell me what is the matter with it, but my perception is that the days of merely a four-page tract for evangelism are past because not simply of postmodernism but the deep, deep degree of biblical illiteracy.
When I do more extended university missions, 30 years ago when I was doing them, if I dealt with an atheist, he or she was a Christian atheist; that is, the God he or she disbelieved in was the Christian God, which meant that the categories were still on my turf. Nowadays, I can’t even assume that. Moreover, the people who got converted tended to get converted during the mission. Nowadays, they almost never do. They’re so bone ignorant.
What they tend to do is get hooked enough that then we set up post-mission evangelistic Bible studies at different times and places that people get into, and for weeks later the leaders are emailing back saying, “Remember that Chinese girl from the mainland? She’s really become a Christian. She’s genuinely come through. Remember that guy, that hunk who plays football? He’s really close with Christ.” That’s what happens. They get converted afterwards.
It’s not because God in his mercy cannot simply zap people and come in in 15 minutes and see them converted. I’m perfectly convinced that God can display himself and save people in 5 seconds if he wants to, but God is normally a God of means, and that means explaining the whole counsel of God in such a frame of reference that what the Christian message is about is structured by a worldview. That’s really what I’m dealing with tomorrow morning in the church service here.
That means that evangelism takes a little more time. Don’t let this intimidate you. This is not saying, “Boy, you have to have at least three PhDs to be able to do evangelism.” It’s the opposite. What I’m saying is the kind of stuff that you believe as a Christian and you’ve believed for a long time as a Christian, you’ve got to learn to put simply. This is a question how to dumb down and simplify, not a question how to ratchet it up and become brilliant.
It’s a question how to make coherent in simple form as an alternative worldview that makes sense of Scripture and of where these people are and presents Christ within that frame of reference. Then, as is always the case with the church of the living God, some will come and some will walk away, but that’s how the gospel goes forth.
It’s the difference between Paul preaching in Athens and Paul preaching in Pisidian Antioch. It’s the difference between Acts 17 and Acts 13. That’s what it is. So yeah, I do think there needs to be more work done along those lines. There has been some. I’m more encouraged now than I was in this area 15 years ago. I don’t know if it’s possible anymore to have a sort of six-page tract to do this. I don’t know, but I’d like to think that I could reduce it to about a 160-page book, a paperback, cheap.
Male: This is going back to this morning a little bit. One thing I had a question about: I’m failing to see how the postmodern mind prohibits the use of presuppositional apologetics, because it seems to hit the non-Christian worldviews at the point where it really counts.
Like in your example of the Calvin graduate, he got up in class in Toronto and stated his presuppositions, but it didn’t seem like he actually did the destructive work against his non-Christian opponents or the constructive work of showing how the Christian worldview provides the only worldview with the preconditions for rationality or morality or science or the use of the laws of logic or language itself or any other things necessary to even begin a discussion with anybody else.
I was just wondering if you could comment on exactly how does a postmodern mind upset the task of presuppositional apologetics?
Don: Because what the postmodern mind will say for all of those steps is, “But now you are attempting to warrant your presuppositions, and your warrants themselves are all foundationless. You have no frame of reference, no foundation, no coherence on which you can base a critique of another set of presuppositions.”
In other words, I think that the whole problem, again, is we’ve bought into the subject-object bifurcation of this side of the Enlightenment and then bought into all kinds of things that are really quite difficult. I’m not saying that there is no place for offering that critique, just as I’m not saying there is no place for offering evidences either, since Scripture can do both. All I’m saying is that if you think that the apologetic in either case is guaranteed to work or be particularly convincing in a postmodern world, the rules have changed about how that game is played.
One of the things that has to be done, it seems to me, along with what evidences are present, as I tried to do briefly last night in resurrection or in presuppositional critique of biases and distortions, as I’m more than happy to do, which is part of what I’m doing, really, this afternoon. I’m also saying that you have to proclaim the whole gospel, and as you proclaim the whole gospel, some in the mercy of God do come, and some walk away.
There is a proclamatory thing that is worldviewish, and that worldviewish structure certainly opens up places for apologetics of various sorts, but the flavor of the whole thing is necessarily going to be way different from what either Josh McDowell was doing or some others in the other camp. Others who have begun to see this, it seems to me, pretty clearly, are John Frame, for example, I think John Frame’s Apologetics to the Glory of God sees this increasingly as well.
Male: It seems like that’s what presuppositional apologetics has always done. For example, Van Til always starts his books with a survey of systematic theology. He tries to set out the whole worldview even before he gets into the task or the point of contact or the method. Maybe it would be helpful if you defined what you even mean by presuppositional distinct from just the simple task of proclaiming the whole counsel of God. It seems like that point is so wrapped up in what some think.
Don: What I have observed in talking with people about apologetics is those from the evidentialist camp always claim that they do begin with the whole proclamation of the truth and are defending the truth in bits and pieces, and those from the presuppositional camp are equally claiming that they present the whole counsel of God and then are busy destroying the counter-failings, presuppositions.
What neither side does very well is acknowledge that the other side has some validity to its approach. That’s what I’m after. The bifurcation between the two is, in fact, funded in the first instance by the Enlightenment subject-object distinction. You squish that and a lot of our debates on apologetics look very different.
Male: Dr. Carson, you mentioned that the emergent church in a lot of ways is a reaction to some of the modernistic or seeker-sensitive type churches. I saw an article in Christianity Today recently that discussed how there is almost a parallel movement of young Reformed people.
As I watch these three groups, the kind of the older generation in terms of the modernistic and seeker-sensitive type models, the emergent church, and the young Reformed movement, what are some ways that we can be wise in our relationships with people from different camps in pursuing faithfulness in our churches?
Don: Be courteous toward all. Learn from as many as possible. Bring everything to the test of Scripture. Don’t just talk about doing it; do it. Don’t talk about how you proclaim the gospel; proclaim the gospel, and you’ll learn how to do it. Spend as much time in reading Scripture and books about Scripture and doctrine and commentaries that are good and devout and your prayer life and all of that as you do on sociology of religion and understanding your culture and this sort of thing.
Make sure where your allegiance lies so that you are reforming in one direction and not the other. Pray without ceasing and understand you’re going to be in a conflict until the Lord himself returns. It’s not going to get any easier. Ask for wisdom beyond your years to be discerning. Be willing to admit when you’re wrong.
Understand that configurations play around and change. But the fact of the matter is Tim Keller and I are very close, but neither of us share quite the same ecclesiology. C.J. Mahaney and I … I respect him enormously, but on certain points we’re not quite in the same camp. So that means, also, deciding on what is central, especially in a particular culture.
What is nonnegotiable? What are you prepared to die for in a particular cultural time and space because of what is being denied? That is also a cultural reading, and where you are really saying, in effect, “Well, I disagree, but that’s not something where I’m going to fight at this point in the universe.” That means also reading the Bible carefully, because even though it’s all God’s truth, some parts of the Bible are more crucial in a particular culture than other parts in terms of dealing with the particular vagaries of that culture.
May the Lord bless y’all real good.
