Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Postmodernism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Today, we are going to look at this business of postmodernism. You may be as tired as I am of talking about postmodernism. One does feel that this is a horse that has been flogged half to death. On the other hand, I hope that by laying certain things out the way I hope to do so today, then instead of it merely being a jeremiad or merely a cultural description, we may get hold of some of the crucial analytic issues that are at stake that will help us as we think through what we should be doing in our own ministries.
The term postmodern is not self-evident. It’s a bit barbarous. If modern refers to what is contemporary, postmodern, you would think, should refer to what is future. Of course, that’s not what happened. The term was first coined in the nineteenth century and then went out of use. It was coined again in the 1920s (in the twentieth century) in the domain of architecture. There was a style of architecture called modern, and then the style changed. Now what do you do?
There’s a sense in which every new style that comes along is, in fact, modern, but because the term modern was particularly associated with this style, and then the styled changed, then the next term could not be called modern, in the sense of mere contemporary, because there was no particular technical term that had been associated with the previous modern. So as a result, postmodern came to be invented.
Then it was applied to other fields, fields of economics and elsewhere, and now, of course, the term is ubiquitous. It is everywhere. The problem is once it becomes attached to almost everything, it is in danger of meaning almost nothing. It is merely a global term of either approval or disapprobation, depending on your point of view.
For our purposes, it seems to me that the heart of the cultural issues connected with the vast range of cultural changes under the rubric of postmodernism focus, in my judgment, on epistemology, the study of how we know things. I’m certainly not the only one who thinks this. That is a very common assessment, and in my view, it is right.
Now at the risk of terrible oversimplification, we may distinguish a premodern, a modern, and a postmodern approach to epistemology. It is a simplification, but it’s still useful. For our purposes, the premodern period will run from the Middle Ages through to about the end of the Reformation, approximately 1600. Now movements in history are messy. They overlap, they’re anticipated, and so forth, but for our purposes, we’ll run from the end of the Middle Ages through to about 1600.
Now what are the characteristics of premodern epistemology? The dominant intellectuals in Europe under premodern epistemology thought of human knowledge somewhat along these lines: There is a God who knows everything. We finite human beings may come to learn only some small part of what God knows. In other words, if we know anything it is, by definition, going to be a small fraction of what God perfectly knows. If there is a God who knows everything, all human knowledge must necessarily be a subset of that knowledge.
So the reservoir of all knowledge is God himself. Human knowing is nothing more than knowing a subset of what God knows, and that means that in some sense or other, all human acquisition of knowledge is the acquiring of what God already knows. To look at it from God’s perspective, human knowledge is bound up with revelation. God knows all things, and for us to know any part of what he knows, God must, in some sense, disclose it.
He discloses it in the natural order; hence, natural philosophy, which came to be called science. He discloses it in Scripture. He discloses it in the church. He discloses it by reason. He discloses it in community. How much he discloses by any particular means, how much he discloses by a dream, by providence, or by Scripture, well there the Christians might disagree. Thus, Aquinas and Calvin, though they are both premodern in their epistemology, do not agree on exactly how much revelation is disclosed in nature. They disagree.
Nevertheless, they are deeply joined by their common understanding that, at the end of the day, human knowledge depends, finally, on coming to know what God exhaustively and perfectly knows. Thus the ultimate criterion of what is true knowledge is God himself. Now that does not mean that we have perfect access to what God knows. That does not solve all the problems, but in the theoretical understanding of how knowledge works, then the ultimate judge, as he is the ultimate judge in every domain, is God himself.
Now many people (again, this is not peculiar to me) use the figure of Rene Descartes as the strategic transition point into modern epistemology. Rene Descartes was not, as some introductory philosophy books portray him, a systematic skeptic. In fact, he was a devout Roman Catholic, but he was discovering that in Europe’s universities there were more and more intellectuals who were self-consciously rejecting premodern epistemology because there were a rising number of atheists.
If you’re an atheist, obviously you can’t buy into premodern epistemology. That assumes the existence of a knowing God in the first place. So he was discovering, therefore, that in Europe’s universities (and, of course, in his case he was thinking particularly of UniversitÈ de Paris, the University of Paris) there were a rising number of intellectuals that no longer shared that premodern epistemology.
So he was searching for a common foundation, a common ground, a common base, on which you could build up structures of knowledge once you’ve lost the knowledge of God. Out of this, in the early 1600s, he came to his (from his point of view) insight or his understanding, taught to every first-year philosophy student today in the little Latin slogan: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Now, in fact, he was not the first person to have said something like that.
Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, had said si fallor sum. That is, “If I err, I am,” but Augustine never placed this within the framework of an entire epistemological structure. It did not become revolutionary for Augustine. Almost certainly, in fact, Descartes had read this in Augustine, because in those days everybody read Augustine. It’s impossible to imagine that a man as learned as Descartes would not have read it in Saint Augustine.
On the other hand, he didn’t remember it as such. As he articulated it, it was cogito ergo sum, and that is the way it has come down to us. Now whether or not you think of this as good philosophy or a good foundation is irrelevant. At this point, I’m merely interested in the historical realities. When he formulated this, it was still another almost 15 years before he came out with his major work. It was tied, in his thinking, to a certain philosophical structure that is adopted by almost no one today, and I need not spend any time expounding it.
There is very good evidence (it’s not quite irrefutable) that after he thought up this wonderful insight, he went to a monastery dedicated to Saint Anne in order to offer special prayers of gratitude to God for giving him the insight, which is not the sort of thing that your average skeptic would do. This was entirely in line, you see, with his devout Catholicism.
From his perspective, he was of the conviction that with this foundation, ultimately using the philosophical structures that he built, he could almost, as it were, argue people into the kingdom, argue people into a shared knowledge of God, and argue people to a shared epistemological structure.
1. With time, modern epistemology (Enlightenment epistemology is virtually an equivalent term) came to be characterized by six features.
A. Modern epistemology begins with I, the finite knower.
“I think, therefore I am.” That is the main difference between modern epistemology and premodern epistemology. Structurally, premodern epistemology begins with an infinite God knowing everything in the first place. Modern epistemology begins with a finite I.
The question is.… How does this finite I know things? It does not presuppose God. It does not presuppose God knows everything. It does not presuppose a certain kind of God. It just begins with the finite human knower, and if there is an I who is actually thinking about these things, if there is a thinker at all, then there must be the existence of the thinker. If there is thinking, there must be a thinker, if I may put it that way. That became his basis, but it begins with a finite I. Now we’ll come to the significance of that in due course.
B. It presupposed, in line with premodern epistemology, that epistemological certainty is both desirable and attainable.
That is, it presupposed that the finite knower could come to know objective truth truly and that this is a good thing.
C. It was profoundly foundationalist.
That is, it was self-consciously looking for a shared foundation that could be shared with others who might disagree on all kinds of philosophical issues, theology issues, worldview issues, racial issues, moral issues, all kinds of things; nevertheless, there would be a shared epistemological structure, a shared foundation.
Initially, the foundation was, for Descartes, cogito ergo sum, but this came to be an approach that was adopted in every discipline, so that every discipline looks for certain axioms, certain self-evident assumptions that everybody in the guild of that discipline assumes. Then, once you’ve got those foundations in place, you develop methods.
D. It is profoundly methodological.
You establish the foundations, then you build your methods, then you turn the crank, and out comes truth. Foundations plus methods, turn the crank, and out comes truth. That means that all over the Western world (and even today, although it’s loosening today for reasons that we’ll see in a moment) until very recently, a doctoral dissertation in any discipline, whether you’re talking about nuclear physics or abstract philosophy, had to lay out its assumptions and its methods.
If you wrote a dissertation on the exegesis of 2 Esdras, or if you wrote some exploratory mathematical model for string theory in nuclear physics, you had to lay out the things that you were assuming, lay out your methodological approaches, turn the crank, and then produce your answers at the end. If, in fact, your answers are judged to be convincing, true, or a net addition to the aggregate of human knowledge, but your methods are flawed, you flunk.
In fact, by and large in Western universities if your methods are good but the outcome is poor, that gets you higher marks than if your methods are really atrocious and your outcome is stunning. So this business of appropriate foundations plus controlled methods that all sides agree are appropriately in place at this point, that’s part of the approach to Western epistemology, also called Enlightenment epistemology or modern epistemology.
E. It is assumed under this aegis that truth is objective and universal.
In other words, modernists strove for ahistorical universality. That is, a universality of perspective that is distinctly ahistorical. The a, of course, is the alpha privative. It is unhistorical. It is not made contingent by history, culture, language, race, or any other factor.
If you discover in Quito, Ecuador, that a water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, lo and behold, the same is true in Cochran, Hungary. If you discover some truth in the domain of ethics or some truth in the domain of microbiology, and you discover it in Moscow, Idaho, it’s also true in Moscow, Russia. It doesn’t really matter because a truth is truth. It’s universal. It’s objective, and it transcends history, culture, race, language, and so forth. In other words, they strove for ahistorical universality.
F. Increasingly, nevertheless, from about the middle of the nineteenth century on, there was a rise of philosophical naturalism.
That is, that philosophical stance which insists that all that is, is matter, energy, space, and time. That’s it. Full stop. This was certainly not true at the beginning, it was certainly not true for Rene Descartes, and it was not, by and large, true in Europe of mainline thinkers until about the middle of the nineteenth century.
This wasn’t true of most intellectuals in Europe until the arrival of Darwin. Huxley said, rather shrewdly, that Darwin made atheism intellectually respectable. So there were atheists before that, of course, and many people who were before Darwin were, in fact, not theists anyway but deists. So the pattern is very complex.
This is far from saying that all scientists were Christian in some sort of biblical sense. Nevertheless, there was not the antipathy between Christianity and science or between Christianity and modern epistemology that gradually became much stronger after 1859 and the publication of the On the Origin of Species. Darwin tended to make atheism intellectually respectable. Now you can see the outworking of this stance in all kinds of ways.
Suppose that a student graduates from secondary school with very good marks and wants to do a university degree in chemistry at a first-class university in your country. This student is very impressive with respect to exams, tests, and so forth, but in a letter, which he sends to the registrar of the university, he says, “I should tell you, nevertheless, that I do not believe in the molecular theory of matter. I do not think that the water molecule is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. I do not think that the periodic table is correct. It seems to me there’s a better explanation,” and so on.
It’s almost inconceivable that could be said, but supposing somebody did say that sort of thing. Would that student get a place at the university regardless of how good the grades were? Well, of course not. The person would be considered some sort of kook, a crackpot, but you see, that’s exactly what went on in many Marxist universities with respect to history.
Once you assume that Marxist historiography is scientific, once that’s the assumption or the given, just as the periodic table is the given in chemistry, then even if you get a student with very, very good marks who really does methodologically disavow Marxist historiography, what history department is going to take him?
The West has similar sorts of pressures as well in different ways, and all of this really turns on the assumption that there are certain axioms, certain self-evident universals, and certain foundations that are non-negotiable. They’re part of the discipline, and certain methods.… Now, with time, your methods change. So let’s take biblical studies.
The methods of biblical studies may be bound up with classical exegesis, learning Greek and Hebrew, and this sort of thing. Then along comes source criticism, tradition criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism. Then eventually you start getting narrative criticism, you get post-structuralism, then you get linguistic theory coming in, and so on.
New methods come along all the time, but when those new methods come along, people are not saying, “All the previous methods are all wrong.” It’s just that we didn’t get them all right. There is more to be said. So the results can be tweaked as new methods come along and are improved, and so on, but it takes much more to change the foundations. It takes much more to change the elemental assumptions at the beginning. Do you see?
So people come along and write a dissertation on John’s gospel, and it’s a source-critical one. They’re interacting, let’s say, with Bultmann’s source-critical approach to John’s gospel. Well, the person who did that, of course, was Moody Smith in his Yale-published dissertation on the composition of the fourth gospel, which was an assessment of Bultmann’s theory 30 years ago.
Then along comes Alan Culpepper, and his Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel is quite different. It’s really along narrative-critical lines, where he’s using narrative-critical theory that was actually developed for the nineteenth-century novel, and that’s his approach to how he’s going to read John’s gospel. He has a rather different reading.
He’s doing a different thing with the text, but he’s got a different set of operative controls. So long as he lays out his methods, everybody understands what the methods are, he’s very accurate in describing them, and then he’s consistent in using them in deploying them, it’s considered a good dissertation.
Whether you can preach any of it in the church might be another issue. Whether it’s tied to historic Christianity is beside the point. The question is whether it’s based on accepted foundations and decent controls methodologically speaking, then you turn the crank, and out comes the truth. Today we do this at another level, then, with the more recent tools that we get.
So that’s modernist epistemology, and it is clearly fruitful in many domains. One has to recognize that the glories and strengths, as well as the shames, of modern science really emerge, in very large part, out of this kind of epistemology. Lest we become too critical and too cynical, let’s be quite frank, the glory of a universal truth is surely something we don’t want to despise too quickly, do we?
2. Postmodern epistemology, for reasons that we’ll come to see in a few moments, reverses or revises all six of these characteristics.
I think that is the easiest way to think of postmodern epistemology. Now, once again, it needs to be said that history is messy. Just as it was not the case that you had a kind of premodern epistemology, then Rene Descartes came along, and he said, “cogito ergo sum,” and everybody in Europe became a modern. That’s clearly not what happened.
There are some premoderns amongst us yet, and there are some moderns amongst us, amongst the premoderns. History is messy, and before Descartes comes along, there are lots of antecedents as well, aren’t there? There are people who anticipate something; they just don’t actually trigger things. Long before Darwin, there were lots of antecedents to Darwinism too. History is messy, isn’t it?
So long before postmodernism gained the intellectual ascendency that it now has in most Western universities (and increasingly in Central and Eastern European universities as well, although it’s a long way from having that kind of power and clout yet), it needs to be said that there were antecedents in the Western world. Let me mention a few of them.
Immanuel Kant, for example, in Germany (though he was no postmodern), by making his strong distinction between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world, anticipated the direction of a fair bit of Western epistemology. You see, in his distinction, the phenomenal world provides you with many pieces of data that your senses pick up and process, but it is the ordering of the data in your mind that gives a control, an order, a meaning, and a structure. These things do not become imposed on the material merely by the dictate of the material. It belongs to the noumenal world.
What that ultimately means, of course, is that sooner or later, the meaning of things is controlled finally by the mind in a way that may be abstracted from what is provided by sensory perception. Now he was no postmodern, but you can understand how his fundamental philosophical distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal can pave the way along these lines. That’s the German world.
Likewise (still in the German world) Friedrich Nietzsche, who really is a rigorous philosophical materialist. Nietzsche insists there is no meaning that is abstracted from questions of power, and thus no questions of right or wrong except that which is imposed by power. Well, that means that the claims of right and wrong and the claims of meaning and significance that many people find have all been relativized, dismissed, and finally reduced to what can be overcome by the power of the barrel of a gun.
Now again, he was not a postmodern in any sort of systematic sense, but he had the effect of reducing or minimizing the significance of truth claims, meaning claims, value claims, and ethical claims that were broadly understood in the culture.
In the English world, the Romantic period of literature, Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, and people like that.… “Fields of dancing daffodils,” and so on. Real meaning is in beauty, truth is beauty, and all this sort of thing.
Again it’s not strictly a postmodern world, but it suddenly means that you’re finding truth in concepts and structures of thought that are far less rigorous than foundationalism, methods (turn the crank), objective propositional control, and so on. In some ways, the Romantic period of English poetry can be understood as a kind of rebellion against the aridity of a merely scientism approach to epistemology.
In the French world, existentialism in its various forms, of course, culminating with the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre.… There was a lovely piece of graffito that was found in the Paris subway in the 60s when students were rebelling, throwing bombs, and things like this. It said, “Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘To do is to be.’ Albert Camus: ‘To be is to do.’ Frank Sinatra: ‘Do be do be do.’ ” The French have had it in for the Americans for a long time. You’ve got to understand that.
Nevertheless, you can see that these fundamental questions of meaning were being strongly debated long before Paul de Man came along or Lacan or Michel Foucault. These questions were, in some ways, anticipated by the existentialists. Meaning is not found in objective truth; it’s found (in the case of Sartre) in the decisions you take and what you do.
Although there was not a whole postmodern epistemology behind this; nevertheless, it was heading in that sort of direction, which is one of the reasons why someone like Francis Schaeffer could anticipate the direction in which some things were going in Europe long before they actually flowered after his death in what we today call postmodernism.
At the risk of oversimplification, it seems to me that the three fundamental streams, the most important streams that have gone into postmodernism or postmodern epistemology, are one from the German world, one from the French world, and one from the Anglo-American world, especially in this case American. The Brits on this front have tended to be more eclectic, picking up a piece here and a piece there. They have not been the leaders on this front, for better or for worse.
From the German side came a great deal of study, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, in the domain of hermeneutic. At the end of the nineteenth century, still well-nestled within the framework of a modernist epistemology, hermeneutics was understood to be that science and art by which we come to interpret things truly. In the field of biblical hermeneutics, where most theologians were introduced to it, then they would read books like that of Terry, a big fat book called Biblical Hermeneutics in the English-speaking world, and other ones.
In its simplistic form, those books argued that they would give you the tools for a right interpretation of Scripture.… You’ve got to learn Greek and Hebrew, of course, and Aramaic. You’ve got to learn some basic grammar. Then you’ve got to learn different genres of literature. You’ve got to learn what parables are and how they work. You’ve got to learn what apocalyptic images are, and so on.
If you want to see a very good example of this sort of thing, read the first two editions (not the third, which has already changed) of Protestant Biblical Interpretation by Ramm. The whole book is made up of these sorts of principles, rules, and structures. The assumption really is that if you get those structures right, if you know how to do it, then you have the foundation.
The Bible is the Word of God. Then you have the tools, the methods, and the hermeneutical rules. Then you turn the crank and out comes truth. You don’t need all that much historical theology. You know how to find the truth yourself from Scripture. You learn Greek and Hebrew properly, you learn the interpretive rules properly, you turn the crank, and out comes the right answer. That’s what hermeneutics largely was. It is still deeply embedded in modern epistemology.
Again, it’s not all wrong. We’ll see in due course. You will discover shortly that I do not want to think of myself as either a modernist or a postmodern. I want to say in the gentlest kind of way, “A plague on both your houses,” but there are some things to be appreciated from both the houses too. I will be arguing in due course that Christians should not be shanghaied by either worldview.
The Germans began to ask the question, in effect, “But who is this I who is trying to know things? I think, therefore I am.” Look at me. I’m a middle-aged white Canadian male. My education has gone down this track not that track. Let’s face it, I am not a sub-Saharan black African prostitute with AIDS in Mombasa, and that means I don’t look at things quite the way she does.
Under the principles of the old hermeneutics, there is the text, and I am the knower. The whole point is that if I ask the right questions, and I hit the text, then the text comes back and hits me with the right answer. But now there is recognition that I am not myself a neutral party. The questions I ask and the methods I deploy are themselves a function of who I am. Another I might have another set of questions and another set of givens. The I is finite, and that limitation means that we’re never neutral.
So instead of coming at the text directly with a flat, straight-on, controlled methodological question, it’s as if I’m sort of swiping it from a certain kind of angle. That means that the kinds of things that I can hear the text saying back to me are controlled in part by who I am, my strengths and limitations, my characteristics, and so on.
Instead of a direct answer in and a direct answer back or a direct question and a direct answer, and a controlled given and “the truth” coming back, it’s now controlled in part by the peculiarities of who I am. I swipe it, and it comes back and swipes me back, as it were. By that swiping me back, I am now myself subtly changed so that when I approach the text the next time, it’s a slightly different me who is approaching the text.
Then it comes back to me and swipes me back, so when I come to it the next time, it’s a slightly different me again. Now instead of having a straight line in and out, I’ve got a hermeneutical circle. It’s going round and round. Obviously, if you push that model far enough, you can’t ever speak of objective truth. I’m not suggesting that all the Germans did. Some did. Some did not.
Then in the French world, the approach was initially through language and linguistics. The father of modern linguistics, of course, was French, Ferdinand de Saussure. During his life he published almost nothing, but after his death his students put together four volumes of his notes and published this multi-volume Cours de linguistique gÈnÈrale, which became the foundational textbook for all linguistics courses everywhere. It’s now displaced, of course, but it was the foundation of modern linguistics.
De Saussure was trying to break down all kinds of ontological views of language. What is the connection between the word tree and that plant that is growing outside your bedroom window that is producing apples? Here is the word tree, and there is the ontological.… What is the connection? Many philosophers of language up to that point were trying to establish some deep etymological, ontological, or some other kind of connection.
He wanted to argue, “No, it’s arbitrary. It’s established by difference. The difference between tree, tea, the, three, Rumpelstiltskin, and roller coaster is established, in fact, by usage. You can see that, surely, when you move from language to language.” A tree is an arbre, a Baum, or whatever language it is.
There’s no particular reason, except usage and common function within a language, why a tree shouldn’t be called a shmookelblox. If it were universally accepted within the English language that from henceforth all trees will be called shmookelbloxen, then that is what we would think of when we heard the word shmookelblox. We would think of what we now think by tree.
There is nothing deep to the word tree itself. It’s established by difference in usage. So when I say tree, I mean something different than if I put in an h and say three, or if I take out the r, change the e to an a and have a cup of tea. Or if I leave the e in so it’s tee but drop the r, and I tee off on a golf course. It’s the difference in usage. That’s all. DiffÈrence.
However, once you reach the deconstructionists, then the insights of de Saussure in linguistic theory (and he was profoundly right in almost everything he touched, it seems to me, in the area of linguistics himself) the kinds of things that he was saying about diffÈrence with respect to the word or with respect to the idiom, they began to apply to the sentence, the paragraph, and the discourse, so that meaning becomes less and less connected with relationship to extratextual reality and more and more connected with subjective diffÈrence.
The question becomes so important for one particular French expert in deconstruction that he spells diffÈrence differently. He changes the final e to an a. It becomes a philosophical structure for him. DiffÈrance.
Now there were other movements, of course. Michel Foucault was very influential. He’s a very interesting chap, of course, because he argued very strongly that one of the strongest motivations for the postmoderns, in which he finds himself, was the desire to be sexually and morally free, and one of the ways to become sexually and morally free.… This is an argument that Dewey presented in the 1930s too, interestingly enough. So did Huxley, and then Michel Foucault says something very similar.
He says one of the ways to become sexually and morally free is precisely by insisting there’s no meaning and there are no morals. Once you destroy meaning and morals, then of course, you are free. He openly says so; he argues the point at great length. So in university talks, I quote these passages at great length and have a lovely time with them. At least Michel Foucault was honest. Not all of the experts in French dÈconstruction really were. That is the French contribution.
The American contribution has tended to come in from the social sciences. That is to say, meaning is often found in the peculiarities of a particular group. One group looks at something one way and another group looks at something another way. The social sciences are interested in various epistemological groups, in various hermeneutical groups, and in various interpretive communities. All of these expressions are common.
So Miss Christian goes off to university, and in her Philosophy 101 course, somewhere along the line, she takes courage in hand. She’s a Christian, and she’s going to fly her flag. When it comes to studying Plato or something, she raises her hand, and she starts saying certain things from a Christian perspective. The philosopher who’s teaching this class is very gifted, and he says, “I’m so glad you made your contribution, Miss Christian. Do you come from a Christian home?”
“Yes, yes. I do.”
“Is that at least part of the reason why you are a Christian?”
“Well, I’m sure that’s the case. My parents loved me and taught me the Bible. I went to a church. It’s what I’ve come to believe myself now, but I’m sure that’s a factor.”
“Have you met Achmud over there, three rows back?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Do you know that he’s a Muslim?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think he’s a Muslim?”
“Well, I suppose he was brought up a Muslim. He’s influenced these ways himself.”
“So do you think that he’s wrong?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”
“But on the other hand, he thinks you’re wrong.”
“Well, yeah, but I think Jesus is the truth.”
“Well, he thinks that Muhammad gave the truth, and he thinks that, not because he’s studied everything a great deal, but because he was brought up in a Muslim home. You think what you think because you were brought up in a Christian home. Isn’t that basically the reason? Don’t you belong to a certain interpretive community, and he belongs to a certain interpretive community? Isn’t that the truth?”
“Well, yes, I suspect it is.”
“So what give you the right to stand in judgment of him?”
You see, it really becomes a matter of interpretive community. Now you put all of these things together (that is, the subjectivity bound up with the finiteness of the human knower, the subjectivity bound up with the mere functionality of language use, and the fact that we are, in fact, inevitably members of interpretive communities) and at the end of the day, how can you speak any longer of objective truth? You start recognizing the intrinsic subjectivity of all pretentions to human knowledge, do you not?
Now there were many antecedents to these things, obviously, but they really came to have a kind of increasing control of the intellectual front line of Western universities from about 1970 on. It was earlier in some universities, obviously, or in some departments, and a little later in other universities.
It needs to be said that this is not a universal perception. I will come back to the diversities of public perception about what’s going on in few moments, but what I want to do now is to show you how postmodernism, under these pressures, has either revised or overthrown the six controlling characteristics of modernist epistemology. Let me come then to these six characteristics.
A. Postmodernism, like modernism, does begin with a finite I, but it draws very different conclusions.
Modernism, beginning with the finite I, was still in the shadow of premodern epistemology, so it was still convinced there was objective truth out there that could be known. Now from the assumption of the finite I comes the recognition that because the I is finite, therefore, objectivity is lost.
In a premodern epistemology, ultimately objectivity is grounded in God’s knowing, but now there is no universal mind. There is no universal knower. There is no omniscient mind. Thus there is no sure place on which to stand. There is no ultimate criterion.
Now because postmodern epistemology shares with modern epistemology the assumption that the finite human knower is focal, that is why some thinkers refuse to use the term postmodern. They say it’s really the same species. It begins with human autonomy, and the only distinction is between early and late modernism. In other words, they argue that postmodernism is merely modernism gone to seed or modernism working out its own realities. It’s modernism coming to terms with itself.
So, for example, Harold Netland, to some extent Tom Oden, and others.… Now these are merely terminological questions, so I don’t feel strongly about them one way or the other, and if your definition of modernism and postmodernism turns exclusively on who the knower is (the first knower), then that’s a valid point, in which case it’s better to think of postmodernism in terms of being a kind of late modernism. I think that’s correct. You’re still talking about the autonomy of the finite knower.
On the other hand, if you think of modernism in terms of something like the list of six controlling characteristics that I’ve just given you, then the changes are so dramatic, as we’ll see, that it seems to me to be better to think of a new era. The implications are pretty strong, and so I still prefer to use the term postmodern. It’s merely a terminological thing. If you want to call it shplakelblux, I don’t care.
B. Modernism, beginning with the I, insisted that epistemological certainty is both desirable and attainable. Postmodernism says it is neither desirable nor attainable.
It’s not attainable because there is no sure place on which to stand. There is no fulcrum for your lever. There is no omniscient mind by which to test things. Things are merely constrained by, in the American model, constraints of particular interpretive communities. They are lost in the subjectivity of language. They are lost in the limitations of the finite knower.
So epistemological certainty is, in fact, a chimera. It cannot be found. Thus, those who claim epistemological certainty are arrogant, bigoted, and out of date. Moreover, they say not only is epistemological certainty unattainable, experience shows it is not even desirable because (this is really the contribution of Foucault) all statements are totalizing. That is to say, they impose a kind of worldview, a total structure, which is itself necessarily manipulative.
It is, therefore, much better in the human condition.… Even if somehow, miraculously, you could get absolute truth, it’s not even desirable because that will prove manipulative and controlling. It’s far better to speak of correlative truths, complementary truths, or truths from different perspectives: the truth for this world, the truth for that group, the truth for this interpretive community, the truth for that religion, the truth for this stance, the truth for that stance, the truth for the feminist, the truth for the sub-Saharan black African, the truth for the white North American male, the truth for the … whatever. Do you see?
All of these truths together are different slants on things, and this gives us the richness of the human condition. It gives us the richness of diversity. It gives us color and depth, all of which you lose once you start insisting there is simply “the truth.” Thus, epistemological certainty is neither attainable nor desirable in postmodernism.
C. Postmodern epistemology is profoundly anti-foundational because, it is argued, the things that we think are foundations are inevitably the structures of finite human beings.
They are not secure. They have not been disclosed by an omniscient mind outside of things and dumped into us so that we can use that as the fulcrum on which to move the world. There is no foundation.
D. Likewise, the so-called methodological controls are merely the methodological structures that some interpretive community, some finite knower, some research project, or some tradition is using.
That’s all. They have no transcendental objectivity. In fact, they are instruments of coercive subjectivity. If you use different methods, you might come out with different things.
So now you look back over the field of biblical studies, and you look at what Bultmann did, you look at what Moody Smith did, you look at what Alan Culpepper did, you look at what John Ashton did, you look at what whoever your favorite commentator or Johannine scholar is, and they’re doing different things. They are reading John’s gospel differently. Very differently.
It is argued that because of these different methods, there is no adjudicator. You can assess how good the argument is given the particular methods that are adopted or how self-consistent it is. You cannot adjudicate as to whether or not it is true. It may simply be true granted these methods, these approaches, or this sort of approach to a text, but that’s the most you can say.
E. This means that you can no longer speak of striving for ahistorical universality.
That’s a chimera. In fact, it’s an idol.
F. As for philosophical naturalism, that’s very interesting as well.
There are certainly many, many postmoderns who have adopted philosophical naturalism. On the other hand, postmodernism, precisely because it is becoming so open to different possibilities for knowing, has in some ways expanded the categories of knowledge to include astrology, insight, third eye, and subjective vision, so a great deal of contemporary fantasy (the X-Men or science fiction like Contact with Jodi Foster) presupposes an approach to knowing that goes way outside any possibility of genuine science.
Older science fiction tried to work in line with what was understood of physics and tried to extrapolate forward to what physics might become, but some contemporary science fiction is lapping into the domain of fantasy without acknowledging that’s what it’s doing because it is profoundly anti-scientific in any historic sense whatsoever and maps into lines connected with the spirit, expanding of consciousness, and all kinds of things.
So in one sense, this new postmodern world is now open to theories of knowledge, approaches to knowing things, intuitions, subjectivity, astrology, in connection with the universe, expanded consciousness, and so on, that is, in theory, open to far more sources of knowledge and far more ways and means of acquiring knowledge. Except that the knowledge then is not of the ahistorical, universal sort. It’s not easy to falsify, so now we may speak in almost creedal terms even of some scientific things.
When my wife was desperately ill of cancer, and we thought there was a very good chance she wouldn’t make it, I had friends writing and emailing from around the world. Some of them would say, “Have you tried the particular natural remedy of …” and then it would be filled in. Then there would be a couple of anecdotes … a couple of people who have taken this, and the cancer was miraculously reversed and so on.
Then would come the pitch line: “You do believe in alternative medicine, don’t you?” This sounds like a religious thing. “You do believe in it, don’t you?” So I would reply, “I believe in the effectiveness of all approaches to the cure of medicine that have been double-blind tested.” Since most of them didn’t know what double-blind testing was, that would sort of end the discussion in any case, but otherwise it is merely anecdotal information.
You see, it’s almost a creedal thing, a religious thing. “You do believe in it, don’t you?” So that you’re somehow inferior, knocking another position, or being critical of another position if you say that you’re a little bit skeptical of all of these alternative medicines. Life is complex, isn’t it? Yet there is something about alternative medicine. What about acupuncture? Let me say again that this domain is extremely complex in several ways, nor is this merely a Christian concern.
There was a very interesting book published in 1995 called Higher Superstition. It was published by Johns Hopkins University Press and written by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. Now Paul Gross and Norman Levitt.… One is a physicist and the other is a mathematician, and they are both philosophical naturalists. Neither is a Christian, and they are both deeply committed to modernist epistemology. They are outrageously funny and bitterly denunciatory of postmodern epistemology.
They go so far as to argue, in effect, that postmoderns are ruining the universities, and what should happen is all the postmoderns in the arts departments should be kicked out, form their own little universities where they can play their imaginary games with imaginary words about imaginary truths while the real knowers, namely the scientists, the mathematicians, and the business people, can get on with the real work of knowledge acquisition in real universities while all the other people are playing their silly games.
That’s really the thesis of the book, but it’s a serious book just the same. It’s Johns Hopkins University Press, and it works through various domains of thought. By all means, if you want a good laugh on a Sunday afternoon, read Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. It’s far, far more denunciatory and bitter than anything I would say, but it is a reflection of how deeply these debates are going on in university circles.
Moreover, in the domain of science, things are not quite as easy and straightforward as they would say because philosophers of science, likewise, are troubled by these matters. In 1963, the first edition of Thomas Kuhn’s book came out called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It’s gone through two or three editions.
What he really argues is that science does not progress by acquiring more facts. Another fact and another fact and another fact, so it’s merely a question of addition. Rather, you get a theory that’s operating. Then as you get more hard data, you discover the theory doesn’t work in certain cases so that eventually you get another theory that replaces it, and you have what he calls a paradigm shift. You shift from one paradigm to another. As you move to another paradigm, then the old paradigm falls away.
So the sensory data actually changed the paradigm in due course, but not directly by addition. Rather, you get a lot of things that don’t fit until you shift into another paradigm. So you have a whole lot of people with the theory of phlogiston, and it eventually gets overthrown by a theory of oxygen. You have Newtonian physics that eventually gets replaced by the new physics, by Einsteinianism.
Then, of course, that doesn’t work in certain respects, so quantum mechanics is invented, and somebody’s got to sort out the mess of the tension between quantum mechanics and relativity theory because that’s never been put together. What we really need is a unified field theory, and now physicists have disagreed as to whether that will ever be achievable and so on. It’s all very complex, but there are whole structures of thought that go way beyond mere facticity, surely.
Now this sort of approach to science that really has come from the philosophers of science has generated enormous debate. Thomas Kuhn has been very severely criticized. Not everybody realizes that, but there have been entire volumes of essays critiquing and modifying Kuhn. Kuhn’s third edition is better than his first two editions in this regard.
So sometimes when people who are suspicious of postmodernism give a certain kind of superficial response, they really do misunderstand. They say, “Oh, yes. All these postmoderns don’t want any facts, but they’re prepared to fly a Boeing at seven miles up. There are a lot of facts there keeping that plane in the air, aren’t there? All the laws of aerodynamics, all the theory that’s gone into the thrust of those Pratt & Whitney engines, and so forth. Do you see? Science does deal with facts, doesn’t it?”
Well, yes. Postmoderns don’t think that planes are an illusion. They’re not stupid people, but what they are saying is that, nevertheless, the scientific structures that control these things are themselves projections of the human mind, which could in theory get overthrown by some new paradigm that comes along later. That’s what they argue.
Now, of course, people argue back on that one too, but because of that, two or three years ago, interestingly enough, there was a major conference in London sponsored by some Cambridge scientists on science, Christians, and epistemology. Almost everybody there was a scientist. I think I was the exception. I was invited to say something about epistemology because I had published in that area before.
About a third of the people were not Christians; two thirds probably were because, in fact, those who were organizing the conference were saying that in some ways both scientists and Christians have a certain stake in the possibility of knowing truth. So what are the overlaps of our interests here? That’s why I was dragged in. In fact, the chap who organized it is at this conference: Dennis Alexander who’s a professor of microbiology, or something or other, at Cambridge University.
These areas, you see, are running into other kinds and categories of discussion. This is not something that’s being done in a corner. It’s remarkably complex. Let me open it up for questions at this juncture. What I want to do next is to talk about further correlatives of postmodernism before I start giving a response.
In other words, I’ve tried to tie postmodernism to the domain of epistemology, but there are other developments in the culture that are also at stake here and that feed postmodernism and are themselves fed by postmodernism. It’s worth listing half a dozen of those before we start thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of where we are and what bearing it has for us as theologians and Christians as we start talking about these things.
