The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

Written by D.A. Carson (Gen. Ed.) Reviewed By Timothy Bradshaw

Donald Carson, a highly respected evangelical biblical scholar, has put the Christian world in his debt by producing this huge volume covering many aspects of the key problem of pluralism. It is written in a very accessible style so as to appeal to the widest possible readership, which would range from concerned church people to undergraduates in theology and also in cultural studies generally. He paints with a very broad brush, a shaving brush at times!—but his aim is to cover a huge span of biblical and cultural material.

There can be little doubt that Carson has chosen to go for the ‘big issue’. His thesis is that pluralism, made into an ideology, has neutered the Christian message as a truth claim, thus gagging God. His robust method of reply is to appeal to the Bible, taking into account the fact that pluralistic relativism has, rather like a computer virus, infected that hard disc by overstressing its diversity at the expense of the unity which alone makes diversity possible.

Carson appeals, more specifically, to what he calls ‘the plot-line’ of the Bible, and this forms the subtext of much of his work. This is a very sensible approach which seeks to uphold the cognitive content of Scripture, but in a way appropriate to its literary type and especially its narrative mode. Resisting Pinnock’s attack on ‘propositionalism’, Carson argues that there is a cognitive content to revelation, but this is of the interpretive, rather than a quasi-logarithmic, type. Carson, with several others concerned with hermeneutics, such as Vanhoozer in Edinburgh, is helping orthodox Christians considerably in this regard. Poetry entails the cognitive as well as the emotional: ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’ actually means something that we can understand, as well as tugging at our heart strings. In essence, such is Carson’s view of how Scripture provides the mind with comprehensible content, and with this we can follow, albeit in a broad fashion, its ‘plot-line’, its basic drift and shape, at the very least, in ‘narrative’ theological fashion.

With this synopsis of the book’s aim and biblical method, we can track through its main sections. There are four parts: hermeneutics, religious pluralism, Christian living in a pluralistic culture, and pluralism within the evangelical camp. The book in a sense comes round in a circle, starting with the Bible and the challenges of relativizing hermeneutical gagging of the plot-line, through the roots of religious pluralism as an ideal, into the practicalities of responding to Western culture, and ending in the evangelical family where pluralistic ways of thinking are evident and enervating. The book can be seen as both theoretical and practical.

Part One identifies our situation as being a hermeneutical morass, made all the more glutinous by postmodernist deconstruction of texts as the primary way of reading. Western culture is now gripped by a philosophical pluralism, a hard doctrine of how things are and should be. This goes way beyond ‘empirical pluralism’, the recognition of diversity of lifestyles and peoples in great cities, and beyond ‘cherished pluralism’, the gladness at rich diversity. Pluralism has become, in postmodernity, a kind of razor insistent on cutting away claims of universality. Tolerance as an ideal presupposed a core value or culture, but this has been displaced by an absolutist doctrine of pluralism.

Carson, always claiming to offer bold mapwork rather than detailed expositions, takes us through the deconstructionist thought of Derrida and Nietzsche. One of the delights of his book is the way he has, through painful exposure to its assaults, learned to play back the deconstructionist critique on itself, unmasking its ‘real motives’ as a bid for cultural imperialism and domination. The book is worth its very reasonable price simply for this lesson, and many an undergraduate in many an arts faculty should be armed with this response in the face of such aggression—one might turn the blade even more and say in the face of this kind of cultural ‘fundamentalism’.

The subjective nature of this Western phenomenon is demonstrated, and we are led to Kant again, surely a correct suggestion, to gain insight into the anthropocentric construction of reality and thence to Nietzsche’s stripping away of the Protestant morality Kant desperately wished to keep, leaving us naked in the public square, to use a striking bon mot, and getting increasingly cold. I am not so sure that Descartes can be blamed quite so fiercely, but he is part of the story.

The impact of this hard pluralist dogma is shown in that key band of Western officialdom: the media, academe, the bureaucracy. As this review is being penned, Mr Blair claims to be ‘re-branding Britain’, entertaining Jacques Chirac in ‘minimalist’ conditions on top of a dominating tower block overlooking the deprivation of the East End of London, to the bemusement of the locals and risking a very high ‘cringe factor’: the reconstructed elite imposing a new taste on the irritatingly backward-looking British. Carson’s points can be illustrated with ease from the daily news. Another amusing cameo could be British Airways’ tail fins being multi-cultural, abolishing the British logo of identity completely in favour of an interesting and stimulating mélange: core identities are suspect and dominating (let the reviewer be forgiven British examples!).

Objective truth has disappeared from this stage, indeed the stage may be spinning round. Carson examines the attempt of Stanley Fish and Hauerwas to handle the hermeneutical problem by claiming that interpretation can only be done in reference to a community (see p. 76 for the famous example of a text, left chalked on a board in a linguistics class, being interpreted by a poetry class!). Carson tackles this with great sense and articulates what many wish to say, that communities can abuse texts as much as do individuals, as the whole tradition of anti-Semitism shows. A fortiori this is so in Roman Catholic cultures, which make community-led interpretation the key hermeneutical principle. Carson holds that the plot-line of the Bible is clear, and that God has accommodated himself to this subtle yet simple mode of self-revelation, in a way which fully respects human freedom—in accord with a key tenet of postmodernist rejection of domination. The postmodernist ends up in a boring kaleidoscope where all colours are the same, in effect, since we cannot judge between them. All we can judge is the attempt to judge, a point made so brilliantly by Peter Berger in his Rumor of Angels three decades ago.

Part Two takes us into an examination of the plot-line of revelation, the defence of the cognitive aspect and fundamental clarity of the whole Bible, fully acknowledging the diversity of Scripture now so emphasized by modern study. Liberals miss the plot-line, fundamentalists miss the diversity inherent in it. Carson quotes Kevin Vanhoozer: ‘Between absolute knowledge and relativism, there lies the alternative of poetic and interpretive rationality’ (p. 189), hence the message of the Bible is not to be gagged. This sensible methodological apologia is followed up by a bus ride through vital loci of the plot-line: God, imago dei, fall, redemption. We get much quotation, too much were the book not aimed so widely, and even get Father Brown cited alongside Derrida and Time magazine. But this adds to the book’s readability.

‘God is a construct of the imagination which helps to tie together, unify and interpret the totality of experience’, according to the postmodern Gordon Kaufmann (p. 222), but not according to Carson. Quite the reverse we might say: we are constructed in the image of God whose objective revelation and redemption alone make sense of the world and our experience of it. That fits the plot-line much better! Carson’s exposition might be summarized with reference to Irenaeus of Lyons, who made the basic connection between the Hebrew God of creation, Adam and the second Adam, OT and NT: that is the shape of the Christian plot, simple yes, but inexhaustibly rich for the thinker. I hope, in fact, that Carson and Thomas Oden link hands in their common task of restating the plot, Oden with his patristic orientation which complements Carson’s. Hick is particularly well treated in this part of the book, as generally are the topics of inclusivism (soft and hard versions), exclusivism and pluralism. Again the book is easily worth its price for this examination of Christianity and other religions.

Part Three takes us into the cultural criticism of the West, its individualism, hedonism, subjectivism and loss of core vision. For more on this I commend O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations. How should Christianity conduct itself in the landscape of ideological pluralism, and ideology almost defined in terms of its desire to free society from the bonds of the Judaeo-Christian ethical tradition? Any religious tradition should be celebrated—except the mainline Christian one which is dominating and a threat. Such questions are wrestled with intelligently. Carson looks at problems in the realms of education, ethics, economics, and the relevance of the gospel to the public domain.

Part Four identifies relativism inside the evangelical world as a major problem, related to a loss of confidence in Scripture as having a plot-line at all, and a move towards an experiential evangelical emotionalism. Carson argues that the full plot-line needs to be unfolded, in today’s culture especially, in order to preach Christ. That is, with Irenaeus, we need to explain the message of God and creation, fall and human need, in order to make Christ comprehensible—the framework is vital. He gives a fascinating example of a missionary friend in India whose preaching of Jesus led to many accepting him, but not to many new Christians—the Hindus in question merely patched Jesus into their existing cultural framework. The missionary left and returned, this time expounding God and Christ, leading to fewer but deeper converts and to numbers of church communities. That story bears considerable thought: how many young people do we know who have indeed ‘made a commitment’ but never come to church and are isolated atoms of faith, afloat in the shallows of our unstable culture?

Carson rejects modern annihilationist teachings which exclude the doctrine of hell in some form, as failing to fit the plot-line. Here his discussion was perhaps not quite so telling as in other places, for the plot-line of God the creator can be brought to the aid of the conditionalist case consistently with Carson’s approach. But the point that Christians must draw lines in an age when this is deeply unpopular and indeed even immoral, stands as undeniably true and necessary however much it may render evangelicals less than fashionable.

While agreeing with Mark Noll that evangelicalism has become anti-intellectual, Carson thinks the deeper problem is the lack of biblical formation of the Christian. One must agree here: for example, if the figure of Jesus is plugged into a New Age type of system, then the gospel vanishes—again Irenaeus had it right, in his argument with the Gnostic syncretists. We do need the plot-line. This is so also for spirituality, a point made in detail in a useful appendix.

Carson gives us a big book but not an intimidating one. Its tone and manner ensure its ease of reading. The reader will gain exposure to a vast range of Christian sources and to key contemporary ones. The achievement in putting together so compendial a work is great. This will sell well among undergraduates, and it might be an ideal present for a teenager embarking on studies of any kind. It will be taken up by the bewildered Christian in the vortex of our culture, whose ‘centre’, as Yeats put it, ‘cannot hold’.


Timothy Bradshaw

Regents Park College, Oxford