Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Truth in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
David Westin, the president of the news division of American Broadcasting Corporation, gave an address recently at Columbia University in the wake of September 11. In it, he said that his journalistic objectivity forbade him from evaluating the moral propriety of flying an airplane full of people into buildings full of people.
You can understand his stance. From the perspective of some people in the world, it was a courageous act; heroic, even. From the perspective of others, it was a tragedy beyond words. About the same time, Stanley Fish, who is one of the American semi pop gurus of postmodernism, wrote an article in the editorial section of the New York Times in which he argued that recent events did not at all cast a shadow upon his approach to postmodernism.
He says that yes, we do have to go after the people who are murdering our friends and our citizens, but on the other hand, we do not do this because we are saying that there is some profound moral issue at stake. Rather, from our perspective, the thing is bad. From their perspective, the thing is good.
But we belong to our tribe, and from the perspective of our tribe, we have to defend our tribe’s existence and stance. You let this thing get out of hand and you could have a nuclear bomb in New York Harbor. So you have to defend your own tribe. But that doesn’t mean that there is any moral issue at stake.
A friend of mine in Washington, DC, a woman about my own age, is only a very recent Christian. Before she became a Christian, she was well known in Washington circles for her lectures on these sorts of subjects. She is one of the editors of the most influential political weekly in DC, and her stance was openly neutral on all moral issues.
Holocaust? From the point of view of Aryan supremacists, it was a good thing. From the point of view of those who suffered, it was a tragedy beyond words. It was Shoah, an abomination beyond words. But she was quite unwilling, from the perspective of her journalistic competence, to make any sort of moral judgment whatsoever.
The odd thing is that this essentially postmodern approach to right and wrong, to truth and error, is widely interpreted today as the highest form of tolerance. It used to be, you see, that tolerance was understood to be the stance adopted by someone who said, “I may loathe your ideas with a passion, but I will defend to the death your right to say them.”
In other words, the idea of tolerance was toward the individual. The ideas could be contested, but the individual had the right to articulate those views. So that tolerance was always expressed towards someone with whom one disagreed. That was the very nature of tolerance. How could you tolerate someone or something with whom you were in perfect agreement? “Oh I agree with everything you say. I tolerate you.” The whole notion seemed strange.
But today, increasingly, under the influence of postmodern epistemology, you are not allowed to say that anybody is wrong. That’s the one wrong thing to say. And if no one is wrong, or if all stances, views, and perspectives are equally right or wrong depending on the particular social grouping that is articulating them, then how on earth can you call the result tolerance? Because there is nothing which with you disagree.
In fact, tolerance in that heritage has recently become very intolerant. That is to say, in the name of tolerance, the one group with which you most disagree, mainly those who say that there is a difference of right and wrong, cannot be tolerated because they are intolerant.
Thus, the very word tolerance has been shanghaied to cover something that is not, in any historic terms, tolerance at all but merely a kind of moral vapidity, a kind of stance that says there is no truth and error, there is no right and wrong at all. Issues such as these are too complex for a decent airing, let alone a thorough hearing in 25 minutes, but I think I must briefly say a few things.
First, it is overwhelmingly common among postmodern critics to offer an unacceptable antithesis. That is, when you get involved with postmodern critics, usually you are offered an antithesis that looks like this: Either human beings may know something exhaustively, omnisciently, or you are lost in some kind of sea of relativism and you might as well face up to it and admit it. Either you can know something truly and absolutely, or quite frankly, to speak of knowledge in any objective sense, in any absolute sense, is a mere chimera.
And because you can always show that finite human beings cannot know anything absolutely in terms of all the possible connections, ramifications, associations, and so on; therefore, if you buy into the antithesis, sooner or later what you’re left with is the other alternative. It took me a while when I was trying to read into this area 12 or 13 years ago before I even spotted the antithesis, and the person in whom I spotted it first was Paul de Man.
In one of his books he describes an Archie Bunker sitcom episode. Are you familiar with Archie Bunker? This is an American situation comedy that was very popular about 25 years ago. It’s gone now but it really was quite funny and it became a bit of a cult thing, you know. Archie Bunker is the quintessential right-wing, ignorant redneck. He hates women, hates intellectuals, loves American football and beer, and comments on life from this sort of redneck perspective. His wife, Edith, is a twit, inevitably, and the children are predictable.
The point of this sitcom was to send the whole thing up. It wasn’t trying to push this stance but by setting the whole thing up in sort of stereotypical terms and with some pretty good writers for the scripts, it was quite a funny program, and it had quite a lot of social impact, in fact. Now in one of these programs, Paul de Man tells us, Edith (the wife) brings in her husband’s bowling shoes. In that sort of world, real men don’t clean their own shoes.
She has one of these annoying nasal whines. “Archie, do you want your shoes laced up or down?” And Archie says, “Ah, what’s the difference?” while he is sipping his beer and watching football. She says, “Archie, the difference is, if you lace them up, you take the ends of the laces and you go to the bottom holes and you start coming up first and then you cross over and you go down, and then you cross over and you go up, and so on. But if you lace them down, you take the same laces and you go down the holes first, and so on.”
The laugh track is cackling away at this. Because, in the words of Paul de Man, everybody knows that when Archie says, “Ah, what’s the difference?” what he means is, “I don’t give a damn.” That’s what he means. He doesn’t mean anything more than that. For her, instead, to think that “What’s the difference?” means “I’d like an explanation of the difference between the two,” produces the laugh track.
Paul de Man then goes on for pages in his book talking about “the vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.” I never did finish that book. I couldn’t get by. I burst out laughing in the library, put it down, and suddenly, a light dawned. You see, in the simplest sorts of jokes, either we’re being asked to have 100 percent understanding by all human beings with a kind of omniscient knowledge or you’re lost in “vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.”
In fact, most people did understand it. That’s why they were laughing. That’s what made the joke funny. Because everybody saw that the expression really did mean something else. The only other person who didn’t get it was Paul de Man. Well, there was Edith of course, but she was a twit. She was not supposed to get it.
You see, there are better ways of thinking about human acquisition of knowledge than this absolute antithesis. If you ask for this antithesis, then inevitably, postmodern open-endedness is right. Because really what it is asking for is that you be God. Either you have the knowledge of omniscience, the knowledge of God, or you cannot know, certainly, anything.
Now if that’s your standard of certainty, if that’s your standard of knowledge, then I agree with you. You cannot possibly have the knowledge of God. But is that the only useful and meaningful construct in which we may speak of knowledge? Surely our own experience, even as students, says that there are better models.
When you start off in some new discipline … let’s say you do part one of a tripos on something or other and then switch to another discipline in part two, and in part two for the first time you’re reading books in a domain that you know nothing about, and at first the terminology is strange, technical, and difficult, and you plod through very slowly.
After you’ve read 30 or 40 books in that domain, they start going a little faster. They’re saying the same sorts of things and it’s only a new technical one in the field that is really throwing you. Introductory books you just breeze through to get some slight difference in slant or the like. What’s going on? With time, your knowledge in any domain improves. That doesn’t mean that there are no errors, no misconceptions, but you come closer to understanding the reality than you did at the beginning.
Thus, if I may use a mathematical example, on an X-Y axis, if distance away from the Y-axis means time, and distance up from the X-axis means removal from the real reality, with time you sort of approach the reality in your knowledge asymptotically. You get closer and closer and closer and closer. You never touch the line, but you can grow in knowledge. And it is useful to speak of knowledge in those sorts of terms.
If the only other alternative is omniscience, then we cannot know anything. But if those are not the only alternatives, then we may know some things with high degrees of plausibility or lower degrees of plausibility with it. Enough certainty to act on them, to walk, as it were, by a reasonable faith. You do that in science all the time. You do that in personal relationships all the time. You do it as you approach things in your discipline all the time, in every domain of life.
We cannot know things absolutely, but we may know enough to base our lives upon them. So I would argue it is overwhelmingly common among postmodern critics to offer an unacceptable antithesis and, in my view, it is not a solid base.
Secondly, Christianity makes two claims that render the postmodern antithesis especially objectionable. The first claim is there is a God who knows everything, and he talks. Now if you have an anchor in a being who doesn’t know anything, the question still becomes how we may know anything when we don’t know everything. If we’re not God, how do we know anything?
You see, even God (according to a Christian heritage) cannot possibly tell us everything because we’re not big enough to receive it. That is to say, we cannot ever have the mind of God in that absolute sense. On the other hand, Christians across the centuries have struggled with what has often been called accommodation theory. That is, how could this God who knows everything communicate some things to us who are so small in comparison with him that the best we can do is pick up fragments compared with what he knows?
Here, the whole Christian heritage has insisted again and again, it’s because God accommodates himself actually to talk in our terms. To give words that we may think about. To invade history and talk. So that he discloses himself in the domain where we live. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to understand everything he says and does perfectly, but just as we can understand one another in substantial ways, so we can understand this God, who talks, in substantial ways.
Then there’s a second element in Christianity, it seems to me, that for the most part takes place in history which is important for overthrowing this antithesis from any Christian perspective, and that is that Jesus rose from the dead. Consider Buddhism. Supposing you could prove with some high degree of plausibility (I don’t know how) that Gautama the Buddha never lived.
Would you destroy Buddhism? No, of course not. Buddhism stands or falls by its philosophical coherence, by its ethical attractiveness, and so forth, to many people. And if somehow (I’m not sure how) you could prove that Gautama never lived, Buddhism itself would not be jeopardized in the slightest.
Supposing you could prove that Krishna in Hinduism never existed, was not a true god, would that overthrow Hinduism? No, of course not. Hinduism claims there is a universal truth which manifests itself in many millions of gods. If you don’t like Krishna, there’s always Shiva and millions and millions of others. In that sense, you see, there is no possibility of overthrow of a system by appeal to some sort of historical artifact or some kind of witness to the originators of the system. Can’t be done.
But, in Christianity, if you could prove Jesus never rose from the dead, you’ve destroyed it. If you could prove he never lived, Christianity is invalidated. Why? This is according to the first witnesses. Paul himself writes if Christ really did not rise from the dead, then several things follow: First, the witnesses that claimed to have seen him over a period of 40 days are liars. Second, he says, we are of all people most miserable because we’re believing something that is untrue and promulgating it when it really isn’t true.
Notice this emphasis on truth. In other words, Paul himself is prepared to make a believable Christianity contingent upon something as implausible as resurrection from the dead … in space-time history. Astonishing, really. But that means, whether we like it or not, whether we who are Christians like it or not, our faith is dependent on historical claims.
If you could show with considerable plausibility that those historical claims are invalidated, Christianity is overthrown, but that also means that our access to the most crucial elements in our faith are true historical witnesses. That’s why, for us, what the Bible says is important. Who wrote it is important. When it was written is important. How the witnesses line up is important.
Whether it’s plausible to believe that they were hoodwinked or whether it’s plausible to believe that somehow they suffered some mass hallucination is important because if such stances are credible, Christianity is bye-bye. It’s gone. It also means that there is no way of getting omniscient knowledge about historical events. No way. Not about any historical event.
So in addition to the intrinsic unbelievability of that absolute antithesis that is being foisted upon us all the time, there is an additional unbelievability about trying to foist it on the historical research that goes into anything that is based on an historical claim. You see, in mathematics, you can define a subsystem tightly enough that you can speak of truth in an absolute sense. In base ten, two plus two is four. In base two, it’s not. But in base ten, you define the system adequately and two plus two really is four.
But in historical research? Christianity, at the end of the day, is based on witness (words), which we claim God has given in space-time history, real history, and certain great events, the greatest of which is the return of Jesus from the dead after he has died on a cross, cruelly, to do something, quite frankly, that makes little sense in a contemporary frame. Namely, to pay for the sins of other people. We’ll come to that in a moment.
Interestingly enough, in John 18, similar considerations surface. This is the passage drawn from John’s gospel, connected with Jesus’ death. He is before Pilate, the Roman governor. The text begins, “Then the Jews …” That is, the Jewish authority. All the participants here are Jews, Jesus included, apart from the Roman governor Caiaphas.
“The Jewish authorities led Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor.” And this exchange takes place: “What charges are you bringing against this man?” Immediately, they are a bit defensive. “If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” “Well, if he’s a criminal, take him and judge him by your own law,” they say.
But the reason they bring him to Pilate is because only Pilate, only the Roman authority, has the right to pronounce a capital sentence. The charge that is now being brought to Pilate is that Jesus is making himself out to be a king. That would make him a traitor as far as Caesar is concerned. The Roman government would have to execute him. That’s the charge. So Pilate then goes back inside and asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
Jesus asks, “Is that your own idea, or did others talk to you about me?” In other words, “Are you coming at this from some stream of genuine witness or is it because others are so malicious against me they want me dead?” “ ‘Am I a Jew?’ Pilate replied. ‘It was your own people, your own chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?’
Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews.” That is, by the Jewish authorities. “But now my kingdom is from another place.’ ” So whatever he means by his rule, by his king dominion, by his kingdom, he doesn’t mean just a political thing.
“ ‘You are a king, then!’ said Pilate. Jesus answered, ‘You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born and for this I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.’ ” Do you hear that? Supposing I got up and said, “I have an announcement to make. Everybody who believes in truth listens to everything I say.”
Would you be impressed? I doubt it. But this is the Jesus who goes through the Gospels and says these astonishing things again and again and again. One of my favorites is found in Matthew 11, where Jesus says of John the Baptist, who announces Jesus’ coming, “This is the greatest man born of woman because he introduced me.”
It is so ridiculous. What do you do with a claim like that? Or, there’s another one that I really like. Jesus sees a man who is ill, goes up to him and says, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.” Suppose, God forbid, someone raped my wife. Would you have the right to go to the rapist and say, “I forgive you”? I don’t think so.
There’s a whole literature on forgiveness that has come out of the Holocaust. And one of the most moving, wrenching accounts of the Holocaust in a book called The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal argues that forgiveness can only be granted by the victims. It’s odious, it’s obscene to grant it by somebody else. And because the victims, in this case, are dead, there is no forgiveness for the Nazis.
But you know, in the Bible, there’s a somewhat different stance. In the Bible, the one who has been most offended in all offenses is God himself. There is David, for example. He’s caught out not only in adultery but he actually murders the other woman’s husband so that he can have her and then tries to hide it all and gets caught out. But eventually, he is moved to pen the words, addressed to God, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”
Now in one sense, of course, that’s not true. In one sense, he sinned against the woman, he sinned against her husband, he sinned against the army generals whom he has manipulated to get this chap killed, and he sinned against the people in betraying their trust. He sinned against just about everybody. But he still says, “Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”
Because, you see, he’s part of a whole biblical stream that recognizes that the deepest part of the offense is precisely our insolence against God, which is why, in every offense, it is finally only God who can forgive. So here comes Jesus, and he sees somebody who apparently he has never met, and he says, “Your sins are forgiven you.” Either he’s on par with the person who forgives my wife’s rapist or he’s claiming to be God, which was understood at the time, too.
“Who are you? Are you making yourself out to be God to say something like this?” That’s the sort of thing Jesus is claiming here. “Everyone who is on the side of truth listens to me.” Here he’s standing before a Roman tribunal. He’s about to be executed by this most barbaric of tortures, crucifixion itself, and he calmly says, “If you listen to me you’re on the side of truth.”
Not because he’s making some sort of arrogant claim that is a bulwark against any form of sanity. Rather, because when he speaks, God himself speaks, and from God’s vantage point, this is merely reasonable. It makes sense. If you don’t see it from Jesus’ perspective and from God’s perspective, then there’s something wrong, which brings me to my last observation.
Lastly, Pilate’s answer, dismissive as it is, shows that there are moral dimensions to the recognition of truth. Pilate simply asks, “What is truth?” This is not an intellectually serious question on his lips. On some people’s lips it is, but not on his. He is not saying, “There is no such thing as truth,” where the obvious next step is to say, “Is that a truth?” And if not, then you can proceed with certain further discussions, and if it is, then it’s already self-defeating.
I mean, they’re some ways ahead, at least in discussion. Do you see? Nor is he saying, “Your truth is not my truth.” He’s not saying anything as serious as that. All he is saying is something like this, “I am an embittered, trapped man. I’m being manipulated to condemn someone who I don’t think is really guilty. Truth? That’s not what the courts are about. It’s politics. I have no choice. Your goose is cooked. You’re done. Bring on the next one.”
That’s what he means, which shows that in such matters as truth, there are almost always huge moral connections in the decisions we make, whether we like it or not. By moral I don’t mean in some narrow sense, I mean in the huge sense of who we are, what our values are, where we’re going. Thus, at the deepest level, Pilate could not really hear Jesus because of his own moral or immoral commitments.
He was committed not to having justice done, but to escaping the political trap that had been set for him, to maintaining his own role as governor, not to get into trouble with Caesar. Those were his gods. He was trapped. In this sense, you see, postmodernism is right. In our approach to truth, it’s never a matter merely of linear thought, straight-line thinking, weighing evidence. There are also questions of who we are, what we bring to the table.
For some people, Christianity is instantly attractive when they hear it presented because it talks about a God who forgives them, and they know they have things to be forgiven. It talks about how men and women can be reconciled to God and they want to know this God. For others, it’s instantly unattractive. Partly, in some cases, because they want to be God. And if there are other gods out there, then those gods, whatever they be, must serve us or we will find other gods.
They must be like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, extremely powerful but ultimately under the control of whoever rubs the lamp. So we speak of “the god in whom I may believe” rather than the God who is there. The reasons why thus some people do not hear Jesus are often complex, and intellectual self-perceptions, prior commitments, and our own self-idolatry, may blind us to hearing what Jesus says in horrible ways.
Then, we come sometimes to an end of ourselves and we begin to see that when Christ went to the cross it was to pay for our guilt and to receive us to himself. He wants our principal submission because we were made for God and that is the framework in which he makes his claim. That is, he makes the claim of God who speaks in history, who wants us to examine all of the evidence that is presented, but ultimately, to bow the knee and to give up claiming that we are God.
Question: The questioner asks, “In what sense is Christianity an ongoing thing?” That is, “I may have doubts and struggle with this or that uncertainty. Is this something that’s going to last me the rest of my life, or do I get to some place where suddenly I’m rock solid about everything, and so forth?”
Don Carson: It’s a good question, and to be frank, the experience of Christians diverges to some extent. Those who were brought up in Christian homes and Christian families often go through a time of struggle where they’re coming to terms with whether or not what they have been taught from their parents’ knees is, in their view, true or merely inherited from their parents.
That is part of growing up. I hate to sound like an old man, but it’s the truth. I went through it myself when I was reading chemistry and mathematics at McGill. It is part of becoming an independent person and thinking things through. So you learn a lot of Bible stories, you sort of take them for granted and then you move on to other things. Sometimes it’s intellectual challenges that shake you up, and sometimes it’s moral challenges, problems of evil, and so on.
Now you get through that stage sometimes and then you might go on for many years of happy existence and then suddenly, your spouse is suffering from a horrible cancer. Then you might start raising questions you’ve never raised before. Now you start reading the Bible with new eyes. You might spend a lot of time in the book of Job or in 1 Peter, both of which say a great deal about suffering.
So I guess what I would say, then, is those who get hold of a lot of information and are careful about it and eventually form a whole worldview that is God-centered and biblically faithful often become extremely stable in their faith, really stable, so that there are not many intellectual doubts that afflict them.
But there are some people who don’t push far enough. They just want glib answers, so they are impressed by the next person who speaks. Then if they hear somebody really articulate from another side, everything is thrown into jeopardy again. They really are quite unstable in their faith for many, many, many years.
The one thing I will say, however, is this: in the Christian way of looking at things, it’s not the intensity of your faith that is crucial, or even its maturity, but its object. That is to say, what saves you is not believing regardless of what you believe. “I’ll believe, I’ll believe, I’ll believe,” and churn up your stomach muscles to believe what you don’t really believe.
Rather, it’s the object of faith which is crucial. Namely, Christ himself and what he’s done on the cross, and so on. Sometimes, it’s a part of wisdom, when you can’t answer this problem or that problem or some other problem, to get to the center. “I may not be able to solve all my questions in the domain of the origin of suffering. I can push pretty far, but I may have huge strands left over, but I do believe it absolutely convincing that Jesus rose from the dead, and there I will trust.”
That gives you a certain kind of center which leaves you at a stable place while you’re still exploring something of the peripheries. The only thing I would say at that juncture is it’s important not only to listen to critics but also to listen to Christians who have walked a long time. Find what there is to read and interact, talk with people. Don’t be afraid. Don’t get nervous. Don’t hide in a corner. Talk, talk. Don’t become embittered. Explore, explore, and become stable. You have to work these things through.
Question: The question is, “Do I think evangelical Christianity relies too heavily upon modernism?” That’s an astute question.
Don: I think some forms of it, in the past, have. I think some forms of it in the present rely too heavily on postmodernism. I would want to argue that really informed Christians should neither align themselves entirely with either modernism or postmodernism. I think there are better Christian structures of epistemology that take some of what’s best in both and don’t really quite belong in either camp.
Believe it or not, I really am not a systematic postmodernism basher. You might not guess so from what I said today. Postmodernism says some important things, but I think it goes way over the top and is itself insufferably arrogant when it goes so far as to say that even if there is an omniscient God who speaks we cannot possibly know it.
We cannot know it omnisciently. That’s true. But that’s setting up the bar too high. I do think we can know it. And yet, postmodernism is not all wrong when it points out the complexities of how human beings come to know. In fact, I would say postmodernism doesn’t go far enough. Not only are we finite, we’re sinful. We have built in ways of wanting to distort truth in all kinds of corrupting fashions. In one sense, therefore, I go farther than postmodernists in the critique of modernism and its approach to knowledge.
