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
I think that it is important to recognize that the kind of fundamental epistemological structures I am talking about transcend any particular philosophical movement. They’re more foundational. What that means is that long after Rene Descartes has gone to his reward, modernism may, nevertheless, persist for three centuries. Likewise today in France, Jacques Derrida is virtually unknown. Michel Foucault is almost as unknown. Jacques Derrida is better known in America today than he is in France.
So la dÈconstruction, as historically developed by some of these thinkers, is on the decline. Americans don’t know it yet, but it is. On the other hand, that does not mean that postmodernism is on the decline because the fundamental streams that have generated this kind of epistemological structure may themselves decline as philosophical systems without necessarily overturning the system by the decline of the source.
Epistemological structures that are deeply embedded in a culture are not easy to overturn. They can take quite some time. Modernism could withstand the impact of the Romantic period, withstand Kant, adapt and adopt the insights of various movements along the line, and still remain pretty stable. Now I do not think that postmodernism will last as long as modernism. I do not think so.
On the other hand, just because people say that Jacques Derrida is now passÈ, does not mean that postmodernism is on the edge of obliteration. I just do not see, yet, anything on the horizon that promises a big change. I see individuals who pass through postmodernism and come out the other side with some ill-defined eclecticism, but an ill-defined eclecticism does not constitute a movement that can withstand an articulated movement. An eclecticism never does. In fact, an eclecticism is itself part of the postmodern phenomenon.
So I suspect that postmodernism is with us at least for a few decades, and maybe for a much longer period of time. I could imagine some historical contingencies that could change that, at least temporarily. World war would do it. Major war generates all kinds of absolutes really fast. They’re not very well thought through, but it does generate all kinds of absolutes really fast. They may not be very stable, so that after the war, they’re overturned pretty fast too.
It’s easy to imagine all kinds of historical contingencies that could throw monkey wrenches at these things. I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, and I work for a nonprofit organization. As a result, I’m leery of predicting where things are going to go, but if modernism lasted 350 years, it is surely true to say that the pace of change in Western culture is today much faster, partly because of the speed of our communications.… For all kinds of reasons it’s faster.
There’s no way postmodernism, which is far more absurdist in any case, is going to be stable for three centuries. There’s just no way that it is. What come next, I don’t have any idea. I have no idea at all. I could imagine catastrophic results in war, decay, and degeneration. I could. I could imagine revival and reformation too. I could imagine all kinds of things, but I don’t know. There are too many contingencies.
Most people who play the game of futurology play it by examining the trends of the last few years, then extrapolating along similar lines in the future, then trying to throw in projections about responses to these things, and that sort of thing, but if history teaches us anything, it’s that trends don’t last very long. So I’m really nervous about playing those sorts of games.
So if you ask me if I think that postmodernism is with us for quite some time, my answer is yes. Do I think that the current structures of thought that have fed into them are going to prove enduring? They’re already fading. Other things are coming along. That has to be understood. Moreover, I have not dealt with all the strands. I’ve merely picked up a few representative ones.
I have not talked about the influence of Wittgenstein, for example, and language-game theory, especially later Wittgenstein; there are really two spheres or periods of Wittgenstein. I haven’t talked about these sorts of things that could be usefully explored. I’ve merely tried to give representative streams that have fed into these patterns.
Now what I want to do for a few minutes before we start coming to evaluation and response.… I want to lay out what I call some of the correlatives of postmodernism. By correlatives, I mean not things that are simple causes of postmodernism nor simply the outflow or results of postmodernism but things which could be either. That is, things which can strengthen the hand of postmodernism, and things which are themselves strengthened by postmodernism. They can be either and both. So I prefer to speak of them merely as the correlatives of postmodernism.
Let me give you one example. Once I’ve given you the example and show how it works, you’ll see right away. Then I can list a lot of others far more quickly, and I don’t need to say so much about them.
1. Consider, for example, the decline in biblical literacy.
Now how far the decline has progressed depends vastly in which country you are in Europe. Amongst many countries in Central and Eastern Europe, amongst those who are not religious but really have been brought up in the Marxist system, their ignorance of biblical categories is virtually absolute. In Western Europe, increasingly because of the pressures of secularization, in fact, it’s almost equivalently absolute in the new generation.
On the other hand, in a place like Ireland, although the move in that direction is very rapid, there is still much more living memory of the church and its influence, people who’ve been brought up in catechetical schools, and this sort of thing. Whether they believe it or not anymore is another issue, whether it’s at the top of their mind is another issue, but there still is something of that residue there.
Norway still has a far higher percentage of people who are biblically informed than Sweden does, just across the border, so one has to be very careful about making generalizations in this regard. Having said that, the drift throughout the Western world is toward massive biblical illiteracy.
When I speak at university missions today (I still try to do a couple a year), I now have to presuppose that the non-Christians in my audience have to have explained to them the difference between the big numbers and the little numbers. They don’t know the difference between chapter and verse. I always explain text, and I print out the text. I have to explain the big numbers and the little numbers. They don’t know anything.
When it comes to explaining Scripture, they don’t know the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. They don’t know those terms. Their very limited religious vocabulary (faith, God, Jesus, hope, truth) in every case means something different from what I mean. In every single case it means something different from what I mean.
One of my students was in downtown Chicago a couple of years ago with his fiancÈe. She was wearing around her neck a gold chain with a little wooden cross suspended from it. A teenager stopped them on the street and said, “What are you wearing a plus sign around your neck for?” You realize that there is some loss that’s gone on there somewhere in terms of public awareness of an icon. That’s in Chicago!
Now there are parts of Bible Belt America where.… Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is sometimes considered the buckle on the Bible Belt … you’ll find many people on the street who would call themselves Christians and not that many people who would admit to not being a Christian. On the other hand, you can go to the New England states or the Pacific Northwest, and the biblical ignorance is as profound as anywhere in Europe. There are entire towns of 15,000 to 20,000 people without a confessional church of any sort that’s doing anything.
Clearly, biblical illiteracy and postmodernism are not the same thing. On the other hand, where you have rising biblical illiteracy, then you are open to input from more and more sources. If you have a population that is profoundly knowledgeable about Scripture, it is likely to be fairly suspicious of some of the claims of postmodern epistemology. Thus, you see, the rising biblical illiteracy strengthens the hand of postmodernism.
Conversely, postmodernism itself will strengthen the drift toward biblical illiteracy. Granted that there are many, many different perspectives, religiously and in every other way, why should I read the Bible particularly? Why not read the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, or whatever? Thus, biblical illiteracy is neither simply a cause of postmodernism nor a result; it’s both in some ways. It’s a correlative of postmodernism. In this regard there are quite a few of them that are worth thinking about quickly. I don’t have time to go through them in detail.
2. The processes of secularization.
That’s neither cause nor effect, but it’s a bit of both. Most people talk about the processes of secularization not as the move toward the abolition of religion, but the move toward the marginalization of religion. So you can be ever so religious; it just doesn’t matter.
Religion becomes something that is squeezed into one small domain of your life, but it doesn’t shape your morals, doesn’t shape your ethics, doesn’t shape your politics, doesn’t shape your goals, and doesn’t shape your self-identity. It’s something that you do on Sunday morning at 11:00, and there is an enormous amount of secularization, thus, of religion in the Western world.
Where there is religion, there is an awful lot of secularized religion. Now there are some wonderful exceptions, of course, but that is still quite common. Clearly then, where you have secularization of religion, then you are strengthening the hand of postmodernism because your religion doesn’t matter. It’s not worldview forming. It’s not shaping. Do you see?
Likewise, postmodernism is going to strengthen the hand of secularization as well. You can be ever so religious, whether this religion or that religion. It just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because you’re not allowed to make an absolute truth claim of it. If it’s not an absolute truth claim, then it’s a subjective thing. If it helps you, fine. “God bless you. Go in peace, my Son,” but it doesn’t mean anything beyond that.
This affects your understanding of morality (right and wrong) for exactly the same sorts of reasons. Rising immorality, from a biblical point of view, will feed into postmodernism, but postmodernism itself will also feed into more and more subjectivity in the domain of morality. I mean by morality not merely sexual morality but right across the whole sweep of things.
In most Western countries until about 40 years ago, you could manage all kinds of business deals with a handshake and a brief contract because there was often a kind of inherited integrity that was simply presupposed. You didn’t want to lose face even if you weren’t a Christian, so you kept your word.
Nowadays, there is more and more business ethic that is circumscribed entirely by endless lawyers writing endless contracts trying to protect against every conceivable way of manipulating things because we’ve become a more and more litigious society. The question is how to win, not what’s faithful or true. Likewise, in the domain of the whole legal system, there is less and less appeal to natural law, and that sort of thing, and more and more appeal to positive law, which is merely the will of the people established by Parliament.
3. Similarly in the domain of tolerance, the very definition of tolerance has changed.
It’s important to see this. It’s very difficult to understand what’s going on in the domain of tolerance without seeing that the definition of tolerance has changed.
In American universities, more so than in Europe, many universities have some mechanism for a public lecture. Any group on campus can invite in a known scholar and host a public lecture, and it can be in any domain of thought whatsoever. The university will pay for the person to come in, give a few lectures, and go away again. It’s no part of the curriculum; it’s not owned by any particular department. It’s a way of trying to enrich diversity of perspective, bring in visiting scholars, and this sort of thing.
Christian groups are also part of the whole structure of universities, so a Campus Crusade group, an InterVarsity group, or something like this, can put in their bids to invite somebody in. It could be somebody talking about nuclear physics, talking about public policy, talking about war, or anything at all. It’s not supposed to be overtly evangelistic or anything like that, but it can be in the domain of religion and so on.
So every once in a while, I get invited to give a public lecture somewhere; some group or other has invited me to go in and give some public lectures at a university on something. In two or three instances, I’ve gone in to give some public lectures under the title “The Intolerance of Tolerance.” Inevitably that topic in North America.… I suspect it would have a similar effect in many universities here … can pack the place.
My most recent one was at the University of North Carolina, and we had more than a thousand people show up for this thing, probably 40 percent of them not Christians in any sense. It’s important to understand that the notion of tolerance, within this framework, has itself a certain intellectual heritage that has been transmuted by postmodernism.
Under the modernist paradigm, tolerance looked something like this: I may disagree with you, but I insist on your right to articulate your opinion however stupid and ignorant I think it is. That’s tolerance. In other words, this means there is tolerance for the individual to say things with which I disagree. The tolerance is directed toward individuals, but there is robust debate at the level of content and substance.
So I may disagree profoundly with Marxist historiography, but if I’m a tolerant person under a modernist regime, I insist on the right of Marxist historiographers to articulate their views. Likewise, under the Western vision of tolerance under a modernist camp, I insist on the right of capitalists to articulate their views, theists to articulate their views, or whatever, however right or wrong I think they are.
Unless there is something deeply, deeply damaging to public wellbeing, as for example, somebody coming along and vociferously advocating pedophilia, then the notion of tolerance allows you to defend almost anybody teaching almost anything, because under the modernist paradigm the assumption is that in the marketplace of disputed ideas, the truth will come out.
There is a truth to be searched out. There is a truth to be pursued. Truth, ultimately, is desirable and attainable. In other words, this view of tolerance is itself tied to a certain kind of vision of truth, a certain kind of epistemology, but once you change the epistemology and lose that vision of truth, tolerance itself is redefined.
Now tolerance means that you must not say that anybody is wrong. That’s the one wrong thing to say. Now notice: under this view of tolerance, you are tolerant not of individuals; you are tolerant of all positions. The tolerance is now directed toward all views that are articulated because you are not in a position to say that any view is wrong. The one thing that is not tolerated is the view that this view of tolerance is wrong. Thus you have the intolerance of tolerance.
Worse, if somebody comes along and says this view of tolerance is wrong, under this view of tolerance, that person is not tolerant and, therefore, should not be tolerated. That person is a bigot, and because there is no understanding of tolerance directed toward the individual but only towards all views (except that view that says that this view of tolerance is wrong); therefore, the university campus can become a very scary place toward anybody who says there may be an absolute right and wrong after all or an absolute truth.
I would argue that this new view of tolerance is, in fact, logically incoherent. I don’t simply mean that it is inconsistent. That is, it proves intolerant. I don’t mean that. It is inconsistent, but I mean something worse than that. I think that it is incoherent because the very notion of tolerance, under whatever regime, presupposes that you have to disagree with someone or something before you tolerate it.
You see, if I say, “On my university campus I will tolerate those who propagate Islam or Marxism” (or whatever … it doesn’t matter), I have to disagree with it before I can use the word tolerate. If I say, “Well, you know, you’re no more right nor wrong than I am. I may agree with you. I tolerate you.” It’s incoherent. That doesn’t even make sense. To be able to tolerate something, you’ve got to disagree with it in the first place.
If, in fact, you are not in a position to say that any position is wrong, how can you speak of tolerating it? Thus, I would argue that the new definition of tolerance is not only inconsistent, it’s incoherent. It proves, in fact, to be less tolerant than the brand of tolerance that was around under modernism because at the very point where it comes up with that which disagrees with it the most, it has to dismiss all opponents as intolerant and bigoted. It therefore becomes, in fact, totalitarian.
Now when I argue for this position on a university campus, it generates immense discussions. It’s wonderful fun because people intrinsically begin to see there is an argument here. There is something here. They say, “Oh, am I actually intolerant?” They all want to be tolerant because tolerant is a positive word. They wonder, “Am I actually intolerant?” So it generates all kinds of discussions and opens up, then, a wedge to talk about how Christians will view tolerance in this framework. So that’s how I start bringing in Christianity through the backdoor in this kind of frame of reference.
All I’m saying by this is that postmodern epistemology is not something that is reserved for intellectual eggheads in philosophy departments. It is something that is part of the atmosphere we breathe. It is the kind of thing that is presented in most of our media. It is the kind of thing that is presupposed in most of our religious discussions and so on today.
Of course, this also vastly affects how we view evangelism. Evangelism is now viewed as a subset of proselytization. Proselytization is intrinsically evil under postmodernism … if there is a category for evil … precisely because in evangelism you are trying to win someone to another position. If you’re trying to win someone to another position, then you are implicitly saying that their position is inferior to yours, and that is the one thing you must not do.
So it is all right to give your testimony. You tell your story about how Jesus means something to you, Mahmud tells his story about how Muhammad means something to him, the local Thai visiting scholar explains how Buddhism is something that generates a lot of peace for him, and on and on, but you can’t say that any one view is right or wrong or any one stance is superior or not superior. That you must not do.
So suddenly, you open your New Testament, and you find yourself in another world. The New Testament speaks of the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Paul speaks of the gospel such that “If anybody preach another gospel, let him be an anathema.” Jesus himself insists we’re to bear witness and make disciples of men and women from all nations.
The ultimate eschatological vision pictures men and women from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. Within that kind of framework, inevitably Christian witness will be viewed as an intrinsically bigoted, right-wing, old-fashioned, nasty piece of work. That’s my encouraging thought for the day.
Male: What effect would all this have on organized religion? It seems like with the rise of postmodernism, the world has become more religious. Religions are becoming more probative. Islam is becoming more fundamental and so, it seems, are evangelicalism, Protestantism, and in many countries Catholicism too. Is postmodern epistemology having a counter-balancing effect within organized religion?
Don Carson: This is very complex, in my view. In the first place, postmodernism is not found equivalently all around the world. I’ve been speaking primarily of North America and Europe, but postmodernism, or something similar, is found in surprising places. Postmodernism is not developing in all parts of the world. That has to be said. On the other hand, postmodernism does extend in slightly different forms in more parts of the world than we sometimes think.
I had an African student two or three years ago, one of the most gifted African PhD students I’ve ever had. He wasn’t in my department. He was really in systematics, not New Testament. I was asked to supervise him because he was writing in the domain of postmodernism, and I had published in that area quite a bit. He had come to ask me some questions, and I ended up supervising him.
He was from Zaire, and he wanted to write a dissertation that had to do with how Christians should respond to the postmodern critique in francophone West Africa. I thought, “My dear brother, there are parts of West Africa.… I’ve been to Africa often enough. There are parts of West Africa that haven’t escaped premodern epistemology yet. I mean, give me a break.” So my initial response was, “You’re living in cloud cuckoo land. What do you think you’re doing?”
Then he convinced me that he was right because.… The pressures were different and the terms were different, but in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a movement in French West Africa that was called la NÈgritude. It’s almost impossible to translate. La NÈgritude was really a movement of young French-speaking black intellectuals who were trying to find intellectual roots for overthrowing the colonial powers.
One way of overthrowing the colonial sense of superiority that you got from Belgium and France (“We are the tradition”) was by relativizing all traditions in order to leave a place for la NÈgritude: for blackness, for black culture, for African culture, and so on. The movement la NÈgritude has now died away. It’s not a movement anymore, but it became part of a kind of African version of the relativizing of all cultures in order to provide a place for sub-Saharan African black culture, especially in the French mold.
Then these young intellectuals, that in any case, because they had been brought up in French-speaking schools, had been exposed to Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and so on themselves, by the time you get to the 70s, they have deeply imbibed of all of this stuff and transmuted it into an African context.
So in African intellectual circles … as opposed to churches out in the bush, and obviously now the rising number of cities in the movement of urbanization, the rising number of universities, and so on … suddenly there is a major need for thinking through how you address those sorts of questions there.
In that sense, in intellectual circles in Africa, you’re facing these sorts of problems. As late as 1963, Nairobi had no university. Now it’s got four, and still most pastors have been taught in bush-league schools, maybe with a primary education and a bit of Bible institute somewhere. They’re trying to preach to thousands of university graduates? It’s appalling. So all over Africa, you hear the cry, “The pews are higher than the pulpit.”
Within that framework, this chap was trying to think through how to develop an apologetic and a structure of thought for winning back.… In that sense, you see, postmodernism is extending, with different forms and variations, in parts of the world that are surprisingly different from Europe but facing similar sorts of problems. This is part of the process of globalization too, it seems to me.
On the other hand, Muslim fundamentalism forms very little part of that, nor does Hindu fundamentalism in northern India and so on. It has to be acknowledged that when you get more and more things opened up, there can also be a backlash. One of the shrewdest analysts of Islam, in my judgment, is a chap called Bernard Lewis. His first book, published 35 years ago, was translated simultaneously into Hebrew and Arabic.
It was published by the Israeli Information Ministry and the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s probably the only book that’s ever been written in English about which that has happened. He is so careful and even-handed in his analysis of things. He is very, very good indeed, and he’s written a lot of books since then. By all means, look him up on Amazon.com and read two or three of his books. He is very, very shrewd.
One of the things that he points out is that Muslim fundamentalism is not so much afraid of the Christian West; it is afraid of the secular West. It has a place for People of the Book, but we’re not the People of the Book anymore. When the West speaks of globalization, what it really means is the multiplication of postmodern relativism: immorality and secularization, besides senses of inferiority and all kinds of other things. That’s one of the things that he points out.
Likewise, when you have the multiplication of relativism of one sort or another, then inevitably you’re going to get right-wing reactions of one sort or another too, whether in Islam, in Christianity, in Hinduism, or whatever. So the world becomes complex, doesn’t it? In my view, one of the better analyses of world movements in this regard is the writing of Samuel Huntington. Are you familiar with that name?
Samuel Huntington published an article in 1993 in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs, in which he invented the term “The Clash of Civilizations.” It was the most widely read article ever published by Foreign Affairs and created a firestorm of debate. Unrepentant, in 1997 he published a whole book called The Clash of Civilizations which is still worth reading in which he predicted, amongst other things, for example, that with …
What he is really arguing is that in the Western world, we have tended to think of things for 70 years in terms of East versus West, Marxism versus capitalism, the Communist empire versus the Allies. That’s what we’ve tended to think of things. Now we’re post 1989, so what’s going on now?
Well, Fukuyama published a book called The End of History in which he argued, in effect, that with this clash gone, now we’ve come to the end of conflict. Although there are a lot of regional struggles that will continue, we’ve come to the end of any need for war. We’re moving into a broader peace in which liberal democracy will eventually triumph, and we’ve come to the end of history. It looks a little less like that today.
Meanwhile then, the response was Samuel Huntington, in which he is really arguing that there are eight major civilizations around the world which have their own structures of thought, value systems, tendencies, belief things, and so on, and they don’t want to be part of the Western secularized world. We think of ourselves as being on the front end, but although they might want our trinkets and our science, that doesn’t mean they want our value systems and our structures, and sometimes not our democracy and other things too. They certainly don’t want our immorality.
So within that framework then, he predicted that one of the crucial elements of those who are outside of power is to use terrorism, but he said sooner or later terrorists will gain weapons of mass destruction. He says that terrorism is the argument of the weak, but sooner or later, terrorists will gain weapons of mass destruction, and then the weak will be strong. Then it will change everything. Now that’s very interesting, isn’t it? That was published in 1993, then came out again in 1997, and now people are less likely to sneer at Samuel Huntington.
Huntington is not a Christian, but all I’m saying is that when one starts looking at world pressures, then there are a lot of other things to throw in besides questions of postmodernism. If you’re becoming a missionary to Nepal, postmodernism is not the most important thing for you to learn. If you’re going to become a Christian working behind the scenes in northern India, again, postmodernism is not the most important thing to understand.
One the other hand, if we’re focusing primarily on Europe, which is where most of us live and move and have our being, then this is something that we really do have to understand, and because of the pressures of globalization and instant communication, whether we like it or not, we’re influenced by other things and other things influence us too.
One of the impacts on us is the rising pressure of Eastern religions, which was not a factor 50 years ago, but is a factor increasingly, whether it’s Islam.… In any given weekend in France, there are twice as many Muslims worshipping as there are Catholics. Who could have imagined 25 years ago a major mosque in Regent’s Park in London? Not conceivable. Now it’s simply the given. Whether it’s that, whether it’s Buddhism, or whatever, there are changing structures, and these diversities are not all easily containable within the category of postmodernism.
Male: A lot of us are not American or do not live in America. How are the American churches influenced by postmodernism?
Don: Again, it depends. Sometimes there’s a right-wing reaction, but in ordinary evangelicalism, you can find this whether in America or in Europe. When I was being taught principles of inductive Bible study 35 years ago, for example, in a university campus, it worked like this: the person who was leading an inductive Bible study was taught to prepare the passage in advance.
The inductive Bible study, the discussion and that sort of thing, was a means of getting people to understand what the text said. So in the discussion, Charles comes up with an interpretation that is right off the wall, and the person who has prepared this text says, “Charles, where do you find that in the text?”
“Well, I just sort of think it’s sort of presupposed in verse 13.”
“Well, Mary, do you agree with Charles?”
“No, I think Charles is all wet. I think that it really means such and such.”
“Charles, how would you respond to Mary?”
You get the discussion going to try to get to a consensus of what the text really means and then apply it to life. That’s that way inductive Bible studies work. They were supposed to be quite a lot of fun, and at the same time grappling with the text to try to see what the text actually says. Do you see?
Nowadays, that’s not the way it works. In most evangelical churches, Charles comes up with some interpretation that’s really screwball and right off the wall, and the leader is now trained to say, “Well, that’s a very interesting insight. Does anybody else have anything to say?” because, you see, the one thing you’re not allowed to say anymore is that somebody has got it wrong.
That’s part of the impact of postmodernism too, isn’t it? What it means is that sooner or later the Word can no longer function as the norming norm. It can no longer function to reform, correct, and instruct. It can be domesticated. It seems to me that has to be opposed in pretty substantial ways. I’ll come to how to do that in due course.
Let me begin now, by way of response, by saying some positive things about postmodernism. It’s very important that we do not simply dismiss postmodernism. We don’t want to develop a knee-jerk conservative reaction here as if modernism has always been the friend of Christians. It has not always been the friend of Christians.
1. The advantages of postmodernism.
A. Postmodernism has very effectively (sometimes too much) critiqued the arrogance of modernism.
It has often exposed the arrogance that is engendered by a form of epistemology that begins with the autonomous, finite self, which is what modernism did. It begins with the autonomous finite self: “I think, therefore I am.” Postmodernism has been very effective at showing the limitations of that sort of approach. I could give you many examples, but I press on.
B. It has also been very effective at demonstrating the genuine differences that finite human beings bring to any discussion.
For 10 years, I worked part-time with an organization called the World Evangelical Fellowship, and it was part of my job to bring together scholars and senior pastors from around the world to.… In small study conferences, I would assign papers in advance, and then after everybody wrote the papers on these related topics, we would come together in one convenient center.
The papers would have been printed and circulated in advance, then we’d come, and we’d discuss them. We’d go through them paragraph by paragraph, and then they would all go home and revise them again. They would come back to me; I’d edit them and out would pop a book. So in 10 years, on a two-year cycle, we produced five books this way that were written, then, by people from around the world.
It was very interesting, just watching these people come into the room. In would come the German and shake everybody’s hand. If he went out of the room to get something from his car, he’d have to shake everybody’s hand on the way out. In would come the Indian, and you’d get a lot of bowing going on with his greeting, Namaste.
In would come the Japanese, bowing with hands down, but how far down you bow … well, that depends on a lot of factors. It’s very difficult for an outsider to sort that one out: how old you are, how young you are, how many degrees you’ve got, how much money you’ve got, whether you’re senior in the church, whether you’re a bishop, or whatever. It’s all very complex about how far down you get. I never get this right. You sort of bow in the general direction and hope that you’re not too insulting. What do you do?
Then in would come one of the Latins from Mexico or Spain with cheek kissing and, “Brother!” Well, I can just about put up with that. I was brought up in French Canada despite my British roots (both of my parents were born in the UK). When I go to Latin America, with my British roots, I like about 36 inches distance.
In Latin America, it’s 18 inches distance. I always feel they’re crowding my space. They think that I’m cold and distant. So I started some experiments. You start talking, and they get right in your face. So I started backing up and putting my foot out to see what would happen. They’d step on it! And we’re just coming into the room, you know?
I remember Pablo Perez from Mexico, all 300 pounds of him, coming into this conference and up to an Englishman who.… He was quintessential. I won’t even tell you his name because many of you would know it. He was quintessentially English. He was standing in a corner, somewhat bemused by this pack of people, in a quintessentially English Harris Tweed suitcoat with his hands behind his back.
Pablo Perez, who recognized him as an author (he knew who he was, but he’d never met the man before), was saying, “Brother!” He was coming to him about to embrace him in a 300-pound hug, and the Englishman said, “Have we been introduced?” Wonderful! Wonderful! Then in comes the American, “Hi, everybody! Sorry I’m late.” This is just coming into the room; you haven’t started the discussion yet.
I was always in the chair for these things. My job was to try to get everybody participating. I’d look around the room.… There are some cultures that are going to participate more than other cultures, let me tell you. So eventually, I would turn to the Japanese. “Brother, I haven’t heard your judgment on this matter.”
“Well, it occurs to me that, perhaps, the blessed apostle Paul is.… Well, he could be taken to be saying, perhaps, that this verse should be read this way. Do you think?” Then the brother from Norway pipes up. “That’s not what it means at all. It’s straight forward what it really clearly means.” The brother from Japan now wonders what sort of group of barbarians he has fallen into.
You see, there is a sense in which postmodernism has helped us to recognize some of these differences a little more, hasn’t it? We do not all think the same way. Some cultures think more laterally than others. We’re not all linear thinkers. Not all forms of culture want argumentation that goes right for the center of things. They want to circle around and around it and hope to cycle in on something.
There are all kinds of genuine differences that postmodernism has exposed us to. In fact, in one sense, I would argue that postmodernism hasn’t gone far enough. Postmodernism stresses our finitude. It does not stress our sinfulness. But a knowledgeable Christian will admit not only our finitude, but also what has traditionally been called the noetic effects of the fall. In other words, because of sin, we’re not only limited, we’re stupid and perverse.
C. Postmodernism has rightly shown, it seems to me, that all human knowing is, in some measure, culturally constrained.
Now that doesn’t mean that I agree with all postmodern formulations of that or with all formulations, therefore, that relativize knowing. That’s another issue, but it is right to say that all human knowing is culturally constrained.
After all, language itself is a cultural phenomenon since all human knowing takes place within the context of some language or other. Inevitably, all human knowing is culturally constrained, and it is right to be reminded of that. There is a sense in which modern epistemology deified human finitude, and postmodern epistemology has debunked the self-deification. That’s not all bad.
2. The disadvantages of postmodernism.
A. Postmodern epistemology regularly exaggerates the difficulty of communication.
Whether from individual to individual, from culture to culture, from race to race, from language to language, or from interpretive community to interpretive community, it regularly exaggerates the difficulties that are involved. It tends to do this, it seems to me, by introducing an antithesis which is profoundly mistaken and which must be constantly exposed.
The antithesis that it deploys all the time is this: either you may understand something truly and absolutely or you are necessarily sunk in a swamp of relativism. That’s the antithesis. Either you may know something omnisciently (let me put it that way) and absolutely or there is no true knowing. If you buy into that antithesis, the postmodern will always win every argument because you can always show that no human being ever knows anything omnisciently.
Nevertheless, before you start thinking of alternative ways of casting the issue (I will come to it positively in a moment), you have to face the fact that, at a certain kind of level, the sheer street experience that we have shows that communication is possible, however difficult. When I wrote the book The Gagging of God, in preparation for writing that book, I read about 1100 books and articles. For the most important books, I checked out the major reviews as well.
What I discovered, of course (you always do), is that sometimes reviewers so attract the ire of the author, that they write into the journal where the book was reviewed to contradict the reviewer. So some postmodern would write a book, it would be reviewed nastily somewhere, and the postmodern author would reply, then, with a long response to the reviewer.
Not once, not once, did I come across a situation where the postmodern author who replied to a review said, “Well, clearly the reviewer has understood my text in a way differently from what I meant, but that’s understandable because postmodernism does teach us that we’re separate interpretive communities. As a result, it’s not surprising that we look at things a little bit differently. I would like to engage this person in conversation to say what I really.…”
Not once! No. In every case it was, “Did this reader actually read the book? Didn’t he notice that on page 362, footnote 47, what I really said was.… If he had understood what the categories were and all.…” What’s being claimed here? What is being claimed by this postmodernist is that texts have meaning which can be discerned, and that meaning is bound up, if you please, with authorial intent. Stick that in your postmodern pipe and smoke it. That’s what’s being said. It’s quite funny, really. Isn’t it?
This suggests that despite the theory, communication is possible. It’s not easy, guaranteed, or simple, and errors can be made, but it’s possible. So we rightly hold reviewers to account if they really don’t understand the material or if they twist it or distort it. Postmodern writers do that as much as anybody else as far as I can see. I read a lot of this stuff before it dawned on me that …
B. This absolute antithesis is what is controlling things.
I’ll tell you the book that I was reading when it dawned on me. It came like a flash of light. I was reading one of the books of Paul de Man in Cambridge University Library. At this point Paul de Man, who worked in the United States for a long time but was French, used an example about Archie Bunker.
Now many of us in Europe have been secured from knowing anything about Archie Bunker, but in order to explain this illustration, I need to explain who Archie Bunker is. Archie Bunker is a figure in a situational comedy on television. It’s now off the air, but for many years it was quite funny and quite well-done. Archie Bunker was a quintessential right-wing redneck … sort of a blue-collar, beer-drinking, football-watching, anti-intellectual, knock-down-the-little-woman hard hat. He was all of those things.
His wife, inevitably, was a sort of quintessential twit … not quite with it, a bit slow, and exists primarily to bring him his beer and his slippers. His daughter is pretty but stupid, and his son-in-law is a great big, lazy oaf. The whole situation actually was quite funny because the script writers were really quite good.
What they were doing was taking the mickey out of this sort of vision of reality. It was really a spoof of the whole thing, and it was over-the-top. As situation comedies go, it went on for years and years because they really did have a good set of writers with them. It actually had quite a lot of social impact. It was really quite funny.
Now Paul de Man refers to a scene in the show in which Edith, the wife, brings in Archie’s bowling shoes (shoes that he uses to go bowling). She’s just polished them. She’s just cleaned them because, of course, in Archie Bunker’s world, real men never clean their own shoes. That’s what the little woman is for. So she brings in Archie’s shoes, and she says, in this whiny voice, “Archie, do you want your boots laced up or down?” He says, “Ah, what’s the difference?”
She says, “Well, Archie, if you lace them up, you start with the bottom holes, but you come up first. Then you cross over, and you go down. Then you cross again, and you come up. But if you’re gonna lace them down, you start with the top holes, but you go down first …” Now the track is laughing away because (Paul de Man says), “Everybody understands that when Archie Bunker says, ‘Ah, what’s the difference?’ what he means is [I quote Paul de Man], ‘I don’t give a damn.’ ”
That’s not how Edith has taken it. Edith says to herself, in effect, when Archie says, “Ah, what’s the difference?” that he needs an explanation of the difference between lacing them up and down. Now from this misunderstanding on Edith’s part, Paul de Man goes on for pages of the most erudite discussion, until he comes up with what he calls the vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. It takes some patience to read the deconstructionists.
Vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. Vertiginous, as in a cliff that is vertiginous or a very vertical slope. Vertiginous possibilities: a huge gap, a cliff of a gap, between what Archie is referring to (referential matters) and what she is referring to. A vertiginous gap of referential possibilities. There are pages of this stuff. Well, I finally got to the end of it, burst out laughing in Cambridge Library, checked back the book, and never finished it. I mean, I just could not finish reading trash like that.
It was so stupid because, after all, the whole point of the humor was that Edith is a twit. The only person who did not understand what he was talking about was Edith, and she wasn’t supposed to because she’s a twit. That’s why the laugh track is going. That is, everybody else did understand it. That’s why it was funny. The only other person who didn’t understand it was Paul de Man!
You read enough of these discussions, and you just go bananas. In every case, what they’re trying to do is force you into a vision in which everything is absolutely clear, there is a universal transformation of all levels of meaning, there is absolute clarity, there is an omniscient transfer of omniscient knowledge from one finite knower to another finite knower, or you’ve got vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.
It’s the antithesis all the time that is being foisted on you. If you buy into the antithesis, obviously, the postmodern will always win because you can always show that in any communicative act or in any attempt to know anything, a finite being never gets it all. But that does not mean that we cannot know some things truly. It just means that we cannot know anything omnisciently.
That means it becomes extraordinarily important for thinking through models of epistemology that are more reasonable. There have been quite a few that have been generated. In the German world, the hermeneutical problem was challenged by what came to be called distanciation and the fusion of horizons. In German, fusion of horizons came to be Horizontverschmelzung, and so on. Whether you remember the names doesn’t really matter.
It’s an argument by analogy. Let’s say the apostle Paul is, in his understanding of something or other as he writes, let’s say Romans.… It’s as if Paul is looking out on a horizon. He’s looking out on a world, and he sees certain things. That’s what he sees because of his place in history, his understanding, whatever God has given him, his experiences on the Damascus road, his understanding of the Romans, all that he is, and all that he understands. As he puts pen to paper, or as he dictates the letter to Tertius, that’s his horizon of understanding.
Now as I look out on the world from my perspective, I have a different horizon of understanding. I’m a twenty-first century person. I was born in the middle of the last century, and I look at things a certain way. I have a different language, and so on. So the question is.… How can he transfer stuff from his horizon of understanding to my horizon of understanding?
The model that was worked out was by distanciation and the fusion of horizons. That is, I must now distance myself, in some ways, from my own horizon of understanding. The way I do that is by trying to find out more how Paul’s language works. I learn Greek. I learn Hellenistic philosophy. I learn Jewish sources. I learn what he would have learned as a rabbi. I examine how he uses his terminology.
Gradually, I distance myself from my sets of categories, so far as that’s possible. It’s never possible exhaustively … there’s this appeal to omniscience again … but in substantial part I distance myself from my horizon of understanding and fuse my now-distanced self-understanding, my now-distanced horizon, with his in some way so that you can get substantial transfer across. It will never be perfect; it will never be exhaustive, but you can get some true transfer.
Another model, starting with the hermeneutical circle that goes round and round, which you revise so that it becomes a hermeneutical spiral. It’s not as if you go round and round at the same distance all the time from any objective reality, but you do circle in to know a little more. Isn’t that also our experience of learning things? You see, you begin with a new discipline (I don’t care what the discipline is), and it all seems very foreign.
When I started reading serious literature in the domain of postmodernism, it took me a long time to get through some of those books, especially when I started reading the French ones. Jacques Derrida.… I read Derrida first of all in English. I didn’t understand him, so I read him in French, and I still didn’t understand him. I mean, I had to keep reading him and reading him until I figured out how he was using language, what he was doing with this stuff, and eventually I got him, but it took me a long time. He’s not easy to read.
One the other hand, after you’ve read 50 books in the area of postmodernism, the next ones are a lot easier. You start going, “I’ve read that. I’ve seen that stuff before. Here’s another discussion.” You find one chapter that’s saying something a little bit new. That’s how you start knocking off eight or ten books a day. You’re not reading every page anymore; it’s not worth it. It’s a pile of junk in terms of what you’ve already read. It’s not saying anything new.
That’s true in every discipline, isn’t it? You start reading Greek. L˙ō, l˙eis, l˙ei, l˙omen, l˙ete, l˙ousin. “Well, how am I going to memorize this? Good grief.” Isn’t that the way.… Or you start learning German or anything else. It doesn’t really matter, does it? Then 13 weeks later, at the end of the course, you’re struggling with the finer points of participles. You know your verb paradigms, and you’re struggling with “me” verbs or something. What seems so daunting becomes part of the baggage.
Likewise. when you start approaching and understanding a text, you may be a long way out, but you do spiral in. You may never have an exhaustive and complete knowledge of something, but you do get some true knowledge of something, don’t you?
The model that I like best, I confess, is one that was developed, in fact, by Karl Popper in the domain of the philosophy of science, and I just like to adopt it to other kinds of things. Picture an X-Y axis. On one scale you are dealing with time. On the other scale, you are measuring distance in your knowledge from actual reality as an omniscient mind would know that reality.
Now picture little Johnny, brought up in a Christian home. He’s 5 or 6 years old, properly catechized, says his prayers at night, reads the Bible with Mummy and Daddy, and goes to a nice church with a fine Sunday school teacher. You come into this home, and you say, “Johnny, do you believe that God loves you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that Jesus loves you?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“We sing in Sunday school, ‘Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.’ ”
“Oh? Where does the Bible say that God loves Johnny?” He thinks, and he thinks again. “Well, I don’t’ know.”
“Well, then why do you believe that the Bible tells you that God loves Johnny?”
“Well, the Bible says that ‘God so loved the world,’ and I’m part of the world, so God loves me too.”
Question: Does Johnny understand John 3:16, which he has just quoted? Now if you’re a postmodernist, gifted in deconstruction, you will proceed along the following lines: “Doesn’t Johnny bring to the discussion a pretty primitive, infantile view of love? Love means cuddles from Mummy and Daddy and a cookie and milk before he goes to bed.
‘God loves me.’ What does he think about God loving him for goodness’ sake? What does he mean by God, a great-grandfather image in the sky? How accurate a representation is that or whatever it was that John was saying? Does he understand anything of the disputes in the last century over the meaning of the verb agapao? ‘God so loved the world.’ World? I mean, how big is the world in his view? Hmm? Does he understand in any case that for John kosmos is not so much a measure of bigness but of badness.
When we read ‘God so loved the world,” we’re not to admire God’s love because the world is so big but to admire God’s love because the kosmos is so bad. Does he think of himself as bad? Hmm? Twenty verses on it says, ‘The wrath of God abides on those who do not believe the Son.’ How does he reconcile in Johannine theology the love of verse 16 and the wrath of verse 36? Hmm? Does he understand John 3:16?” Wouldn’t I make a good deconstructionist?
Surely, this is again the same trick. It’s insisting that you have well-nigh omniscient knowledge, or you’ve got nothing. I would want to say, “Of course Johnny understands the text.” He’s in the middle on the graph. He’s 5 years old. He’s pretty distanced from the text as God understands it, but he understands it. He’s in the right quadrant. He doesn’t think that the verse is actually talking about the virgin birth of Christ or about the sex life of sea turtles in the South Pacific. He doesn’t think the text is talking about these. He’s in the right quadrant; he’s basically got it.
Now he grows up, he goes to your Bible institute, and eventually comes to Trinity for a PhD in Johannine theology against Jewish background. I supervise him, and I’m mean. He finishes his PhD. Now does he understand the text? I would like to think that he understands it better than when he was 5, but he still hasn’t touched the text. He’s moving closer. Mathematically, that’s called an asymptotic approach. That’s an asymptote.
With an asymptote, it gets closer and closer, but it never touches. So 50 billion years into eternity, if we may think of eternity in terms of the passage of years, does he now understand John 3:16 perfectly? Nope, because omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God. You say, “Wait a minute! What about 1 Corinthians 13? ‘Now we know in part; then we shall know even as we are also known.’ ”
First Corinthians 13 is not promising omniscient knowledge. It is promising unmediated knowledge. “Now we see through a glass [a mirror] darkly …” All of our knowledge of God is mediated. “… then face to face.” What we shall have is unmediated knowledge. We will never have omniscient knowledge. Omniscience is an attribute of God, an incommunicable attribute of God. That is, an attribute of God that cannot be shared.
Some attributes of God can be shared with other beings. So the texts can say, “Be holy as I am holy. Be perfect as I am perfect.” They do not say, “Be omniscient because I am omniscient.” Omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God. So for all eternity, neither you nor I nor Johnny will ever have an omniscient knowledge of John 3:16, but does that mean we do not have a true knowledge of it?
It means we don’t have a true knowledge of it only if we’ve bought into the antithesis, that the only way you can speak of true knowledge is by insisting that it be omniscient knowledge. That’s merely part of the postmodern agenda. It is a huge mistake and has to be blown up and overthrown again and again.
Now then, there are some huge implications, it seems to me, for our response to postmodernism along these lines in terms of how we start getting across Christian truth or Christian thinking again. It seems to me that it turns, finally, on questions of worldview formation. It affects how we think about evangelism, how we think about worldview formation, how we think about metanarrative, and things along that line.
