Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson answers questions on the topic of Truth in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Male: Do we have some questions already in? If we do, perhaps we could hand them this way. For the sake of focus, we will look at those questions which pertain directly to the subject matter for tonight first. There are some of us who have questions from other areas, and perhaps we will reserve those for the end if we have time. If I could invite Professor Carson to come back to the mic, I have a few questions here that are relating to what he has just been talking about.
Question: “One needs to have doubt in order to have faith in something. How then can doubt simply be a function of immorality?”
Don Carson: Well, let me work backward on this one. I tried to say that doubt is not simply a function of immorality. I tried to argue instead that immorality may be one of the causes of doubt. That is to say, doubt can come out of ignorance. It can come out of immaturity, sleeplessness, a philosophical structure, and immorality.
I am far from saying that every time you have people doubting it’s because they’re sleeping around. I’m not suggesting that in the slightest, but I have known it to happen. It’s important to recognize the complexities of the things that go into doubt. There are lots of examples of that in Scripture, too, for that matter.
As for the first part, “One needs to have doubt in order to have faith,” I don’t believe that. Very frequently people do move from doubt to faith, and that is often especially true in the lives of young people who are beginning to sort out how much of their faith up to that point has been merely inherited from their parents.
Children sometimes are brought up (whether Muslim or Hindu or Christian or whatever) in a certain kind of faith structure and heritage. Then they might go off to university and have it deeply, deeply challenged, so that they go through a period of real doubt before they come into a stable position.
Existentially, it is often true that people go through a period of doubt on the way to faith, but it is not a necessary thing. I can certainly show you some people who have exhibited remarkably strong faith stably from very early years on all the way through. I confess I don’t quite buy into the premise in the first part of this question.
Question: “How do I go about convincing people the authors of the Bible have a specific message they want to bring across and Bible verses are not meant to have multiple meanings that contradict one another?”
Don: One of the things I often try to do is to get people who are interested into Bible study for themselves. You see, sometimes when people raise an objection, it’s not a serious objection. “Well, you know, everybody knows the Bible contradicts itself.” “Well, everybody doesn’t know that. Would you like to give me an example we could consider together?”
Sometimes an objection of that sort is not really serious. It’s merely something that’s thrown out there. The way to counter that is, “You know, I’d love to sit down and read with you the gospel of Mark or the gospel of John. You think we could have a six-week study together, one evening a week for six weeks, and read through the gospel of John together and see what it actually says? Wouldn’t that be fun to do together?”
Then you start finding out whether people have any interest in actually finding out what Bible says as opposed to merely sloganeering. To my mind, that is one of the best ways of proceeding in this line. If, instead, people come from a background where they’ve been thrown lots and lots and lots of problems only from professors who are way out there on the far left, so far left you need field glasses to see them, then sometimes what you have to do, if they’re willing to read at all, is to offer them alternative books.
Nowadays, on most subjects that have encouraged pretty way-out skepticism, there are really excellent volumes that have been written. If a person is having doubts about when the New Testament documents were written, well, if they’ve never read anything in the area, it’s still worth reading a little book by F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? It’s worth reading.
If they’ve read beyond that and they’re having more sophisticated doubts, I can give you a long bibliography on all of these subjects. If you don’t know what the bibliography is, then you talk to Pastor Josh. If he doesn’t know, then you go and talk to Bishop Rennis, and if he doesn’t know, he’ll email somebody. Nowadays, there is literature out there that you can find out about. If you’re serious in finding answers to these things, believe me, there is a lot of literature out there for which you can thank God.
Question: “Dear Professor Carson, Thank you very much for your informative talk, but how does knowledge of postmodernism really help us to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with our postmodern non-Christian friends?”
Don: Directly, it doesn’t. That’s not really what I was trying to do. I’m not trying to say, “Learn postmodernism so that you can share your faith.” I’m not trying to say that. What I was trying to say instead, tonight, was that many of us live and move in the atmosphere of postmodernism even without understanding what the categories are or how we got here historically or what are the presuppositions that we’ve inherited all around us.
Even on television these things come across, are pushed all the time. They shape us in subtle ways that we don’t know. What an understanding of these things helps us to do is to become a little more self-critical and a little more critical about what is going on in the culture so that we might become a little better informed about how to respond in these ways.
If you want to know what I think is the best book on sharing your faith with an informed postmodern crowd today, in my view, the best book came out in February, written by Tim Keller called The Reason for God. Someone has called it a book for skeptics and for those who love them.
If you’re serious about learning how to answer postmodern yuppies, and Singapore is full of them, then that’s the book to begin with, The Reason for God by Tim Keller, or it might be down as Timothy J. Keller. I don’t remember what is on the cover. He is a close friend, and I know him as Tim. The Reason for God by Tim Keller, published by the Penguin Word Group.
Question: “What do you suspect to be elements in our Christian worship and evangelism which are influenced by postmodernism?”
Don: Whoa! Because strong postmodernism has made us suspicious of linear thought and of truth and confessionalism and tends to emphasize the affections and the emotions and the experiences, we tend to have, increasingly, in what we call Christian worship, a lot of enthusiasm but not always a lot of knowledge.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not justifying knowledge at the expense of enthusiasm. The Bible doesn’t simple say that we’re to know God. It says we’re to love him with heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbors as ourselves. So we are whole people, and ideally, we should grow right along all of the axes of human experience.
But if human experience then becomes the supreme arbiter, the filter by which we judge the worth of anything, then, in due course, we (I’ll overstate it) become our own gods. Our own experiences become the arbiters, the final judge of what is good.
I was in England a few months ago speaking at what is called the New Word Alive conference. The chap who was leading corporate worship is a man called Stuart Townend. If you know anything of contemporary hymnody, you know that he is one of the best of the best. He and Keith Getty wrote the one “In Christ Alone.”
“In Christ Alone” is a superb piece. It’s contemporary, but there’s lots of thought in it and confessional truth and adoration and worship instead of just having a chorus which tells you about 18 times to worship but doesn’t say much about the God you’re supposed to worship or which builds up a lot of enthusiasm with a really good beat but doesn’t have really anything of splendor or thought or depth. His pieces, almost without exception, have a great deal of truth and integrity in them even while they’re encouraging you to worship God from the heart.
We went through a period, it seems to me, in English-speaking hymnody where there was an awful lot of shallowness, I’m afraid. That’s beginning to come around, and Stuart Townend is one of the ones who has helped to bring it around. Well, for an hour and a half we sat down together over a cup of coffee and what he said to me was, “Don, tell me what biblical themes we’re ignoring in our songs.”
Isn’t that a wonderful question? Because you see, he is a man who is interested in confessionalism and the truth and so on and so on. We had a serious talk for an hour and a half about what kinds of themes need to be written about and thought about and sung about. There are many, many, many themes and biblical books and so on and so on that are completely ignored by common hymnody today.
When I was a boy, I was brought up in English and French, and because we were a pretty musical family I think we knew all 1200 songs of Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos, and another 549 songs on the French side. Nowadays, we tend to sing the small handful of choruses and stuff, and we don’t know the breadth of Christian hymnody or the depth in terms of history or the diversity in terms of Christian truth.
Now, there is a rising generation that’s beginning to change that again. Bob Kauflin, for example, at Sovereign Grace Ministries and then in Britain this chap Stuart Townend and a number of others of similar caliber. That’s certainly one of the domains that is a wee bit troubling. One could mention others.
Question: “ ‘The Bible does not encourage one to believe in what is not the truth.’ What are some truths in the Bible? How does one know these are truths? To accept they are truths just because the Bible says so? Isn’t there some cyclical reasoning, here?”
Don: Yes, if I were trying to argue that we should believe them just because the Bible says so, eventually there would be some cyclical truth. At one level, you still have to say all human reasoning is cyclical in some sense. That is a function, in fact, an insight from postmodernism. It is another way of saying we are perspectival.
That is, we don’t have some anchor outside of ourselves to which we have access that we can exhaustively know. That is a prerogative of God, himself. People who work in this area like to distinguish between reasoning that is in some sense circular from vicious circular reasoning. Vicious circular reasoning is self-destructive. It’s completely incredible. But the reasons for thinking that the Bible tells the truth are many.
It’s not that you stand on some objective place and can quantify and qualify all of those objective reasons by themselves, as if you can assess those reasons from a stance that is entirely outside the Bible. You approach these matters asymptotically. Nevertheless, there are reasons for thinking that what the Bible says is true. Let me list some of them.
First, even on historical grounds, reasonably good historiography, the Biblical documents were written within the eyewitness lifetime of the original witnesses who saw Jesus. The amount of alignment in what they say, for example, about his resurrection or his truth claims and so on, even if you just give them general passing marks for history and nothing more than that, you are already beginning to come to an understanding of who Jesus is merely on historical grounds, which are not infallible, but they’re interesting.
You come to the place, when you start accepting that Jesus really is who he says he is and he knows what he is talking about, and then you become a little more interested in what Jesus says about Scripture and its truthfulness and its relationship to him and how the words of God, in fact, are settled forever in heaven. You start saying, “Well, if Jesus is true in this domain and this domain and if he really did rise from the dead, I’ve got to start paying a little more attention to what he says, too, about the nature of Scripture and so on.”
Then, you can come to little, little things. For example, it is such a small thing, but in the Roman world, different cities had different words for what we would call mayors, that is, the executive power of towns. Some were called a hegemon. Some were called a protos. Some were called a whatever. It depended on what kind of town it was.
When you read the book of Acts, people have done studies, for example (they’re interesting studies), that have shown that wherever Luke can be tested, he gets the right name for the right person at the right place. Some of those towns actually changed what they called them at different periods in history. Wherever Luke can be tested on that front, he comes out smelling like a rose.
If he becomes so accurate in something so minor, so insignificant, you start saying, “Why should I be so skeptical about his witness in other domains that I cannot test so easily?” You start multiplying the reasons and the reasons and the reasons. None of it is in itself an infallible reasoning, but eventually you come to the conclusion (at least I have come to the conclusion; I think Christians eventually come to the conclusion) that the Bible is the Word of God and you can trust it.
When you come to that position, then, you start trusting it, too, for what it has to say, and you discover that it has a certain kind of coherence in your life and a coherence in understanding sin and how people are reconciled to God and so forth. Then, I’m happy to tell you quite a number of truths the Bible does say.
Many, many people would acknowledge the Bible does say these things even if they don’t think that they’re the truth. For example, the Bible insists that there’s one God who made everything. The Bible insists that what is wrong with the universe is not matter over against spirit or something like that but rebellion against God; that is, a rebellion against God that doesn’t like the God who is there so we make others gods, or we distort God, or we become god for ourselves.
It’s one of the reasons why Paul can say that covetousness becomes idolatry, because what you want the most becomes god for you. Thus, covetousness becomes idolatry. I can tell you quite frankly that the Bible insists what we need the most is to be forgiven by this God, to be reconciled by this God.
According to the Bible the ultimate ground of our forgiveness is that this God, though he is one, is triune. You are right at the edge of the capacity to think coherently. He is one God. Yet, he is a complex unity. In the person of his Son, he comes to us and actually becomes a human being and bears ours sin in his own body on the tree. God the Father looks at me in my sin through his righteousness. He looks at Christ as sees that Christ has borne my guilt.
Christians have sometime spoken of this as a great exchange. He takes my guilt, and I get his righteousness. The ground of my acceptance before God is certainly not how good I am. I’m just not good enough. God is just too holy for that, but what he, himself, provides in the person of his Son. Yeah. The Bible says that.
The Bible says, for example, we must confess our sins before him, turn from our sin, confess that he is Lord, and trust him for his forgiveness. The Bible certainly says that. The Bible says God is holy. The Bible says God love us despite our rebellion. The Bible says there will be a judgement of the last day and every knee will bow and tongue confess, “Jesus is Lord.” The Bible says that.
Oh, there are a lot of things the Bible says. The Bible says certain things about the family and how to live and the grace of gratitude. It says quite a lot, too, about what justice looks like and so forth. There are many things the Bible says all right, but you don’t want me to rabbit on all night, I’m sure.
Question: “How can a Christian argue for the Christian position on moral issues (e.g., abortion, homosexuality) in the public arena which assumes a largely secular stance without explicitly resorting to our Christian presuppositions? It seems to me that without the Christian starting point there are few, if any, substantial arguments against the liberal position on these issues.”
Don: I’ve written a whole book on this subject. I could just say go and read the book. The book is called Christ and Culture Revisited. This is a question that is very probing, and it’s really quite complex. If it interests you, that book came out in March or so. In very large measure there is truth in all of this.
The question is whether there are at least some moral issues that belong to (Christians talk about these in a variety of ways) natural theology (I don’t like term very much), to the imago Dei, to the image of God, to the fact that we’re stamped with God’s image. That is to say, are there some things that we really should cherish because they are almost universally recognized values such as the importance, for example, of honestly and truthfulness in our dealings? Shouldn’t that shape how we make business laws, for example?
Sometimes you can form allegiances and alliances amongst different parties on certain moral issues. For example, you may have some allegiances on certain sexual issues amongst, for instance, Mormons and Christians and some Muslims on certain moral issues. On other moral issues they might divide, but on some issues you can sometimes find a co-belligerent status to try to push a certain stance.
You must understand, too, that in the history of the church there have been times, in fact, when Christians grew sufficiently influential in the corridors of power that they did reverse things. In 1740, religion was in such a bad state in England that there were only six people that showed up for Holy Communion on Easter Sunday in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
There were 280 crimes on the books for which you could be hanged. Slavery was rife in the empire. At the same time that about 11 million slaves were transported across the Atlantic into America, about 13 million slaves were transported north up through the Arabian Gulf, too, into that part of the world. Slavery was everywhere.
The Industrial Revolution was in full tilt, and children as young as 4 and 5 were being sent down into the mines to work until they died. The rich were getting richer, and the poor were getting poorer. God raised up a man called Howell Harris in Wales in 1734, George Whitfield in Bristol in 1738, and John and then Charles Wesley in 1740, and what they did was preach the gospel.
They preached the gospel so compellingly that thousands and then tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands were converted. As they were converted, they changed their moral views on all kinds of things, including people like Wilberforce. Wilberforce and others managed after decades to ram through the British Parliament the abolition of the salve trade across the North Atlantic, for example.
This came about, ultimately, not because Christians were in the majority. Nevertheless, by their constant teaching and preaching and insisting and so on enough had, in fact, come to faith and their moral voice became the conscience of the nation that there was a transformation in all kinds of areas. Trade unions were invented. The abolition of child workers, the introduction of prison reform, and so on and so on and so on came about largely out of Methodist Christians converted under the ministry of these and other Christian leaders.
In times of decline it’s not always possible, of course, to have your way in Parliament. That raises fundamental issues about what we think of the nature of democracy. We might well cherish democracy and freedom. I do. On the other hand, I do remember what Winston Churchill said, which was, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other kinds.”
I remember, for example, that a friend of mine in Slovakia, told me three weeks after the wall came down in Berlin and the collapse of Eastern and Central European Communism was taking place.… He said, “For the first time I saw on the streets of Bratislava, sold in the open marketplace, pornography.”
In a fallen and broken and rebellious world, freedom brings also freedom to sin. Life is complex. When you have a country the size of let’s say the United States which is a democracy, you have 300 million sinners voting. Does that guarantee there is great wisdom in their decision? Whether you have 10 sinners voting or 300 million sinners voting, you still have sinners voting. Don’t you?
A whole country, whether it’s Singapore or America or anywhere else, can vote for all kinds of foolish things, because we often vote selfishly or according to our biases. In other words, democracy does not guarantee goodness. The trouble is totalitarianism tends, with time, to guarantee even more un-goodness.
That’s one of the reasons why, for Christians, we will never ever, ever succumb to the view that any form of government will guarantee a certain utopia. It is ou-topia; that is, no place. It doesn’t exist. We try to do the best we can. We try to be faithful, to serve people, to ensure as much goodness in a government as we possibly can. Yes, those are all responsible things.
Paul, himself, tells us that the powers that be within that framework are ordained of God, and we’re supposed to be good citizens. That’s all true. At the end of the day, there is not going to be utopia until the new heaven and the new earth and the whole of righteousness. Those things have to be worked out, and I tried to work some of them out in that book, Christ and Culture Revisited.
Question: “How do we argue against philosophical materialism? How can a worldview, a method of looking at reality, be wrong?”
Don: Well, let me take the second part first. “How can a worldview, a method of looking at reality, be wrong?” I’m not sure a worldview is, first and foremost, a method. A worldview is, first and foremost, simply a way of looking at the world. Different worldviews are, in fact, in some instances, mutually incompatible, so they can’t all be right.
It’s easy to think of ways in which worldviews can be wrong. Do you really want to say the Nazi worldview was right? A worldview is simply a way of looking at the world, and, of course, it can be wrong. If you start asking, “How do we argue against philosophical materialism,” that is really a question of saying, in effect, “How do you start arguing against atheism?” (Though it’s a little more complicated than that.)
If I were going to be brief on that front, I would, again, start by beginning with the book that I’ve already mentioned by Tim Keller. One of the things I like about Tim Keller’s book is that he takes up objections that are raised, including the objections of atheism, and he puts them more sympathetically and more convincingly than the atheists and the skeptics themselves.
In other words, he listens to the objections fairly, and then he begins to answer them in a variety of ways. If someone claims to be an absolute atheist, then, my usual way of beginning is by asking things like (and here I will get all kinds of responses), “As an atheist, do you think that there is a distinction between right and wrong, and on what do you base it?” If they say, “Well, right is what is good for most people or what the government says it is or what I want or right is …”
It’s very easy to poke holes in all of those kinds of things. They are not sustainable views in my judgment. In fact, some atheists will say, “There are no such things as right and wrong. It is all bouncing molecules. That is all it is, just bouncing molecules. So there is no moral difference, then, between kissing your wife and pouring boiling oil over her head.” Well, there’s a difference from the wife’s point of view, no doubt, but morally speaking, I mean, it’s just bouncing molecules. Isn’t it?
There are ways of beginning to show that so many of these positions turn out, eventually, to be self-refuting in one fashion or another. Then, you start dealing with historical questions as well. “What do you do with Jesus Christ? The evidences for him are so good. What do you do with him?”
Then, there are also yearnings in the human heart that are really interesting. The yearnings in the human heart make most sense if you start assuming the Bible is telling the truth and we were made for all eternity. Otherwise, why do we always feel death is unjust and too soon and we belong to something bigger?
There are ways of approaching things along those lines as well. What kinds of arguments I use depends a bit on where these things come from. At the end of the day, I’d strongly encourage anybody who is really interested in this area, not least the person who has written this question, to go to Amazon.com or whatever your easiest access to a book is here, and type in Tim Keller and The Reason for God. If you don’t have the money, sell the shirt off your back and buy the book.
