The Interpretation of the Bible in a Postmodern World: Part 2

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical interpretation in this address from The Gospel Coalition.

Male: Would it not be the case that even under the assumption of a God who is there, nevertheless, it’s an I affirming that there is a God there or claiming to know that there is a God there so that even the medieval and Reformed heritages were, in fact, unwittingly modernists.

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Don Carson: In part I want to come back to that again on the last day. It is certainly not the way Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin would have seen it. They would not have seen it that way, and the reason they would not have seen it that way is that they are already dealing with a God who is there. A God who is there before any other I is there. A God who discloses himself by making things in the first place. Everything is looked at from his perspective.

If any being comes along and says, “I make a judgment about the fact that God is there,” then they are already standing over against God as if they have the right to stand in judgment of God, which is already a mark of sin and depravity. So their entire world and beginning point is different, but part of the problem we’ll see in all of this is we’ve treated epistemology as if it were a morally-neutral discipline. I think that’s part of the problem, but I’d like to come back to that a bit more on the last day if I may. In other words, I’m punting.

Let me then trace out some of the steps that have taken us to postmodernism, what it looks, and what it’s doing. There’s no way I have time to stop at the various major figures from Spinoza on. Let me mention Emmanuel Kant rather briefly. Emmanuel Kant took a major step forward when he argued that what he calls the transcendental ego (more or less what we mean by the I or the mind, the thinking person) does not simply look at sensory data and infer patterns that we now call science, but it imposes order on the data.

Do you hear what he’s saying? He’s saying not simply that a whole lot of data comes in and then the transcendental ego, the I, actually finds out how it works (draws inferences), but that a whole lot of sensory data comes in, and the mind actually imposes order upon it. But if it’s imposing order upon it, then it is bound up with the I that is doing the imposition.

What happens now if another I establishes another order? Now that second question he doesn’t ask. He wasn’t a postmodernist, but you can see already that there is a problem, an instability, inherent in the modernist system as soon as you start saying things like that! Then we move on to …

We’ll take another jump to the so-called New Hermeneutic. Now if hermeneutics is the art and science of interpretation, biblical hermeneutics is the art and science of biblical interpretation. Hermeneutics in a modernist world presupposes a subject interested in an object. You ask the right question to the object, which gives back an appropriate answer.

So what does the parable mean? You have to establish what hermeneutics is, what parables are, how the Greek language works, how the culture works, but once you know those things (the proper foundation) then you ask the right sort of question, building on that foundation. That’s how you go about coming to understand historical records like biblical texts. You ask the question, and then you get an answer back. You’re the subject; it’s the object.

Increasingly, the New Hermeneutics people in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany were saying things like, “Yes, but the kind of question that the subject asks will depend a great deal on who the subject is. A Buddhist may not ask exactly the same question as a Christian. An atheist may not ask the same question as a believer.

Moreover, even the same person may ask different questions or be prepared to hear different answers depending on whether you’ve had a good night’s sleep, whether you’re in a good mood or not, whether you’ve just kissed your husband, whether you’ve just had a row with your teenage daughter, or whatever it is you’ve done. All of these things affect who we are, what questions we ask, and what answers we get back.

So there’s no sort of direct question and direct answer. The sort of a question that spins off me and hits this thing a glancing blow, and the answer that comes back to me, is going to be similarly distorted. That’s inevitable; it’s just the way it is.” In other words, you send off your question and hit it a glancing blow, and the answer comes back, but the circle will be a little bit different for other people.

If that’s the case, and you push this model to the limit, then pretty soon you discover that when the answer comes back, it subtly changes the subject. Supposing, for example, I don’t know anything at all about the Bible. I open the Bible for the first time; I start reading John 3. It seems very strange to me. I don’t have any categories to explain it in.

Now once I’ve read John 3 once, I might have some pretty strange ideas about what John 3 means, but I’ve read it once so that when I go back to ask a question of the text the next time, what I think I know from my first reading is now part of the package that makes up the I. The subject is different, not just the object. The subject is different so that when I go back and look at the object the next time and get an answer back, the answer that I get back will be subtly different from the answer I got back the first time!

So now you’re going round and round, but if you’re going round and round, how can you speak any longer of the eternal truth of the gospel? Can you ever get off the circle? In fact, isn’t there a sense in which this is coming along and.… Well, you’re interpreting it in the sense that you’re trying to make sense of it, but it comes along and as it were (to push the metaphor a bit), it interprets you. It does something to you. It identifies who you are, and where you are.

You’re not simply a blank computer memory that pulls in objective data. You are already a complex program, and when the input comes in, it modifies the program a bit. When you go back to take a look at things again, well it’s changed again. In fact, it’s more complex than this.

Now there’s a sense in which you ask the question, but the answer that comes back is also at the same time asking you a question, as it were. It’s questioning your existence, who you are, and what you believe. So that when you go back with your question, your question is in part also your answer to it. At this point, which is the subject and which is the object? So the New Hermeneutics people (if they pushed this far enough) would say, therefore, to speak of the objective truth in texts is a mere chimera. You can’t do it. You can’t find it.

As a result, gradually during the last 60 years or so in the Western world, people have moved back farther and farther from any notion of thinkers finding the objective truth in texts to the thought process that at one time we believed that texts preserved the thought of their authors so that when you came truly to understand the text you were understanding the mind of the author, whether the author was Paul or God.

But when authors write things, they don’t say all that they know. They sometimes put things down that they don’t really mean. They make mistakes and, in any case, the texts take on a life of their own. You’ve got to make a cleavage between author and text. A text takes on a certain independence. We must go beyond that.

We’ve not only moved now from author to text, but now the reader comes along, and he or she is so subjectively tied to his or her interpretive community, where he or she is in history, what they think they know, what they think they know but they don’t know, their biases, their culture, the time of the month, or whether they got up early that morning.

No matter what it is, it doesn’t matter. It means that nowadays the meaning isn’t really even in the text because even if it is there, you can’t get at it. The meaning is really in you. It’s what you find in the text. So now the locus of meaning has moved from the author to the text to the reader. Now you say, “This is all very strange, but we don’t really live like that.” No?

In the last 20 years, most inductive home Bible studies that I’ve seen have moved precisely in that direction. There was a time when inductive home Bible studies or inductive studies at university were meant primarily as a kind of method to find out, communally in a small group, what the text says, what God says, what John says, Matthew says, Paul says, so that we might learn to live by it. Nowadays the object of the exercise in many, many home Bible studies is, rather, that everyone should express his or her opinion.

So no matter how screwball the interpretation, whoever is chairing will say, “Well, that’s a very interesting thought.” Now I know pastorally that might be a more gentle way of letting the person down than saying, “That’s right off the wall,” but there are some alternatives, such as, “Well, is that really what the text says? Does anybody else see that’s what the text says?” and then let somebody else clobber the screwball idea. That’s the whole point of this method.

Nowadays you’re not allowed to say that. The one thing you’re not allowed to say in an inductive Bible study is that anybody else is wrong, because the aim of the exercise is that everyone should express an opinion.

“Did you have a good Bible study?”

“Oh, yes. It was very good discussion tonight.”

“Oh, what did you discuss? Did you come to an agreement?”

“No, no. There was no agreement, but there was very good discussion tonight.”

That’s a postmodernist approach to inductive Bible study. You say, “Ah, but surely in the area of science at least, that’s not how the game works. Surely in the area of science people are still talking about objective truth. After all, we work out our aerodynamics, then we get on board an airplane, and we go somewhere. There’s objective truth.”

Well, that’s what a lot of scientists think, but it’s not what the philosophers of science think. For that reason, there’s a fair bit of strain between the two bodies. Let me explain what I mean. There are many philosophers of science who don’t know much science, so we’ll excuse them, but there are not a few philosophers of science who are scientists first and then moved into the area of philosophy, and some scientists who don’t know anything at all about epistemology except what they crank up in their labs.

Recently in philosophy of science, the argument has been going like this.… Michael Polanyi, for example, 30 years ago was arguing that no matter what the field of science, science is now so complex and there are so many things to know, that in any field there is what he calls tacit knowledge, that is a whole lot of knowledge (claimed knowledge) that is simply assumed. It fits into a grid of assumptions and presuppositions and, in fact, it could be fit into another set of assumptions or grids.

Thomas Kuhn comes along (the third edition of his book, 1970) and argues that it used to be thought in the modernist model that science had a body of truth and then sort of a larger concentric circle of theory. The idea was to prove or disprove the theory until it became part of this body of truth. Gradually the body of scientific truth expands and expands, adding on bits and pieces by careful experiment and control.… He says that’s not the way science works and never has been.

What happens instead is you have some sort of controlling theory that explains a whole lot of data, like Newtonian physics, for example. The apple on the head bit. How gravity works. Mathematical formula. Work it out. Invent a branch of mathematics (calculus) to explain time-distant-motion problems so that you can put people on the moon. It all comes out of Newtonian physics. You don’t need Einstein for any of that.

Then, gradually, you build up more problems in the way light works and the way time works until in 1905, an Einstein comes along and publishes an article on relativity, and then a couple of years later publishes his general theory of relativity. Meanwhile, Niels Bohr is doing his thing on quantum mechanics, and those two theories don’t really come together.

Eventually there’s so much restlessness in the entire system that you don’t simply have adding bits on to Newtonian physics, you have a whole overthrow of the old paradigm and the adoption of a new paradigm. He also says the two paradigms are incommensurable. Incommunicative. Now it’s important to understand what he means by that.

He does not mean that you can’t communicate between the two. He does not mean that there’s no way that they’re related, that in one sense Newtonian physics is a kind of limiting case of Einsteinian physics. He’s not saying any of those things. He is saying that the model of how the whole universe works shifts into another model. There’s a paradigm shift. Strictly speaking, Einsteinian physics is not merely an extrapolation by adding a few more bits on to Newtonian physics; it is another whole model.

There are some scientists who think that before we get to the sort of universal equation Stephen Hawking is talking about, there’s going to be another major shift yet that hasn’t even been thought of. Most philosophers of science are somewhere in this sort of orb today, Feyerabend. and many others with different particular emphases, but what they’re arguing is that science isn’t nearly as tied down and controlled as many scientists think.

It still has to be said that there’s much more control to the hard sciences than people sometimes realize because there are experiments. You can do them again and again. There are agreed procedures, agreed controls, and laboratory conditions. In that sense (within a certain paradigm, within a certain model of things) you can get absolute results that are very accurate, repeated again and again.

Scientists devote their whole lives to going after the truth within that sort of paradigm. If you ask the average scientist in the average laboratory who never reads any philosophy of science, “What do you think you’re doing?” You’ll get, “I’m pursuing the truth in my discipline.” This is one of the reasons why, nowadays in university circles, the young people that are getting converted are far, far more likely to be scientists than art students, because they still do believe that there’s a category called truth. That’s what Christians also believe. There is still a category called truth.

At the end of the day, when you actually take those scientists and move them outside their laboratories, most of them are postmodernists in every other domain. When it comes to religion, literature, arts, politics, culture, they’re postmodernists. Why? Because at the end of the day, they watch television too. They read books. They’re part of this culture. Unless they’re self-critical in this area or have another anchor, as Christians do, they’re going to get snookered the same way as anybody else.

If you want to see the difference between modernism and postmodernism, I’ll tell you what to do. Go and watch five programs of the original Star Trek series. That’s modernism. Modernism right down to a T, laced with a fair bit of naturalism. Then the latest version of Star Trek.… Now you can only get it on Sky Television here so far, so I’m told. I saw it in North America before I came over this time. It’s out over there. It will come and afflict you in due course; be patient.

Well, there aren’t a lot of things I watch on television, and we don’t allow our children to watch television unless one us is watching as well, so when it came out in North America I thought, “Well, Star Trek. My nostalgic youth. Yes, we’ll watch that with my children.” The programs.… I looked at it, and it wasn’t the same thing. It had the same rerun plots (basically corny), souped-up graphics, same crises all squished into an hour every time, reasonably good acting, lots of money, but the worldview was different. It was a postmodern world.

I’d stop in the middle and say, “Look at that! Look at that! You have to remember that. We’re going to talk about that at the end.” There’s a postmodern worldview coming through program after program of the latest version of Star Trek. It is now almost everywhere. There is one more realm into this that I’ll mention, and then I’ll outline some of its bearings on biblical interpretation, evangelism, and discipleship, in order to depress you good and proper in preparation for what is to come.

There’s another way into this thing besides this hermeneutics. It comes out of the realm of linguistics. Linguistics is a discipline that really was invented in France in the 1920s. It came to fruition in the work of a chap called Ferdinand de Saussure. Now de Saussure never published much, but his students took voluminous notes of his lectures and eventually published de Saussure’s four-volume work, Cours de linguistique gÈnÈrale.

These four volumes on theoretical linguistics became the basis for almost all linguistic work done in the West. Now I won’t trace the heritage of the contributions that he left us. His work was foundational to a great deal of contemporary work in Bible translation, for example. He did a lot of work that was extremely good.

Linguistics has broken down into many, many subfields, but out of his work has come a new movement that is usually called deconstruction. It’s not called deconstructionism. The reason is that the word was, in fact, invented in French, and it was simply referred to there as la dÈconstruction.

Deconstruction has many different flavors, but in large part it is arguing that at the end of the day; if there is no truth in the author that is being communicated through the text to the reader; if there is no truth in the text that is being infallibly communicated to the reader; if, in fact, all the meaning is finally in the reader; and if language is so complex, so subjective, and so easily misinterpreted, therefore, there is no place for talking about discovering the meaning in text. Be done with the whole thing. Be honest.

Therefore, the most we can do is to deconstruct texts. That is to say, you come to a text, you look it over, and you discover that there are bits in it that don’t cohere. No text ever does cohere. You pick it apart. You set this bit against that bit, and thus break up the text. You deconstruct the text. You examine its presuppositions, show its inconsistencies, and expose its idiocies, until gradually you have destroyed any notion of meaning in the text. You’re being honest with the fact that that’s the way life really is anyway!

Then what you get out of it are the bits and pieces which you absorb into the system that is you, which you can then further use to criticize the text. That’s deconstruction. Now this is serious philosophy today. At Cambridge University, for example, 10 years ago there was a major fight in the English department. Power plays between deconstructionists and everybody else.

The university in Britain with the strongest biblical studies faculty academically nowadays, in terms of the number of people with advanced degrees and so on, is (I think) Sheffield University. Almost to a person there, they are committed to a deconstructive approach to biblical exegesis. Now what that looks like, I’ll spell out tomorrow.

There are different forms of it. The guru in the area is Jacques Derrida, but there are others. There’s a chap called Michel Foucault, for example, whose argument is that because all readings are inevitably, subjectively bound up, therefore, all readings are inevitably some form of power struggle.

They’re a statement of power and, therefore, of abuse. All texts are abusive, including the biblical texts. They’re either chauvinist, racial, religiously narrow, or something, but they’re narrow and bigoted by definition. All statements and all interpretations of statements are inevitably expressions of power.

Then there’s Stanley Fish in the United States. Stanley Fish argues that meaning is not just tied up to the individual reader (not the individual writer but to the individual reader). He’s saying that readers are themselves locked into interpretive communities. The reason why you read a text a certain way is because you belong to a certain interpretive community. If you’re an Arminian, you tend to look at biblical texts and read them in an interpretive way as an Arminian.

If you’re a charismatic, you tend to look at the texts and interpret them along the lines of charismatic theology. If you’re Reformed (capital R, small r, it doesn’t matter) you tend to look at it and say, “Well, yes. There’s a lot of Reformed theology there.”

If you’re an atheist, well you’ve got explanations for all the things that you find there in the text, but you’re not just doing that sui generis, as if you’re all on your own, all by yourself. It’s because you belong to a community of atheists or you belong to a community of charismatics or you belong to a community of … whatever.

Thus interpretations are community based. So he argues, “It doesn’t really matter what your interpretation is, so long as it’s authentically grounded in the community,” which means now instead of having people who hold idiotic ideas you have communities that hold idiotic ideas. At the end of the day, what you have is authenticity grounded now in a larger body rather than in any truth beyond truth for you or truth for your community.

He gives an example. He was teaching at Duke University, and he had two classes back-to-back. The first class was a class on modern literary critical theory, and toward the end of the class he wanted students in the class to read a number of essays in a book edited by Jacobs and Rosenbaum. To accomplish this, he made the following notations on the blackboard:

Jacobs-Rosenbaum

Levin

Thorne

Hayes

Ohman (?)

The reason for the question mark was that he couldn’t remember whether Ohmann spelled his last name with one n or two. As such, the students diligently wrote down their homework assignment.

The next class he was to teach in the same classroom was, in fact, a class studying seventeenth-century religious poetry. He suddenly had a brainstorm: here’s a different interpretive community. So the first students left the room, the second students were coming in, and he simply put a box around what he had written, with “Page 43” on the top. Then the class began, and he said, “Would anybody like to interpret this for me?”

Well, there was a buzz as they got their heads together. “What does this mean? We’re all interested in interpreting texts. It’s clearly in poetical format. Jacobs. We’re talking about religious poetry now. Jacobs. It’s clearly bound up with the covenantal people of God in some sense. Rosenbaum. That’s German, of course, for rose tree, which is one of the poetical devices for referring to the cross. So you’ve got the covenant community moving to the cross.

Now out of this wonderful movement in biblical redemption from the covenant community to the cross (from which all true roses spring), there is, nevertheless, the obligation to deal under it with Levin, which is in the Bible very often a symbol of that which is bad. Of course, it’s misspelled, but maybe they misspelled things in the 1700s.

Leaven is so often a symbol of that which is bad. You’re supposed to eat unleavened bread at Passover. Thorne clearly is part of the sufferings, the passion of the Messiah himself. You work your way all the way down until you come to ‘Ohman (?)’ and you end this entire exercise with praise, ‘Oh, man!’ But some doubted.”

Now that may say more about the state of American education at Duke University than anything else, but Stanley Fish has pages on this in one of his books to prove his point that, at the end of the day, even the simplest of texts (like this one) is going to be interpreted differently by different interpretive communities.

Now, let me pause again for questions and comments, and then I will lay out what this means for contemporary culture, evangelism, and Bible study.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: But that’s what they say. That’s the whole point. They do conflict. That’s exactly what they say, and if you say to them, “Yes, but if you claim that there is no truth, say the truth that there is no truth (which is one of the standard conservative ad hoc responses). Someone who’s sophisticated, like David Tracy at University of Chicago, whose influence in this area in theology is vast, would say, “We have no choice. There is no sure ground on which to stand. None.” That’s what they would say.

Male: Isn’t Stanley Fish, at some level, correct?

Don: Now you’re asking the right kinds of questions all right. Isn’t there a sense in which I’m not Chinese (well, quite a few senses in which I’m not Chinese); therefore, my ability to understand the Chinese culture is strictly limited. Don’t we say this even about the church? The church is an interpretive community too, even if we appeal to the Spirit helping us in our interpretations. Isn’t that correct? Haven’t we been talking about contextualization for years?

Doing theology in Africa looks a bit different from doing theology in downtown Manhattan. The answer is, “Yes,” but it’s part of why I’ve been trying to say I’m neither a modernist nor a postmodernist. You can see that if you go down that track far enough, there is no place at all, and then how do you speak of the eternal gospel, which is the way the Bible speaks?

On the other hand, if you go down the track to raw modernism, you’re making claims that are not only extremely arrogant but that finally leave God out and are out of step with this genuine degree of subjectivity that is around, whether we like it or not. So what do we do? That’s day three.

Just to make things a little more depressing, first of all, let me now suggest to you that this postmodern world is tied to a number of other developments. If postmodernism now is not simply a question of image versus word or anything like that but is primarily a question of epistemology, and it marks a major shift in Western culture …

If all of that is correct, and it spins off and displays itself in the preference for image over word, feeling over thought, and that sort of thing, then what kind of picture can we paint of its impact in a number of areas, not least biblical studies? First, it affects how we think about pluralism. Now there are different kinds of pluralism.

One pluralism is merely empirical. That is to say, most Western countries now are more diverse on many axes than they were a hundred years ago. We have more races, more cultures, more language, and more religions in most Western countries (and many non-Western countries, for that matter) than we had a hundred years ago.

It’s part and parcel of the post-colonial era. It’s part and parcel of more rapid communication. It’s part and parcel of fast travel and more money, but in all of those levels, it’s merely a brute fact. It is by itself neither good nor bad. If you like lots and lots of color and diversity, then you think it’s a very interesting and enjoyable thing. If, on the other hand, you’re scared witless unless you find blond, blue-eyed people all of approximately the same height and speaking the same language, then you’re threatened by it.

In the one case, you speak of a super-race, or you think that way. Whether you say it anymore because it’s politically incorrect is another matter, but that’s the way you think. On the other hand, if you like a cosmopolitan city, and you prefer cities where they’re speaking three or four languages, then you’re more comfortable in Geneva or Montreal than you are in London. By itself that’s neither good nor bad. It’s merely a brute fact; it’s merely reality.

There are some cultures that have not partaken nearly so much in this move towards empirical pluralism because they’re closed in one fashion or another. Japan is relatively closed. It has a fair number of Koreans in it, but apart from that, it doesn’t have.… There are a few Chinese but not many others. There are Americans who are still on the ground militarily, but apart from that, there aren’t a lot of people …

You can go through Tokyo and not see anybody other than Japanese, and you won’t hear any other language than Japanese. So a city like Tokyo is not very cosmopolitan. On the other hand, a city like Geneva, London, or New York (or most Western cities) is extraordinarily cosmopolitan. So there’s a fair bit of diversity in the cities of the world about how much diversity there is, but at one level, pluralism is merely empirical.

At the second level it is empirical plus an assumption that the diversity is good. There’s a value judgment put on the empiricism. Now whether that value judgment is right or not, I’m not here to discuss. There’s a third kind of pluralism that is different again, and it’s the kind that interests me. In the third kind of pluralism, there’s a dogmatic insistence not only that pluralism is good but that it is always wrong to say that any other group is wrong.

Now that comes out of postmodernism. That comes out of a postmodern epistemology. That means that for the first time in church history.… Now it’s very dangerous to say things like, “For the first time in church history …” because somebody’s going to pick up an exception, but by and large, it’s still the first time in church history, as far as I can see. You can find individuals who’ve said these things, but not a whole culture that said them.

So for the first time in church history, we live in a culture where the majority view is that there’s no such thing as heresy except the heresy that there’s such a thing as heresy. The only heresy left is that there is such a thing as heresy, and that means, suddenly, that when you try to preach the gospel and say this way is right and that way is wrong, you sound like a nineteenth-century modernist bigot.

That also means that the definition of tolerance has changed. It used to be that a tolerant person was understood to be someone who might hold strong views in some particular area, but who insisted that you be allowed to express your views. They might think that you are wet and say that your ideas were flaky but insist that you have the right to proclaim them, to expound them, to publish them. That person was viewed as tolerant.

Nowadays, that’s not the case. The tolerant person is not the one who has strong views but who allows you to speak, it’s the person who doesn’t have strong views, except for the strong view that you must not have strong views. Only that person is tolerant. That’s been demonstrated, incidentally, in survey after survey. What that also shows now is that tolerance is no longer bound up with the kind of person you are. That is, you might have strong views, but you are open to other people expressing their views even if they’re wrong. The kind of person you are.

Now tolerance is tied to the kind of position you take, namely the postmodern position. If you step outside of that plausibility structure (to use the expression of Peter Berger) you’re narrow-minded, bigoted, stupid, and ignorant. Clearly this affects many other areas. It affects morality. Who’s to say what is right and wrong? Ancient texts that have come down to us? Do we make our own right and wrong?

It affects processes of secularization and New Age religion. Secularization does not banish religion. Secularization squeezes religion to the periphery of life. You can be ever so religious; it just doesn’t matter anymore so long as it’s private and between you and God (whatever he, she, or it may be). It doesn’t matter. That’s still secularization.

Within that kind of framework, with lots of pluralism, lots of New Age thinking, lots of notion of religion that is bound up with fulfillment, self-actualization, finding yourself, expressing yourself, being yourself, and having touch with the transcendent, then truth claims don’t come into it. So it’s fed by secularization and reinforces secularization. It’s fed by New Age thought, and it’s reinforced by New Age thought.

Then you add to this biblical illiteracy. I’ve been doing university missions in one fashion or another for 25 years. One of the most striking features, besides the move from modernism to postmodernism as the baseline epistemological assumption, is the growth in just sheer biblical illiteracy.

It’s not just in university circles but in blue-collar workers, in the back country, or wherever. All over the place now we’re dealing with people who’ve never heard of Moses or else confuse him with Charlton Heston. They don’t know that the Bible has two testaments. There’s an awful lot more religion expressed in North America than here, but …

A couple of years ago I was on a television set for two days where there were several programs on Jesus and religious heritage, and I was a sort of token conservative doing my bit. While I was there, I talked to about 30 different people on the crew. It was a highly professional, trained crew.

Four of them I talked to at length about the Lord, the gospel, and so on. The rest I talked to briefly. I only found one person out of the 30 (and she only knew because she had been asked by the studio to do some background work in preparation for this particular series) who knew that the Bible had two testaments.

So while you’ve got these clumps of evangelicals here and there showing up by their thousands at some place like Skegness (Costa del Skeg), yet in the nation at large, you’re now dealing with vast numbers of people who don’t know anything about anything, and because they don’t, therefore, there is no heritage grip that serves as a kind of unacknowledged filter for getting rid of ideas. People are open, in theory, to almost anything. If it works, feels good, or it seems to make sense to me, try it.

That means that I can’t speak to any group evangelistically nowadays, apart from a group of churched unconverted people.… If I’m really talking to outsiders, proper outsiders (which is the kind of evangelism I’d much prefer to do), I cannot talk to any of them anymore assuming that they will mean what I mean by God, faith, truth, salvation, grace, Spirit, born again, regeneration, Moses, Abraham, covenant, Psalms, Jesus, Paul, apostle. We’re dealing with a complete worldview clash here, and how do we get back into the debate?

Now I want you to feel how depressing that is. I really do, because despite the happy times we might have in conventions and meetings, basically Western culture is going to hell in a basket. Unless we feel that deeply, we won’t even try to ask the kinds of questions that will demand that we stand up and check it in certain ways.

We need to try to be faithful, at least, in articulating the gospel in a way that meshes with where men and woman are today. Whether there is repentance or no is not finally in our hands. It is our responsibility to articulate the gospel clearly to men and women of this generation. Today. Where they are.

Before we close in prayer, are there final questions or comments?

Male: Can’t we go one stage further in pluralism and describe a kind of pluralism beyond stage three in which people mix and match bits and pieces (that maybe are mutually inconsistent in some ways) to form new holes.

Don: I agree with you entirely. Yes, but I would say that really is still part of number three. It’s really the entailments of number three that I haven’t spelled out. It’s not something beyond that, it seems to me; it’s merely the exemplification of that, how it works out.

For example, I can show you in the literature where serious anthropologists and experts in world religions will argue that they are unprepared to say that some tribe in a remote jungle that burns the firstborn child to death is wrong in what it’s doing, because that might be very meaningful for them. This is serious anthropological literature. I provide the references for it in the book that I’ve written on the subject.

It’s everywhere now. That’s not viewed as shocking. So that where there is moral indignation.… If you come back and say, “Well, maybe Hitler was right from his perspective too. He had his own worldview.” What they will say is.… At least the best of them; there are a lot of them that just sort of argue ad hominem.

The best of them (someone like David Tracy) will say, “No. You have to face the fact that the burden of Western culture now is liberally orientated sociologically, egalitarian, fundamentally committed to a secular worldview, and so on. Those are the goods and the givens in our Western culture, and postmodernism must be interpreted and operate so as to reinforce those views.

You say, “For goodness’ sake, why? You’ve just made up some arbitrary goods and bads.” They’ll say, “But that’s the way it is. That’s the way it is in Western culture.” It is a frightening world. It is a very frightening world.

Male: Would you say that the media’s reaction to the Dunblane disaster was an illustration of that?

Don: In my view, the reaction nationally (not just in the media, but nationally) to the Dunblane disaster is a reflection of something just a bit different, although it’s related. It’s a reflection of the fact that we no longer believe that the world is under a curse and people will suffer. So that when people do suffer, there are no categories for it.

You see, we expect some suffering in all those nasty areas in the Balkans where people hate each other and have for centuries. I mean, they’re sort of hate-filled people over there, aren’t they? What do you expect? Tribal areas of Rwanda. Of course they’re going to shoot each other, but not us in Britain.

In other words, we have not come to terms with the pervasive nature of evil. If we don’t really accept the biblical pronouncements on sin, its universality, the capability of human beings to descend to the gutter, the imperative of social restraint, and then the fact that rotten families, apart from the intervention of the grace of God, produce rotten kids.… This murderer’s mother acted as if she were his sister until the kid was 16. What kind of home did he come from?

You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, but you don’t expect that because the social services are meant to take it over. Nobody’s supposed to die. We have National Health. Now for the first time, therefore, this whole century (as opposed to virtually all the centuries in the Western world before that), we do not expect to suffer. We do not expect to die. It always comes as a surprise. Whereas, 150 years ago, almost every family lost one or two babies along the line, didn’t they? People were afraid of disease because medicine was pretty primitive.

There’s a wonderful poem by Thomas Nashe, a late post-Puritan Anglo-Catholic who died in the plague. Describing his illness, he wrote this poem with these recurring lines at the end of each verse: “I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us!” Now we say, “I am sick, and if the medical society doesn’t fix me up then I’m going to sue.”

So we simply have no categories for evil and suffering, and the result is when it does happen, you blame God. You blame the government. You blame the police. You blame the gun laws, and so on. There’s no doctrine of depravity, and so it’s part of a worldview again that is open to these things.

I put my daughter on a plane (she’s 13) last Sunday back to Chicago because her best friend (who’s not a believer) has leukemia and is not expected to live very long, so we thought we should send her back, to a Christian family, and so on. Now I don’t know how she’s going to cope with all of this. She’s only 13, but we have insisted all the way along the line (and I pray God that the Christian family she’s staying with will insist all along the line) that kids do die.

Just because you’re 13 and live in North America or in England doesn’t mean that you don’t get leukemia. People do die. We are under the curse. It’s surprising that anybody is still alive, God have mercy on us. Unless you build that kind of worldview into things, then the first time something bad happens, you have no categories. You have just enough theology to curse God, but not enough theology to find any comfort in him, which is a terrible state to be in. Well, let me close in prayer.

We take great delight in remembering, Lord God, that at the end of the day the gospel is still the power of God to salvation to those who believe, Jews or Gentiles, from every race, from every time and place, from every culture, including this most remarkable postmodern culture.

We hunger to see genuine reformation and revival, but whether it comes or no, whether you will have mercy upon us despite our great sins, or no, grant, nevertheless, that we, your people, may find favor in your sight to learn how to be faithful, bold, compassionate, courageous, articulate, wise, humble, unyielding in the midst of a culture that has not only squeezed you to the periphery but effectively gagged you by simply making you irrelevant.

Speak again, we pray, by your Spirit, by your Word, to the conversion of men and women and the reformation of the church. Grant that all the pundits may be dumbfounded as the truth of the glorious gospel rises again in this land. We ask for Jesus’s sake, amen.