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’d like to begin by reminding you of an interchange that took place after Jesus was arrested. He was charged with blasphemy and with treason. Because the local religious authorities had no right to bring in capital punishment, they handed him over to the Roman governor. As a result, an exchange was set up between Jesus and Pontius Pilate, this governor.
The fact of the matter is Jesus proved to be quite a taciturn sort of a prisoner. He didn’t say very much. He kept very quiet, but on several points he spoke quite bluntly. This is one of those exchanges. “Pilate went back inside the palace and summoned Jesus and asked him, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ ” Now from Pilate’s point of view, that would sound like a heresy, like a treason charge. That is to say, if he was going to be the king at all, he might be, in some ways, threatening Caesar’s claim.
“ ‘Is that your own idea,’ Jesus asked, ‘or did others talk to you about me?’ ‘Am I a Jew?’ Pilate replied. ‘It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?’ Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight, but now my kingdom is from another place.’ ‘You are a king, then!’ said Pilate. Jesus answered, ‘You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born and for this I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.’ ‘What is truth?’ Pilate asked.”
His question in the context is larded with cynicism. Suppose, for argument’s sake, Jesus had replied along these lines, “Well, my definition of truth is such and such.” Then what’s Pilate going to do? Either he can say, “Well, in fact I agree with you. That is a very good definition of truth.” In which case the cynicism is unjustified. Or he could say, “I don’t agree with that definition of truth. Here’s another one instead.” In which case the cynicism is still unjustified.
Well suppose that, instead, Jesus had replied, “Actually, Pilate, I agree with you when I come to think about it. Truth is much too great to be defined.” Or perhaps (2,000 years early) he was a sort of cryptal postmodernist if he had said instead, “I agree with you. Truth, finally, is culturally relative. It depends on the particular language group or the interpretive community or maybe even the individual, but there’s no such thing as culture-transcending truth. You have your opinion on these matters, and I have mine.”
Then what might Pilate have said? Well, if he said, “Yes, I agree with you and that’s my point.” He’s justified his cynicism. On the other hand, it’s very difficult to see how he’s going to maintain his status as an upholder of justice or how he’s going to judge at all in this matter of whether Jesus is guilty.
It reminds me of something that Charles Colson wrote in one of his essays. Charles Colson was a man in politics in the United States when he was converted to Christ. Years later, he has become very involved with prison reform and the like. A journalist, a well-known journalist whose name should be kept silent for the protection of the guilty, came to Charles and asked him, “Would you tell me something about your Christian faith? I can see that it has done something to you. Go ahead. I’m taking you out for lunch. Convince me.”
Colson went through the regular kinds of things Christians talk about. The evidence for the truthfulness of the Bible. There’s a lot of evidence, good evidence. The evidence for the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. There’s a lot of evidence, good evidence. In every case the man replied, “Well, that’s the way you and your interpretive community read things. There are a lot of other people who read things quite differently. I’m glad that your faith helps you. I’m really pleased. I can see that it’s done something to you but, quite frankly, I don’t need it.”
Colson was getting more and more and more uptight and unable to answer and felt very much like Pilate and his cynicism. “ ‘What is truth?’ ” Finally, Colson brought up one of Woody Allen’s films, Crimes and Misdemeanors. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but in this film the protagonist kills his mistress, and for a while writhes in a sort of agony of self-guilt and shame.
Then, gradually, because he’s not found out, he comes to the conclusion that there is no justice in the universe anyway and it doesn’t really matter whether he did what he did. His mistress, after all, is only an accidental concatenation of atoms, no longer nicely organized in an organic whole, but there’s no moral significance in the murder.
So comes to the conclusion at the end of the film, in fact, that there’s no need to feel guilty. Just get on with life. Do your own thing. From there, Colson went to Tolstoy and contrasted Pierre in Tolstoy. Recall how Tolstoy, likewise, writhes through an agony of guilt and finally asks the question, “Why is it that I don’t do what I know I should do, and I do do what I know I should not do?” This, of course, is the question the apostle Paul asked following Jesus 2,000 years ago.
From there, he began to paint a picture of an entirely different world, where the question still has to be asked. “Is this all there is? Is there no notion of justice that is coherent at all such that shame and guilt are coherent notions? Do we simply live like beasts: might makes right? Lift up Nietzsche?” So the man began to listen. In other words, it becomes very difficult sooner or later for thoughtful people to live comfortably in a thoroughly consistent postmodern world. It becomes very difficult to live that way.
Let me give a couple of pieces of merely anecdotal evidence, but it’s the way the world works. In the institution I teach near Chicago, every once in a while we run courses at night that bring together people from very different historical and theological traditions. We have somebody lecturing from each of those traditions for two or three hours and then open it up for questions and see what happens.
I come out of a confessing, Christian background, but every conceivable tradition under the sun is represented in some of these evening courses. This was a course on hermeneutics, that is on principles of interpretation and the bearing between the interpreter and text. When I had done my bit of two or three hours there was a woman in the class, a PhD student at Seabury-Western, a bright lady who had said nothing all this time. She then told me, in no uncertain terms, that she viewed me as a nineteenth-century modernist and a bigot who really didn’t understand contemporary philosophical analysis.
She was probably largely right. At that point I just hadn’t done enough work in the area. Her prodding probably made me do a good bit more. I was trying to present a coherent framework, and she was presenting her response. Finally, in a moment of sheer intellectual perversity on my part, I said to her, “I think I finally understand now what you’re saying. You’re using irony in order to affirm the objectivity of truth.”
“I’m not saying anything of the sort! You’ve twisted what I’ve said to the exact opposite! I’m saying …” and she repeated. I said, “This is terrific! Now you’re adding passion to the ironic affirmation of truth.” “I’m not saying anything …” She went up again, you see? Well, eventually she came down and I said, “But that’s how I’m reading you.” Now it wasn’t nice, and it wasn’t even true, which I then confessed. Mind you, to admit that you’re not telling the truth to the postmodernist is already a bit of a dicey thing to do, but that’s another issue.
What I said to her, though, is that the reason I had gone through this rather rude exercise was because, in response, she had immediately replied by tying her authorial intent to her own text. In other words, what upset her was that I was interpreting her text out of line with the way she meant her own text to be interpreted.
In other words, she was not only disavowing my right as an independent interpreter, insisting that all interpretation rests with me, the reader, the interpreter. She was also disavowing that I might do this merely in exchange with the text. I had to take into account the author of the text, if the text was her text. So why not extend the same courtesy to the apostle Paul, or to God, for that matter, if God talks?
In other words, at the practical level, however convincing the arguments of a Richard Rorty or a Stanley Fish or others, at the end of the day when their books are reviewed, they get their noses out of joint if somebody hasn’t understood their books. “Well, that’s not a fair criticism because that’s not what I said! Clearly the reviewer didn’t understand me!” But what is that other than an implicit recognition that most people do want to retain some kind of copyright on their own text, tied to their own authorial intent at some level?
Now I don’t think postmodernism is all wrong (I’ll come to that), but I am saying that the purest forms of postmodernism don’t work. They don’t work in reality. They don’t work because we rightly feel that not only scholarship, but even basic courtesy has been breached if we do not try to interpret texts in line with authorial intent, with what the texts actually say and express.
Now I would love to respond to this one at a theoretical level, but this isn’t the time or place to do it. Let me suggest, however, that part of the problem in contemporary analysis that leads to the lost forms of postmodernism is absolute antithesis. That is to say, we are repeatedly told that either we understand something absolutely and truly, or we don’t understand it objectively at all.
Take an example from Paul de Man. This is his example. I’m not putting words in his mouth. He calls up an American television character, Archie Bunker. If you haven’t been exposed to Archie Bunker, on one level you haven’t missed much. Archie Bunker is a kind of right-wing, bluecollar nasty piece of work who’s against women and blacks and minorities, no matter what. He’s sort of right-wing, anti-everything.
This whole program is really designed to spoof such people. It’s a comedy that ultimately blows up the kind of narrow-minded bigotry of this kind of universe. In this program his wife, Edith (who’s bit of a twit in the program), asks him at one point, “Archie, do you want your bowling shoes laced up or down?” And he says, “Aw, what’s the difference?”
And she says, “If you lace them up, you start at the bottom and you begin to go up through the holes, and if you lace them down you start at the top and go down through the …” At this point, everybody’s pulling themselves, laughing, because everybody understands, to use Paul de Man’s analysis, that when he says, “What’s the difference?” what he means is, “I don’t give a damn!”
Now from this example, Paul de Man goes on to pages and pages of explanation about how even in the simplest question, “What’s the difference?” there are “vertiginous possibilities of misconstrual.” From this, he goes on to show how all language is so culture-laden and open and patient of misunderstanding. How we could possibly communicate with one another and convey objective truth.
I confess when I read the example of Paul de Man, my first reaction was, “Give me a break!” The only person who didn’t understand Archie was Edith. Everybody else understood it. That’s why they’re laughing! Everybody laughs precisely because they understand that this is not what Archie meant. The only other person who didn’t understand was Paul de Man.
You can see what the logic is doing, in any case, can’t you? What the logic is doing is either there has to be perfect fit, a perfect, absolute understanding of everything, or everything is relativized. I would’ve thought that a Christian would want to answer, “Surely people can know truly without knowing exhaustively or absolutely.” There are a lot of models that go along those lines. Let me mention two or three.
For example, there was some work done in Germany in the 30s and 40s and 50s that ultimately talked about the fusing of horizons. What was meant by that was quite simple. If you liken the presuppositions of a writer, let’s say the apostle Paul, one of the major writers of the New Testament.
Imagine all of the presuppositions and beliefs and biases and assumptions of the apostle Paul as a kind of horizon, because when he looks out there, that’s what he sees. He can’t help seeing all of those kinds of things on the horizon. He might see some individuals playing around in there. His own individual thoughts. His horizon is then likened to his background.
Then, I, as a reader coming into the text, bring my horizon. So the question is, using this kind of model.… Is there a way of so fusing my horizon of understanding with the horizon of understanding of the apostle Paul’s? There can be some sort of decent transfer across from one horizon to another. Obviously I can’t think myself into Paul’s mind exactly, clearly.
On the other hand, can I think my way into it sufficiently well that I may know some things truly, even if in not all of their proportion and precision and complexity? That’s why they spoke, then, in Germany as they were working these things out of Horizontsentfremdung and Horizontsverschmelzung. That is to say, a kind of what is now called distanciation.
You distance yourself from Paul in order to recognize how many different biases there are. You try to read yourself into what is going on in a first-century Jewish writer with Greco-Roman training. You try to read yourself into what he knows, and first-century life and thought and languages. That’s why theology faculty still teach Greek and Hebrew.
You try, as far as you can, to understand the other person’s point of view. Then once you have distanced yourself from your biases and you don’t bring all of your twentieth-century truck with you, as much as you can, you distance yourself, but it’s possible to have some communication. It might not be perfect, but it can still be true. There is a meeting of minds in texts.
Instead of being locked into a circle in which you go round and round and round, can there not be a kind of spiral in which you get a little closer to the center? Or a model that I prefer myself, (partly because my own background was in mathematics) on an X-Y axis, a line that comes down and approaches the X axis but never touches it is called an asymptote. This is an asymptotic approach. All of the branch of mathematics called calculus depends on asymptotes.
In other words, it never touches. It’s never a perfect fit, but it’s all based on infinitesimal approximations, approximations which are good enough, finally, to put people on the moon. You can’t put people on the moon without calculus. It’s the branch of mathematics that is very concerned with how you measure diversely moving bodies. It’s all based on approximations at the end of the day.
Now on this knowledge, on this line, suppose you find a 6- or 7-year-old brought up in a nice Christian home, going to Sunday School, being catechized, learning his Bible, memorizing texts. At some point, a visitor walks in and says, “John, does God love you?”
“Yes, God loves me.”
“How do you know God loves you?”
Well, this kid’s really been well catechized. He says, “Well, I remember that Jesus said that God so loved the world, and I’m part of this world, so God loves me.” The text being quoted is “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” That’s the quote that the child is referring to.
When you look at this line approaching the X axis, this kid is only 6. Does this kid understand anything of what John means when he records these words? Does he understand anything of Johannine theology? That is, the theology of the gospel of John. No. Has he ever done any study on what the Greek verb agάpe, to love, means?
Has he thought through, for example, God so loves the world? What on earth does world mean to John? “God so loves the world.” Does he even know that the Greek world is kosmos, and in John’s gospel it’s used 70-odd times? Apart from two or three instances, it always has to do with the created moral order in rebellion against God.
In John’s gospel, God is not pictured as someone who loves the world and whose love must, therefore, be wonderful because the world is so big. Rather, God loves this world in anarchic rebellion against him. The world is so bad, and God loves it anyway. Does the kid understand that? No. Probably the kid is still thinking in terms of a mommy or a daddy who loves him and gives him hugs, You know, “God who loves me too.” More hugs.
What are we going to say? The kid misunderstands? The kid has abused the text? I don’t think so. I think in real life you would say, “The child has a childish understanding of the text but still understands the text aright.” It’s in line with the direction of the text. It’s in line with it. Now, on this asymptote out here, the kid’s pretty close to the right axis, to the Y axis. Come over here, and you’re right out of line at all.
It’s not saying that Pinocchio was an imp. That’s not what the text was saying. The kid was in the right line. I mean, there was a sort of line up there to the asymptote, you see? Eventually, this child goes to Cambridge and studies theology and Greek and things. Eventually, this child is far enough along that he or she might be able to give some kind of an exposition of the text that is a little closer in line to Johannine theology and to the mind of the writer and, maybe, thus apply it to himself or herself a little better.
I tell you this, from a Christian point of view, even in eternity to come that asymptote never touches the line. Are we ever going to know all there is to know about the love of God as God knows it? That would require omniscience. In other words, when we are offered absolute antitheses, either you know things absolutely, perfectly, truly or else you don’t know anything. In real life, it doesn’t work like that. In fact, the kinds of models you can build show that in real life you can know things truly.
You can know true things, truly, even if you can’t know them exhaustively or absolutely. So for all of these and many more reasons, I would want to argue that when Christians claim certain things are true about Christ, they are not claiming to have an inside track to absoluteness as if they themselves are omniscient. Far from it. Let me give you one more example. Supposing, for argument’s sake, that you were far brasher than any decent Englishman or Englishwoman is likely to be, maybe an American or something like that. You felt called upon out of Christian conviction to go to some Buddhist temple outside the center of Bangkok.
Now out of sheer missionary zeal, you have learned enough Thai to get by with a terrible American accent, but you could make yourself understood. As the worshippers come out of this Buddhist temple, you declare, in all of your Christian zeal, “Jesus is Lord!” How will the locals hear you? Well, for a start, besides thinking that you’re funny-looking and you speak Thai poorly and you’re a bit rude …
Besides those obvious things, if they’ve learned anything theologically at all, they’re going to think that one of the things that you’re affirming about Jesus is that he’s inferior to Gautama the Buddha since at the highest levels of exaltation in most strands of Buddhist thought you reach that highest level when you can no longer have something predicated of you. You are neither hot nor cold. You are neither good nor bad. You’ve transcended all of those sorts of categories.
If you’re busy affirming that Jesus is Lord, then you’ve not yet reached the highest state of exaltation. If you’re still affirming something, “He’s neither Lord nor un-Lord” would be a much better thing to say. To say that he’s Lord, well, clearly he hasn’t quite arrived yet, has he? This isn’t quite what you had in mind.
So does this mean that you can’t get across what Paul means by “Jesus is Lord” to Buddhists or to Thai speakers? No, of course not. There are Thai Christians, too. What’s at stake is that you’ve got a whole worldview, so that when you just hear the individual phrase, the phrase is not only language-laden, it’s culture-laden.
Language is inevitably a function of culture. Beyond that, there are all sorts of presuppositions in the Buddhist mind. If you are going to have a genuine meeting of minds as to what Paul means by the confession “Jesus is Lord” (which this zealous American Christian is citing), then what you’re going to have to deal with is not simply a quotation but a worldview, an entirely different framework.
Now what I want to argue tomorrow is that Christians are dealing with a whole framework when they talk with postmodernists or anybody else. It is very difficult to get inside what Christians mean about the Christian faith and the claims of Christ unless you begin to see how that framework works and that, at the end of the day, that framework stands over against any particular form of postmodernist framework, or any other kind of framework. There’s a whole framework claim.
Before I end today, let me just finish this way. The absolute antithesis may be unreasonable. Fair enough, but there is one thing that postmodernism does extremely well. That is, it begins to challenge the absolute hubris, the absolute arrogance, of modernist construals of rationality. You see, the modernist tradition has argued that we can get to the truth by merely exercising reason.
I think that although the Bible tells us we ought to reason and think, the Bible would be the first to applaud that kind of worship of an exclusive rationality. It’s not that the Bible is on the postmodernist side on every front, as if the Bible loves absolute relativism or cherishes irrationality, but it does recognize that however important rationality is, by itself it will never find its way. It is overly pretentious.
Who you are affects things. What kind of baggage you brought into this meeting will affect things. People don’t become Christians for all kinds of reasons, not many of them purely rational. “It’s going to muck up my priorities. It might change my morals. It might affect what I do with my money. It certainly is going to change my value system. That could be terribly daunting. Then it affects my circle of friends, my links with my family, my antecedent biases.”
Now in all of those sorts of areas, there’s more than mere rationality that is at stake. In that framework, too, then it is important to recognize that Jesus comes to us in the pages of John’s gospel, not simply as the one who makes extraordinary claims about the truth. He was on the side of truth, he says, listens to me. As bluntly as that. To Pilate, if you please.
He is also the one who speaks with compassion and gentleness. The one who, elsewhere in the Gospels, receives little children, deals with the broken, and breaks down arrogance. Now that’s a holistic man I want to listen to and find out more about. Tomorrow I want to talk more about the construction of Christianity that stands over against postmodernism in this respect.
