Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson answers questions on the topic of Truth in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Don Carson: I think we have opportunity for at least a few questions before tea or coffee, whatever is back there.
Female: If you believe that God authored the Bible and used his Holy Spirit to work through men authoring the Bible, then can’t someone expect that only God knows its intent, and that as humans, because we’re fallen, because we’re finite, our perspective is that it is not possible, we can’t see it all, the perspective that God had, when he revealed it to us through the Holy Spirit?
Wouldn’t that just rule out all sorts of quarrels about what is true and what’s not true? When it comes down to it, he is the only one who can reveal his truth to us as the author God and that his Holy Spirit is the only one that can touch humans and shows it by wisdom and if they’re not touched by that wisdom, by God’s holy hand, they’re not going to understand.
Don: Let me try and summarize your question. You ask, “Isn’t it true to say that if God ultimately stands behind the Bible as its ultimate author then we human readers cannot possibly understand it as he omnisciently knows it? It really is going to depend on him revealing it to human beings by his Spirit or else we’re always going to distort it. So at the end of the day, what is at issue is what in theology is called the illumination of the Spirit of God.” Is that a fair representation?
Female: Right. Yes.
Don: Okay. What I would want to say is that in very large measure I agree with you so long as you don’t run down a certain perceived entailment with it. There are all kinds of areas that I didn’t even bring up tonight, and that’s one of them that I would have brought up if I had had a lot more time.
Let me say what I don’t agree with in what could flow from what you’ve said. I don’t want anybody to come away thinking that the Bible is a kind of magic book, a book of codes, somehow, a book that is essentially incoherent apart from a dose of illumination that gives people a code.
For example, one of the things that Jesus says to his disciples after the resurrection when they’re so surprised by it all is, “Oh fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken,” and so on. In other words, he tells them, in effect, that they should have understood, even while the New Testament (you’re quite right in this respect) also says as in 1 Corinthians 2:14, that the natural person, the person who is still lost in rebellion, doesn’t understand the things of God, they’re foolishness to them, they’re not going to be discerned, and so forth.
It seems to me that the dividing line in all of that is something like this. It is true, finally (here I’m with you entirely), that when men and women actually do close with Christ, do become Christians and so on, it does take a work of the Spirit of God in their minds and hearts so that the text comes alive to them. They see themselves in the light of the text. The things that they have discounted in the past, they see aren’t all that unreasonable after all, and they come in due course to rest their faith in Christ. I agree with that.
Nevertheless, I do also see that in the New Testament it does not mean, therefore, that the apostles or anybody else sat back and simply said, “Well, we’ll wait until the Holy Spirit enlightens us.” Thus you find Paul reasoning daily in the streets and in the temple and Peter exhorting us to be ready to give an answer to everyone for the hope that lies within us, and so forth.
Not for a moment do I want to suggest that we can reason people into the kingdom. I don’t mean that at all. Nor do I want to suggest that somehow by simply getting your epistemology sophisticated enough then you’re going to handle all problems. I don’t mean that.
I am saying that even out of a Christian perspective that has a very high valuation of what only the Spirit of God can do, you are still morally responsible for approaching the question of an apologetic to a particular people in a way that is sensitive and intelligent and faithful to Scripture.
I would say (this would have been my next point had I gone on to it) one of the best examples of that is Paul, himself. Compare Paul, for example, preaching evangelistically in a synagogue in Pisidian Antioch in Acts 13. There he is dealing with Jews and proselytes and God-fearers who are biblically literate. They already believe what we call the Old Testament. They already believe the Hebrew Bible.
He doesn’t have to go back to those sorts of basics. He keeps trying to show from Scripture that Jesus really is the promised Messiah. They have all the shared ground. Now you park him four chapters later in Athens, and he is dealing with people who have never heard of Moses, he is dealing with complete biblical illiterates, and his whole approach to articulating the Christian faith starts farther back.
He starts off on their turf. Then he starts talking about the God who made everything, because most Greek thought (although there were gods a-many,) there was often underlying a lot of Greek thought a kind of deep-seated pantheism. It’s why Greek writers can switch back and forth between one god and many gods, but the God of the Bible is a personal transcendent God. He is above space and time.
Our problem is not our material nature but our rebellion against him. So he starts talking about God’s providence, his transcendence (what the Puritans called his aseity; that is, he was from himself, he’s self-existent and doesn’t need us), his watch-care over us, and his hatred of idolatry. He creates a whole worldview before he gets to Jesus.
What I’m saying is part of our faithful witness in our generation, in a world that has long removed itself in the West and is increasing in removing itself in the West from the kind of shared biblical framework that dominated much, is now following Paul into the pages of Acts 17 and away from Acts 13.
But it’s still the same Paul who writes 1 Corinthians 2. It’s just that, at the end of the day, you can have apologetics until you’re blue in the face, and unless the Spirit of God changes people’s lives, people aren’t converted. I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying so long as it does not become in any way a surreptitious means of defanging an intelligent articulation of the gospel.
Male: In this postmodern world, or what I call this era of irrationality, do you think a presuppositional or an evidentialist apologetic would be the most effective? Which one are you interested in?
Don: The question is, “In this postmodern age,” which he defined as an age of irrationality, “do I think that evidentialist or presuppositional apologetics are most fruitful, and which one am I?” Carl F.H. Henry, after whom these lectures are named, is prone to remark that there are two kinds of presuppositionalists, those who admit it and those who don’t, and I agree with him.
The trouble is that those two categories, presuppositional apologetics and evidentialist apologetics, are often freighted with some baggage that makes me uncomfortable, so I don’t quickly align myself with either unless I can have a few minutes to define a few things.
For example, one of the writers who aligns himself constantly with the presuppositional camp, John Frame, in his most recent book, Apologetics for the Glory of God, gives all the places where an evidentialist apologetic is exceedingly important, but where his presuppositional structure reigns is he doesn’t let down the side at any point about his understanding of the gospel and his presuppositions about God to begin with.
In other words, he doesn’t want to put himself in the position of the opponent and try to work from there, because from there isn’t going to get here. I agree with that. On the other hand, when the Bible speaks of the many infallible proofs concerning Jesus’ resurrection and things like that, I don’t want the presuppositional apologetics to become merely a question of saying, “All you’ve got to do is change your fundamental attitude. That’s going to happen by grace. That’s all there is to it,” and present none of the reasons for the hope that lies within us.
I venture to say that out of the next period in Western church history there is going to arise some articulations of the gospel that aren’t going to be happy with quite either of those labels and that are going to think above all in worldview-ish terms. I think that those worldview-ish terms are more closely aligned with what was traditionally called presuppositional apologetics.
While we give this big storyline, give the reasons for holding it, do what Francis Schaeffer used to describe as sort of a debunking the opposition in a gentle way and all the rest, and still insist that at best we’re poor beggars telling others where there is bread.… It’s not because we’re smarter or better or wiser. We’re not! We’re merely sharing the good things we’ve found in the forgiveness of Christ with others.
After we’ve done all of that and still insisted that men and women are converted by the work of the Spirit of God changing them from within, I think that these traditional categories of evidentialist and presuppositional apologetics are gradually going to fade away. I think that the issues are bigger than how they’ve been understood. They’re worldview-ish. That’s another whole subject.
Male: Do you think there’s a link between some forms of religious experience today such as the charismatic movement and postmodernism?
Don: This is a very good question and a very difficult question to answer in some ways. There is no doubt rising emphasis on Christian experience, which can be used for good, and it can be used for ill. Let us be quite frank. There have been forms of Christian propositionalism that have been desperately arid. That, too, is part of the entailment of Cartesian thinking. Provided you’re orthodox, you’re all right.
James has something to say about that, doesn’t he? “The Devil also believes these things.” I don’t want to downplay the importance of Christian experience. It’s astonishing how much David and Paul and other writers in Scripture speak out of the framework of Christian experience. Nevertheless, I am nervous about the lust for new experiences unconstrained by what God has disclosed. That gives me much more pause.
The so-called charismatic movement is now so incredibly diverse that it’s a bit dangerous to make simple generalizations about it. At its worst, I’m sure that some of which you’re intimating is doubtless true, but it’s not all of a piece. I could give you lots of examples from that, but perhaps we’d better press on to some other topics, but there are lots of examples of that sort of thing, I’m afraid.
Male: In modernism, I understand truth. I respect your right to the truth. In postmodernism, our environment certainly determines truth. All environments have equal veracity. What’s next?
Don: The question is, “In modernism you and I might think that we have truth. Tolerance dictates that we allow the other to speak, and we try to arbitrate. In postmodernism each truth claim is shaped in a final way by the social structure, by the social context, and no social structure has a leg up on the next one. That becomes the new definition of tolerance. What’s next in the culture? Where do we go from here?”
The short answer is, “I don’t know.” To use the words of the Old Testament prophet Amos, “I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet,” and I work for a non-profit organization. (That bit wasn’t from Amos.) On the other hand, having said I don’t know, I could make some guesses. Already there are all kinds of fights that are developing.
For example, in the university front, there is a very interesting book by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt that came out in 1995, Johns Hopkins University Press, called Higher Superstition. It is modernist through and through, but it’s sort of scientists fighting back. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a backlash towards a modernist approach in years to come. I don’t think it will happen, but I wouldn’t want to rule it out.
Then there are others like Paul Ricoeur who tries to take a mediating position. I don’t think he is going to win the day, partly because although he wants reference (he talks about texts … talking about things, not just talking about words) the things about which he’s talking are all in the world of text rather than extratextual reference. I don’t think he is going to win, either.
Then there are people that are moving into the area or out of the area again. I don’t see another big movement on the horizon that is about ready to take over, but there are some huge questions that could be raised. They’re parts of what makes me say, “I don’t know.”
The founding fathers of this nation were convinced it was not possible to have a democracy with minimal government unless you had a people that morally and, in large-scale vision, had similar shared views. If, in fact, you move to a kind of position in which there are no rights or wrongs other than what a governmental body decrees, then it’s pretty easy to imagine various ways in which you can have a kind of totalitarianism by ballot box.
In our incredibly diverse society today, there is a part of me that loves it. The Bible pictures the new heaven and the new earth with people coming from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. In that sense, I want to argue that LA is more like heaven than Pottsville, North Dakota. In other ways it may not be, but in that way it is.
There are parts of this diversity that I like and appreciate and want to encourage and so on. Yet, want that means in terms of government and stability and so forth, I don’t have a clue how it’s going to work out. It may be that we’ll head into one of the periods of history where in the West the church will become a more persecuted group or something like that. That’s not inconceivable. There are lots of times when that has happened in church history.
Not fewer then 10,000 people are sold into slavery and/or murdered in southern Sudan every few months. In Burma, there are groups of people being killed just because they’re Christians. It could happen. I was brought up in French Canada between 1950 and 1952 in which Baptist ministers alone spent eight years in jail, and we kids were beaten up because we were maudits Protestants. That was in a democracy. Democracy works fine.
It’s easy to imagine all kinds of projections in the future that could make life more interesting, but I don’t know. At the same time the Lord may give us massive revival, or it may be that there’ll be a societal backlash. It may be that something that is still unforeseen will come around the corner. I don’t know. Seems to me that our job, primarily, is to try to understand where we are and be faithful where we are, and within that framework to do the best we can out of that understanding.
Male: I recently read one of George Marsden’s new books, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. He talks about the postmodern context providing the wonderful opportunity for Christians in the academy, assuming there are “-isms” out there. Why not Christianity be one of the main “-isms” of the competing voice there?
It seems to me, he is on to something plausible, but at the same time there’s some concern raised that we might be forfeiting our soul to gain legitimacy in the university. Do you think it would be giving too much away to …? Can you comment on this author?
Don: I agree with both of what you said. That is, your analysis of Marsden that is exactly correct. The dangers are also considerable, because one of the rules of discourse in a lot of the postmodern environment in which we find ourselves today is that you can put forward almost any outrageous idea, including something as outrageous as biblical Christianity, provided you don’t try to say, “And it really is the way to God, the only way to God,” because that sounds, modernist, rightwing, bigoted, nineteenth century, and all the rest.
There is a constant danger, then, in that framework of playing the game but sacrificing the rules. That is, the rules inherent in essential biblical Christianity. Then you become sort of one more option.
I would want to tell those who are planning on going into that kind of world to understand well how it works and play the rules with courage rather than wimping out or else you may end up doing more damage than good. Your religion may become just privatized. At the end of the day, that’s not in the gospel’s interest. It’s not in the church’s interest. It’s not to the glory of God.
Male: You had talked about one possible way of getting past the idea that there’s only complete, thorough, exhaustive knowledge before [inaudible] and that that’s not true, that actually we can know incompletely and still know truth. You mentioned Francis Schaeffer a little bit ago. I think something he said about this is that another bridge between the two is the fact that while God is infinite and we are finite we are both personal. Can you comment on that thought?
Don: Oh, yes. I had said earlier that it is necessary somewhere to break up this antithesis between knowing perfectly, truly, comprehensively, exhaustively or being lost in a sea of relativism. In that connection, I tried to give one or two ways of breaking that down.
This gentleman says Francis Schaeffer had said that another way to reckon on the possibility of communication from one being to another is the fact that we all share personhood. We are all persons, and so forth. Now, I would say that Schaeffer is right. I would also say that in the contemporary discussion in let’s say France or in Germany he is also irrelevant.
He wasn’t irrelevant in his own day. Don’t misunderstand me. But if you threw that up with those who follow let’s say Jacques Derrida, they would say, “You simply don’t understand the nature of language.” He is not denying we are persons. he is saying we don’t understand how language works. Someone like David Tracy in Chicago.… He insists on personhood, but he insists we’re finite persons who are socially constrained by the social matrixes in which find ourselves.
From a theological point of view, I would want to argue that not only are we persons, we are persons made imago Dei and that God, himself, is a person. I don’t know quite exactly what that means if he is also sovereign and transcendent, but he is a person who accommodates himself to speak in human speech. I think that just as the doctrine of the Holy Spirit adds all kinds of new wrinkles to our epistemology, so also does an omniscient talking God add all kinds of new things to our epistemology. I didn’t get into any of those things tonight.
So I would want to argue that from a point of view of inner-Christian discourse, sorting out how to think about these things, it is important to insist that God is a person, that God is an omniscient person who accommodates himself to speak in human talk so that although God, himself, cannot get across all he knows to us, because we’re finite, he can say some things truly even if we may not latch on to them in a truly exhaustive way.
There are all kinds of ways of configuring these things into a whole Christian epistemology. Then the work of the Spirit of God is something that I have not probed adequately and so forth. Having said all of that, all of those things, it seems to me, are part of a Christian grasp of reality that gives us courage to go forward.
It’s part of the whole package, the worldview, the metanarrative, that we explain to people to give a reason for the way we look at things this way, but by itself, I don’t think it helps to prick the balloon of pretension in a Derridian approach, for example. I think, there, you need to do another part of Francis Schaeffer that which blows up people’s worldviews a little bit.
