Listen or read the following as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.
I’m sure if we read at all or if we’re familiar with discussions in contemporary journals and the like, then we come across this term more often than we’d like: postmodernism. It’s a barbaric expression, isn’t it? It’s completely opaque.
If modern refers to what is contemporary, then you would think that postmodern refers to what is future. So it’s not a transparent expression, is it? In fact, in broad discourse in the culture, the term is applied to just about every dimension of life: literature, art, architecture, design, economics, and political theory. It’s applied all over the place, and as a result, nobody knows quite what it means, or more likely, it means different things to different people.
The expression was first coined in the last century, and then it dropped out. Then it was coined in this century in the 1920s and 1930s in connection with architecture. It was a style that was called modern. And then, the style changed. What do you do then? If the term modern merely refers to what is contemporaneous, then every style is modern when it first appears, and it’s old-fashioned as it dies.
But this word modern was so tied to one particular style that was contemporaneous with the 1920s that after it was replaced, the one that replaced it couldn’t be called modern, because modern at that point was tied with the previous style. Therefore, the next style was called postmodern. And that cycle of things has happened in the domain of economics and several other fields. That’s why the expression is so opaque.
But in my judgment, what holds all of the contemporary uses of postmodernism together is one particular field. If we get ahold of that field and understand it well, it really does tie to an awful lot of other issues. It helps, I think, to open up where our culture is going, and then it becomes a little clearer what we need to bear in mind as we’re witnessing to men and women today about Christ.
That’s the field of epistemology. Epistemology is a branch of the philosophy of religion. It’s the branch of philosophy of religion that deals with how you know things or how you think you know things. That can sound terribly abstruse, something for learned people to write obscure books about, on a par with medievalists who debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
But in fact, epistemology is not something that you can avoid. It’s something that we have all bought into without even realizing it. If we claim to know anything, we have done so on the basis of some sort of epistemology whether we’ve thought about it or not. We absorb entire systems of epistemology from our surrounding culture without even realizing it. How do you think you know anything? You make a claim. On what basis are you making the claim? That’s epistemology, whether you like it or not.
Now for the sake of setting this thing in a larger historical sweep, I want to distinguish premodern epistemology, modern epistemology, and postmodern epistemology. Premodern epistemology covers the period (for our purposes) from the late medieval period, roughly AD 1200 on, through to the end of the Reformation, starting at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with roots a little earlier, and then in England running into the seventeenth century. So roughly AD 1200 to 1600, more or less, and, of course, primarily in Europe.
Now at that point in Western life and thought, the overwhelming majority of people who thought critically about these sorts of issues at all, when they thought about how human beings know anything, began with God. God knows everything. He is omniscient. Human beings, whatever we know, inevitably only know a small part of what God knows, because we are not omniscient.
God has some attributes that cannot be shared with anyone who is not God. The Bible can say, “Be holy, for I am holy.” It does not say, “Be omniscient, for I am omniscient.” In other words, God has some attributes that are sometimes called the incommunicable attributes of God; that is, the attributes of God that cannot be shared with non-God, and omniscience is one of them. The Bible says that we are to do justice because God is a just God. It does not say, “Be omnipotent because I am omnipotent.”
So omniscience, precisely because it’s an incommunicable attribute of God, is not something, by definition, that we can share; therefore, all of our knowing is necessarily only the tiniest part of his knowing. He knows all things. That’s the anchor of all knowing. Our knowing is only a tiny fraction of his exhaustive, perfect knowing.
But that means that our knowing comes about in consequence of revelation; that is, it’s somehow a matter of how this God who knows everything lets us who bear his image know some small part of it. Now whether God does this by direct work of his Spirit, or by Scripture, or by what he’s disclosed of himself in nature, or by the interactions of brothers and sisters in Christ in the church, or by whatever means you like, it’s all in one sense or another by revelation.
If God had remained closed in on himself and refused to disclose it, we wouldn’t know anything. In that sense, therefore, whether you’re talking about a Catholic medievalist like Thomas Aquinas or a great reformed thinker like John Calvin, all leaders (virtually all except for a tiny, tiny handful of people in the Western world) bought into an epistemology that said, in effect, “All human knowing is a function of revelation from the God who knows everything.”
The beginning point, the foundation, is the omniscient God, and then all human knowing is a function of revelation. Now they then had disputes about how much is revealed in any particular domain. For example, Thomas Aquinas thought God had revealed so much of himself in nature that with the right logic and the right argumentation, and so on, you could actually lead people to the Roman Catholic Church by just appealing to nature.
John Calvin didn’t think so. John Calvin was convinced that out of nature we could rightfully read that God exists, that he is sovereign, that he is ordered and creative, and that he is powerful, but you could not read the whole plan of redemption in creation. That took special revelation. It took Scripture. It took God working through the great acts of redemptive history. It took the coming of Jesus.
The coming of Jesus is not merely a foundation for salvation; it is a revelatory act. It took revelation, specific revelation beyond what you get in the world all around us, to bring us to Christ and to bring us to salvation. Now in fact, I agree with Calvin, but that’s a minor point. My main thrust here is to point out that in premodern epistemology virtually all thinkers held that all of human knowing is a function of God’s self-disclosure through whatever means: Scripture, the Spirit, nature, whatever. Then by the time you get to the 1600s, things change.
History is messy. Huge paradigms just don’t change overnight. You have some thinkers that are pushing in that direction in advance, and then it takes a while for others to catch up. It takes a lot of movement before there is a paradigm shift. But the figure that most people latch onto as the kind of turning point, the one who helps to explain the difference, is a Frenchman by the name of RenÈ Descartes. In perspective, his thought is sometimes called Cartesian thought. He represents the dawning of what is now called the modern period of epistemology.
RenÈ Descartes himself was a Catholic. He had a Catholic institution in Paris. He observed that there were rising numbers of people as the Enlightenment was beginning to take hold who called themselves atheists. Now if you’re an atheist, then obviously you can’t buy into premodern epistemology, can you? Premodern epistemology begins with God. If you don’t have a God to begin with then what does your epistemology consist of? How do you know anything if you’re an atheist?
Thus, all of his traditional arguments for truth and for the truthfulness of Christendom and all of that didn’t quite stand up to these atheists who had a whole different approach to things. So Descartes set himself to doubt everything to see if he could come to a common foundation, a common basis along with all the atheists and others who were a still a minority, but a rising minority, in intellectual circles in Europe.
It wasn’t because he himself was a doubter. Sometimes, first-year philosophy texts that talk about Rene Descartes get that wrong. He was not an atheist; he was a devout Catholic all his life. But he set himself the task of doubting everything to see if he could find some common foundation with people who didn’t share what we now call premodern epistemology. He had a flash in the night in his mind, an insight he thought was extraordinarily illuminating, and every first-year philosophy student in college learns it: cogito ergo sum. Latin for “I think; therefore I am.”
Now what did he mean by that? What he meant (whether it’s a good argument or not is irrelevant) was, “Look, if there’s something which you can’t doubt, surely it’s your own existence, because as long as you’re even thinking about the matter, there is a thinking being doing the thinking. So as long as you’re thinking, then you must exist. You’ve got to accept at least that as a foundation for all genuine knowledge.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim. It doesn’t matter whether you are an atheist or a theist; if you are a thinking being, you are. That’s a proper foundation for things. You can share that, can’t you? Then from this basis, he started building up with a whole philosophical structure that we needn’t go into (in which virtually nobody buys into today in any case).
He built from that a huge structure that was published in a multivolume work in the 1630s in which he thought he could actually bring people to the Catholic faith from this foundation. This was the beginning of what came to be called modernism or Enlightenment epistemology or sometimes foundationalism, because it’s looking for a foundation on which you can build. No longer are you building on God; you are finding some other foundation.
Now, as I said, he was a devout Catholic. There is pretty good evidence that after he had this insight he went off to one of the Saint Anne monasteries and offered prayers there because he was so grateful for this wonderful insight, which is not normally the sort of thing a sceptic would do.
Moreover he wasn’t, strictly speaking, the first one to argue exactly along those lines. Saint Augustine in the fourth century had said, si fallor sum, “If I err, I am.” When Augustine said that, he was not trying to build a whole epistemological system. It was just one of those things that was slipped in on the fly.
Almost certainly Descartes had read that in Augustine because in those days if you were an intellectual at all, you certainly read Augustine. He had undoubtedly read Augustine, and then somewhere in his thinking about all of these things, it came back to him, and it came out cogito ergo sum. So we are all dependent on somebody else in any case, aren’t we? But in this case it was a bigger shift than he himself saw.
Out of this arose modernist epistemology that was eventually characterized by six crucial assumptions. They are extraordinarily important because if you understand these six assumptions in modernism, you will quickly discover that postmodernism either overthrows or seriously modifies all six of those assumptions in modernism. Then I think you grasp better just what postmodernism is, what it looks like, and what it does to our culture. Those six assumptions in modernist epistemology are as follows:
1. It begins with I.
It begins with a finite knower. It’s no longer anchored in the assumption of God and his omniscience. We begin with I and now we start looking, for example, for proofs of this or that, including proofs for the existence of God. If you begin with the knowledge of God, then you don’t start creating proofs for the knowledge of God, or if you do, you construct them as confirming proofs after the fact.
But if you begin with I, and you don’t know whether or not God exists because all you’ve got in your foundation is this finite I, then you’ve got to construct proofs for the existence of God from the basis of this finite I. But you do that in every domain. Now you have the I, me, the independent thinker, the autonomous judge of things, the decider, the knower.
Our knowledge is not dependent on revelation. It is dependent on our own good judgment, on good argument, on good foundations, and other matters that we’ll look at in due course. That’s a major shift, you see, in the way you think about how human beings come to know anything. It’s not a minor step; it’s a biggie.
2. It was assumed all through the modernist period that epistemological certainty … that is, certainty of knowing … is both desirable and attainable.
That is, it is assumed that these finite human beings who are trying to know things, can know things. That this is a good thing; it is desirable. It’s a good thing, and it’s attainable. We can actually get certain knowledge about things. In other words, provided you do this right, we finite human knowers can actually know the truth about all kinds of things.
3. It was profoundly foundationalist.
That is to say, like Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, like his assumption of the foundation of everything, in every discipline, in every domain, we started looking for foundations, common assumptions. Axioms, we called them. Self-evident truths, things that everybody agreed were true. They were the foundations on which you built everything else.
If you can get those foundations in place, and everybody agrees that they’re the truth, they’re self-evident, they’re the foundations on which all knowledge is built, then you can build a superstructure on top. Now the foundations differed from discipline to discipline, but every discipline started working them out. So that whether you’re in history or whether you’re in physics or whether you’re in mathematics, you look for certain common givens that everybody in the discipline works with, and then you build up from there. Which brings us to the fourth point.
4. Modernist epistemology tried to be methodologically rigorous.
That is to say, you built your foundation that everybody agreed with, and then you constructed your methods. Foundation plus methods, turn the crank, and out comes truth. That’s how you do it. That meant, for example, that if you were writing a doctoral dissertation in the 1800s in Britain or in Germany or in America or anywhere … in any field. It didn’t really matter which field. Whether you’re talking about chemistry or microbiology or history in the twentieth century, it doesn’t matter.
In every case, the dissertation had to acknowledge what the assumptions were at the beginning and then establish what the methods were, whether they were scientific methods as determined by the constraints of a laboratory or a certain approach to history. You established what your methods were, how you were going to go about doing it, and then you do it, and you get your results at the end.
When the examiners come to examine you, they not only check out your results, they want to check whether or not you have been methodologically rigorous. I don’t care how good your results are, if you are methodologically “un-rigorous,” you flunk. That was the way it worked, and it’s the way it still works in some disciplines in the Western world, although it’s dying. It’s changing somewhat, as we’ll see in a few moments.
So in other words, truth is desirable and it’s attainable, and the way you get it is by beginning with a finite knower and certain assumptions about reality that we all share in a particular discipline. Then you build up the right kinds of methods, you turn the crank, and out comes truth. What those methods were not only depended on the discipline but sometimes even on the sub-discipline.
For example, in the school of history, there are different theories about how you go about studying the past. One approach to history looks at the big thinkers. It holds that the thoughts of the influential big thinkers are the things that change history, that shape it. So that sort of approach to history would look at Nazis and would try to find all of the influential people that shaped Nazism as a philosophy.
For example, how much did the nihilism of the previous century influence them, and so forth. The big ideas and how they shape things. So the way you do it is by checking through all the primary sources of the primary thinkers of the Nazis and see what kind of person they depended on, and what kind of people they read, and what those people said, and so on. You develop methods for doing all of this.
On the other hand, another school of history is sometimes called the Annales School of historiography. It was developed in French, so it’s a French word. The Annales School of historiography just doesn’t look at the big picture, the big influential leader person at all; it’s much more interested in what happens in the social context of a village on an ordinary day. It’s interested in what’s happening on the street. Instead of thinking about the big, big, big thinker who is influential, it’s trying to find out what ordinary people say and do and how they live.
To take an easy example, in Western evangelicalism, one of the most influential thinkers in evangelicalism in America in the twentieth century was Carl Henry. On the other hand, Carl Henry, though he wrote about 40 books, founded Christianity Today, was a close friend of Billy Graham, organized the first World Congress in Evangelism in Berlin, and did all kinds of things of that order.… Nevertheless, is he more influential or less influential than, let’s say, Hal Lindsey and The Late Great Planet Earth? Or Tim LaHaye and the Left Behind series?
Who is more influential? If you want to ask, “Who is a more rigorous thinker? Who is a better scholar? Who influences the leaders more?” That is one set of questions. If you want to ask, instead, “Who influences most people sitting on their rear-ends in a pew?” That is another question. It’s not the same question. They are both historical questions. They are both interesting, but they are different schools of historiography.
So the Annales School of historiography asked different sets of questions, had different sorts of methods, had different sorts of approaches; so it’s important to get the foundations right, and then the methods, and then you turn the crank and out comes the truth. Every discipline did it. So you have certain methods for particle physics and different methods for microbiology, and so forth. Beyond all of this, it was assumed that …
5. Truth that you pursued is characterized by ahistorical universality.
This is just another way of saying that truth, if it’s truth at all, is true always, everywhere, in every land and place and culture, in every language, at all times. It is characterized by ahistorical. That is, not merely historical but universal historical. It’s not limited to any history. It’s unhistorical in that sense, universality. It appeals everywhere.
In other words, if you find out in Peru that the water molecule was made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, guess what? That is also true in Pago Pago. It was true 2,000 years before Christ, and it’s true 2,000 years after Christ. In other words, it’s not true only for a particular culture … it’s not only true for whites or not only true for blacks or not only true for Hispanics or not only true for Chinese … it’s not just true in the twenty-first century; it’s ahistorically, universally true.
In other words, truth has a certain kind of transhistorical universality. If it’s true, it’s true. It’s objectively true. Therefore, it was very important to find out the truth about anything, whether to do with history or to do with literature or to do with mathematics or physics, because once you had the truth it was a discovery that was universally applicable to every tongue and tribe and language and people.
6. With time, modernism was characterized increasingly by philosophical materialism.
Now it wasn’t so at the beginning. At the beginning, most people working in the field were like Descartes himself, theists. Some were deists; they thought that there was a God but he had sort of removed himself from this world and was big and transcendent, not interested in the nitty gritty of life, but still existed. Most of them, in other words, were not atheists. They thought there was a whole spiritual dimension.
So for the first two and a half centuries or so of modernist epistemology, the overwhelming majority of thinkers were theists or deists of some sort. But with time you got a rising number of atheists. The biggest impetus towards this was with Darwin who, in the words of Thomas Huxley, made atheism intellectually respectable.
As a result, especially as you move into the twentieth century, you had rising numbers of scientists and others who adopted the stance of philosophical materialism. Philosophical materialism holds that all there is is matter and energy and time. That’s it! Space, if you want to use the Einsteinian coordinates. But that’s it; there is nothing beyond what exists in the universe.
Thus, everything that is to be explained is to be explained in material terms. What happens to my consciousness of self, my self-conscious I. Well, that’s just the way the synapses are firing in my brain. It’s all explainable at the level of biology, and biology itself is explainable by what happens at the level of the molecules in physics.
And if you want to talk about love, well, it’s the way the hormones bounce or it’s the way pleasure centers in the brain are served by various enzymes or insulin. At the end of the day, nothing is to be explained outside of the material order; which means, of course, that if you buy into that sort of view, Christianity is ruled out a priori from any sort of consideration as is any religion, except perhaps as a psychological blessing, but certainly not of something that is objectively true.
So modernist epistemology, unlike premodern epistemology, was characterized by an I; it began with I. Then while holding that knowledge was still desirable and attainable, it tried to establish foundations. It focused on method. It believed the truth that is discovered is characterized by ahistorical universality, and across three and a half centuries it gradually became more and more committed to philosophical materialism. Are you with me so far?
Now postmodernism questions all six of those points. It either overturns them or it modifies them significantly. That’s probably one of the easiest ways of getting at postmodern epistemology. Let’s begin with the I. We say that the I is the finite knower, and postmodernism agrees. But it draws some different inferences from it.
It points out that finite knowers don’t know anything on a secure base. All of our knowledge, precisely because it’s finite, is shaped by who the finite knower is. I’m a middle-aged white Canadian male. That’s who I am. I’ve had this pattern of education and not that. Exactly what do I have in common in outlook with a sub-Saharan black African prostitute who is illiterate and with AIDS on the streets of Mombasa?
Exactly what do I have in common with an illiterate Chinese serf in the hinterland of Manchuria? What do I have in common with a devoutly committed, well-trained Marxist philosopher in Beijing University? In other words, all of my approaches to knowledge, the questions I ask, the kinds of information I bring to the table, the assumptions that are mine, are a function of who I am.
I don’t approach any question from the stance of omniscience. An omniscient knower has got everything in balance and proportion and perspective, precisely because an omniscient knower knows everything. You can’t get anything out of balance. But a finite knower rather depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?
Now this was developed in Western thought in a lot of different ways. There were roots to it in quite a number of movements. Immanuel Kant, for example, in Germany. He was not, in any sense, a postmodernist, but he started making important distinctions between what he called the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. The phenomenal world, the world where you actually see and touch and handle and measure, does not receive any order until it’s imprinted and structured by the orders of your mind, by the structures of your mind, the noumenal world.
If you push that far enough, you start saying, “That means what we think about the phenomenal world is itself shaped by who we are as knowers.” Then the Romantic period, for example, of English literature, and so forth, produced many kinds of thinkers who were far more impressed by romantic views of acquisition of perception of the world than with linear thought and logic and methods.
Now you’ve got dancing fields of daffodils in the Lake District of England, the poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Wordsworth, and so on. Although the movement didn’t last very long, nevertheless, it was trying to get away from mere linear progression and logic and evidences and was trying to expose us to the esthetic and the artistic, and so on, as ways of knowing.
Then in Germany in this century, in the 1930s and 1940s especially, and then resuscitated after World War II, you’ve got a whole lot of people thinking in terms of what came to be called the new hermeneutic. Hermeneutic, sometimes called hermeneutics, is the art and science of interpretation.
So if you read books on hermeneutics, biblical hermeneutics, in the nineteenth century (that is, the late 1800s), then biblical hermeneutics looked like this: How do you interpret the Bible? What are the rules? This is how you do word studies. These are the rules for interpreting parables. This is how you put things together. Remember different literary genres. This is how you understand Wisdom Literature. This is how you understand apocalyptic literature. This is how you order the structured depictions of God’s characteristics.
Do you see what’s going on here? You’re trying to get rules of interpretation so that when you study the Bible you have a certain foundation: This is the Word of God. Then you have certain kinds of methods: your hermeneutics. Then you turn the crank, and out comes the truth. That’s what you preach on Sunday.
It’s a very modernist approach to knowing, isn’t it? It’s not really beginning with God. That’s part of a given with Christians; he’s back there somewhere. But actually the discipline of hermeneutics.… Well, there are foundations, then there are rules, then you turn the crank, and out comes the truth.
But the Germans started saying, “Wait a minute. This business of the I is a bit slippery.” You see, this business of hermeneutics presupposes I (the subject) look at it (the text, the thing being studied … whatever it is), and I ask questions of the text. If I ask the right questions, out comes the answer and, thus, I get the truth. Isn’t that the way it works? Straight answer from me to it, and then it gives me back the answer, and I’ve got the truth.
But if, in fact, the I who is asking the question is not in a stable omniscient position but is characterized by his or her own location in culture, his or her own biases and ignorance, his or her own tiredness or fatigue or anger, then maybe when I ask my question I am not asking a sharp question or a good question or a clear question.
I’m asking a question that sort of bounces off on it on the way by, and the answer that comes back sort of comes back and hits me and modifies me in some sort of small way so that when I go back to it tomorrow, I’m not quite the same person I was yesterday. So I come back and ask another question from a slightly different point of view, and it comes back and hits me again, and modifies me again in some way, and then I go around and around and around.
That’s what is called the hermeneutic circle. So instead of a straight line in and a straight line back, I’m going around and around and around. How do you get out of the circle? You are always finite. You can’t get off. That’s the human condition. That’s the line that was taken out of a lot of German philosophical work. Now it was modified in ways we’ll come to in due course.
In French circles, it worked rather differently. It worked out of the debates about language. The modern field of linguistics was first invented by a French thinker by the name of Ferdinand de Saussure. So in Germany you had people like Fuchs and Ebeling and people like that. In Germany the fountainhead was a chap called Ferdinand de Saussure.
De Saussure wrote almost nothing, but his students took voluminous notes. After he had died, they published them. It was this four-volume work called Cours de linguistique gÈnÈrale, or Course in General Linguistics. That became the foundation for the whole modern field of linguistics. Now he was interested in how language worked.
A lot of people … not everybody, but a lot of people … up to that point thought that there was some sort of deep connection between any word and the thing that it talked about. But he said, “No. There’s an arbitrariness to it. What’s the difference between tree and tea and me and free and pomegranate, or anything else? What’s the difference? Is it something deep in the word itself?”
When I speak of the tree outside the church door (assuming you have a tree outside your church door; I walk by faith here, so maybe it’s presumption).… When I speak of the tree outside of the church door, what is there in the word tree that has tree-ness into it? And the answer he says is, “Nothing.”
The only reason why tree means tree-ness to us is because we have culturally agreed, as it were, that that’s what t-r-e-e means. But if you are French, you wouldn’t say that that’s what t-r-e-e means. To get a similar meaning, you have to have a-r-b-r-e, arbre. And if you are German, it’s got to be B-a-u-m, Baum. And so on and so on. There’s nothing in tree that does this.
And there’s a sense in which if the culture agreed for whatever reason not to call a tree a tree but to call it a shmookelblox, and then if everyone agreed there was a shmookelblox, then shmookelblox would be that thing outside the door of the church. So there is nothing intrinsic to tree that could not be conveyed by shmookelblox. It just depends on the conventions. There is nothing intrinsic to tree-ness. Now he was right. He is entirely right at this point.
But this was eventually taken up by a philosophical movement in France that came to be called deconstruction, which came to apply the insights at the level of words and of linguistics to whole sentences and discourse, which made all sentences and discourses equally arbitrary. And because they’re all equally arbitrary, they’re all cut off from reality. Therefore, you are free to manipulate them, to make them bounce off each other, to find disconnections, to critique them. There is nothing stable in any of these sorts of expressions and discourses. So language itself becomes much more of a game.
Then in America, postmodernism took on a slightly different shape, still tackling this question of the I. This question of the I in North America is looked at from the point of view of anthropologists and from the point of view of sociologists. Here it all depends on the interpretative group.
In other words, I might look at a question as a white middle-aged Canadian male, but there are other interpretative communities possible, aren’t there? In some other interpretative communities the same thing might be looked at from a very different perspective. It depends on your interpretative community. Thus, all of our perspectives on knowing depend on who you are; that is, not who you are as an individual, but what group you belong to, what interpretative community you belong to.
So, I could introduce you to all kinds of cultural anthropology books that are used by cultural anthropology students in our major universities today which argue, for example, that the child sacrifice system of the Incas cannot possibly be spoken of as intrinsically evil because, of course, it was very meaningful to them in their culture.
I could introduce you to some, although it’s not very politically correct, who will go so far as to say, “Likewise, you cannot think of the Holocaust as intrinsically evil,” because it again transparently depends on your interpretative community. To the Aryans, getting rid of the Jews was a good thing. To the Jews it didn’t seem like such a hot idea, but on the other hand, it depends on the interpretative community, doesn’t it?
So we might think here in America that flying airplanes into hundred-floor buildings is not a very good thing; it’s an act of terrorism. But meanwhile, there’re tens of thousands of Muslims on the streets of the world who dance with joy and call it an act of courage and fidelity and covenantal faithfulness to Allah. It depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?
Don’t talk to me about evil, not in any transcendent sense. It all depends on who the I is, or in this case, who the we is, who the interpretative community is. And we all belong to interpretative communities. Nobody is objective. Do you see what is going on in this way of thinking? You’re beginning with a finite I, you’re acknowledging that the I is finite, but now you’re drawing something rather different. Now you’re drawing the inference that because we are all finite, therefore, there is no objective truth out there.
Or if it is out there, you can’t find it, because we all approach things from a subjective point of view. There’s no anchor in eternity. There’s no anchor in omniscience. There’s no standard. Anybody who tries to compose a standard is merely composing a standard from the perspective of his or her own interpretative community. You can’t escape that.
Which means that the finding out of truth perceived to be both desirable and attainable is now completely overthrown. It’s judged to be unattainable, and in fact, not even desirable. The reason why it’s not desirable is partly a question of making a virtue out of necessity, in postmodern thought. That is, because it’s not possible to get this degree of certainty.
Therefore, isn’t it a much more desirable thing to let all of the various voices have their say, to have different approaches, different interpretations. We can all rejoice in the insights of other people so that epistemological certainty is no longer seen as a good thing, let alone an achievable thing.
Moreover, postmodernism now becomes profoundly antifoundational. Because, it is argued, all of those ostensible foundations are themselves, in one way or another, human constructs. And because they’re human constructs, therefore, they partake of the finitude of all human endeavor and other cultures have other foundations.
It will go farther. The methods, likewise, are in some way or other different constructs. They’re methods that we ourselves have deployed. Haven’t we learned that, it is argued, even in some measure, in the realm of science? So we speak nowadays increasingly not only of Western science but of Chinese science or Western medicine and Chinese medicine.
There they have acupuncture. There it depends on the obverse flows of various fluids in the system. The whole analysis of how medicine works is rather different in the Chinese world than it is in ours. We have a social construct to our medicine; they have a social construct to their medicine.
Who is right? You can’t arbitrate, because even the arbitrations at the end of the day are all human constructs. And that means that the notion that truth is characterized by ahistorical universality is not only a chimera it’s a phantom. It’s just not true. It’s idolatrous. It’s arrogant. How can you speak of truth being transcendentally true, cross-culturally true, and so on. That’s utter rubbish.
It all depends on your point of view. It depends on what race you’re in, what culture you’re in, and how old you are. It might depend on how you see things, and how you see things might depend on the time of the month or how much sleep you’ve had or how crabby the kids have been or whether you’ve just been through a divorce or just lost someone or flunked an exam. How you look at things depends on so many things: your identity, your race, your background, your genes, your culture, your interpretative group.
Some of you got converted out of some other group. Some of you were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and when you were in that particular interpretative community you looked at certain biblical texts in a certain way, didn’t you? And now that you are in this interpretative community you look at them another way. So how can you speak of ahistorical truth.
And then, with the culture moving more and more toward philosophical materialism, that one, too, is now being challenged, although there are all kinds of scientists and many others who are functional atheists. That’s pretty common. Have you not noticed that in the last 30 years there’s been a fantastic resurgence of talk about spirituality, a renewed interest in astrology … call it spirituality? And spirituality is good, isn’t it?
This turns on the rising perception that the bases for knowing are more than linearity and logic and foundations and methods and turning the crank. The bases for knowing are all kinds of things, so let’s have bases for knowing in the ancient mystics and astrology. You find help here and you find help there.
