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
Yesterday I began with Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. Today, eventually, we’ll get to Athens. Pontius Pilate, if you recall, was the Roman governor who asked, at Jesus’ trial, the rather cynical question, “What is truth?” From there I wandered through the byways of postmodernism trying to argue that postmodernism in its rawest form is not really a very stable position that people can live with anyway.
Nevertheless, it’s probably worth saying just a bit more about modernism and postmodernism because those expressions are not translucent. They mean slightly different things to different people, so let me offer a couple of definitions and a bit of historical perspective before I try to outline a Christian framework for looking at these things.
Most people today call the period from roughly the 1600s to about 1970 or 1980 modernist. The reason for that is because of the huge change in epistemology (that is, in how we know and how we think we know) that came about with the beginning of the 1600s. Although there were many individual figures who were involved in the change, the figure who actually marks the turn of the era is inevitably RenÈ Descartes.
He was a devout Roman Catholic, but in 1619 he set himself to answer the objections of skeptics in his day. He discovered that so many of them didn’t share his presuppositions about the authority of Mother Church, the authority of Scripture, or about the authority of the teaching office in the church. So he was trying to find some common base of agreed knowledge that he would share with them on which they could build until he could show them the truth of Catholicism as he understood it.
In 1619 he came up with his bright idea, which he eventually published in a book in the 1630s. He was so pleased with the idea, in fact, and so devout a Catholic, that he went and offered sacrifices and prayers to Saint Anne in a monastery. You must not think of him as a radical skeptic. He wasn’t that.
His common base on which he was trying to build was cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. He wasn’t the first to say something like that, but I won’t go into the history of previous assertions. What is interesting about it, however, from the point of view of Western thought, is that for the first time in Western thought, people were trying to develop a basis of knowledge without reference to God, in the Middle Ages, for example, or in the Reformation.
In fact, throughout that period all the way up to Descartes, the vast majority of thinkers began with the God of the Bible who knows everything without exception, who knows everything perfectly, truly, absolutely, exhaustively, and in its proper proportion. Therefore, all our knowledge is inevitably some sort of subset of his knowledge.
So the question of human epistemology (how we come to know anything) is going to depend, in part, on where and how God reveals himself. Does God reveal himself in nature? Does God reveal himself in Scripture? Does God reveal himself in the person of his Son? And so forth. But he was looking for some basis that he would not have to share with a Christian so he could convert skeptics.
And he started out with this cogito ergo sum, because even if you are thinking skeptically, at least you’re thinking. So at the level of praxis, it’s pretty hard to deny that you exist. All kinds of philosophers since then have doubted that’s a very logical argument. I won’t go into that debate at all.
Whether people agree with Descartes or not, what he set off was a whole lot of approaches to knowledge very different in nature, in which in every case you start off with a kind of basis, a kind of foundation. Then on this foundation you develop certain methods, methods appropriate to the particular discipline. So foundation plus method, turn the crank, and out comes (allegedly) absolute truth.
That was supposed to be true in the sciences. It was supposed to be true in history. It was supposed to be true in religion. What you do is you start off with the proper foundation (hence the term foundationalism, which developed into several branches), then you develop methods appropriate to the discipline, and then you turn the crank and out comes absolute truth.
So it’s not that this suggested that everybody saw things exactly the same way, but if they didn’t see things the same way, then either they didn’t know as much, they hadn’t refined their method, or they needed to get back to an assured foundation. But once you had the proper foundation and the method, you could be assured of public truth. Cross-cultural, cross-linguistic public truth.
Now of course, in Marxist historiography, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, that perspective was sacrosanct. But it was sacrosanct in a lot of the Western countries as well. For example, in Marxist historiography, if you couldn’t see with proper basics and method the truth of a Marxist reading of history, then quite frankly, there was something wrong in your head. Maybe you deserved to be incarcerated, because quite frankly, you couldn’t see what was, in fact, public truth. A Marxist economic reading of history was the truth.
It was properly based on a proper foundation and you had proper methods. You turned the crank and there was the explanation of the French Revolution. There was the explanation of Luther, and there was the explanation of the Puritans. It was all to do with economics and the class struggle, and so forth. If you couldn’t see it, there was something wrong with your head because the truth was public truth.
The trouble is, of course, that with the modernist approach to truth, to epistemology, based as it is on what I know (I think, therefore I know), pretty soon people start observing that what I think, individually, is not what you think, which is not what you think, which is not what you think. The methods themselves grant you some sort of objectivity. No, it came to be argued, the methods themselves are bound up with our subjective choices, with who we are, with our culture, our language, our approaches.
So at the end of the day, eventually there was so much dissatisfaction with this modernistic approach to truth, even in the hard sciences, philosophers of science questioned whether or not there was really objective truth along this sense or whether there were paradigms of science which changed every once in a while. Hence figures like Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn, and others. Eventually the whole thing couldn’t hang together anymore.
Out of various traditions developing largely in this century, partly on the linguistic side, partly on the philosophy side, has arisen postmodernism. That is to say, it’s really a bastard child that has devoured its mother. The movement of modernism has generated something that isn’t modernism. It has generated an illegitimate child, but the mother was so unstable herself she had to produce something else. What it has produced is postmodernism, which turns around and devours the mother.
Postmodernism says there are no methods, there are no foundations that can ever escape our finiteness. None. Therefore, there can be no cross-cultural truth, no trans-cultural truth, no translinguistic truth. There is only the truth that you perceive or that your interpretive community perceives. But you cannot speak of truth that is culture transcendent. Now within that framework, suddenly a lot of things change.
That means, for example, that if I try to convert you, the kindest thing you can say about me is that I’m being rude. That is to say, I’m suggesting you might be wrong. And if you try to convert me, then you’re suggesting that I might be wrong. But how can you speak of right and wrong positions when all positions are inevitably related to the interpretive group? Or to an individualistic reading? Or to a certain cultural heritage and nothing more?
They are not anchored in anything objective. Unlike, for example, the epistemology of the Middle Ages or of the Reformation period where things were finally anchored in God, who could tell the difference between truth and untruth. Or in modernism, where it was assumed that the methods would finally prevail to crank out infallible truth. Nowadays, we’re convinced even about the subjectivity of the methods. The result, for example, is that tolerance has changed.
It used to be, about 20 or 30 years ago, that a tolerant person was understood to be someone who might have very, very strong opinions about something or other but who insisted that you have the right to express your opinions even if they are diametrically opposed to theirs. That person was still a tolerant person. He would want to argue his case. He would want to push pretty hard, but he (or she) would also be willing to push hard for your right to argue your case.
Not anymore. Nowadays, in poll after poll of people under 35 in the Western world, a tolerant person is understood to be the person who doesn’t have strong opinions in the first place. That’s a huge difference. We’ve suddenly come to the place where, for the first time in history, vast numbers of people now believe that the only heresy is the view that there is such a thing as heresy.
Yesterday I tried to argue that that is an unstable position as well. It can’t survive. It just isn’t the way people live. I won’t reiterate those arguments now, but there is a sense in which a Christian will want to say, to both the modernist and the postmodernist, “A plague on both your houses.” There are things to be learned from both, but on the other hand, the Christian doesn’t want to be utterly dependent on either, quite.
For instead, a Christian will want to return to a God-centered epistemology in which, the Christian wants to argue, the God who was there, who really does know everything, becomes a kind of anchor that guarantees a kind of stability to knowledge that you cannot find under either modernism or postmodernism.
Now for various reasons I suggested yesterday this ultimately means a Christian trying to present something in this kind of framework has to come in with another whole picture, another worldview, another way of looking at things. And the truth of the matter is that also happened in the first century. There were no postmodernists in the first century. Of course not.
On the other hand, after all, the first Christians were all Jews. Then they were Gentiles who read the Jewish Bible. They were people steeped in what we today call the Old Testament. They thought in those terms. As the church began to expand and the good news about Jesus began to move out, then increasingly they came across people who had never heard of the Old Testament.
They had never read about Moses. They didn’t know anything about the kind of God the Bible talks about. Most people in the Greco-Roman world were polytheists (they had lots and lots of gods) and if they had one god behind all of that, that god was more or less pantheist. That is, that god was impersonal and could not be distinguished from all of reality.
That god and ultimate reality were all sort of bound up together. Within that kind of framework, then, where do these people start when they start talking about Jesus? Are they going to come along and say “Jesus is your Savior”? “Save me from what?” “He will get you ready for heaven.” They didn’t think in terms of history going somewhere, coming to an end either with your death or at the end of the age, and then heaven. The categories are all wrong.
So what they had to do was to explain a whole Christian worldview again. And one of the classic summaries of those efforts is found in Acts 17 in Athens, where Paul (who was one of those extraordinary chaps who could move into various cultures), is actually hauled up before a learned assembly (the Areopagus) in Athens in the first century because he has been talking in the marketplace and trying to present Jesus in this kind of framework.
Some of the things he’s been saying sound so odd that the intellectual religious giants of the day want to sort of check him out. So they invite him and he begins to speak. He says, “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.”
Now probably this sort of altar was with respect to a perennial fear that you leave some gods out. If various gods have certain duties (they will bless you financially, or they will ensure you have a fat baby, or they will get you out of difficulty, or they’re good luck, or they’re fine for traveling or something), you don’t want to leave any of the gods out. So you cover it all by offering sacrifices even to an unknown god if need be. That’s probably what was going on.
But he says the God he wants to talk about is not lost in some ethereal unknown. “He is known, and I’m going to announce him,” he says. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all life and breath and everything else.
From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the time set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed.
And he has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” Then, there’s an interruption. “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ ” And then the account goes on. Now we should not think that this passage is an exact typescript of what Paul said. Undoubtedly, an Areopagus address went on for two or three hours … certainly a long period of time.
What you have here is a summary of the main points, but even that summary is very interesting. Listen to what he says. He says, for a start, that this God is independent of the world. That is, this God is not a pantheist god to be identified with the world, indistinguishable from all that is. He was before anything else was. And he doesn’t need us. That’s what it says. “He is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything.”
In other words, for Paul, we’re not to think of God as sort of miserable up there until we bow before him, worship him appropriately, and stroke him a little bit. He doesn’t need us. In this country, in the Puritan period, Christians used to refer to the aseity of God, from Latin a se: from himself. That is, all he needs is from himself. He’s self-existent.
And of course, God in the Old Testament speaks the same way. “If I were hungry, would I speak to you? Everything is mine. How are you going to serve me?” Moreover, he’s the Creator of all, this text insists. That is, different from him, dependent upon him, made by him. And ultimately, as he goes on to spell out, the ground of all human responsibility toward God turns, in the first instance, on the fact that he made us.
In other words, the picture is of a God who is there, and originally, when God made human beings, they were for him. They were designed for him, if you can put it in descriptive terms. They woke up in the morning and thought about him. They loved him. They wanted to please him. He was God. He was the center of their imagination. He was the being they wanted to serve. And because they were rightly related to him, they were rightly related to each other.
But eventually, he describes a time of the dawning of what he calls idolatry, which, in the Bible is merely the dislocation of God from center stage and the introduction of anything else. Now each person thinks that he himself or she herself is now the center of the universe. Not geographically. We’re not quite that crude. But nevertheless, that’s the way we think. Is it not?
We think we’re at the center of the universe and God, if he, she, or it exists, must exist to serve me. If this God does not serve me, then quite frankly, it’s not a god I can believe in. As soon as you start talking like that, then you’re no longer talking about whether or not this god is there, it’s whether or not you will bestow on him, her, or it the favor of your belief.
The Bible insists that has things all wrong. That’s trying to domesticate God. At the end of the day, what that does is produce a kind of god who is at the level of a trained poodle, who does tricks now and then on demand but isn’t to be worshipped. Sort of a convenient blessing, but no more. So because each individual now starts thinking of himself or herself at the center of the universe, the horizontal relationships go askew too.
Now might makes right. Oh, we’ll invent gods that we can believe in. Domesticated gods. Gods that are shiny, full of silver and gold, Paul says. Gods that are nicely located in temples where we can organize the appropriate sacrificial system, install them nicely in our churches, at our altars. But no longer a God to whom you owe everything, a God who demands allegiance.
You may have a Christian friend who has tried to share his or her faith with you. And Christians can be pretty pushy. So you may have, at some point, said something like this: “Susan, I’m quite grateful if your faith helps you. Fine. But back off and leave me alone because I don’t need it. And quite frankly, although I like you as a friend, you go right up my nose. If you push any harder, I don’t want your friendship either. Back off.”
Yeah, sometimes we are rude and we are pushy. Sorry. But on the other hand, you still have to look at it from a Christian point of view. From a Christian point of view, you see, entirely backing off is the one thing we can’t do. Because the very fact that you can think like that with respect to the kind of God who made you is, from our perspective, an index of the problem.
If God made us for himself, then to go along with Frank Sinatra and say, “I did it my way,” is already an index of the problem. The heart of sin is not, at the end of the day, robbing a bank, or clobbering a policeman, or sleeping with somebody else’s wife, or whatever. That’s not the heart of sin. The heart of sin is insisting on doing it your way. All the rest are manifestations.
It’s idolatry, in other words. That’s why, in one New Testament writing, for example, which talks about the importance of who Christ is, the importance of love and the Christian fellowship, and about all kinds of various things, and then it comes to the end and it just ends with one line: “My dear children,” the old man writes. “Keep yourself from idols.”
He hasn’t talked about idols in the whole book, at least not idols in terms of chunks of stone or anything like this. Or Paul, elsewhere, can say, “Beware of covetousness, which is idolatry.” What he means by that, of course, is that if you want something with all your heart so that is what you fasten on to the exclusion of everything else, then that becomes for you your god.
And what God thinks (who made you, to whom you owe your life and being and allegiance, whether your recognize it or not) is that this is astonishing, pathetic rebellion. That’s the kind of picture Paul frames, and he goes so far as to insist on a number of other things along the line. For example, he insists on providence, God ruling over the whole world. He’s not just a tribal deity. From one man, he made every nation. No racism here. None.
If there is but one God, then in some sense he is the God of all whether he’s recognized or not. It’s one of the entailments of monotheism. Then, on top of all of that, he insists that history is going somewhere. Most Greeks thought history was going around in circles. But the biblical view is that history really is going somewhere. It stops at certain places and certain dramatic things happen. He introduces the most dramatic, the coming of Jesus.
But then he says at the end, there is a final accounting to give, too. A final judgment. We have to give an account to God himself. So there’s a different view of history that’s involved. Do you see what he’s done? He still hasn’t brought up Jesus yet, but he’s painted a whole picture of how history works, of how God exists independent of this world, how he made things, which grounds human responsibility in God himself and what we owe him as our Maker, the nature of idolatry, the nature of rebellion.
At the end of the day, you see, when the Berlin Wall comes down and President Bush declares that we have now entered a new order and people start speaking of peace in Europe, worlds without end, one wants to say, first, “Don’t you read history?” and secondly, “You certainly don’t think Christian-like.”
For although I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. There will turn out to be more war. Not just in Bosnia but sooner or later spreading beyond that, because the human heart hasn’t changed. Sooner or later the alignments come back again in one power play or another. We want a little more land or we want a little more power, or we want a little more money or a bigger share of the market.
Sooner or later, as Jesus taught us, “There will be wars and rumors of war.” “Don’t be alarmed,” he says. “The end isn’t yet.” Because the human heart hasn’t changed. We still have our idols. We’re not so centered on God at the heart of the universe that we can escape these terrible tyrannies that return and return and return.
“Therefore since we are God’s offspring …” That is, made by him and for him. “… we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill.” We’re not to think in those crass terms. No, no, no. “God has now set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof to all men by raising him from the dead.”
Now at this point, that was just a bit too much. Because most Greeks (not all, but most) at the time thought matter was bad by definition and spirit was good by definition, so to have somebody come back from the dead was like saying coming back from good to bad. To live on beyond the dead in the spirit world might be okay. But resurrection? Inconceivable.
But Paul insists that is exactly what happened with respect to Jesus, and then he’s interrupted. Now if he had been able to finish, judging by the kinds of things he says when he sets out exactly the same line of thought elsewhere, in his letter to the Romans, for example, it’s pretty clear where he’d go from here.
It’s where all the New Testament writers go in one fashion or another. He’d go on to try to explain what the death of Jesus was about that brought him, finally, to resurrection. For example, in his letter to the Romans, Paul spends two and a half chapters outlining what’s wrong with the human race and then shows how Christ’s death meets it.
He says that the God who made us is, in fact, set over against us in judgment because of our rebellion. But although this God with perfect justice could wipe us out with perfect justice, he doesn’t owe us. We owe him. Yet instead, out of love, he sends his Son to die in our place. Now the notion of a Son of God is itself not a translucent one.
There have been some people who have thought Christians teach that God had sex with Mary, Jesus’ mother, and produced Jesus, a kind of half-breed, and the three together constitute a Holy Trinity. But the Bible doesn’t say that. No, it pictures God being a complex unity. And God so arranging things that in the fullness of time, Mary’s son was born … miraculously, I have to say … flat out miraculously, and that he was genuinely a human being but nothing less than the manifestation of God himself absorbing in his own death our guilt, our shame.
There are a lot of different images in the Bible used to depict this. In John’s gospel, which talks about Pilate, there are half a dozen images, some of them very colorful. In one of them, Jesus says in John 6, “I am the bread of life. Whoever eats me will never go hungry.” For most of us brought up in a technological society, we think of bread as something you buy wrapped in cellophane with about 40 different brands on the shelf of a supermarket.
But in the first century, where the vast majority of people were tied much more closely to the land, this would speak volumes. You see, if you go down to McDonald’s here, except for the salt (of which there’s too much) and a few other minerals, everything you eat is dead. You’re eating dead barley, dead wheat, dead lettuce, dead cow, dead tomatoes, dead pickles, and dead cucumbers. Everything is dead; it doesn’t matter. In fact, the only way you live is if something else dies. You cannot survive unless something else dies.
So when Jesus says, in that kind of culture, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you can have no life in you,” what he’s saying is, “I die so that you may live.” Now there are other connections in that chapter, but that’s the heart of what he’s saying. Or, four chapters later he says, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep.” At one level, that’s patently obvious and at another level it’s monstrously untrue.
No shepherd goes around trying to die for its sheep. A shepherd may risk his life for his sheep, yes. But Jesus takes that truism, “A good shepherd is willing to risk his life for his sheep” (because after all, they’re his livelihood) and then he shoves it all the way to the wall. He says, “I actually lay it down. My Father has given me this command. I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it back. No one can take it from me, but I lay it down of myself.”
Suddenly you realize that this has gone way beyond the obvious metaphor and it’s saying Jesus is a Shepherd of a very extraordinary sort. His sheep can’t live unless he dies. In other words, the Christian gospel, the Christian good news, the Christian approach to modernism and postmodernism is inevitably bound up with the whole Bible’s story line. It’s a whole package.
You cannot think of the Bible as offering you sort of a thrilling moral center and nothing more, a sense of the universe and a feeling of fulfillment, a point of self-identity, or a good religious package to sort of bring up your children in safely unless you think of it enmeshed in the matrix of the whole Bible story, namely: God made us for himself. We’re lost without him, in overt rebellion against him, and instead of merely condemning us he sends his Son to die for us, absorbing our guilt.
What he demands from us is repentance and faith. That is, acknowledging fully that we are in rebellion against him, abandoning ourselves to him, accepting his gift of life on his terms, bowing gladly to his lordship. Then he does change us in a variety of ways, yes. But it turns, finally, on this gift of his own Son and the cross.
Now out of that framework then, Christians claim to know the living God experientially. It’s not just a piece of rationality that we’ve come to because we’re dyed-in-the-wool modernists. No, I don’t think that human reason can ever find God by itself nor can postmodernist experience find God by itself. The wonderful thing is that God has disclosed himself. He has revealed himself.
He’s done that in the pages of a book. He’s done it supremely in the gift of his Son. And he demands that we come to him on his terms. So Christians, therefore, although I admit we can seem terribly arrogant as we try to convince other people that we are speaking truth in a postmodern age, if Christians are well-informed at all, they will see themselves a bit like poor beggars telling other poor beggars where there’s bread.
Not saying, “We have the truth. All you poor benighted heathens don’t.” No, no, no. We have found ourselves to be alienated from God and reconciled to him only by the death of the Son whom God sent. And we have found this so good, so important, and so properly grounding for all truth and epistemology that we commend him to you.
