Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.
It is important to see, so far as postmodernism is concerned, transparently, it is saying some things that are true even though it has some flaws right at the heart. The thing that is true, the thing that is attractive about it, is that it really does account far better than traditional modernism for several things that are part of our common experience.
For a start, it really does account much better for different ways we do look at things with our different cultural backgrounds and our different senses of humor and our different experiences of life. My parents were both born in the UK. I was born in Canada, and I’ve lived in England for nine of the last 30 years. They have a different sense of humor over there. A lot of British humor, especially popular, blue-collar humor is sort of Benny Hill, slapstick, schmaltzy. At the upper level, it’s sort of self-deprecating.
When you go to Australia, it’s not self-deprecating. They have an expression they use. “Cut down the tall poppy.” We cut down the other person. The first time I went to Australia was about 1984 to give what was called the Moore College Lectures. Because I was a foreigner, they were on their best behavior, so the first night I was introduced by somebody on the faculty, and I was this distinguished visiting scholar.
The next night (this went over five or six nights) another faculty member had to introduce me and felt he had to outdo the person who had spoken the previous night, so by that time I was approaching brilliance. By the third night, I was the greatest saint who had ever walked the face of the earth, bar the apostles, and by the fourth night, I was approaching apostolic status.
By that time, I had been there long enough to discover that’s not the way they talked to each other. They would insult each other gloriously and fall off their chairs laughing, and here, they were stroking me all the time, so after being introduced the third or fourth night, I said, “I don’t know who the bigger sinner is here, this person for telling all these lies, or me for enjoying them.” They all fell off their chairs laughing, and after that I was introduced only with insults, and I knew I had arrived.
But there’s no way that’s going to happen to you in England, and it’s probably not going to happen to you in this church either. You didn’t give me a single insult this morning! If I had been an Aussie, I would have felt quite insulted. I’d wonder who he was trying to suck up to or something. It depends on your point of view in so many ways, doesn’t it? On your cultural backgrounds and experience and sense of humor. Postmodernism accounts for that much better, doesn’t it, than traditional, linear, logical, coherent, box-like thinking?
Moreover, it has been very good at debunking the arrogance of modernism. Postmodernism has taught a lot of humility. That’s not all bad. Modernism has not always been the Christian’s friend. Moreover, it has also been pointed out how many different things go into our coming to know anything. There are a lot of things that go into how we come to know things, aren’t there?
Some things we can learn theoretically, but you don’t really know them until you’ve experienced them. Some kids are stronger along those lines than others, too. I have one you can explain things to, and she’s probably got it. I have the other one who understands what you said probably before you’ve said it, but he’s still going to try it anyway. He’s going to learn the hard way. That’s the way he is.
With my daughter, when we were living in a very cold part of the country, she was only 3. “Don’t put your tongue on cold metal in the wintertime. Do you know what will happen? Your tongue will stick to it. It’s going to hurt.” So she never did it. I had a son and told him the same thing. He probably went out and tried it. What do you do? Some people learn by experience. It’s not the linearity or the cohesion of the sentence. That’s the way he’s going to be. You just pray to God he’ll have enough really nasty experiences before he gets into really big trouble.
When I was a pastor of a church in Vancouver many years ago, we had a lot of college and career kids in that church (100 to 150 of them). There were a lot of them, so that added all kinds of interesting dynamics. We had one young woman in the church named Peggy. She was vivacious, friendly, outgoing, and she didn’t have a linear thought in her head. She was all aesthetics and experience and bubbly enthusiasm. She was absolutely captivating, but she couldn’t have done a Euclidean proof if her life depended upon it.
She was a bright student doing whatever she was doing at the University of British Columbia, and she came bouncing up to me one day and said, “There’s this chap who is interested in me.” Guess what? His name was Fred, and Fred was a football hunk at the University of British Columbia, and he was as linear and logical and a doer as she was bouncy and vivacious and aesthetic and thinking about association games.
He wasn’t a Christian. He had no Christian background at all, and she wanted to know if it was all right to see him because he was interested in Christianity. I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pull the other one.” She said, “No, no. He really is.” I said, “Fine, fine. Just be careful. It’s very easy to get snookered in these sorts of relationships. Be wise and be careful in all of this. Set some guidelines in your mind about what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do and where your limits are.”
“You know me! I’m Peggy. I love Jesus.”
“Fine. Go out with him, but after your date, make sure you bring him here so he can talk to me.” I was busy! Saturday night at 11:00.… Tap! Tap! Tap! “Hi! This is Fred.” Fred sat there, a big football hunk. “My name is Fred.” You knew right away this was a case of opposites attract. We went out to IHOP, the International House of Pancakes, and we started this conversation.
That first night it was just talking about football and give and take, bits and pieces, but every Saturday night after that, they’d go to a movie or go to a concert or something and tap, tap, tap on my door at 10:30 or 11:00 at night and we’d go to IHOP. We’d be there for an hour or two hours or three hours. Instead of me finishing off the sermon I should have finished half a week earlier, I was talking with Fred.
From the second week on, every week he had a bunch of questions, and I’d answer the questions. The next week he’d come back with another list of questions, and I’d answer the questions. Then the next week another list of questions, and I’d answer them. This went on for 13 weeks, and at the end of 13 weeks he said, “All right. I’ll become a Christian.”
He really did. I baptized him. I talked to him on the phone not many months ago. This was 25 years ago. He’s happily married, a deacon in the church, and has brought up two children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Their daughter just got married to a wonderful Christian chap, but I have to tell you, that has not been my most common experience in evangelism.
A lot of us think, “If you just get your apologetics you can lead anybody to Christ; we’ll argue them into it,” but the fact of the matter is the reasons why people close with Christ humanly speaking are astonishingly varied, aren’t they, and they often have to do with suffering or somebody smiled at the right time or somebody was nice to them at church or some little thing clicked.
Who knows? God does all kinds of really strange things. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn the apologetics. The Bible tells us we’re supposed to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within us to everyone who asks us, so yes, yes, yes, but at the end of the day, experience does teach us the way you come to know things is not always in some linear, logical, cohesive argument. Isn’t that true? It seems to me postmodernism is better than modernism at analyzing that kind of thing, isn’t it?
The big weakness with postmodernism is it then pushes so far as to say, at the end of the day, truth becomes privatized. You cannot really know public truth. You cannot really know truth in any absolute sense. You cannot know truth that is universally true. It’s always construction. It is always such interpreted truth that you cannot really know truth in any historic sense.
How to think about that, we’ll come to, but that is the tension you face. There is some genuine insight from postmodernism. How do you adopt the insight from it while rejecting that next stage to the argument? We’ll come to that in due course. Let me open up for question and answers.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: This question and answer is about what I’ve said so far about the nature of the problem. It’s not about any of the solutions or how you answer this stuff, because we haven’t gotten there yet. There will be time for Q&A on that front, but that’s one of the ones I’d like to do a little later in the morning, if I may, because we are coming to that. I won’t duck it, and if you think I have ducked it, then at the last Q&A you hit me again. It’s one I would like to deal with in its place.
It’s a very important question, because faith, as I indicated last night, is widely assumed in the culture to be personal, religious preference in a domain where you can’t know the truth, and there’s no way that’s what the Bible ever means. It’s a very important question, but I would like to slot it in the right place, if I may.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: I’ve only looked at it a couple of times, and the times I’ve seen, it’s really epistemologically incoherent. On the one hand, they’re trying to say the truth is out there, but on the other hand, the truth they’re trying to get all the time is in the range of the paranormal and the supernormal and the non-linear and the pseudoscientific.
In some sense, what they’re really trying to say is truth comes from all kinds of places, and it’s out there, but it’s not at all fitting into any sort of double-blind coherence or anything like that. In one sense, the larger framework, despite the formulations of third-class script writers, is, nevertheless, within a larger framework of the paranormal.
Question: Do you see a connection between open theism and the rise of uncertainty in postmodernism?
Answer: “Do I see a connection between open theism and the rise of uncertainty in postmodernism?” Yes, but it’s, again, more by way of correlation than by simple cause and effect. If you buy into postmodernism, it’s much easier to justify open theology and vice versa. Open theology, for those of you who are not afflicted with it yet, holds God cannot know the outcome of a future, free decision of morally sentient beings.
In other words, if I make a moral decision down the line and I choose this or that, God cannot know which way I will choose if my decision is genuinely free. Therefore, people in this sort of perspective think the reason why God can win, as it were, in world matters is simply because he’s a better chess player.
In other words, no matter what we do, he is smarter than we are, so you win sort of long haul, as it were, but on the other hand, it’s not because he’s directly in control in any sense, so such people speak of the God who risks, as it were, but what that does, of course, is open up all kinds of uncertainties. In my view, it’s profoundly unbiblical on half a dozen fronts even though it has a kind of superficial modicum of biblical conformity. In that sense, it’s opening up to all kinds of uncertainties. I don’t think it’s a direct line of control, but there is a certain correlation.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: The question really belongs to the much larger question of why God allows any evil. You can’t answer your question without also reflecting on why God allowed the Holocaust or why God allowed your wife to have cancer or why God allowed anything. That, too, has to be put into a much broader framework (it seems to me) of the entailments of sin and the fall.
If you have a world in which God’s image bearers de-God God, insist they’re God, fall, and rebel against him, and thus, attract the curse of God to themselves which affects not only their physical life but their emotional life, their mental life, what the Reformers meant by the noetic effects of the fall have to do with the effects of the fall in the human mind. That comes right from Paul. Paul, in Romans 1, says, “Because of their wickedness, they suppressed the truth in unrighteousness.”
In other words, from that kind of perspective, the suppression of the truth, the distortion of things, is again, part of the curse of God on the fall granted that we have a sinful world. You cannot, from a total Christian perspective, even begin to answer questions like that until you have bought into the whole package of sin and the noetic effects of the fall and the curse and so on.
In fact, from the Bible’s point of view, it’s far more surprising God just hasn’t wiped us all out instead, but instead, in his forbearance, he still nurtures, and he still sustains, and he pours out his sun and his rain upon the just and upon the unjust and still sends forth his Spirit to bring conviction to the hearts of men and women.
Thus, the surprise, once you grant the big picture, is not that people are saying stupid things about God or confronting the fact that the psalmist can say, “It’s the fool who says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” That’s not the surprise. The surprise is that God is still forbearing and still pursuing us.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: From postmodernism, unless the Lord comes back first inevitably, but what it will be is much harder to predict. There are some people who are saying postmodernism is short-lived and is already dying. Modernism lasted about three and a half centuries, and undergirding epistemological structure is a stable thing. It lasts a long time, unlike some of the individual pieces that go into it. There were hiccups in that period like Romanticism and the influence of Kant and existentialism. They were all hiccups in the broad from of modernity.
I can’t imagine postmodernism could go on as long as modernism. I can’t imagine it, partly because it is more intrinsically absurdist, so it’s more unstable, and partly because of the pace of life because of the Internet, globalization, multiplied media, and so on. The pace of change is much, much faster than it was 200 years ago, but if you ask me, “What is coming down the pike next?” I don’t have a clue.
There are people who have gone through postmodernism and come out the other side, but they are not forming coherent positions that are beginning to constitute new promises in an epistemological direction. They are often just eclectics. They pick a bit here and a bit there and a bit somewhere else, but they don’t have a package that is commanding assent in the culture.
There are others who come to the end of deconstruction or something. They’ve written their doctoral dissertation and they’ve come to the end of that, so they’ve rejected deconstruction, maybe, at some point, but that doesn’t mean they’ve really abandoned postmodernism. You can reject all kinds of the individual pieces that have gone into postmodernism and still come out to be remarkably morally relevant.
In some sense, postmodernism is much bigger than any of the pieces that have gone into assembling it in the first place. What will come out of the end of this? I don’t know. I don’t know. The Lord could bring massive Reformation and revival. If there is another really major war, a world war, then people become absolutists very quickly, but that’s not always a better thing, is it?
The reasons why people say and do these things are very complex, and even this side of 9/11, you have more bifurcation in the country. You have people beginning to talk publicly about the nature of evil again. On the other hand, while they’re talking about the nature of evil, it’s evil out there. It’s the other people. It’s all evil on the social range. It’s all evil on the horizontal range. It’s still not deep thinking about evil with respect to God. It’s not evil that is in our hearts or lives. It’s the other people, and that is frightening as more relativism.
Question: Is it possible that in some ways history is repeating itself?
Answer: That’s a good question, too. “Is it possible that in some ways history is repeating itself?” There are people who say we’re heading in Western culture to a kind of new Sodom and Gomorrah, and in that sense, there are new idolatries going on and so on, so in that sense we’re heading to similar sorts of destructions, and that may be. That may be.
The Lord raises up nations and casts them down. There have been 21 world empires. Every one of them has declined. There is no way the American Empire, so far as it is an empire, is not also going to decline. No way assuming the Lord doesn’t come back first, but that does not mean it’s going to happen this week or next week.
The Lord has sometimes brought in remarkable revival, and sometimes it has been when nations have been extremely wicked and lost and at the edge that God has raised up some remarkable movements. In 1740 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, there were precisely six people who showed up to Holy Communion on Easter Sunday.
There were 286 crimes on the books for capital punishment, including stealing a loaf of bread. Children were sent down into the mines at the age of 5. One-third of all children born in England were killed by exposure. You’d throw them on the ash pit because they didn’t have abortion, so that was the way you got rid of your unwanted ones.
You go through the social circumstances of the day.… They were horrible, and there are many historians, myself included, who think England was headed for something the equivalent of the French Revolution, at least as bloody and maybe worse, but instead, God raised up in 1734 Howell Harris, in 1738 George Whitefield, in 1740 John Wesley, and in the mercy of the Lord, over 60 years the nation was transformed by the gospel.
Thus, the people who started trade unions, for example, against the astonishing greed and power of the great new industrialists, were all Methodist ministers. The first of them, all three of them, were sent to life banishment in Australia in the slave camps there. It was Christians who curtailed the prison conditions. In those days, when you were thrown in prison, if your relatives didn’t bring you food, you starved.
They started new prison societies, they were the ones who started to care for old-age pensioners, and they were the ones who started education. They were the ones who managed to ram through Parliament laws regarding child labor. Finally, Lord Shaftesbury and his friends were the ones who banned slavery. It’s really important to see that all came about as a function of gospel preaching.
Who knows what God may do yet? It is important, likewise, to say.… Let me put it this way. After the Towers came down, within the first week, both Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell had said things about how this was the judgment of God upon us because of abortion and homosexuality and so on. Then they got pilloried in the press for it, so they backed down and apologized.
In one sense, they were right, and in one sense, they were extraordinarily foolish. They were foolish not for saying God brings judgment on a nation. That wasn’t the problem. The Bible insists God brings judgment on a nation, and it insists also God may bring judgment on a nation from the hands of an even more wicked nation.
That’s what Habakkuk can’t fathom. Why is God using the Assyrians to beat up his covenant people, because even if the covenant people have been faithless, they’re not nearly as bad by any measure as the Assyrians for crying out loud? That’s what the whole book of Habakkuk is about. You get the same thing surfacing in Ezekiel. You get it very strongly in Isaiah. It’s everywhere, so that notion of God bringing judgment upon a wicked people is very common. In that sense, I wish they had spoken more strongly yet.
The problem was the sins they focused on were other peoples’ sins. Nothing to do with the deep lusts of America at large: the love of materialism, the pride of life, the endless de-Godding of God, what we’re doing in abortion, how we abandon our children, our divorce rates. If they had mentioned one or two things that stand outside normal criticism within that larger sphere, they could have had a prophetic voice. Instead, they just sounded like cranky, old people who were blaming other people, but “Not me!”
In that sense, the Towers do remind us of the fallenness of human existence. There will be wars and rumors of wars. Be not dismayed! The end is not yet. Let me tell you what’s going to happen in the twenty-first century. There’s going to be a lot more evangelism, a lot more prestige, and a lot more wars. That’s what’s going to happen. Get used to it.
The notion that we’ve moved into a new sublime sphere of maturity and freedom from.… It’s called cuckoo land. It’s liberal poppycock of the very first water because it doesn’t come to grips with the nature of the sinful human heart. People think, if you can just sit down and discuss, you’re going to stop thugs. Hasn’t anybody ever heard of Hitler or read of Munich?
It brings up huge ethical questions about whether Christians should be pacifists or the nature of just war theory and so on. There are huge questions that have to be addressed by serious Christians in that line so we’re not just knee-jerk conservatives or knee-jerk liberals. I think the Bible does give deep, solid, substantial, thoughtful, restrained answers in all of those sorts of areas, but it would take us a little farther afield than what we have now.
Many of these things turn, in the first place, from your doctrine of anthropology and your doctrine of sin, who human beings are, and what sin is. If you don’t get that one straight, everything else gets screwed up somewhere.
Question: How do we explain the rise of postmodern pluralism and this sort of thing, and on the other hand, the rise of fundamentalist stances, not only in some branches of Christianity but also in Hinduism and Islam and so on?
Answer: I think there are two or three reasons. At a superficial level, the one encourages the other. If you talk with serious Muslim thinkers in Egypt and elsewhere, in some ways what they fear in the West nowadays is not the power of Christianity but the power of Christianity gone wrong. They fear our licentiousness which is available to them over the Internet, satellite dishes, and all the rest.
They fear our money-grubbing ways that debunk religion. That’s what they fear. For them, globalization is not a positive term. They would like the technology, they would like the doodads, they would like the computers and the iPads, but at the end of the day, they don’t want the porn. They don’t want the marriage to break up. They don’t want the de-Godding of God.
“Allah is sovereign, and we must submit.” From their point of view, our very pluralism is itself part of the problem, and thus, in a world of disorder, in a world of broken values, in a world of competing things, people start looking for voices of security for psychological reasons, for epistemological reasons, for coherency reasons, for self-identity reasons, so in one sense, the one extreme feeds the other extreme.
Far from being difficult to understand, it’s precisely what one would expect when one looks at these sorts of things on a historical canvas, but there’s another factor, too. It really is important to remind ourselves of world history in the Western world for the last 1,300 years. Islam, in its first three centuries, achieved its growth almost entirely by the sword.
Eventually, it moved into Spain, of course, after that and almost conquered Spain, until the Moors were driven out. On the other side, it crossed the Dardanelles and moved into what is now Turkey and was right on the borders of Vienna as late as the seventeenth century. It’s important to see that.
In terms of rural conflict, that was the tension that was going and going and going and going, and the historic direction, despite the hiccup of the Crusades, was their conquering. Then things changed, partly because of the outcome of the Reformation and the Enlightenment and, therefore, Western technology and science and power, so that eventually they were pushed back and they were relegated to a sort of secondary role because of our superiority in arms and technology and science and so on.
Then, in the twentieth century, the great conflict became between the West and liberal democracies and, on the one hand, Nazism or Fascism, generally, and Communism, on the other hand. Both of those occupied all of our attention, our focus, in one fashion or another. First of all, the rise of Germany, partly in World War I with militaristic tendencies and Fascism in World War II.
Once the Thousand-Year Reich was destroyed in 12 years, what that left was Communism, which really came to military power only, after all, in the October Revolution of 1917, which is celebrated in November, for some strange reason. Then it was the Cold War that eliminated that, because all of Western Europe saw itself as pinioned between two superpowers, but now one of those superpowers is gone. Who is worried about Communism today, for goodness’ sake?
Well, some people in Asia because you still have totalitarian China, but apart from that, Fidel is not a threat. Give me a break. In intellectual circles, militant Communism is not a threat. There are people trying a revised Marxist historiography and all that. Yeah, you still find people trying.… Dream on. In terms of world power, it’s not the issue anymore, but once it has been taken out of the way, what is the issue?
Suddenly, you see, then, the encroaching power of Islam still there just beneath the surface feeling more and more justified in the long haul and resentful they’ve been relegated to second place for about three and a half centuries and now feeling with oil that Allah has provided them with money.
Now, with increasing power, they are beginning to encroach again, and with immigrant patterns changing, there are now more observing Muslims in France than there are observing Catholics. Suddenly, they’re winning by la revanche des berceaux, the revenge of the cradle, rather than by war, but they’re winning. In Regent’s Park in London is a huge mosque. Inconceivable a few years ago.
I’m not putting down the diversity. All I’m saying is these are historical realities you have to be aware of and look at through Muslim eyes, and from their point of view, therefore, this is a time of regaining things. In the Muslim world, pluralism is not a factor. It is not an issue except on the fringes of intellectuals who have been influenced by the West, but that world is really largely immune from these sorts of things.
It’s partly because there is virtually no history of liberal democracy in that kind of order either. Of the 38 predominantly Muslim countries, only two (perhaps three) approach anything like a democracy. Pakistan, to some extent, although even there you have to stretch the term really hard and there’s no real freedom of religion in terms of freedom to convert.
Turkey is the closest, but that was because Kemal Atat¸rk in the 20s and 30s tried to make the secular state, and even then, it’s caught between trying to join the European Union, which demands it be more democratic, and moving back to something which demands it be less. Where that one ends up, I don’t have a clue! In Indonesia it’s racially divided. If a Malay tries to convert to Christianity, he’ll probably lose his life. If it’s one of the Chinese population, he or she is all right. The disputed people are the national indigenous peoples.
Apart from that, you go around the world and Islam is not afflicted with liberal democracy, so within that kind of framework, the whole history of the rise of pluralism in the West is still not an issue. From their point of view, if they think about it at all, that stuff’s a threat rather than an advantage.
In this country, the fundamentalisms again are often resentments. That worries me. As the world begins to crumble, instead of thinking more biblically, we think with knee-jerk conservatism. That’s not helpful. It really is not helpful. We do not need a whole new generation of angry, young men. What we need are gospel people who love people self-sacrificially, know where the truth is, and are prepared to die for it and articulate it boldly but with a smile and a laugh. We do not need another generation of angry young men. All that does is swing the pendulum.
I’m not a politician. I’m, first and foremost, just a Bible reader who is trying to understand the world in which he lives. It’s worth trying to explain to Americans that Europeans are looking at things from a certain vantage point and to Europeans why Americans are. I spend my time in Europe. I’m over there eight times a year, and I have to spend my time, at least in part, in informal conversation trying to explain Americans to Europeans, and I do the reverse over here.
You must understand Germany and France have huge Muslim populations. While they’re accusing us of listening to “the Jewish lobby,” we have every right to accuse them of listening to the Muslim lobby. Moreover, for a long time Europeans were squeezed between the Bear and the Eagle. Of course, they wanted to be on the Eagle’s side, but now the Bear is not there, so the European community has to define itself against the only remaining superpower, and by defining itself against the only remaining superpower, it has to distance itself from the superpower.
That achieves a certain kind of instant success in the populous for getting votes right off the bat. It’s one of the reasons why you really have to see that Tony Blair has been remarkably courageous, because he’s losing his own electorate. He could get turfed out of office before this is done.
On top of that, the governments of Europe, for various reasons, have moved left in the last few years. A lot of them were more right and they moved left in France, in Germany, and in Britain. Whereas, this country, moving from Clinton to Bush, moved somewhat right, so they’re going to dislike each other for that reason, too, aren’t they? The things mount and mount and mount, and the perceptions are different and so on.
Yeah. It’s not that postmodernism itself causes that. You don’t want to make postmodernism the whipping boy for everything. On the other hand, there is less and less of a shared historic vision of right and wrong, a shared historic vision of immutables, so a lot more things get tangled up in political, sort of brutal realism that is not well-grounded in ethics or morality of any transcendental sort. Everybody is jockeying to cast his or her position in what they want to be believed to be the moral high ground, but it’s often just a power grab of one sort or another. We do it, too.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: The question of church and state.… It’s very important to recognize the foundations of the division between church and state come from Jesus himself, because, after all, the Old Testament covenant community married church and state. The covenant people was the state of the Israelite nation, but Jesus comes along and insists, under the terms of the new covenant, the new covenant people of God (the messianic community) will be from every tongue and tribe and people and nation and will not be allied with any state.
You get his remarkable utterance, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God, the things that are God’s.” There is, in principle, a division between church and state under the terms of the new covenant, which is why the Christian church grew in its first three centuries through martyrdom and not by power. You start getting a mingling of church and state only with the Constantine settlement at the beginning of the fourth century.
Even all through the Middle Ages, when there were eventually disputes between Charlemagne and the Pope and so on, as long as there are disputes you see there is, at least in theory, some sort of division of where the real authority lies. Likewise, at the time of the Reformation, the northern German states tended to go with the Reformation, and the southern German states did not. They tended to remain with Rome.
Again, there was tension between the claims of Scripture or the claims of the Pope and the claims of the individual duchies and so forth. The Western world has always had this. Then it was worked out with a lot more rigor after Calvin and the Western democracies as democracy rose, so you got more thinking on this business of church and state.
What has happened in the Western world is that the non-establishment clause has been increasingly interpreted in the last 50 years by the Supreme Court to deal with things that weren’t in the minds of the founding fathers at all but have to do, instead, with the imposition of any tax-based structure that has anything to do with religion.
The long-term effect of that, because government has grown so much more, too, from the days of the founding fathers, there aren’t many things it doesn’t touch. As a result, it becomes a huge impetus toward the privatization of religion which is not, again, what the founding fathers meant. Even someone like Madison, in the Federalist Papers, would argue if you have a society that loses a common moral and religious vision, then the only solution for preserving order is more government control. That’s remarkable. We’ve lost vision of that today.
If you lose a common consensus, then the only way you can preserve order is by forcing it, but those are the realities we live with, and there is a huge sense in which it’s very important for Christians not so to idolize democracy. Then democracy becomes an alternative god. Democracy is not the last word. Democracy works very well when you have a whole lot of people with a common consensus. It doesn’t work nearly so well when you have a lot of people with highly diverse consensuses. Where that will end up, I don’t have a clue.
That, surely, should not bother us as Christians because.… I mean it bothers us as citizens and all of that, but it shouldn’t bother us in any ultimate sense as Christians because, after all, at the end of the day, the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ and he will reign forever. We do live in a tension between the already and the not yet. That’s the framework in which we live and move and have our being, and our final confidence should not be in the US Marines; it should be in the sovereignty of God.
I’m not knocking the military, either. My son wants to be an officer with the US Marines. Just as we need Christian officers with a Christian frame of reference there, so we need them in business and in science and everywhere else. On the other hand, the solution is not science, and it’s not business, and it’s not the US Marines. Our ultimate solutions are going to be gospel solutions or we’ll go under as a nation as a quasi-empire whether it’s in the next century or the century after that or whatever before Jesus comes back.
As for the larger issue of God turning evil for good, that’s true, but his scale is not our scale. God can turn evil for good three generations after you’re dead. Part of our problem is, when we look for God to turn evil into good, we want it done immediately if not sooner. Preferably by this afternoon at 5 PM. Whereas, God works in a much bigger time frame and time scale, and sometimes it’s only in retrospect that you look back over history to see what has been done.
You look back at World War II with believing eyes today, and you can see the nation that was the most technologically advanced, the most scientifically advanced, with by far the most powerful and informed and erudite universities in the world, namely Germany, caused all the havoc and the death and the destruction in the hellish camps. Have we learned anything from that?
Meanwhile, the British Empire with its history of colonialism, by far the best of the Empires up to that point in world history but still with its own arrogance and haughtiness, it was also brought low by World War II. Shall we be exempt for our sins? It’s very important to start looking at these things from a large frame of reference.
Even now, with the rise of Islam, we can go around living our lives in fear (I know we can), but there are more Muslims coming to Christ today in many parts of the world, it’s unbelievable. Partly because the very violence itself is so nauseating, a lot of ordinary, thoughtful Muslims are quietly becoming Christians. Who knows but the Lord will use a bloodbath somewhere to turn many to Christ? It has happened before when the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church.
It’s really important to see we’re living in a world, as I said in the public lecture, where we’ve come through the bloodiest century in world history. We, then, conclude under postmodernism there’s no such thing as evil. What will God do, then, to teach us there is such a thing as evil? You start looking at the Twin Towers and persecution and violence from that perspective, will it take a new Holocaust to convince us there is such a thing as evil?
Just as postmodernism, you see, has overturned the arrogance of modernism, it has introduced a new, massive arrogance, an arrogance that will not see evil, which says, even if God does exist, we can’t possibly know him. What’s more arrogant than that? How can you look at the record of the twentieth century and not see evil? Blind, blind. Will God let that go away?
The praeparatio evangelio, as it’s called (the preparation of the gospel), is recognizing you are evil and under God’s curse and you must have his forgiveness or you die. What will God do, then, to bring about such recognition of evil? He’s a God of means, and some of those things may include pretty horrible bloodbaths, so be of good cheer, brothers and sisters in Christ. There will be wars and rumors of wars and the end is not yet. Aren’t you glad you have invited me? So many hopeful insights. Just so long as you come out of this feeling good, we’ll all be happy. Now turn to Acts 17.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: Anything, so that what, then a rigorous postmodernist would say is, “We all have different approaches to Bible study, don’t we?” If you’re a Latin American and come out of a liberal background, then you might read the Bible as that which frees the poor. In those sorts of circles, you begin often with the story of exodus and God freeing the slaves. That’s what the gospel does. It frees the slaves and takes away the power from the economic tyrants. That’s what the gospel is. That’s a legitimate Bible study, too, in a liberation context.
How do you begin to answer that? The point is, you see, what this is saying is there are lots of different truths. It depends on how you start, it depends on who you are, and it depends on where you begin. No truth is universal. It’s true for you. It’s true for your interpretive community. The question, then, in that frame of reference is not whether Bible study methods are useful, but not allowing them to claim too much.
Whereas, I would want to argue against merely mechanical approaches to Scripture and interpretation that there are some aesthetic factors. There are moral factors. A person who is harboring deep, deep, deep hidden sins in resentments or lusts or a bad relationship or something in their hearts while they’re approaching Bible study, sooner or later it will affect what they read there and how they read. It’s not just a question of turning a crank, is it? It’s not just a question of methods. It depends on who you are, how much sleep you’ve had the night before, and all kinds of things.
In that sense, postmodernism has some genuine insight. The real issue is, from a Christian perspective, when you build a whole Christian epistemology, can you know some true things the Bible truly says, and can you trust them and lay them on the conscience of others? That’s the dividing line, and there you must say, “Yes, yes, yes. Thus says the Lord. I may not understand all this says, but I understand some things of what it says, and that is the truth, and God has given it.”
Does that begin to make sense? We didn’t add framework. Clearly, there are some methods that are better than others, and the person who has learned rudimentary inductive Bible study is on the first step. Somewhere along the line, you will also learn something of the way God communicates in different genres of literature. What God does in language is not the same thing in Wisdom Literature as it is in Narrative Literature or in Lament. If you have a crabbed literalism and linear thought when you’re expounding a passage like this one, you’ll kill a lot of congregations.
“Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, ‘A child is born to you—a son!’ May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”
Point number one: Jeremiah wishes his mother had been eternally pregnant. You can’t interpret Scripture that way. It’s a lament. The guy is saying, “This isn’t fair! Life’s not fair! Why did God ever let me live? I’m ready to curse the day I was born. That’s pretty close to cursing God himself since he brought it about.”
Unless you can see the power of the poetry and the nature of the lament as a genre, you’re not going to understand that, are you? That’s Bible study method two, of course, but it is admitting there is real truth there to understand, to appropriate, to fit into the book of Jeremiah, to fit into the Prophetic Literature, to fit into the Canon and to incorporate into your life and thought and impose on others.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: The most informed postmoderns will not say there is nothing actually out there, because that would be an absolute claim. They are merely saying, “Whatever it is that’s out there …” They’re not anti-realists, after all. They still live. They’re not claiming to be in a dream world. “… we can’t know it truly.”
In other words, even if God himself exists, because of the finitude of our knowing apparatus, we cannot know truly. Then you build up the absolute antithesis, and then you’re lost in a sea of relativism again. It doesn’t have to be strictly speaking anti-realist; it merely has to be anti-realist so far as our knowledge of the real is concerned.
At that level, people are not often very rigorous thinkers, but to assess any movement properly, you need to assess it at its best, and its most erudite people don’t bother wasting time on denying reality because that assumes they have criteria by which to deny it. They merely argue we can’t know it. It comes out with the same thing at the practical level, but it is, at least, a little more philosophically rigorous, and all sides acknowledge that. I’ve given a bird’s-eye view.
One of the most rigorous and thought-provoking thinkers in this regard is Paul Ricoeur, who is not your typical postmodernist. He makes all kinds of connections toward reality that most postmodernists don’t make, but he has been very, very productive in 50 years of publication. If you don’t think you can handle that one even briefly is to make a distinction that is often made in the philosophy of science.
There’s a whole philosophy of science I just indicated very briefly last night that speaks of the social construals of science, and it drives physicists and people like that mad. We still get onto a 747 and fly to Pongo, Pongo with perfect confidence the laws of aerodynamics are going to work, and postmoderns do that as much as anybody else, so in that sense, surely, they’re trusting in some objective truth being out there, aren’t they?
What the philosophers of science who come from a kind of philosophical postmodern stance say in that regard is, “Yes, we’re not denying there are facts, that there are empirical data, and that science in some sense progresses. We’re not denying any of that.” They’re not anti-realist. Sometimes, our efforts to pooh-pooh the postmodernists as if they’re denying facts there as plain as the nose on their face (“They’re all stupid people”) really won’t work.
The best of them are really very sophisticated in this regard, but what they point out is science is more than an accumulation of data. It turns on whole construals of reality. You have Newtonian physics and then along comes Einstein and then comes Niels Bohr and quantum mechanics, and most physicists today will acknowledge those are construals that, sooner or later, are either going to have to be corrected or replaced or modified by something bigger to give us a unified field theory because nobody has figured out how to put relativity together with quantum mechanics.
These are construals. Maybe there’s another whole construal for something. They’re socially constructed. Maybe it will work in some other fashion. You can’t escape the finitude of human knowledge. It drives physicists mad because they see much more. There was some work done by Thomas Kuhn called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
What he is really arguing is that the science does not progress by a cumulative acquisition of more data, but you have a whole construal which eventually accumulates enough data that shows it doesn’t work. Everybody knows there are all kinds of bits of data that don’t fit. Eventually, some theory pops up that makes a lot of the data fit better.
Then people pop over to the new paradigms, so you have a paradigm shift. It’s not the acquisition of more data on a straight line. It’s a paradigm shift. It’s a scientific revolution. It’s not as if Newtonian mechanics gradually adds more information to the Einsteinium new physics.
There have been whole books and conferences that have come out of that and criticized Kuhn in some way and made him put in more footnotes and so on, but there is some truth to that. Clearly, there are construals to those larger paradigms. People are not denying facts, but how do you move from the fact to the large scientific construal? You’re back to Immanuel Kant, the phenomenal world and the noumenal world.
There are limitations on human knowledge. They’re not entirely wrong. They go much too far with it, in my view, because, after all, you can argue that Einsteinium physics, at the limit once you slow the speed down, gives you Newtonian mechanics. There’s no formula in Newtonian mechanics that has been overthrown, provided you’re not running at speeds near the speed of light. Newtonian mechanics still works. It’s just that it’s at a limit.
There are all kinds of footnotes that have to be put in. Then people speak of different ways of knowing and knowing facts versus knowing theories and knowing people versus knowing facts, so there is a large literature on that that is addressed by all sides of the debate, and I ducked all of those complexities since it would have taken far too much time to begin to explore them, but they are out there in the literature.
Question: [Inaudible]
Answer: Of course, you do! Of course, you do. You must. If you claim to come without those assumptions, you’re back in a modernist mode where you think you can convince people with neutral arguments about God. Of course, you come with the assumption of a believer. That’s not the issue. The question is whether the assumption reflects something that’s true.
In other words, because you’re a finite knower, does it mean, therefore, what you claim to know cannot itself be the truth? What I’ve tried to argue, you see, in the first two or three points of this last period is there are ways of thinking about these things that finite knowers can approach knowledge of absolute truth even without claiming absolute knowledge.
There are lots of ways of approaching that sort of thing. For example, radical biblical scholars often, often, often argue anything that is written in the Gospels about Jesus that is important to them has probably been so shaped by their theology that you cannot trust their historical claims. That is a massive assumption. Anything the gospel writers feel strongly about and lay on the lips of Jesus is not likely to be true historically because they feel so strongly about it that they’ve read it back onto the lips of Jesus.
My response to that is picture a Jew who escapes from Auschwitz in 1944 and somehow manages to get to the West with eyewitness news of what he has seen. Maybe even a picture or two somehow. What would he say? Will he say, “Well, I’d like to give you the pros and cons of this description”? Won’t he be passionate about what he says?
If he’s careful because he wants to be believed, he will try not to exaggerate. He would say only what he has seen, and if he is reporting something he has only heard about, he’ll say it’s what he has only heard about, but he’ll describe it accurately. He won’t exaggerate, he won’t puff it up, he won’t put it down, but he’ll be passionate about it precisely because it would be obscene for him not to be passionate about it.
The first gospel writers believed Jesus rose from the dead. They saw it. They touched. They handled. It would be obscene for them to be neutral. It would be blasphemous for them to be neutral. That’s the problem with modernism. If you start approaching Christian witness from mere neutrality, you’ve already denied the statement in the first place.
By itself that does not say anything one way or the other about the truthfulness of what you believe. The passion with which you hold something does not affirm its authenticity and it doesn’t deny it. The biblical critics are wrong. The postmoderns are wrong. It’s not a valid test for authenticity.
You can passionately believe things that are horrendously wrong. Sincerity doesn’t prove anything, but it doesn’t prove you’re wrong, either, which is why, at the end of the day, questions of truth and authenticity and validity and so on and the Christian witness to what took place in history cannot be determined by such means.
Question: How would I defend to a biblically illiterate person that the Bible is true even though sinful people wrote it?
Answer: The question is, “How would I defend to a biblically illiterate person that the Bible is true even though sinful people wrote it? There are layers of questions behind that question. It’s a very good question. Let me deal with one layer first. A lot of times what is really behind that question is the old slogan, “To err is human.” Thus, if humans are involved in the writing of something, there must be errors because to err is human, but even the slogan, “To err is human,” does not mean every human is erring all the time about everything.
Even if you have sinners who err often, it doesn’t mean they err every time they’re writing anything down. When you write something in a mathematics assignment, sometimes you err. Sometimes you don’t. The fact that you don’t sometimes does not overthrow the slogan, “To err is human.”
In addition to that, if you believe what the Bible itself says, what Jesus himself taught about God superintending these erring humans that when they wrote at that juncture they did not err, then the application of the slogan cannot lead you to the conclusion that Scripture has errors. Does that make sense?
That’s merely at a superficial level of the whole thing. If I were trying, on the other hand, to bear witness to someone, I don’t usually start with the authority of Scripture. That has to be dealt with somewhere, and in those sorts of arguments I’ve just given, it might be important and lot of other arguments, but that’s not where I start. I never do.
When you’re dealing with complete biblical illiterates, that’s rarely the place to start. In fact, in university missions, I often start with something like this, and you can do this in private, too. “Any reasonably educated person has to recognize Christianity has had a lot of impact on the West for good or ill however you interpret it (I don’t give a rip at this stage), so doesn’t it behoove us to know at least a little bit of something about Christianity? The best way to begin to understand that is with its founding documents.”
I haven’t claimed anything about inerrancy now. I’m not even saying, “You have to believe this or you’re all damned.” I’m not saying any of that. I would say to a university crowd as you would say to a friend, “What I’d like you to do is read together with me some of these founding documents so you can understand what Christians have thought, what Christianity claims.”
At this point, that’s entirely safe because we’re not even asking them to believe it. That’s when I start expounding Genesis 1, Genesis 3, Exodus 20, and so on. It’s actually as people get into it that they begin to see there are claims being made and there are embarrassing things coming out and they say, “If that’s the case, what about this?”
After the meetings, you’re getting into more Q&A, and you’re getting into more apologetics and all that kind of thing, but the thing is, if you deal with a whole lot of apologetic issues too soon with people who are biblically illiterate, they’re busy arguing about the apologetics before they have any substance to argue about.
That’s why, in a university mission, I will never anymore take on the subject of the problem of suffering and evil. If I’m at a medical convention.… I was at a medical convention in England two weeks ago where I had to deal with the question of suffering and evil to Christian doctors, and I spent hours with them on it. I’m happy to do it.
The point is, in a strictly biblically illiterate crowd, to talk about the question of suffering and evil is a massive waste of time until I’ve taken the time to put in the Christian worldview in the first place because how you approach questions of suffering and evil are predicated on understanding what the Christian worldview is in the first place.
How can I get that across to people who don’t know what the worldview is? The ignorance is so massive that you have to start somewhere else. When people ask me to do that, I’ll say, “Yeah. I’ll be happy to. Give me 20 hours first to lay out what a Christian worldview is in the first place. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time.”
I would say the same about the doctrine of Scripture. If you don’t have a place for a doctrine of God, if you don’t have a place for a God who knows everything, for a God who has accommodated himself to reveal in space-time history, if you don’t have a place for that as a category even, whether or not you think it’s true, you can’t possibly talk about inerrant Scripture. It’s a waste of time.
To quote Billy Graham, “May the Lord bless y’all real good.”
