The Interpretation of the Bible in a Postmodern World: Part 4

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

That brings us to Bible studies and evangelism and the like, not just at universities but in our churches and elsewhere. I suggested yesterday that home Bible studies in many evangelical churches have felt this second-degree impact of postmodernism, where the aim of the exercise is not so much bicommunal discussion to find out what the truth of the passage is and sort through how to apply it to our lives, but the aim of the exercise is for everyone to express an opinion.

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It doesn’t matter how daft the opinion, so long as the opinion is expressed. That makes for a good Bible study. What you must never say is that any opinion is nuts. Now the same sort of thing also happens in evangelism. There come to be pressures then for Christians in evangelism, that if they’re going to do an evangelism at all to present it this way:

“I would like to present Christ as a kind of option for you. While you’re here, there are other voices around, and I admit that there’s some revelation in all of them and there’s some good things in all of them, and who’d want to say that our Muslim neighbors are wrong in any particular.… It’s just not a very nice thing to say. But we do claim that Christianity does offer quite a lot. There are some advantages to being Christians. There’s joy and peace and this abundant life.” Abundant life covers an awful lot of things. You can sort of fill it with your own content.

Likewise, in the church it’s no longer a question of the gospel being that which was once delivered to the saints. It is no longer a question of a Paul coming along and saying, “If we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you, let him be damned.” No, no, no. We all have our perspectives to contribute to the church. We have an evangelical perspective to contribute, too, don’t we? Thus without ever denying anything, you have relativized everything. That’s the danger.

Then you can go farther and say just as you have to adapt how you proceed in evangelism and Bible instruction and so on to any particular culture that you go to, so we have to adapt to a postmodern culture. In adapting to a postmodern culture then you need less discourse, less preaching, less propositional content. What you need is more images. What you need is more drama. What you need is more narrative. What you need is more music. What you need is more feeling.

In each case, as we’ll see, there’s just a snippet of truth in all of it. It’s also dead wrong, but it’s important to see where the truth is in all of these claims before we write it all off too. Well, of course, this also affects morality, doesn’t it? It affects morality. Because morality, at the end of the day, depends on certain perspectives that are formulated.

As soon as they’re formulated, they’re texts. Soon as they’re texts, they’re interpreted. I don’t care whether they’re legal texts or constitutional texts or oral tradition texts or biblical texts. As soon as they’re texts, they have to be interpreted. If they’re interpreted in a postmodern mold, they can be reinterpreted and reinterpreted and reinterpreted.

In the United States, where there is, unlike this country, a written Constitution, there are massive debates in the Constitutional arena of law as to whether or not the high court judges, the American Supreme Court, ought to try to interpret the Constitution in line with the original intent of the framers or not.

The overwhelming majority now say not only not, but that it can’t be done in any case. The conservatives in the area say if you want to change the Constitution, then it should be done through the legislative branch. Because otherwise what’s happening is the judicial branch becomes, in fact, the legislative branch by redefining the Constitution, redefining the law. Reinterpretation. You can always reinterpret something.

This also affects apologetics. Let me give you a concrete example first and then something of the theory. I’ve been involved in university evangelism at one level or another now for 25 years. It used to be in most Western universities you could put up a few banners saying something like, “Has anybody ever come back from the dead to prove it?” or something provocative.

Then you get a lot of the local Christians to bring along their Christian friends. Then you use a fairly straightforward apologetic, either presuppositional or evidentialist. For evidentialist, you might use a book like Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? It has all the evidences for the resurrection.

In that kind of modernist world, if you could bring someone to the place where he or she was pretty well convinced that all the evidence really did line up to prove that Jesus really had come back from the dead, you were 80 or 90 percent of the way to getting them to become Christians. Because the entailment of seeing the truth there meant that they ought to become Christians. It is public truth. So if you see that that’s the truth, well you ought to become a Christian, shouldn’t you?

But nowadays if you put up a banner saying, “Has anyone ever come back from the dead to tell us?” in the first place, almost no non-Christians would show up except for those who have been explicitly invited by Christian friends whom they trust. Nowadays, I just refuse to be the main speaker at any university mission where I can’t get in a week or a month or two months earlier and spend a lot of time with the Christians so that they trust me.

Because if they don’t trust me not to embarrass them in front of their friends, the fact of the matter is they don’t bring their friends. If it takes them the whole week to get to trust me, they don’t start bringing their friends until the last night. That means I’ve wasted a whole week of my life in evangelizing converted people, which doesn’t seem to be the best investment of my time.

I just refuse to go anymore, unless as part of the package I get to talk with the Christians for quite a few meetings first so that they can trust me, so they start bringing their non-Christian friends (if they have any) from the very beginning. Because very few non-Christians will walk in off the street to that sort of talk.

If then I were foolish enough to being with traditional evidentialist apologetics in that sort of venue, amongst the first three or four questions at the end of the talk would be something like this. “I’m very glad if your belief that Jesus really did rise from the dead helps you. I’m sure it does. I’m sure this is a stabilizing point in your life, but what about all the Hindus?” That’ll be in the first five questions.

In other words, it is insufficient to prove something happened truly by all the canons of historical proof that might be open to you, because in fact, such “proofs” in a postmodern world are all relativized by the community out of which you speak. In any case, you don’t want to sound as if you’re saying that any other group, like the Hindus or the Muslims or whatever, are wrong, do you?

Thus, all the evidentialist apologetics in which you line up the evidence for something can be paradigmed out as belonging to some kind of postmodern community. If instead you come in with presuppositional apologetics, your opening presuppositions govern everything, well what happens then?

There was a young man by the name of John Cooper who went to Calvin Theological Seminary, a fine orthodox school. He went to Calvin College before that. Some years later, he went to do a PhD under Paul Ricoeur at the University of Toronto. Ricoeur is one of the leaders in this field and more conservative than some in the whole schmear of literary criticism of a postmodern mold. He has a lot of important things to say. Ricoeur, leading this doctoral student seminar, met this young man. This young man, John Cooper, was trying to hold up a Christian flag.

He wanted to be courageous, a Christian of integrity. Somewhere along the line in one of these seminars, he screwed up courage inside and said, “I think an awful lot depends on where you begin. If you begin with the God of the Bible then it becomes self-authenticating. You come to know who he truly is. The evidence really does line up that way. Presuppositions are extremely important in how you come out on these things. I have to tell you, I’m a Christian who’s come to that persuasion.”

He sat back, drenched with sweat by his own acknowledgement. He had sort of taken the big leap of faith. Ricoeur and the other students turned to him and said, “Yes, yes.” As if he had just announced that the Pope was Catholic. Any decent postmodernist believes in presuppositions, how they control things. Ricoeur wanted him to go on, because Ricoeur was interested in the authorization of presuppositions and the grounding of presuppositions. “Where do you go from there?” He didn’t have a thing to say. So apologetics is changing.

Now then, have we done enough of this? Have we done enough of the negative? Are you sufficiently depressed yet? Are there questions you want to raise just about what this stuff looks like before we start dealing with ways back? Are there questions you want to raise? You who are young people at universities or at work in intellectual centers, quite apart from the experiences that we all have in our various professions and laws, am I exaggerating? You could all tell stories far more horrific than the ones I’ve told you. I’ve edited out the worst bits.

Male: What place is left for evidentialist apologetics? Is Frank Morison’s book just left for reinforcing the flagging faith of sinking Christians?

Don Carson: Would you let me take a pass on that one for now? In terms of fighting back now, I want to start working toward that in the next day and a half. At the moment, I’ll take questions in the area of understanding what the problem is. If I haven’t made the problem clear, the solution’s not going to make any sense either.

Male: Where do they stand on historical reality? They don’t accept the reality of God. What about historical reality? If they feel something, are they really feeling it or does it mean anything or is it just a dream?

Don: That depends a bit. A related question to that is, “What do you do with science? What do you do with the hard sciences?” Which I began to approach yesterday and showed how philosophy of science through people like Feyerabend and Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn don’t deny that there’s some correlation between scientific conclusions and reality.

What they say is, however, that they are themselves set in larger theories that either involve (to use Polanyi’s expression) tacit knowledge or theories that are themselves non-provable and are, in principle, overturnable and are incommensurable with what’s preceded. Now I tried to align those sorts of things yesterday.

Most people in this area are, in fact, naturalists. Not so much because they are thought-through naturalists as because they are anti-super naturalists. Therefore, they tend not to align themselves with the idealists of another generation that wrote endless books as to whether or not there was any extra-person reality out there. Most of them really are naturalists through and through because they are the product of nineteenth and twentieth century science.

Some genuine scientists are worried about the inroads of the philosophy of science into the discipline. Because most scientists actually, with hands-on, the hard sciences, still think in the modernist mode, as I tried to argue yesterday. They think in the modernist mode in their own discipline even though many, many of them are postmodernists outside their own discipline.

Yet once the epistemological foundations begin to shake underneath of that and the work begins to filter down into the university community that instructs the next generation of scientists, then people do fear for the future of science in the long haul. There’s no doubt about that, too.

Male: Can I ask how you view God? Do you see God as essentially modernist?

Don: Oh yes, absolutely. Modernist through and through.

Male: Do you see Darwinism evolving or, because it is tied up to a modernist paradigm, will it eventually just go down a hole?

Don: It is very important to recognize that you can say some true things in both the modernist and the postmodernist epistemology. The epistemology by itself does not establish either the factiveness or the falsity of something. It establishes how you get there. Whether the thing is true or not is something relatively independent. So it’s possible to be a Darwinist and postmodernist. It’s possible to be a Darwinist and a modernist.

That it was invented in a modernist frame doesn’t stop many, many postmodernist from being Darwinists. Whether you say Darwinism is evolving really depends, almost absolutely, on your definition of Darwinism. Many people use Darwinism in a strict sense that requires natural selection by very small increments, and then they would exclude the kind of macroevolutionary models that were invented subsequently.

In that sense, Darwinism is defined in a particular frame and is now largely eclipsed except in a relatively small number of cases. You may hear people on television talking about evolution, but they usually don’t restrict it to so narrow a definition. They include models of macroevolution and they include statistical aberrations and things like that, which were not part of the original frame. So what you really have is a slightly different definition of Darwinism.

Male: I assume, therefore, that any form of revelation is doomed to be subjective as well.

Don: Yes. Revelation understood in the Christian sense is revelation from a talking, speaking God who discloses himself both personally and in words in space-time history. Since the majority of people working in this area don’t have any such definition of God, any such definition of revelation is impossible.

But they would say that even if such a God existed and such a revelation existed, you would have no means of knowing that it existed as such other than by the subjective beliefs of your particular community system, your interpretive system, your Christian heritage, your church, whatever.

So even if there is truth out there in a God who is out there, which most of them would deny, you can’t know it anyway. You can’t know it truly. You can’t know it certainly. You can know it only as people “know” “truth” in the structure of your interpretive community. If, on the other hand, you hold to some definition of God other than that that is largely pantheistic or New Age or subjectivist, then the gloves are off and all kinds of different things can happen.

Some of these people use revelation in an entirely subjective sense. I didn’t mention yesterday, for example, that in the hermeneutic circle model that was developed in the 30s and 40s in Germany, where instead of having a direct attack on the subject … from subject to object with a question, the object coming back with a direct answer … you start developing the hermeneutical circle and you could never be sure who’s interpreting whom, and you go round and round and round.

Out of that came this language. The aim of such interpretive exercise is not to find out what the text says, because the text is also interpreting you, and it could say something different to you tomorrow. The Germans invented two different words for this, depending on whether you’re talking about Fuchs or Ebeling (or one or two others). In German you can put words together and invent new words.

The two words are Sprachereignis and Wortgeschehen. Sprachereignis means, literally, language-event. Wortgeschehen means a word-event. It’s almost a serendipitous moment, an “Aha!” experience. So the aim of the exercise is to run into the text and have an “Aha!” experience, some insight in which you understand yourself better or your world better, or you think you understand your world better or your community understands this world better, but not to say, “The text says X.”

That becomes a revelatory experience then in the language of some German theologians from about the late 40s on. That becomes to you a revelatory experience, which isn’t exactly what Paul means by revelation when he makes the kinds of claims to revelation he makes in Galatians 1 and 2 that we saw yesterday.

Male: Isn’t there some sort of illogicality in university departments conveying this sort of thing to another generation, because surely the logical extension of this sort of model is that you can’t convey anything to anybody? The name of the game is solipsism. You’re lost in your own little world. Thus, there is no sense of conveying truth. Am I right?

Don: Partly. I couldn’t possibly know. If you push any of these models to their limit, that’s where they can go. On the other hand, the sophisticated people who write in these areas get very annoyed with that sort of charge, and it’s not just because they’re poor losers.

For example, if they follow the Stanley Fish model they would say there are communities of interpretation. Within the community, you can communicate truth (that is, truth for the community within the community) and be understood. That you can move, in fact, from one community to another with information or perspectives, and so on, because communities do overlap to some extent. There are some certain common things held in common with this group or that group or the other group.

They’re not denying that all communication is possible. What they are denying, however, is.… If you take somebody like Jacques Derrida you get very close to solipsism, because he does not emphasize the communal model; he emphasizes the individual model. So you get very close to that kind of problem.

But in the most sophisticated treatments, David Tracy, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, and people like that, they avoid those traps very nicely. What they do deny, however, is that any university department can then tell you the truth on something.

Male: Do they live their lives according to that philosophy? What sort of interpretation do they give to the text?

Don: I’ll come to those sorts of ad hoc responses in a moment. They have some value, but only limited value, but I will come back to them in due course.

Male: What about the sciences and philosophy of sciences trying to find this theory of everything? It seems to be essentially modernist.

Don: Yes it is. Absolutely. Steven Hawking is a modernist through and through.

Male: What it is that I’m hearing about is he’s the one that doesn’t actually believe there was a moon walk, but he makes points, basic points. He said if he could find the theory of everything, you then have the question, “Why should there be a theory of everything?” Now does he speak just for himself? Is he a modernist, first of all?

Don: He’s a thoughtful man. I think he’s a modernist, but he’s a thoughtful modernist. The catch phrase “theory of everything” now is often misunderstood by laymen. The original notion of a theory of everything was merely a mathematical formula to link the four fundamental forces of nature.

If you ask me if I think that’s likely to be discovered some day, quite frankly, I think yes. But it will not by itself mean that everything is completely predictable. But it’s used more widely that is to try to allot some kind of absolute determinism. That raises all kinds of other issues both in the area of mathematics and in the area of epistemology that I just don’t want to get into here.

Male: Will that go down a hole, as well?

Don: No, no. Well, only insofar as modern science itself isn’t likely to go down a hole. Even at the technological level, it’s going to continue advancing unless we blow ourselves up.

Male: Is this an element of modernism that’s not going to disappear?

Don: So is science then an element of modernism that will not disappear? Will this quest not disappear? The quest for a unified theory of the four forces will continue as long as there are theoretical physicists around.

Male: Is that essentially modernism?

Don: Yes, but all I’m saying is that there are all kinds of scientists around who are postmodern in every area except their own discipline. Whoever said that philosophers are consistent? Let alone scientists. It would be very nice if you could say, “Starting from here you have modernism and then it ends at 6:36 a.m. on 1972.” It just doesn’t work like that.

Think of it in the area of Bible studies. You find today some postmodern biblical theologians who are writing the kind of thing that I just talked about, and you also find some people in Britain who are defending the King James Version. They’re both twentieth-century Brits, aren’t they? You find process theologians in Manhattan, and you also find snake handlers in the Blue Mountains. You do find that sort of thing.

So it’s very important to understand the history and the tracing of intellectual movements. It’s a messy business. One can speak of the dominant spirit of the age or where the cutting edge of the intellectual movement is going without trying to say that everybody who doesn’t happen to be on that particular train at the moment is necessarily a twit.

Strictly speaking, I’m beginning on tomorrow’s talk, but tomorrow’s talk is too long anyway so I need a head start. What I will want to argue in the rest of this hour and the hour and a half tomorrow is that thoughtful Christians will want to be neither quite modernist nor postmodernist. A plague on both your houses.

Understand by this, however, that I am not suggesting that we are not interested in a modernist’s insistence on truth or that we’re not interested in a postmodernist’s recognition of the rightful place of subjectivity. I’m merely now dealing with things from the epistemological level. From the epistemological level, the kinds of areas that I laid out yesterday, a Christian does not want to begin with Descartes.

We do not want to base all of our Christian epistemology on Cartesian assumptions; some foundationalism plus method, in order to fight our way back to God. “I think, therefore I am,” and then from this build up a whole structure that brings people back to God. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to do it for all kinds of reasons.

First, we don’t think it can be done rigorously. Second, it fails to cope with the fact that in the Bible, there are moral dimensions to knowledge. So much Western epistemology has simply ignored the moral dimensions in knowledge. A lot of the reason why people don’t come to grips with the truth of the gospel is because they don’t want to, for all kinds of reasons still to be explored.

It does not adequately deal with the godhood of God. The godhood of God does not allow itself to be examined as a mere object so that human beings are always the subjects. “I think and, therefore, I am. If I happen to come to the conclusion that God actually exists, well bully for God!” That’s scarcely a Christian epistemology, as if we’re doing him a favor by discovering him and declaring that he exists! Modernism has not always been a friend of Christians. There’s no way that a thoughtful Christian should be a locked-in modernist, epistemologically.

On the other hand, I hope I’ve hinted at enough things to suggest that there are reasons why Christians don’t want to be postmodernists as well. But that does not mean that either perspective is entirely wrong in all of its entailments. In reading through the literature on this stuff, you discover pretty quickly that there is a feeling of lostness, of discontinuity, of disorientation, of uncertainty that is part of the whole feel of Western culture at the moment. So people constantly cite this well-known poem by Yeats.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

So how do we begin to come back?

1. It is important to recognize certain strengths in postmodernism.

For a start (although this is a purely negative judgment), it has been useful in overturning some of the sheer arrogance and hubris of modernism. Let’s just take biblical studies, because at the end of the day, this is supposed to be a seminar on the interpretation of the Bible in a postmodern world.

In most Western university departments with biblical studies, until the rise of postmodernism, although there were different schools of thought, once something became part of the assured results of modern criticism, it was extraordinarily difficult to take it on from the front, just extraordinarily difficult.

After all, you’re confronting the truth. You’re a narrow-minded bigot. You haven’t learned anything from criticism. You are precritical. Which was the ultimate slur, almost as bad as, “You are a fundamentalist.” So suddenly now to have university departments saying, “Well, we don’t mind having evangelicals here and Catholics and Buddhists and North American Indian ritualists.”

Suddenly, at least you’re back into a world in which the sheer hubris of naturalist modernist assumptions in every discipline controlling everything is beginning to crack. Some of us who have worked in this arena for a long time say, “Thank God. It’s about time. Some of us have been trying to crack it for a long time.” In this area, for some of these things to crack, quite frankly, I’m not entirely displeased. That’s a negative reason, but it’s still a reason.

On the positive side, there is a lot of evidence to show that there is an important place to subjectivity. Is there not? Why is it that the majority of young people growing up in a charismatic church learned to think and worship in the charismatic mode? The majority of young people growing up in a Scottish “Wee Free” Church without musical instrumentation learn to worship in that kind of mode, unless they rebel and go to the local charismatic church.

Why? Of course, they’ve learned it. They belong to an interpretive community. Why is it that if you go to sub-Saharan black Africa and talk with Christians there, you find many, many, many interpretations of Pauline texts that are sensitive to family or body language or organic structure of the church or the like? Whereas in the West, we’re fairly insensitive to those things and stress much more individualism. Why?

Is Paul talking out of both sides of his mouth? Or is it perhaps that our own culture blinds us to some things in the text? Meanwhile, you can talk to a few Africans then along this mode and pretty soon on this basis, they’re arguing themselves right into ancestor worship. Harry Sawyerr, for example, or John Beattie Then you want to say, “Wait a minute. Maybe you still do have one or two things to learn from Western individualism. Haven’t you gone a wee bit over the top?”

But still we would have to acknowledge that it has been the individual culture or background that has helped to shape the heritage of interpretation in which we’ve been nurtured, wouldn’t we? Now the problem is how you move from that recognition to an insistence that there is such a thing as actual truth, truth in the public arena, culture-transcending truth without losing the recognition that there is a subjective element involved in all interpretation, including biblical interpretation.

We haven’t worried about how to get there yet. We will. But it is important to acknowledge that there is subjectivity, is it not? That is what the debate in the last 30 years of missions theology has been about in the area of contextualization and globalization. Contextualization is easily enough put. It has a good form in my judgment and a bad form.

It used to be that the most far-sighted missionaries (like Roland Allen a century ago) were saying that churches don’t really become established in the new area until they are three-selfed. They have to become self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. Once a church has become self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating so that it’s not requiring on Western leaders, Western money, and Western evangelists, then it really is an indigenous church.

That was the mark of indigeneity. With the rise of contextualization, people said it needed one more category, a fourth area of self … something. Self-propagation, self-support, self-government, and self-constructed theology. That is to say, it should not be importing all of its theological instruction in books and teachers and so on from some other culture.

It should be mature enough theologically and in its biblical heritage and this sort of thing so that it is generating and regenerating itself in its own Bible colleges or seminaries or whatever mechanisms it had in that culture to be forming people on biblical lines within its own heritage and culture.

It might reach out to other things and pull things in, just as we reach out to German culture and read Martin Luther and we reach out to Swiss culture and we read something of a chap called Calvin. Then we reach out to Latin culture and read some stuff by some modern Latinos, Emilio NuÒez at the Seminario Centroamericano, or someplace like that.

We bring in things from other cultures as well, but we expect to produce our own material to train the next generation. We’re doing our own theology. That is, contextualizing theology within our frame. Thus, most systematic theologies in this country do not have any substantial reflection on exactly how you handle demons. Most Western work on demons is piffle. It’s not very deeply grounded at all. It’s mechanistic and superstitious.

On the other hand, you talk to Africans, well-trained theological Africans and they have faced more of this. They need to think things through in animistic culture, so that within that kind of framework that becomes a little more important in any theology that they would write. They’re contextualizing theology in that kind of framework.

Now all of these things are a function of our recognition of our locatedness in history, in a particular culture, in a particular time and space. They’re not all bad. One of the things that modernism has done in the area of biblical studies has driven us to a fairly narrowly rationalistic approach to exegesis.

Now believe me, I’m not anti-rational. I hope I’m not irrational. On the other hand, an approach to rationalistic exegesis tends to get everything all lined up in propositions and truth claims and structures (all of which have their part in the Bible) but tends at the same time to be a little less sympathetic to dimensions of the Bible that some of us in our traditions have overlooked: the affective claims. That is, the areas that appeal to emotion, the images of apocalyptic literature.

We just don’t think in those categories. Or we can fuse it maybe with psychedelic images under drug inducement, or something like that. Or the reflective, non-case law Wisdom flavor of Proverbs. How do you handle that sort of thing? The best of Western culture recognizes that there are different literary genres, and so you have to say, “Yes, you interpret literary genres according to the light of their own genres, and that is part of a rational process.”

There’s a large body of truth in that. Yet it’s possible to come to something like apocalyptic literature and recognize that it’s got extraordinary images in it and mutually conflicting metaphors and be so busy analyzing it that somehow it loses its power as it washes over us. Now do not misunderstand me. I do not want to go the next step and say, “Well then let’s forget about propositional truth. Let’s forget about revealed truth. Let’s forget about rationality. Let’s just let the Bible wash over us and make its appeal.”

Like the first example I gave you, “What is your particular impression of Isaiah 21?” I’m not saying that. I am saying, however, that there are dimensions of the Bible that Western modernist exegesis has largely lost sight of. A well-trimmed and disciplined input from postmodernism will help to open up some of those blinders. I’ll come to them on the last day.

I’m unwilling to say that that is postmodernist exegesis because postmodernism, as I say, is tied severely to an epistemology. I think it’s profoundly mistaken. Yet just as there have been things to learn from modernism, there are some things to learn from postmodernism. Being open to some of the non-rational … not irrational, but more than rational, super-rational … dimensions of text is part of that, but we’ll come back to that on the last day.

2. Practical experience shows that accurate communication is possible.

This is merely a pragmatic thing. It’s not a theoretical response yet. I’ll come to that next day. Practical experience shows that accurate communication is possible, even across remarkable interpretive community barriers.

Because I’ve written a book in this area, I’ve had to read a lot of other books in the area. Sometimes when I read books in the area, I read the reviews of the books in the area. Then it is very interesting to see what the reviewers are saying and occasionally how a writer responds to a reviewer, too. That’s even more interesting.

Supposing a modern deconstructionist wrote a learned tome, which was reviewed by another deconstructionist, or at least another postmodernist, who profoundly misinterpreted the book in the review. Would the first writer hold his or her peace, granted there’s a “letters to the editor” column or something similar? Well, only under the most remarkable constraint.

At the end of the day, such a writer is likely to reply, “This reviewer is incompetent. He or she has not understood what I’ve said,” which remarkably is tying his text to authorial intent. You’ve moved back, in other words, from the reviewer (the reader), to the text, back to the author’s intent.

At the risk of boring you with a story that I’ve told in these august halls in the past two or three years ago when I was at Word Alive, my first encounter with this sort of rebuttal took place 10 or 12 years ago when I was speaking at a mixed course in hermeneutics taught by a number of seminaries in the Chicago area.

It was an evening school course, an optional course. There were people from different traditions and I was the token evangelical doing my bit. I had not done as much reading in this area as I should’ve, and I’m sure I didn’t know as much I should’ve to be teaching the course, which I’m sure didn’t help.

There was a young woman in the course who was a PhD student at another institution. After I’d gone on for a while, two or three hours, when question time came she told me in no uncertain terms what she thought of my old-fashioned hermeneutics and bigoted exegesis and modernist worldview and so on. So I tried to argue with her, rather inadequately. She argued back rather enthusiastically.

Then in a moment of considerable intellectual perversity on my part I said to her, “I think I understand now what you’re saying. You’re using irony in order to affirm the objectivity of truth.” Well, she went up in smoke, basically. She became very … “That’s not what I’m saying at all! I’m saying just the opposite of that! You’re not understanding. You’re twisting all of my words.”

I said, “This is terrific! To the irony that you were using a moment ago, you are adding passion. So passion plus the irony to affirm the objectivity of truth is a wonderful rhetorical device.” Boom! She went off again. I’m afraid I did it three times, by which she was so close to cardiac arrest, I thought it was time to call it quits. Then I said to her, “But that’s how I’m interpreting you.”

When she cooled down, then I had to apologize that I wasn’t telling the truth, because it wasn’t how I was interpreting her. It was a trick, a cheap trick … a cheap, manipulating trick. I had to acknowledge it. But it was still a cheap, manipulating trick that was designed to make a point. Namely, that when it came to her own text, she wanted to maintain the link between text and authorial intent. That was the only reason why she was angry, the only reason.

So the question is, “Why then can she not extend the same courtesy to Paul, or to God, if he’s a talking God?” Now it’s very important to recognize that that is an ad hoc argument. It is not a sophisticated argument. It does not deal with sophisticated structures of deconstruction. It does not deal with any of the underlying epistemology.

But it is an important enough ad hoc argument that it ought to begin to make at least some people in those fields say, “There must be something at least a little bit wrong with the system here somewhere if I can get so hot under the collar when my own theory says I shouldn’t be!” So it’s not a knock-down, drag-’em-out argument.

It is a slightly perverse way of getting their attention, as it were. In other words, if a whole theory of epistemology is such that you cannot live by it, there’s something wrong with it. Even if there may be components to it that are right, there’s something profoundly wrong with it. Now where do we go from here? Well, where do we go is to our next seminar and come back tomorrow. Let’s bow in prayer.