Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Postmodernism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
I suspect our reduced numbers proves most people at this conference are as bored with the topic of postmodernism as I am. In other words, it’s one of those things everybody has been talking about for quite some time. Isn’t it? One says, “Oh here comes another one.” I have some of that feeling myself.
In this case it’s compounded by the fact, of course, that I spent almost four hours on it in the Theologian’s Network, but the organizers of the conference insisted that I try to give a sort of slimmed-down version in an hour and a half for this workshop as well, which means those who attended the Theologian’s Network need not be here unless they really like a whole lot of vain repetition, because this is really going to be the slimmed-down version of exactly the same sort of material. In large part, I’m going to follow the outline in the Theologian’s Network section, now repeated in the workshop section. I hope it will be of some help.
I should begin by pointing out that the term itself, postmodern, is confusing in two respects. First, it’s not intrinsically transparent. It is an almost opaque term. If modern refers to what is contemporary, you would think postmodern refers to what is future, and of course, it doesn’t. The term was first coined in the nineteenth century and then dropped out of usage. Then, in the 1920s, it was applied to the domain of architecture.
In the city of Chicago, where I live, you can take a boat cruise in from Lake Michigan and up the Chicago River, and on one of these boat cruises, they have an expert in architecture who will lecture on the different architectural styles in the city of Chicago. I know almost nothing about these things, but the experts tell me that Chicago is one of the most architecturally beautiful and interesting cities in North America, not because it has all the glories of a really old city, like Sopron, Bratislava, or better yet, Prague, or whatever.
It is not an old city, obviously. In fact, it was all burned down in 1871, so it’s really quite a young city. But granted that it’s a city of sky-rises and the like, it has an astonishing variety of intelligently planned architectural styles. As you take this boat cruise up the river, sooner or later the guide is saying, “Now these buildings over here are a perfect representation of the 1920s and 1930s modern style.” He’ll show you all the features on the windows and so on to prove that this is a modern style. You see?
But then the style changed. What do you call the style after modern? That’s the problem. Every style when it first comes along is modern in terms of the meaning of the word, but once the word modern gets attached to a particular style, then you can’t use modern for the next one, so that’s what happened in the domain of architecture. Gradually, that sort of thing happened in the domain of economics, and pretty soon, then postmodern was being used for broader areas of thought.
The second difficulty with the term is it is used today as either a blessed approval word or a quasi-swear word. That is, if you like the changes going on in culture, then you bless them by calling them postmodern, and if you hate them, then you curse them by calling them postmodern. The term is used without a whole lot of distinguishing semantic clarity. It’s merely a label.
Now within this framework, I still think the term is useful, but only if it is carefully defined. In my judgment, it is best to define it in the domain of epistemology. I’m not the only one who says this; this is a fairly common approach. From now on, when I speak of postmodernism, I’m not talking about what’s going on in the larger culture regarding music; politics; strictly-speaking, morals; pluralism; or any of those kinds of things, although those things are related in some ways, as we’ll see, to postmodernism.
I’m really talking about the domain of epistemology. That is, the theory of how we know things. How do we know things, or how do we claim to know things? On that front, it’s useful, though a vast oversimplification, again, to distinguish premodernism from modernism and postmodernism.
At the risk of oversimplification then, premodernism will cover the period in Europe from the late Middle Ages to about 1600, give or take.… That is, just this side of the Reformation. What characterizes epistemology during that period. Almost all thinkers in Europe at that time believed in the existence of a personal transcendent God who is omniscient. God knows everything. Human beings, by contrast, only know a little bit. They are finite knowers and, therefore, their knowledge is very small.
That also means that everything human beings know is a small subset of everything God knows, and since God is there first, it also means all of our coming to know things is a matter of revelation. That is to say, it is a matter of God disclosing some small part of what he knows omnisciently to us who are finite knowers. The reservoir of all knowledge is God. The test of all knowledge is God. The absoluteness of all knowledge is God.
The whole question, then, is how this God makes some small part of what he exhaustively knows to us his image bearers, who can know only a small part. The domains of this revelation are many in the natural world. Hence, what we call science was called natural philosophy; or in Scripture; or by the Spirit; or if your epistemology permitted, in dreams or visions; by communal living in the church; or by reason.
All of these channels, you see, were legitimate channels for this omniscient God to disclose some part of what he knows to us, his finite knowers. That’s premodern epistemology, but it did not last. I should say this: premodern epistemology has certain problems to it. I don’t want for a moment to suggest that it is flawless, or if we could all go back to the Middle Ages and worship at the shrine of Aquinas, everything would be all right with the Western world. It’s not quite as simple as that either.
This sort of ordering of epistemology can lead people … precisely because we are sinners, because we can corrupt any system, because we can twist almost any structure … to a vision of what some call an open universe. That is, a universe in which there is a kind of interchange between us and the whole spirit world that is really fairly unconstrained by laws and structure and order.
It can lead, therefore, to an openness to a great deal of superstition … being afraid of this little demon or wondering what the stars are going to do in the realm of astronomy (astrology and astronomy are one at that point) and on and on and on. So it can lead to a kind of open universe that has very little place for a rigorous science or a rigorous control. Science assumes a certain kind of predictability, which at very least means that God ordinarily does things exactly the same way most of the time.
A purely open universe can lead you to all kinds of almost magical approaches to knowledge that can lead to arrogance and claims of special revelation so certain people know things better than others and so forth. The system is not without its potential for abuse. Nevertheless, the transition to the next stage was inevitably messy, because history is messy, but most people, for convenience, use the figure of RenÈ Descartes as the great transitional person.
Hence, people speak of Cartesian thought, of course. RenÈ Descartes was himself a devout Roman Catholic and he was observing that in the university circles in which he found himself in France, there were rising numbers of atheists and others who were rejecting, in effect, premodern epistemology.
He was trying to find some basis, some common foundation on which they could hold discussions of what truth was, and so forth, so he set himself the task of doubting everything to see if he could strip things away to get down to a common foundation all sides would agree was really there and then would support the building up of a whole structure of thought. And, of course, near the 1600s, he came to the conclusion that the basic foundation is cogito ergo sum, which every first-year philosophy student learns: I think, therefore I am.
The cogito, as it’s often called, whether it is good reasoning or not, is immaterial from our perspective. It’s what he thought was an appropriate foundation for everything. In fact, he wasn’t the first person to say that. Saint Augustine, of course, had said, si fallor sum, “If I err, I am.” But Saint Augustine hadn’t tried to build an entire epistemology upon it.
Almost certainly Descartes had read Saint Augustine, because anybody who was educated read Augustine in those days, but he hadn’t remembered that form of it and came up with this form and thought it was a wonderful insight. He then imposed on this, he laid on this, a whole philosophical structure I need not go into and which nobody buys into today, but in the 1630s he published his multivolume work, which in many respects revolutionized epistemology in the Western world, or it was one of the transitional books that helped to do this.
Now notice what this does. This does not begin anymore with God. It begins with a finite I. I think, therefore I am. At the risk, then, of oversimplification, note six characteristics of modern epistemology.
1. It begins with a finite I.
That means, of course, if you’re going to have belief in God, God will become no more than the conclusion of a long string of inferences. Or, he will become the conclusion of rigorous research. Or, he will become the conclusion of a whole lot of intuition. He’s going to be the conclusion in any case. He’s no longer the beginning point. I is the beginning point.
2. Descartes still assumed that epistemological certainty is both desirable and attainable.
That was never called in dispute. That is to say, you can truly know things. You can. It’s attainable. Epistemological certainty is attainable, and he argued, this is a good thing. The reason I frame these things this way is because we’ll see in a few moments that postmodernism revises or overthrows all of these points. We’ll come to them in due course.
3. It is profoundly foundationalist.
That is to say, in its very essence, it is looking for an acceptable foundation on which to build a whole lot of other things.
4. It is methodologically rigorous.
So you find the foundation to all of knowledge and then eventually the foundation in every discipline, foundation after foundation after foundation being established in all of the disciplines, and then you build your methods upon it. You find the foundation, you build your methods, you turn the crank, and out comes truth. The truth is true truth. Do you see? Which brings us to the next point …
5. This resulting truth is understood to partake of ahistorical universality.
That is to say, it is true everywhere, in every culture. That is, it is ahistorical … a is the alpha privative. It is not historically limited. It is not constrained by a particular historical stream, not constrained by a particular language stream, racial stream, or cultural stream. If you find that the water molecule has two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen in Buenos Aires, Argentina, then lo and behold, the same thing is also true in Sopron, Hungary.
That’s the way it is. It’s true everywhere. It doesn’t matter what race you are, it doesn’t matter what color you are, it doesn’t matter what education you have, it doesn’t matter what period of history in which you live, it’s true true. It’s the very nature of the thing. You see? It partakes of ahistorical universality.
6. Though this was not true at the beginning, with time, modernist epistemology imbibed more and more and more philosophical naturalism.
That is to say, it adopted the position all that is embraces matter, energy, space, and time. That’s it. Full stop.
Now this was not true of Descartes. Descartes was a devout Catholic. In fact, there’s pretty good evidence that when he had his great insight, he went to Saint Anne’s monastery to offer a whole lot of prayers and so on for a retreat to thank God and Saint Anne after his discovery. Indeed, most of the early scientists, most of the early thinkers in these realms were at least deists. Many were theists. Although, there were plenty of atheists in the intellectual circles of Europe.
In fact, atheism does not become a dominant force in the Western world until after Darwin. A little sooner, of course, in France, because it became anticlerical at the time of the revolution (1789), but in the Western world generally, atheism really was given its greatest impetus by Darwin. As Thomas Huxley used to say, “Darwin made atheism intellectually respectable.”
As a result, from about 1859 on, you get a rising philosophical naturalism connected with this movement. And it led, in the 1920s for example, in British thought, to logical positivism and so on, that we need not pursue here. It’s important to think through this approach to things. It is one of the foundations, for example, of contemporary science. It’s important to see that. It’s not the only foundation, but it is an important foundation to contemporary science because there is a rigorous method that’s tied to it with predictability, order, and structure.
This sort of approach lies at the heart of most doctoral dissertations in almost every discipline in the Western world, so when you write your dissertation, you acknowledge your foundations in your discipline or in your particular specialty field of research, then you specify in some detail what your methods will be, then you apply your methods to your field of study, then you turn the crank, you write your dissertation, you come to the conclusion, and when your work is evaluated, the examiners will probe as hard in the domain of your methods and the rigor with which you apply them as in the domain of your conclusions.
In fact, if you have been methodologically rigorous and made a few mistakes along the line, they’ll let it pass. If, on the other hand, they discover that your methods are really flawed all the way through and you apply them inconsistently, then no matter how charming your outcome, you will probably fail. That’s the way dissertations have worked, you see, in the Western world for about three and a half centuries. It’s changing now for a variety of reasons.
Moreover, this way of looking at things means that in every discipline there are some shared givens. There are some shared foundations. Thus, if you are about to admit a student to a physics course at university and this student has had very high results in secondary school, passed all of the examinations, done wonderful work, and then this student writes to you and says, “I should warn you, however, that in my understanding of physics, quantum mechanics is entirely mistaken. I can buy into Einstein, but as far as I’m concerned, the entire.… Niels Bohr and subsequent developments are a pile of rubbish.”
How much chance do you think that student will have of being admitted to a physics program? You see? It’s just not very likely. Why is that? That’s because there are certain now shared assumptions in the entire field. But you see, that’s exactly what went on in many Marxist universities, too. “Shall we admit this Christian student?”
Well, we understand how history works, don’t we? Marxist historiography tells us how it works. If you approach the Reformation, you must apply the principles of a Marxist storyography to understand how there are revolts amongst the peasants against the duchies and so on, that that’s the analysis. If instead, someone comes in and says, “I don’t really believe that this is scientific history,” then no matter how good your grades are, you don’t get in.
Because you must be some kind of a twit or an intellectual pervert in order not to see what the common assumptions are in the discipline. Do you see? So it became a way of excluding some people from university. We have ways of doing that too in parts of the Western world, where certain disciplines will be closed to someone who doesn’t believe in the strongest form of evolution, for example. There are ways of squeezing people out because their views are not part of the givens anymore.
Now it has to be said that precisely because history is messy, although this modern period runs all the way through to … what can I say, 1917?… a little earlier in some places, a little later in some places … but in terms of dominant control in intellectual circles, about 1917. Nevertheless, there are all kinds of people and movements along the line who challenge this in some way but do not really overthrow it. Thus, the Romantic Period of English poetry. Thus, Immanuel Kant in Germany and his distinction between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world.
The phenomenal world gives you all of the observations that the senses measure, but what gives order to the phenomenal world is the impress of the noumenal, of the mind. So you’re making a distinction between the data that comes in, as it were, and the ordering of things from the mind. Now don’t misunderstand me, Immanuel Kant was not, himself, a postmodernist, but that distinction helps to pave the way in this direction.
Or someone like Friedrich Nietzsche who, precisely because he was such a rigorous philosophical naturalist, and because of his philosophical naturalism, denied the existence of any objective morality, at the end of the day, the only right or wrong was power and will, and that challenges something of the order of things that tries to prove the existence of God with the classic proofs and so on as well.
There are some precursors to what we call postmodernism. French existentialism was another one. I mentioned in the larger group that in the 1960s, in the subway of Paris, there was a graffito that showed up pretty regularly: “Albert Camus: ‘To be is to do.’ Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘To do is to be.’ Frank Sinatra: ‘Do be do be do.’ ”
Yet the clash, even between Camus and Sartre in this regard is really quite interesting, isn’t it? Where do you find your being? For Sartre, it’s not in morality, it is in doing. You become a person who forces your being, as it were, determines your being by your doing. For Camus, it was almost the mirror image of that. So these sorts of movements, likewise, sprang up and challenged regular notions of Western enlightenment modernist epistemology. But in fact, by and large, this heritage reigned.
Postmodernism can be understood to be that movement which either overthrew or substantially revised each of these six characteristics. And when you see postmodernism along those lines, I think it helps to grasp what’s going on in a lot of our cultures. Postmodernism, like modernism, begins with a finite I. At that point, it is in agreement with modernism. But it draws a very different conclusion: because the I is finite, therefore the I is subjective, not anchored, looks at things from a certain point of view.
There were various movements that went into this change of perception (and I spent quite some time with them in the Theologians Network outlining them; I just don’t have time here), including some developments in German hermeneutics, some developments in French linguistics that led to la dÈconstruction (deconstruction), and some movements, too, in the social sciences that tried to speak of different groups as different interpretative communities.
I’m not even going to go into those things here. I don’t have time. Except to say that once you see that the finite knower is not an independent person, not staying in an independent place, the finite knower is himself or herself constrained by a whole lot of previous pressures, structures, and so on, then what that finite knower is claiming is already tainted.
Look at me. I’m a middle-aged white Canadian male with education in certain domains and not in other domains. I am not a sub-Saharan black African 34-year-old prostitute with AIDS in Mombasa. That means I don’t look at things quite the same way. You see, even within my race, or even within my country.… I was brought up in French Canada. Let me tell you, French Canadians look at things a bit different from the way English Canadians do in Alberta. Most Albertans can’t stand Quebecers. It’s all right, we return the compliment. And that’s just within Canada.
Then, you see, I went to McGill and my first degree was in chemistry, and the chemists and the scientists in general had some wonderfully withering comment about all McGill engineers. “That’s just science and engineering.” “Well, mechanical engineering,” we said. It’s a tautology, isn’t it? “Civil engineering. That’s an oxymoron.” So we had all of these wonderful insults and they had their insults back, you see, and that’s just between science and engineering, two different interpretive communities.
Then you start throwing in contrast between science and the arts or the young and the old, the educated and the non-educated, the rich and the poor, different races, different continents, different periods of history.… The perspectives that we bring are very different. In fact, I might have a different perspective depending on how much sleep I had last night. If I’m really tired, I can be far more cynical than if I’ve had a good night’s sleep. Can’t you?
For one-half the race, let me tell you, part of the way you look at things will be the time of the month. That, too, affects things, doesn’t it? Or how good the kids have been this week. There are so many things that affect the way we look at things. Isn’t that true? So that means that suddenly where is the stability of this finite knower? There is no fulcrum. There is no sure place on which to stand.
You see, in premodernism, then there is an anchor in God. Now we might not have access to God very well, but on the other hand, there is a theoretical anchor at least in God himself. But now God is not much more than an inference. Well, what you know about God is only from the structures you’ve put in place yourself, and those structures themselves are all questionable because you’re the one who has put them in place.
From this finiteness of all human knowing, we come to the second point, and we infer, then, that objective human knowledge is neither attainable nor desirable. It’s not attainable for the reasons I’ve already said. It just isn’t attainable. To pretend it is, is idolatrous. It’s ignorant. It’s right-wing. It’s old-fashioned. It’s bigoted. It’s merely modern. But far from this being a weakness, postmodernism argues, this is, in fact, a strength.
For, the claim to knowledge when you cannot have it is not desirable. Besides, if you have a diversity of perspective, then there’s much more color. If you have only one perspective and that perspective is the truth, it gets boring after a bit, doesn’t it? Far better to have multiplied perspectives, isn’t it? You have your perspective; I have my perspective. You have your religion; I have my religion. We look at things differently. You look at things this way; I look at things that way.
All the color together makes variety and spice and so on, instead of having boring meat and two veg meal after meal after meal. Now you can have sushi, and now you can have glorious borscht, and on and on and on. You see? There’s color everywhere. So, in other words, epistemological certainty, far from being a good thing, is now perceived to be not only unattainable but a bad thing. It’s not even desirable.
Thus, postmodernism becomes profoundly anti-foundationalist, because these foundations which were supposed to be absolute, universally recognized, the givens, the things everybody accepts, the axioms, the self-evident truths … they are all now called in question, because, after all, they are, at the end of the day, the constructions of finite knowers. No more.
Likewise, the methods are themselves, now, called in question, because they, too, are the constructions of finite knowers. Thus, postmodernism is profoundly anti-foundationalist, and although it will appeal to methods, so you can still keep writing doctoral dissertations, now the methods are fairly arbitrary. The test of a doctoral dissertation’s methodological rigor nowadays is merely self-consistency; not the appropriateness of the method to the discipline, but merely self-consistency.
So in the domain of biblical studies, do you see whether you choose to write a redaction critical study of Luke, a narrative critical study of Luke, a text linguistic critical study of Luke, an historical study of Luke, or what, it doesn’t really matter, because the aim is not to find the meaning of Luke because there is no the meaning of Luke. There is only a lot of meanings of Luke depending on what methods you use, what foundations you presuppose, and who is doing the study, and so on.
That means, in the fifth place, that you do not view the resulting truth as partaking in ahistorical universality. Rather, there is what is true for you or true for your interpretive community. In fact, at the risk of oversimplification, just so far as texts go (we’ll use texts in a narrow sense), it used to be that meaning was understood to lie in the text.
In fact, before that, meaning was thought to rest first and foremost in the author. Then the author wrote stuff down and produced a text. Then the reader comes along and reads the text, so that under a modernist approach, what the reader is supposed to be doing is finding the assumptions, the foundations, and the methods appropriate for getting into the author’s mind through the text, but the initial meaning is back here. Do you see?
Now everything changes. The author doubtless has a meaning when he or she writes, but as soon as he or she writes stuff down on the paper, because he or she never puts down everything he or she means and may, in fact, misspeak and get the balance wrong, or be in a rush or say something incorrectly, the text achieves a certain kind of autonomy in any case. Doesn’t it?
Besides, the text is going to be read differently by different readers, depending on who they are, how learned they are, what culture they’re in, and so on. Because of all that, therefore, the meaning is shifted from the author to the text to the reader. Nowadays people will say the real meaning indeed is in the reader, in his or her interpretive community.
So to speak of trying to find the authorial intent in the text already marks you out to be an old-fashioned, ignorant modernist. But if that’s the case, then what quite is the point of trying to find the mind of God in Scripture? The Scripture will mean different things to different people in different interpretive communities in different religions or different denominations or different cultures, different heritages. How on earth can you any longer speak with Jude of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints?”
The last point … the sixth point … that too has changed. Although there are a lot of philosophical naturalists who are postmoderns (that’s true), precisely because postmodernism does not want to narrow its gaze to any one stance, even if that stance is philosophical naturalism, interestingly enough, it suddenly appears to be the case that postmodernism is open to all kinds of forms of acquisition of knowledge so now you’re open to astrology again, or you’re open to the demonic world, or you’re open to new forms of spirituality.
“Well, I’m really quite a spiritual person, you know. I mean, what I do every night is put on a copper bracelet and the vibrations give me a great deal of tranquility, and this in combination with the vibrations of crystals gives me a deep, deep connection with the universe and anchors my spirituality.” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard stuff like that. But where is the scientific rigor for that? Where is the spiritual authorization for that?
We’re back, almost, in the era of medieval magic and superstition, and it’s really quite.… People are open to almost anything. And it has changed some of our literature, Isaac Asimov … people like that. An older version of science fiction tended to take the current structures of science and extrapolate out where people thought they would go in a hundred years, five hundred years, a million years, whatever, and make up a world as to how things would be then, but it was in line with what we already knew of science and beyond.
But many of the newer forms of science fiction are really much closer to fantasy. They overturn what we already know to be the case of the physical universe, and so now there are all kinds of fantastic schemes in which we control a great part of the physical world by expanding mind consciousness and things like that, which is very different from the older kind of science fiction. This is partly because we have an expanded set of forms of epistemologies.
These, it seems to me, are some of the characteristics of postmodernism. Let me go on, briefly, then, to mention some of what I call the correlatives of postmodernism. These are things in the culture that are neither the causes of postmodernism nor the effects, but they can be either or both. That is to stay, they strengthen the hand of postmodernism, and they are, in turn, strengthened by postmodernism, but at the same time, they are not simply causes or simply effects, so I call them the correlatives of postmodernism.
They include rising biblical illiteracy. Clearly, if you have a lot of Bible reading in a devout context, there will be fewer people who are snookered by postmodernism. As you have biblical literacy declining, then obviously postmodernism gains in strength. But conversely, if you have postmodernism gaining in strength, there is less and less incentive to read your Bible seriously as a norming norm because, in fact, it’s really only one more religious tract, as it were; that’s all. Biblical illiteracy is massively on the rise in most parts of the Western world. Not every part, but in most parts of the Western world.
I was mentioning the other day that one of my students sometime back was walking the streets of Chicago with his fiancÈe, who had a small chain around her neck from which was suspended a wooden cross, and a teenager stopped them on the street and said, “What are you wearing a plus sign around your neck for?” You realize you’ve lost something of common Christian heritage when people can ask that sort of question on the streets of Chicago.
Nowadays when I speak in university missions, the biblical ignorance amongst the unconverted is profound. Although there are parts of society that are more biblically literate, and some countries in Europe that are slower to be biblically illiterate, sometimes because of the impact of Catholicism, let’s say in Slovakia, Poland, or Ireland, nevertheless, there are other parts that are profoundly biblically illiterate and becoming more biblically illiterate very quickly.
And there are sectors of the society that are more biblically illiterate. I was on a TV set two or three years ago for one of these religious programs that Discovery Channel or somebody was doing. I was the token evangelical, and in the course of the two days I was there, I made a point of speaking to everyone in the 30-person crew. During that time, I think I talked to all of them, either individually or in groups, and I didn’t find one of them that knew the Bible had two Testaments.
Well, that’s not quite true. I found one, and she was the one who was interviewing me. She came to me and said, “You know, I’ve been studying the Bible now for six weeks and I think I’ve got quite a good handle on it.” Boy, was I impressed. You see right away what the problem is now when there is that degree of biblical illiteracy.
There are other correlatives to postmodernism. One could argue that secularization is one of these correlatives. Secularization, you see, does not mean the abolition of religion. Secularization means the squeezing of religion to the periphery, so you can be religious; it just doesn’t matter. It’s one of the things you do. It is not your controlling lord.
So you go through the religious exercises but it doesn’t shape how you run your business, what you think about, what you do with your money, how you bring up your kids, or what you watch on TV. It just doesn’t do any of those kinds of things because it’s merely an activity. That’s part of secularization.
You get enough secularization and people will probably drop religion precisely because it’s not important enough to value anymore. But you can actually have a society that is remarkably religious in one sense with huge inroads of secularization just because the religion doesn’t matter very much in terms of determining the direction of the entire culture.
Clearly, the more secularization you have, likewise, the more open you are to postmodernism. But by the same token, the more postmodern you are, the more pressures there are to secularization because religion now becomes privatized. It becomes what you think. It becomes what your interpretive group thinks. But if you try to say that somebody else should think that way too, implicitly you’re saying they’re wrong, and that, of course, is the one wrong thing you’re not allowed to say.
It changes, also, the view of tolerance. Tolerance, itself, has changed meaning radically in the Western world. It used to be that tolerance, under the regime of modernism, went something like this: tolerance was directed toward the individual, even while there was, in a sense, intolerance toward the individual’s ideas.
In other words, I could say, “Those ideas really are stupid. They really are wrong. Here are the following 14 reasons why I think they’re wrong. Nevertheless, I will defend to the death your right to teach them,” so that in a Western university in the past, the whole nature of modernist tolerance was to allow people to offer conflicting and mutually contradictory theories in the hope that in the exchange of ideas the truth would emerge.
So in that sense, therefore, there is liberty, it was argued, there is freedom, there is tolerance, as long as you allow people to speak their minds, even if you think their minds are pretty stupid, pretty corrupt, or pretty ignorant. There is still, nevertheless, freedom. In that sense, there is an exchange of ideas, and sometimes a pretty rough one … pretty in-your-face … it’s rigorous debate. Nevertheless, you insist that everybody has the right to speak and defend their corner. And the best arguments will eventually win and carry the day, so it is argued.
That’s part of the whole assumption of progress and the assumption of modernist advance and knowledge, and so on. That was the nature of tolerance. But under a postmodern world, the tolerance is not extended toward people and rejecting ideas; it’s extended toward ideas and rejects people. Because under the new definition of tolerance, what you’re really saying is all ideas are equally valuable. They’re all equally true or not true. They’re merely a different perspective.
They may not be my perspective but if they’re your perspective, they’re valid for you, even if they’re not valid for me. And that is, by definition, tolerance. So therefore, all views, all religions, all perspectives are to be tolerated, because they’re all equally valuable. They’re all equally true.
The one thing that is not tolerated is somebody who doesn’t take on that view of tolerance. Then, you see, you mustn’t tolerate such people. No, it’s people who are not tolerated. Because, they are uttering a view of tolerance which shows them not to be tolerant. Thus, the definition of tolerance has changed massively with the result that on many, many Western campuses now, there is actually less actual toleration of diversity than there was 25 years ago. There’s a rising intolerance in the new tolerance.
That’s the irony. In fact, there’s a kind of interior inconsistency in this tolerance because the very notion of tolerance presupposes that you disagree with someone or disagree with a system or something before you tolerate it. Is it consistent to say, “Oh, I love Marxism. I tolerate it”? It doesn’t make sense. “I love Islam. Oh, I tolerate it.” “I love Christianity. Oh, I tolerate it.” It doesn’t make sense. Does it?
You have to say, “I think Christianity is a lot of baloney, but I tolerate it.” Now that makes sense. “I think Marxism is a load of rubbish, but I tolerate it.” Do you see? You have to disagree with it in a sense before you tolerate it. But under the new definition of tolerance, you’re not allowed to say it’s a load of rubbish. You have to say it’s equally valuable to whatever it is you hold, and “I tolerate it.” That doesn’t even make sense.
It’s not even an internally consistent view of tolerance, but it is the rising view of tolerance in the West, and this view of tolerance is now reinforcing postmodernism and postmodernism is reinforcing it. It’s really a very interesting sort of world in which we live, in this regard. Likewise, this means evangelism is no longer viewed in any sense as a good thing or a courageous thing, it’s viewed as a modernist and essentially corrupt thing, because if you’re trying to evangelize someone, then you are trying to proselytize them. You are trying to convert them to another world.
It’s all right for me to tell you my story and you to tell me your story. I tell you how Jesus helps me, you tell me how Islam helps you, you tell me how Buddhism helps you, and you tell me how crystals help you. We all tell one another. And if somewhere as we tell one another we decide also maybe we want to try something else, that’s all right too. But what you must not say is, “Jesus helps me, and he is the eternal Word of God and he will stand in judgment of all of us on the last day. You really do need to repent and believe.”
At that point, you see, you are saying that somebody else is wrong, and that’s the one thing you must not say. As a result, you’ll be judged intolerant, right-wing, and bigoted precisely because you’re trying to win somebody to another stance. As a result, how you go about these things on university campuses has changed somewhat over the last 30 years, too. All of these things have to do with understanding where we are. Let me pause there for questions and comments, and then I will quickly summarize some things we should learn from postmodernism.
I insist that Christians should be neither modernists nor postmodernists. There are some strengths in both systems and some things to be rejected in both systems, and I’m as nervous of reactionary modernists as I am of so-called Christians who are worshipping at the postmodern shrine. There are some things to be learned from postmodernism as well. Before we critique it, it is important also to offer some approbation. Questions, comments first?
Male: [Inaudible]
Don Carson: Yes, basically that’s correct. It’s not allowed. Except, the one debate that goes on in postmodern circles tends to be methodological. It tends to be the debate of trying to win more people to postmodernism. Because the one thing that postmoderns will be constantly saying is wrong is anything that’s not postmodern. But once you get within the system, then you discover it’s a perspective on this and a perspective on that.
I go every year to the Society of Biblical Literature, which meets with the American Academy of Religion, and this brings together somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 people every year. You look at the book of programs, lectures, conferences, and seminars and so on.… I’ve organized some of these myself. I’ve been involved with them now for 25 years.
You look at the topics, and it’s: “An African-American reading of Ruth,” “Reading Sacred Texts through American Eyes,” “A Black Feminist Interpretation of [whatever],” “A White Greek Immigrant Understanding of [whatever].” I mean, it’s just on and on and on and on and on.
Then, it becomes methodologically diverse as well: “A Discourse Analytic Treatment of John’s Gospel.” You’re not trying, thus, to define the truth of John’s gospel, or to find what Ruth says. This is one way of reading it. And the one thing you’re not allowed to say is that anybody is wrong.
This comes into our churches in a lot of ways too. I mean, when I was an undergraduate at McGill University and first was doing inductive Bible studies with students, we were told that the person who was leading the Bible study was supposed to prepare in advance and know what the text really did say and had done his or her homework in the commentaries, and then, if some crazy interpretation was advanced from the floor.… If Charles really came out with a real winner, you would say, “Charles, where do you find that in the text?”
“Well.… I … uh.… I sort of think it’s there.”
“Well, Mary, do you agree with Charles?”
“No, I don’t see that there at all.”
“Why not?”
“Well, the text says such-and-such.”
“Charles, how do you respond to Mary?”
See, the whole idea was to get the discussion going to try to find out what the text actually says. But nowadays, even in many evangelical churches, now when Charlie comes out with some really stupid right off the wall interpretation, the chair is much more likely to say something like, “Well, that’s a very interesting insight. Does anybody else have anything to say?”
Because, you see, the one thing you’re not allowed to say anymore is that somebody is wrong. What that means is that Scripture gets domesticated. Scripture can no longer be the norming norm. You can’t correct anybody by Scripture.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: The title, Reading it Through Confessional Eyes?
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: Yes, that’s right. In part, it was meant to be my tongue firmly planted in my cheek.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: Let me repeat the question. The question is twofold. First, there are so many books, pamphlets, and articles on postmodernism today. Does this actually suggest that the whole movement is coming to an end? And if so, what’s around the corner? What’s on the horizon? What might be new, if anything? Has September 11 changed any of this? Second, is there a difference in European and American scholars in this regard?
Let’s take the first one first. One of the reasons why I laid out postmodernism by focusing on epistemology rather than by focusing on particular movements that have fed into it is because the movements change without really changing the epistemology very much. So one of the things that fed into the rise of postmodernism as an intellectually vigorous force was, for example, la dÈconstruction, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Lacan, Paul de Man, and so on, from the French side.
That whole movement is dying. There are very few intellectuals who follow Jacques Derrida in France anymore. It’s old fashioned. It’s old hat. Jacques Derrida is far more popular in America at the moment than he is in France. On the other hand, as far as I can see, that does not mean in France there is less relativism around. It doesn’t mean there is less pluralism. I do not see, myself, in France a great decrease in postmodernism, as defined by these six points.
It’s important, it seems to me, to recognize that epistemology as an assumption in the broader culture is much broader than the movements that feed into it. It is harder to displace. It’s fairly easy to displace a short –ism. It’s fairly easy to displace, with time, a major philosopher. But once you get an epistemological structure deeply embedded in a culture, it’s a lot harder to overturn it.
So I find that there are some intellectuals who have come through an infatuation with postmodernism now treat it with suspicion and come out the other side. What do they come out to? Well, insofar as individuals come out to it, not many have come out to mere return to modernism.
They tend to come out to some form of eclecticism, but eclecticism is, itself, deeply, deeply, deeply pluralistic. It’s almost the definition of it. It comes out, in some sense, still remarkably tied to some form of postmodernism as I’ve described it. Even while people are suspicious of it and coming out the other side.
So if you ask, do I see on the horizon a fairly clear intellectual movement that seems to be on the edge of capturing a new epistemological stance, I just don’t see one. I don’t see one there. I see individual efforts and individual books, some of them Christian, too. I see, for example, the influence of Plantinga, but that doesn’t mean that Plantinga is somehow.… I mean he might be winning some grounds amongst philosophers, but there is no way that Plantinga is anywhere near the front end of shaping the epistemologies of Western universities and Western media. Not anywhere near.
Now if you ask about September 11, that’s a bit different. September 11 gave permission to start talking about evil again. So there is a sense, you see, in which September 11 did more to challenge postmodernism than any hundred books. There is some truth in that. On the other hand, that’s not transparent either.
Stanley Fish, who is one of the sort of semi-popular figures.… He’s not the front rank like Richard Rorty or people like that, but he’s a semi-popular figure in the whole business of postmodernism. He was asked a couple of weeks after September 11 to write an editorial piece in the New York Times. He was asked if he changed his views on the relativism of all evil, his postmodern views on these matters, in the light of September 11.
He said, “Of course not. It proves my point exactly. I mean, from the point of view of those who were in the towers, from the point of view of Americans on the ground, it was a terrorist act. It was evil. It was unjustified. It really was an evil thing. On the other hand, from the point of view of militant Islam, it was a jolly good thing. It was courageous. The people who did it were heroic, they were right, and it was about time to challenge the secularization, globalization, and arrogance of America. It was a necessary thing and those people should be viewed as martyrs and go to heaven.” He said, “That’s exactly the point. It all depends on your point of view.”
He was asked, then, “Does that mean, therefore, that if America goes after the terrorists, you wouldn’t want to do it because it’s all relative?” “Oh no,” he says, “I think we should go after them.” “But then why do you think you should go after them?” He says, “Because America is my tribe.” Thus, you see, the reason for going becomes tribal, a power structure. Not of intrinsic right or wrong, it becomes a power structure. So you haven’t really lost in that sort of argumentation. You haven’t really lost, on the long term, any postmodernism.
So there are all kinds of people on the ground who speak of evil again, but if it’s evil out there that somebody has done something to us, I’m not sure how deeply it’s challenged the epistemology. It may just be a whole lot of angry stuff that is not very well thought through. And meanwhile, those people who are talking angrily about this group or that group, whether they’re talking about it from the perspective of France or the perspective of America, it doesn’t make any difference.
In point of fact, when it comes to how they view morality, how they view truth, how they view all kinds of things, they haven’t changed very much in their deepest epistemological structures. It becomes a way in to talk about these matters, in my view. It provides a wonderful opportunity to talk about these things, and it’s a way into more conversations and all of that, but do I think that it has actually deeply changed the epistemological direction of Europe and North America? Doubt it.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: That’s right. That’s correct. But Fukuyama came out with that in, was it ‘91, ‘92? But already in 1993, Samuel Huntington came out with his essay on foreign affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations,” which was expanded into a book in 1997, in which he sees eight major civilizations around the world that are clashing.
But Huntington is not in any sense a Christian or a theist or anything like that, and what he says is, there, too, you have very different perspectives. He’s not trying to adjudicate about the rightness or wrongness of them. He’s saying that these things are all out there competing. So there are still immense forces out there that justify this sort of thing.
Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man, could have been tied either to modernism or postmodernism; so can Huntington. By itself, neither challenges the deepest structures of this sixfold profile of postmodernism that I’ve outlined. I would like to be able to tell you, “Yeah, this is on the way out. Don’t worry about it. There’s something new coming around the corner,” but I don’t see what it is, personally. I mean, it may, but I don’t see what it is.
There’s one more thing to be said in this regard, it seems to me. This may add a bit of perspective. There are some analysts, some thinkers, who refuse to speak of postmodernism, and speak instead of late modernism. In other words, they understand what I’ve just described as postmodernism to be late modernism or hypermodernism. It’s the same movement, just a different label.
There is a reason for that. The reason is my first point. That is, in both cases you’re beginning with a finite I. The essential characteristic of modernism in the first instance is you’re not beginning with God, you’re beginning with the autonomous I, and there is a sense, thus, in which postmodernism, hypermodernism, whatever you want to call it, is merely an extension of that same movement. In that sense, it is part and parcel of the same thing. It’s modernism gone to seed. It’s trying to tease out further the implications of beginning with a finite I.
The label is not really all that important. In my view, it’s still worth talking about postmodernism because the six characteristics change or are overturned so massively that there are some big differences in outlook on point after point after point. So I still do prefer to speak of postmodernism.
But there is a sense in which postmodernism is, in fact.… In my book I called it “the bastard child of modernism.” It’s bastard in the sense that it’s illegitimate. It’s not what modernism wants. It’s off to the side. But it is the child whether it likes it or not. It’s not coming in brand new. It’s not de novo. And it’s not just a child either; it’s a bastard child.
In that sense, it seems to me you cannot think of modernism being this massive movement that went for 350 years. Now modernism comes along. It’s just a little blip on the screen. It’s going to disappear now and something else will come along, or modernism will win again. That can’t be, because there’s a sense in which this postmodernism is part and parcel of this big thing. You can’t get back there anymore. You just can’t do it.
It may be that postmodernism is so absurdist it’s not very stable. I agree with that. And there will be some that will go back and tilt to that one a little bit more, but precisely because it is the bastard child. You can’t undo the bastard. The bastard is there. You can’t put the genie back. The critique of modernism by postmodernists is so acute, there’s no way back. Not at the cultural level, only by individuals. As a result, I don’t see an overturn of this tomorrow or the next day. I wish I could, but I don’t.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: I think that’s a mistaken category, with all respect. Because what I’m talking about is epistemology, and postmodern epistemology does not in any sense preclude the imposition of new ways of doing things, not in any sense. That’s why I’ve already indicated that postmodernism can be, in fact, the least tolerant of forms.
Postmodernism now appeals to raw power. We saw that with Stanley Fish. It appeals to power. Not to truth, but to power. It can appeal, then, to the value of each group, whether it’s the snail darter in the Tennessee Valley so that you cannot produce an entire dam project that will serve the needs of millions of people.… No, you can’t do that.
In fact, in metro Chicago last year, there was a whole debate about whether or not we should abolish spraying for mosquitos because after all, they’re a life form too and they have their rights, and.… Then eventually a number of people died of the West Nile virus, which is being carried by Chicago mosquitos, and people changed their minds.
But the very fact that you could have this kind of debate, you see.… We’re talking about rights again, but it’s entirely within the framework of an astonishing flexibility about where the authority for all of this comes from. So I see those developments, and I would be the first to acknowledge that both modernism in the form of a Stalin or any form of authoritarian control … a Nietzsche or a Pol Pot or a Hitler, as those are still within the broader modernist epistemological structures … it can be totalitarian. But so also can postmodernism be totalitarian.
So the fact that you start having totalitarian structures does not by itself mean that you are moving away from postmodernism. Because all those structures have to do is build up the intrinsic, internal argument that says, “If you disagree with what I’m saying, in fact, you are intolerant,” and the flag is flown again. It seems to me to be important to distinguish between the underlying epistemological structures and the highly diverse forms of governmental, structural, and rights arguments that can be engendered.
Our time here is going to fly very quickly. Let me, nevertheless, take a few minutes to lay out some of the strengths, the advantages, of postmodernism so that we do not stop ourselves from saying something positive in this regard.
1. Postmodernism has offered a very telling and penetrating critique of the arrogance of modernism.
This observation is bound up, of course, precisely with the fact that you are in both systems beginning with a finite I and drawing rather different conclusions. You begin with a finite I, and now, instead of being so certain that you’re right, that same beginning point is now teaching a fair bit more humility, and that’s not bad. After all, it’s important to keep saying that modernism has not always been the friend of the devout Christian.
2. Postmodernism, on the whole, has been much better at sensitizing us to the extraordinary diversity of perspectives, structures, cultures, and languages that come to the table in any discussion in a globalized world.
I would love to give you lots of examples there but I’ll let that pass for want of time.
3. Postmodernism also is far better than modernism at probing the different methods by which people learn.
Modernism favors, massively, linear thought, rigorous methodology, and so on whereas postmodernism is far more open to the diversity of ways in which people learn and know, and that’s not all bad.
You saw some of that already in the Romantic Movement in which truth is beauty and all of that. Fields with dancing daffodils and Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and people like that. But at the same time, it is so ethereal that it doesn’t have a strong voice in a strongly modernist world. It has much more of a voice today, although it leads to all kinds of superstition and silliness in certain respects, it also conforms to our experience of a lot of things.
I gave this example in the Network quite a few years ago, almost a quarter of a century, I was pastor of a church in Vancouver, and in the church was a young woman who was a student at the University of British Columbia. Her name was Peggy. She was vivacious, an intuitive thinker. She didn’t have a linear track in her head anywhere. Artsy, colorful, enthusiastic, intuited everything, and so on. A keen Christian.
She came to me at one point and said that there was a chap on the football team, a great big hunk called Fred who was taking an interest in her and was it all right if she went out with him, because she thought that he might be somewhat interested in Christianity and so on, so on, and so on. I said, “Peggy, for goodness sake, be careful. Your heart can get blown away here and suddenly you’re in a relationship that you can’t handle anymore. Just be very careful.”
She said oh she’s not going to get snookered but she’d really like to go down that route. And I said, “Fine, fine, fine. Go out with him. Just make sure you bring him back and introduce him to me afterwards.” I thought that would sort of kill it right there, or else she’d go and do her own thing in any case and not pay any attention to me.
But that Saturday night about 10:30 in my study at the church while I was still doing preparation for the next day, there was a knock knock knock on the door and in came Peggy and Fred. Fred had never been inside a church building and was looking distinctly nervous. It turned out that.… He’s a great big football player. This is American football now; it’s not soccer. He’s a great big bruiser, and he was as linear and do-er and straight and logical as she was intuitive and vivacious and so on. I mean, if opposites attract, this was it.
So we went out to a place to eat and talked until about two in the morning, and I tried to get to know Fred and put him at his ease and this sort of thing. Next Saturday night, knock knock knock on the door and in they came again. They’d been out to a movie or something and this time, he had a list of questions. So we went out to a restaurant again and sat down, got some coffee, and started to talk. “Well, this is my list of questions. Number one …” I tried to answer as best I could. “Number two …” We went through his list of questions.
Next week, knock knock knock knock. Came back. He had another list of questions. For 13 weeks, every Saturday night he came in with his list of questions. At the end of 13 weeks, he said, “All right, I’ll become a Christian.” And he really was converted, too. I mean, I baptized him a couple of weeks later and today he’s deacon of a church. He’s brought up his two children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and he and Peggy have a wonderful marriage to this day. What can I say? He was converted.
But I have to tell you, that’s not my normal experience in evangelism. I mean, I’ve had a few that have been converted like that, but not many. It’s far more common to see people being converted.… Yes, there’s some input from the gospel and explanation from biblical texts and all.
But there is also, you know, “Well, my mother has been praying for me for 40 years,” or “You know, my wife was sick and somebody came along and cut the grass for me from the local church and it really spoke volumes to me,” and thousands of little things that go into your openness or your acquisition of knowledge. Isn’t that the case? “I was sure that Christians were all wrong and then I got cancer and I was really afraid and boy, the Lord really spoke to me.”
You can’t do evangelism very long before you find people becoming Christians for the most screwball reasons, to be quite frank. Not even, necessarily, because they really think that this is the truth, even quite. It’s a screwball world. What can I say? And there is a sense in which postmodernism by its very openness to the diversity of ways of human knowing is a little more realistic than a merely linear sort of approach. It’s not to be despised completely.
On the other hand, the principal problem with postmodernism is that it operates almost all the time.… Well, let me say one more positive thing, too. Postmodernism, although it draws the wrong inference from this, it rightly teaches us, it seems to me, that all human knowing is culturally dependent knowing. After all, every language is a phenomenon of culture.
So if you know something and think about it in Polish, it’s culturally dependent. If you know something and think about it in Bulgarian, it’s culturally dependent. If you know it in Urdu or Swahili, it doesn’t really matter; it’s culturally dependent. Do you see? All knowing is culturally-dependent knowing. You cannot escape your finitude. There is no fulcrum. That’s correct. It’s important to keep saying that.
In my view, postmodernism draws the wrong inference from this. It infers from this that, therefore, there is no true knowing. Now we come to the first major criticism. Postmodernism constantly works with a built-in antithesis which you must discern and destroy every time you come across it. The built-in antithesis is this: either you may know something absolutely objectively (we might say omnisciently) or you are lost in a sea of relativism.
If you buy into that antithesis and get into an argument with a postmodern, the postmodern will always win. Always, without exception. Because you can always show that no human being ever has an omniscient knowledge about anything. So that if the only alternative is omniscient knowledge or not truly knowing, then inevitably, because you can disqualify this and these are your only poles of antithesis, then you’re left with the relativism. There is no other track.
It seems to me that one of things Christians have to say is, “We may know some things truly, if nothing exhaustively.” It’s important to argue that one out in great detail. I’ve tried to argue some of it out in my book The Gagging of God, and I spent a lot more time in the Theologians Network trying to give models for how that can be done.
There are various models for thinking it through, but I rather like the model of Karl Popper. Karl Popper developed this with respect to the philosophy of science. It’s called the asymptotic approach to knowing. It’s not a perfect model, but it’s a useful one. This is an X-Y axis system, of course.
On the X axis we’ll measure time. On the Y axis what we will measure is distance from objective reality as God knows it. (I’m assuming the existence of God for the sake of my illustration.) So this is distance from objective reality as God knows it. So if you deal with a 5-year-old’s understanding of something, he may be up here. His understanding is a long way removed from the actual reality as God knows it.
But with time, that child may get more and more and more understanding of it until you have, as it were, an asymptotic approach. The line is called, in mathematics, an asymptote. This is an asymptotic approach. This asymptote gets closer and closer and closer but never, ever, ever touches. It never does.
So supposing a 5-year-old has some knowledge of John 3:16, some simple knowledge, “Yeah, I believe that John 3:16 tells me God loves me,” you can show that the child knows nothing about agapao, nothing of what kosmos means there, nothing about how to reconcile that with statements about the wrath of God, far too many sentimental notions of what love is, and all of his understanding of love is Mummy giving him cuddles before he goes to bed.
There are all kinds of things he doesn’t know. He’s a long way from looking at love and John 3:16 the way God looks at it. But now he grows up and is in the bosom of the church, is taught basic Christian theology, does a PhD in Johannine studies, and on and on and on. Does he touch the line? No. He still doesn’t know all about John 3:16 the way God does. Now he’s 50 billion years into eternity. Does he have an omniscient knowledge of John 3:16 then?
No, of course not, because omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God. The texts say, “Be holy, for I am holy.” They do not say, “Be omniscient, for I am omniscient.” Even 1 Corinthians 13 does not promise us on the last day omniscient knowledge. “Then we shall know also as we are fully known” does not mean that we shall then know omnisciently; it means we shall know with unmediated knowledge.
“Now we see through a glass darkly [whereas God knows us in an unmediated way], on the last day we will see him face to face,” and then we will know in an unmediated way the way God knows us in an unmediated way. We will never know omnisciently. So all human knowing is inevitably non-omniscient knowing, inevitably. But that does not mean that it is not knowing.
So if you set the standard of what knowledge means by describing knowledge as intrinsically omniscient knowledge and then set up the antithesis that way, then you can show always that human beings are finite, and at that point, the only alternative is postmodern approach to knowledge.
But I would want to argue that one of the tasks is to show that human beings may know some things truly without knowing anything omnisciently. And there are whole models for doing this sort of thing. This is merely one of them. There are three or four major ones and a lot more that are being developed, and it’s important to keep saying that kind of thing.
Within that framework, I would actually go so far as to say that in one sense, postmodernism is an insufficiently radical critique. It blames our ignorance on our finitude. But Christians will say that our ignorance should be blamed both on our finitude and on our fallen-ness. So Christians rightly speak of the noetic effects of the fall. Do you see? We are not only, in other words, finite, and that will limit us from ever having omniscient knowledge of anything.
We are also, until perfected in the resurrection, perverse, so we are bound to twist things. In one sense, it undermines postmoderns when I’m on a university campus and tell them, “As far as I’m concerned, your critique isn’t nearly radical enough.” We’re not only finite, we’re stupid, and this from a moral cause. But that does not mean, in fact, that there is no way back to knowledge, and so then I try to lay out ways of thinking about human knowing that are reasonable, understandable, and believable, even if they are never partaking of omniscience.
One may argue further that.… When these issues of epistemology come up today, sometimes conservative Christians say, “Yeah, but what we really need is the truth. We just need the truth.” But what postmodern Christians are likely to say is, “But that’s not the way people think. They think in terms of relationships. We must show the church to be full of relationships and integrity and warm acceptance and a good experience of worship. That’s the way people are drawn to the church.”
I want to say, with the most profound respect but with a certain amount of heat, “A plague on both your houses.” Because after all, the Scripture insists on both. On the one hand, there is a truth that was once for all delivered to the saints, which we may not understand perfectly and exhaustively and omnisciently, but we can certainly articulate and are morally responsible to do so.
On the other hand, Jesus himself taught us, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another.” And thus the integrity of human relationships and the integrity of loving one another, and the integrity of self-sacrifice and so on, it does speak volumes, whether to a modernist who won’t admit it or to a postmodern who insists upon it; nevertheless, those sorts of relational things do speak volumes. Don’t they?
You do find postmoderns going into a church and initially sometimes being far, far, far more impressed by the integrity of relationships and the authenticity of corporate worship of whatever heritage than they are by the linear arguments of the sermon. But in due course, if you want those people to come to a genuine knowledge of the truth, you want it to be so integrated that it involves their minds, their wills, their hearts, their value systems, their judgments, their relationships, because that’s what Christianity is about.
There is but one God and our whole being must love him with heart, soul, mind, and strength. It seems to me that far from being on the defensive with postmoderns, what we must start saying is, “Well, you do have some real insight. You have part of the truth, if I may dare speak of truth, but only part of it. There is a sense in which the Bible is more comprehensive than you are. Let’s think about this together.” Now there are all kinds of entailments then for the way we do evangelism and all kinds of other things, but it’s time for me to stop. Are there questions, comments, in the last few moments?
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: Yes, that’s true. That’s why I said this is not a perfect model. Yet, it’s important to see what this is trying to say. When Popper uses this, of course he’s using it in the realm of the philosophy of science, and I’m adapting it for another purpose. I am not saying that this is the way people come to knowledge, nor am I even insisting that this line may in fact sometimes look like that. I’m not doing any of those things.
All I’m trying to say is that one may truly speak of true knowledge without speaking of exhaustive knowledge, and we will never actually hit the line. It is asymptotic. It is merely a way of trying to debunk the constant antithesis that postmodernism throws up, either explicitly or implicitly, that either you have omniscient knowledge or you’re locked into a sea of relativism. That is a false antithesis. It sets the bar too high. It demands, in fact, that you be God to know anything. It sets the bar too high and is intrinsically idolatrous.
The irony in part is that postmodernism, which was quite effective in overthrowing the arrogance of modernism has its own deep, deep, deep arrogance built into it as well. For it is now so constructed reality that even if there is an omniscient God who speaks, we can’t possibly know him. That is supremely arrogant, isn’t it? In fact, I first gave some lectures on this … it was rather interesting … at Cambridge University about seven or eight years ago.
What happened was I was speaking at a conference on some of these things. I was beginning to do some work. I hadn’t written The Gagging of God yet. I was struggling my way to read through the stuff on this and understand it because I could see things changing in university missions and I didn’t quite have the categories to handle it. I’d begun to give some talks on it.
This young woman who was a student in the English department at Cambridge University, she came to me and she said, “Look, I have friends in my department who are losing their faith.” The most dangerous departments nowadays are English, the social sciences, psychology and so on. They’re not science departments. They’re not dangerous at all compared with those departments these days.
She said, “Would you come and talk to them.” I said, “Look, I’m busy. I’m booked solid. I’m leaving the country in three months. I really don’t have time.” She said, “No, you have to come to them. Just give me an evening or two because they’re losing their faith.” So, “Okay, okay, okay, I’ll come. I’ll come.” We agreed on a date. I didn’t think about it again until a couple of days before I looked it up in my planner and I prepared something and went there.
What I didn’t know is that instead of having a few friends there, she put up signs all over the university, “Professor D.A. Carson,” without saying that I was a theologian or anything, just “Professor D.A. Carson: God and the Possibility of Truth.” Then she rented the biggest hall in her college.
I walked in there, below me the hall would seat 350 people and it was absolutely packed out. There were people up in the platforms sitting on the floor, and about 10 percent of the people who were there were dons, that is academics. They weren’t undergraduates. I was in there for a little chat with a few people who were about to lose their faith.
It suddenly dawned on me that boy, this one’s a hot one. I really have to do something about this. Well, that was the beginning of my commitment to write The Gagging of God. So I talked for about an hour, an hour and a quarter, and then we opened it up for question and answer. And the first question came from a don. I’d never met him before, although I’d been at Cambridge for years.
He was sitting on the floor behind me, all hunched up behind me on the platform and he said, “Are you saying that if there is an omniscient talking God who accommodates himself to let his speech be heard by us, it changes all of our epistemology?” “Yep! That’s exactly right. And that’s elementary Christianity.” He hadn’t even heard of it. He hadn’t even thought of it. At Cambridge, the center of the Reformation in the British Isles. It was a new light coming on.
And far from getting any antipathy or any reaction to any of this, we then had an hour-and-a-half or two-hour discussion. It was very interesting and very challenging. Far from being defensive about any of this, it seems to me that Christians who are well-informed in this area can engage in the open marketplace of ideas on this one, and make a very credible case again and again and again. Don’t get scared. Engage, engage. Okay? Let’s bow in prayer.
We confess, Lord God, that we do not know anything as we ought to know it. But we bless you that in your great mercy you have disclosed yourself to us in words in a Book, in great events, in redemptive history, events to which witnesses have borne testimony. By your Spirit you disclose yourself to us. Supremely in the person of your Son you have disclosed yourself to us.
We are ashamed at how little we understand, how little we know, and how much we twist. Have mercy upon us we pray, and correct us, rebuke us, instruct us, and lead us in the ways of righteousness and truth, truth not only propositional but relational, integrity, and conduct of life until the day we see the Master ourselves face to face. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
