Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Truth in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Male: Once again, on behalf of the Christian Young Adults Network, welcome to St. John’s—St. Margaret’s Church and to tonight’s talk. When we were given the privilege of hosting Professor Carson and setting the topic, the subject of postmodernism resonated among the committee as something that is both Professor Carson’s area of expertise as well as an issue that all of us grapple with at various levels of understanding and insight.
I’d like to let you know that tonight, after the talk, there will be a time for questions and answers. There are slips of paper that will be provided at the end of each row for you to write your questions on. So if you have a question, write it down later, and then you can pass it to one of our ushers who will be walking by. They will pass it to me, and I will then hand it to Professor Carson.
Let me introduce our speaker for tonight. Professor Don Carson received his bachelor of science in chemistry from McGill University, his master of divinity from Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto, and his PhD in New Testament from Cambridge University. His areas of expertise include biblical theology, the historical Jesus, pluralism, Greek grammar, Johannine theology, Pauline theology, questions of suffering and evil, and, of course, post modernism.
He is the husband of one wife and the father of two children. In his spare time, Dr. Carson enjoys reading, hiking, and woodworking. If you are curious to find out more about him, why not check out what Wikipedia has to say!
It is my great honor and pleasure now to welcome Professor Carson to address us.
Don Carson: Well, it’s my privilege to be with you this evening. My assigned topic is Can the Truth Be Nailed? To many young adults today, the claim that we can nail down the truth, especially in religious matters, sounds like the presumptuous arrogance of an older generation sadly out of date. In other words, to some extent, though far from exclusively, this is a generational shift.
I would like to talk about this shift under three headings by raising three questions. First.… What are some of the factors that have brought about this perceived generational shift? Secondly.… How might a thoughtful Christian offer a preliminary response to this perceived generational shift? And finally.… How shall we wisely wrestle with questions of doubt when they arise? So, first of all …
1. What are some of the factors that have brought about this perceived generational shift?
So many things could be said here. I’m going to mention six.
A. There has been a change in our understanding of the nature of tolerance.
Tolerance has been variously understood across the centuries in different times and places. Until about 25 years ago, dominantly, many of us had inherited (whether we knew it or not) the approach of Voltaire. Voltaire insisted, “I may detest what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The idea is that there would be ample scope for people to disagree with one another, and, in fact, to argue vociferously that others were wrong. But in a truly tolerant society, they would insist equally strongly that those who disagreed with them had the right to do so and stake out their claims as well. For a variety of reasons that we don’t have time to explore, in much of the technological world, that notion of tolerance has largely dissipated.
Today, tolerance means something like: the commitment not to tell others that they’re wrong. So there have been many, many tests done in a variety of nations that have asked university students, “Which person is more tolerant, A or B, with A being the person who has strong views about a number of things but insists equally that others have the right to articulate their strong views, even when they disagree with his, and B being the person who does not have strong or exclusive views about very much at all and who thinks that all people are equally right?”
Today, in many tests, 85 to 90 percent of university students argue that B is the tolerant person. With so many competing pressures, not least in the religious sphere, with the fears of fundamentalisms of various sorts, tolerance surely generates amongst us a perspective that is really nervous about claiming too much in the domain of truth, too much in the domain of exclusive truth in particular. There is a new understanding of tolerance.
B. Perceived challenges to modernity from postmodernity.
These are such slippery terms today. There’s so much written on the subject it’s painful. At the risk of oversimplification, I would like to distinguish premodernity from modernity, and modernity from postmodernity.
For my purposes, premodernity runs in many, many cultures up until about the 1600s and in some cultures way beyond that. I will speak of the world I know best, first of all the Anglo-Saxon world. In the premodern world, especially in Anglo-Saxon terms but also throughout much of Western Europe and way beyond that, for that matter, premodernity already presupposed, by and large, the existence of an omniscient God.
There were a few atheists around, but not many. The kind of God they believed in was the God who was personal, sovereign, and omniscient. If you are dealing with an omniscient God, and almost everybody in the culture believes that there is an omniscient God, it follows that all human knowledge is necessarily some subset of his knowledge.
If there is a God, and he knows everything, then all human knowledge is necessarily a subset of his exhaustive and perfect knowledge, which is another way of saying that in some way or other, the acquisition of knowledge by human beings is really a function of revelation. That is, this God know everything. How do human beings come to know anything? By learning something of what God knows perfectly.
In this view then, God disclosed himself in nature. God discloses himself in human experience. God discloses himself supremely in his Word. God discloses himself through his Son in the Christian heritage. But in all domains of knowledge, we learn some small subset of what God knows exhaustively and perfectly.
For a number of important reasons in the European context, that shifted. There were rising numbers of atheists coming out of the Renaissance. There were increasing disputes coming out of the Reformation. Eventually, a young French philosopher by the name of RenÈ Descartes thought that he would try to find common ground with his university friends who were increasingly skeptical.
They were in some cases atheistic, or at least agnostic, no longer buying in to historic Christianity, so he tried to set himself the task of doubting everything. This was not because he himself was a systematic doubter. In fact, he was a devout Catholic, but he set himself the task of doubting everything to see if there was some fundamental basis that he could share with other human beings.
Of course, as every first-year philosophy student learns, he eventually came out with what he thought was a rock-solid bottom foundation. Because he wrote in Latin, he wrote it in Latin: cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.” If you want to doubt your own existence, well, even while you’re doubting, you’re thinking. Thus, your very thinking attests your own existence. You cannot escape your own existence. You cannot, surely, doubt that.
Now whether that is good reasoning or not, I am not here to dispute, is what he said. Then through a complex system of philosophical structures, most of which are now viewed as obsolete, he then worked out a whole system of epistemology, a system by which he claimed people came to know things. In his own view of things, this brought him back to a complete Christian view of reality.
In due course there was a shift that was taking place from beginning with God to beginning with I. “I think, therefore I am.” If the premodern world begins with a presupposition of God, so that all human knowledge begins with how God’s knowledge is somehow transferred to us, in the modern world, you begin with the individual knower. You begin with I. “I think, therefore I am.”
In this heritage, eventually, knowledge even of God becomes an inference. It becomes a deduction. It becomes something you prove and so forth. At the risk again of oversimplification, let me give some of the characteristics of such modern thought.
First, it begins with I. In other words, it is limited in that sphere.
Secondly, it early became very interested in method. That is to say, you begin with I, but then the I has to work out how it learns things. Ultimately, method was as important as the truth itself. This still prevails in many, many universities of the world today. You do something in history, chemistry, microbiology, whatever it is, and you set yourself a certain research task. You establish what your methods are.
If, at the end of your dissertation, when you are being examined in a viva, your examiner discovers that you have fine answers in many respects but you have ignored the methods that you have stipulated, you will fail, because methodological rigor is part of the discipline. Each discipline establishes its own methods with the idea that with these methods, you come to a truth.
Thirdly, and equally, this sort of approach was extraordinarily foundational. That is, in each discipline you sought certain foundations that all sides agreed were basic. Now you have foundations, you add methods, you turn the crank, and out comes truth. Foundations plus methods, turn the crank, and out comes truth. And this all beginning with I in the first instance.
Fourthly, it operated with the assumption that the acquisition, the attainment of truth, is both desirable and attainable. That is, by the appropriate foundations, the appropriate methods, the appropriate pursuit, the finite eye really can discover the truth. There was very little doubt about this in early modernity.
Fifthly, such truth would be universal. If you discovered in Quito, Ecuador, that water molecules have two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, lo and behold, that’s also true in Singapore. It’s true everywhere. If it’s really true, then by definition, it is always true, universally true, aculturally true, alinguistically true, atemporally true. That is, it is true across cultures, all times, and all places; otherwise it isn’t the truth.
Finally, though not at the beginning, gradually as modernity continued, more and more voices within the academic community became committed, increasingly, to philosophical materialism. That is, they became committed to a view that all that there is in the world is matter, energy, space, and time. That’s it. Now at the beginning, it was not so. All of the early modernists were either theists or even Christians, occasionally deists, but they were not drifting toward philosophical materialism. That was a fairly late development.
So then, where does postmodernism fit into all of this? Many thinkers in the history of modernism and postmodernism actually view postmodernism as a kind of debased form of modernism. They call it an ultramodernism because, in fact, it is based on very similar principles but then runs off in another direction.
It too begins with I. It acknowledges that we start off individually where we are, but now it draws some different inferences. Yes, you begin with I, but because the I is finite, because the I is limited in knowledge, doesn’t this mean that we bring certain baggage with us so that we look at things from a certain perspective?
Look at me. Look at me. I’m a six-decades-old white male from North America brought up in French and English. I look at things out of that perspective. Am I really going to look at things out of the same perspective, let’s say, as a young African prostitute on the streets of Mombasa who’s semi-literate?
When you watch people come together across cultures.… Part of my job for 10 years was to work with the World Evangelical Fellowship, and I brought people together from around the world to work on a number of projects. As I brought them from the different continents and different countries.… They were Christians, they were committed to Scripture, but even the way they came into a room and greeted one another attested their differences.
In came the German and shook everybody’s hand. If he went out to get something at the car, he probably shook everybody’s hand on the way out and might’ve shaken everybody’s hand on the way back in. Then in came the Indian, and in his greeting to everyone, Namaste, there was a lot of bowing. In came the Japanese, and now there was bowing with hands down to their side. But how far down you go depends on how much money you have, how old you are, how many degrees you have, whether you’re a president or a secretary, on and on. I never remember all the rules.
In come the Latins, and it’s cheek kissing and, “Brother!” In come the Arabs, and it’s usually three kisses. I can never remember which side to start on, which gets embarrassing when you get close. I can remember when Pablo Perez from Mexico came in and descended upon one little Englishman standing there in his tweed coat. As he descended upon him, all 300 pounds of him, the little Englishman said, “Have we been introduced?” In comes the American and says, “Hi, everybody. Sorry I’m late.” You realize you have culture difference.
Even the forms of argumentation are different. I was always in the chair, and I would turn after a little while to a Japanese brother and say, “I don’t think we have heard from you on this subject. Do you have anything to contribute?” Of course, he’s from a shame culture, where no one must ever be permitted to lose face. So he would speak very carefully. “Is it possible that we could consider whether or not, perhaps, the blessed apostle might have meant that …”
Whereupon, someone from Norway or somewhere else in northern Europe would say, “Oh, no, that’s ridiculous. That’s not what that means. I mean, clearly what that text means is …” Which means, of course, that my Japanese brother wonders what brand of barbarian he’s fallen amongst. That’s before you’ve got to matters of substance.
You realize right away that after all, we are finite, aren’t we? We bring our own packages and our own biases. “I think, therefore I am,” but what I think will depend on how much sleep I’ve had, whether I’m just going through a divorce, how much I’ve read, how much I know. I bring all kinds of baggage and limitations with me, don’t I?
Within this framework, postmodernism becomes very antifoundational because even the foundations themselves, it is argued, are human constructions. It becomes suspicious of methods because the methods themselves are chosen. They’re selected. It’s not as if they are neutral; they are themselves selected. Therefore, the knowledge that truth is easily attainable and desirable actually, in a postmodern world begins to look artificial. It begins to look like at errant claim.
Truth is attainable? Really? Surely we catch one little corner, but is that corner really of the truth? How can you possibly say unless you have a vantage point that can look at everything? Where do you start? Surely there is a sense in which truth, as we think of it, resides in the knower. It resides in the interpreting community.
If it resides in the interpreting community, how can you speak of exclusive truth, culture-transcending truth, or universal truth? Therefore, that notion has to go as well. Truth is culturally imbedded. Truth is culturally relative. Then, interestingly enough, increasingly, far from sliding into philosophical materialism, postmodernism often slides into a kind of universal and rather sloppy spirituality.
People start saying, “Yes, yes. I’m not a Christian. I don’t believe in all this churchy stuff, and all of that, but I’m quite spiritual, you know. For me, it’s crystals. The vibration that I get from them really makes me in touch with nature.” Suddenly there is this very ill-defined notion of spirituality that suggests that knowledge comes from all kinds of things and domains.
This postmodernism suddenly becomes astonishingly amorphous and open-ended. Anything that seems too boxy, structured, distinctive, or exclusive just begins to seem narrow, bigoted, and obsolete. Once one has bought into this sort of frame of reference, then we develop new notions of truth and far more flexible notions of morality.
What right do you have to tell me what’s right or wrong? That’s going to depend on where you are located in culture. Even morality itself, it begins to be argued, is a structural thing that comes out of your social grouping. It has no independent existence.
C. Contemporary respectives regarding the nature of faith.
I haven’t been in Singapore enough times to be certain.… Because there are such interesting and diverse religious communities here, I’m not certain what I’m going to say works out widely here, but it would work out, certainly, in a large number of sectors. For many people, faith means one of two things.
Faith either is a synonym for religion (there are many religions, there are many faiths) or it means something like personal, subjective, religious choice. That is, it’s not necessarily tied to notions of truth. It’s tied to religious choices you make. Thus you cannot talk in an objective fashion about faith because it’s abstracted from notions of truth in a way that science isn’t. It’s abstracted from such matters and is bound up with personal choice in the religious dimension.
I suspect that there are millions of people in a population of 4.5 million in Singapore who operate with an assumed definition of faith somewhere along those sorts of lines, certainly in the younger generation.
D. There are interesting pressures from the realities of multiculturalism and globalization.
If you worked, lived, and died exclusively in some narrowly-defined tribal culture or in some community that belonged exclusively to one ethnicity, then probably your frames of reference would be largely inherited. You would reflect, in all probability, the kinds of frames of reference that your parents did, your neighbors do, the person on the next street, the whole town, and so on.
Many world-class cities today are astonishingly cosmopolitan. Some people are frightened of the diversity. There are many reasons for really appreciating it, especially if you like all those different restaurants, for example. Imagine, in one small area, going to Indian restaurants, Vietnamese restaurants, French restaurants, and on and on. That’s just starting to talk about food. Then there is the diversity of music, the diversities of senses of humor, the diversity of perspectives, different shapes of faces, and so on.
Many of us have come to really appreciate that diversity. But the more diversity that you get along those lines.… When you start meeting people, whether on the Internet or down the block, and you discover all of the diversity, you start saying to yourself, “This diversity is good. What conceivable right do I have to say that anybody else is wrong?” Thus what begins as empirical diversity, empirical multiculturalism easily moves into a philosophical stance in which diversity of every sort is always good by definition.
E. There are also opportunities and challenges from technological society.
For a start, many of us live and work with high-pressure jobs that demand long hours in competing markets where you must put in those sorts of hours in order to keep a job and climb up the corporate ladder. Then, when we are off the clock, in a technological society, we have iPods, television, radios, videos, channels of this, and who knows what over there, with the result that we receive endless stimulation.
It is very difficult for young people, under the age of 30 or 35, to want to just sit alone and think. Maybe not even read, unless they’re reading one more manual for their next job. Or they’re reading something on a computer screen. Or they’re reading something from the latest blog. But to sit and read and think through serious material, meditatively thinking on Holy Scripture, for example, just seems so alien.
How is there time for introspection when, if there’s any moment of silence, you immediately plug the iPod in your ear? Do you see? So suddenly, that changes our notions of relationships, our notions of how we use time, our notions of self-examination. All of these things change, too. Don’t they?
With this then comes, very often, a concomitant biblical illiteracy. I’ve been speaking on university campuses about Jesus Christ for three or four decades. Three or four decades ago, at least in North America, if I spoke on a university campus and met an atheist, he or she was a Christian atheist. That is to say, the God that he or she disbelieved in was the Christian God, which meant, of course, that the categories were still on my turf.
Of course, that’s not true anymore. You can’t assume that. That’s far too simplistic. Moreover, the degree of biblical illiteracy on campuses is spectacular. Most young people that I talk to today on university campuses don’t that the Bible has two testaments. They wouldn’t know what the word testament means, unless maybe it means last will and testament.
They’ve never heard of Abraham. If they’ve heard of Moses, they’ll confuse him with Charlton Heston. They’ve certainly never heard of Isaiah, let alone Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.… Baz for short. Because they don’t know the Bible’s storyline or the Bible’s content or anything, it’s hard even to know where to start. The worldview is so different, and they don’t really want to learn either.
F. There have also been certain popularizations of some irresponsible scholarship, not least in the domain of gospel origins and so on.
Have you had endless discussion here, in this part of the world (which we have certainly had in Europe and North America) about the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Thomas, things like that? Have they been in your press in substantial numbers? I’m seeing very few heads nodding. I’m seeing a lot of blank stares. “What is this character talking about?”
In many, many parts of the world, it has to be said that there is a kind of popularized scholarship that argues, amongst other things, for example, that originally Christianity was an astonishingly diverse phenomenon. It included things that we find now in the New Testament but also included the Gnostic gospels, all kinds of spectacular notions, feminine gods and goddesses, and all kinds of things.
Eventually, nasty, narrow-minded, bigoted orthodoxy squeezed them all out. By the time of the Constantinian settlement at the beginning of the fourth century, they were all relegated to the ash pit of history. If that’s true, then again you have further warrant for thinking that diversity itself is automatically good, diversity of every kind. Let’s go back to the original forms of Christianity that were so incredibly diverse.
All of these sorts of things, and many others, have pressured many of us to be very suspicious, then, of truth claims that sound at all exclusive, crisp, or clear. How shall we even begin to respond?
2. How might a thoughtful Christian offer a preliminary response to this perceived generational shift?
Let’s begin with tolerance. I would be prepared to argue that …
A. The new definition of tolerance in which you are not permitted to tell other people that they’re wrong, especially in the religious sphere, is epistemologically bankrupt and morally perverse.
That’s a strong claim, but I claim it anyway.
I think that it is academically and epistemologically bankrupt because tolerance itself is an incoherent notion until you disagree with someone. In other words, if a capitalist says to a Marxist, “I don’t see anything wrong in your worldview. I tolerate you,” you start scratching your head and say, “How is coherent communication going on?” The same is true if a Marxist speaks to a capitalist.
Supposing a devout Muslim says to a devout Christian, “I see nothing wrong with your perspective. I tolerate you.” Is that coherent? Or a devout Christian saying the same to a devout Muslim. As long as you are saying, “There is nothing in your belief structure that I disagree with and that I’m prepared to criticize; therefore, I tolerate you,” then wherein does tolerance lie? Don’t you have to have disagreement before you can tolerate?
In other words, the capitalist has to say to the Marxist, “Quite frankly, I think your views are nuts. I tolerate you in that you have the right to push them and publish them …” But, in point of fact, how can you speak of tolerance in any coherent sense whatsoever until you have disagreement? Do you see? It is a vacuous notion, this new, modern tolerance. Worse, I think it is actually perverse because in the one domain where the new tolerance actually acknowledges that there is difference, there they are intolerant.
For example, in UN documents, in Canadian Parliamentary documents, and elsewhere, increasingly there are statements of this sort: “We tolerate all views except intolerance.” I think I know what they are trying to say. I think what they’re trying to say is: “We’re not going to tolerate people who start throwing bombs or are intolerant by blowing up other perspectives.” (Or whatever.) Nevertheless, the very notion as it’s presented is slightly bizarre. If you disagree with any other person’s perspective, then you are intolerant, and then we won’t tolerate you.
In other words, the one place where they’re prepared to say that somebody is wrong, namely if they disagree with your view of tolerance, then at that point, we don’t tolerate your skewing of what tolerance is. Suddenly, the one place where disagreement is possible, people are condemned. This is surely morally perverse, and I think that on the long haul, it is damaging to notions of freedom and democracy.
In Canada, for example, there are increasing numbers of what are called Human Rights Commissions. These Human Rights Commissions will take you to court and cost you quite a lot of difficulty if you say too strongly that you think some other view in some domain or other is wrong or mistaken.
Then you’re acting intolerant. This is not because somebody is saying they should be crushed, expelled, locked up, bombed out, or any such thing. We just say, “We think that group is mistaken in their views on such and such a matter.” You can be hauled before the Human Rights Courts for being intolerant.
Then when you say, “How is that tolerant?” They say, “Some freedoms, including freedoms of speech, have to be curtailed in order to promote tolerance.” You realize that there is some double-thinking going on here. It begins to sound like George Orwell’s 1984. Such phenomena are increasingly common.
My suspicion is that what we ought to be doing is justifying the old tolerance with maximal civility. That is, we need to be able to disagree with one another with a smile, friendship, a meal together, and civility. Tolerance where people disagree is surely a wonderful thing. Where you can tell me, “Don, I think your views are nuts.” I can say, “Quite frankly, I thing you’re up the creek,” and still we can tolerate each other and defend the right of the other one to speak and voice his or her views.
That kind of tolerance will breed civility in society without actually crushing other people. It is, on the long haul, a far more tolerant approach. That means that you are then back in the domain where you have to start arguing for certain visions of truth and reality and so on. You can’t duck them anymore under some generalized, agglutinized sort of “everybody’s right and nobody’s wrong” perspective.
B. What shall we say about distinctions between modernism and postmodernism?
These are extremely complex. What’s happening in the field today is really quite interesting. The old debate between what we’ll call hard modernism and hard postmodernism thought in these sorts of extremes. Hard modernism was interested in propositional truth, in getting things exactly right, and in universalizing everything.
Hard postmodernism was equally concerned to say, “There is only truth in the particular hermeneutical community. There is only truth in the particular individual. There is only truth in particular interpretations, and it’s not universal truth. It’s not truth that is for all times, places, and cultures. There is no such thing. It’s not available.”
Increasingly today, people working in the field are far more cautious. They were burned out by these debates. You still find books, many of them churned out every year, arguing for this absolute dichotomy, but it’s already old-fashioned. Many, many, for example, of the strongest thinkers in this heritage were French: Michel Foucault, for example, Jacques Derrida, and many others.
I was brought up in French, and I spend a fair bit of time in the francophone world. Nowadays, nobody in France at the university level reads Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. It’s passÈ; it’s gone. The people who are reading them now are people who read English and read these blokes in translation. We’re just behind a bit, that’s all.
In fact, what people are recognizing is that even the so-called moderns recognized how often how little they knew. They often approached questions of truth with a certain humility. Soft postmodernism, likewise, is much more prepared to say, “Oh, it’s true. You cannot know things from the perspective of omniscience, but surely you can know some things.”
Let me put it this way. There are two kinds of perspectivalists, that is, of recognizing that we all look at things from a certain perspective. There are two kinds of perspectivalists: those who admit it and those who don’t. Perspectivalism belongs to our finitude. It belongs to the fact that we’re small. We don’t see everything.
There is only one non-perspectivalist, namely, God because he does know everything. He does know absolutely everything. He’s non-perspectivalist. He doesn’t look at things from only one perspective. Because we’re not omniscient, of course, we’re perspectival. But does that mean we can’t know the truth? That’s the question. Hard postmodernism says, “Yes, that means we can’t know the truth.” Soft postmodernism says, “You can sidle up to it.”
Let me give you a mathematical example, if I may. The engineers will enjoy this one. Those of you who have only read history and don’t like mathematics will have to forgive me for about two minutes. My first degree was in chemistry and mathematics, so I have to go back to my childhood.
Imagine now a big graph, an X-Y graph. On the X-axis is time. On the Y-axis is distance in one’s knowledge from the actual reality. So, if you hold that reality is true, and you are up here, then your understanding of something or other is quite far from the reality. Is that clear? If you come down close to it, then you’re getting closer and closer in your understanding to the truth. What I would want to argue, and most soft postmodernists today would argue this, is that on this X-Y graph, in the domain of many spheres of knowledge, the graph looks like a plane coming in for a landing. For the mathematicians, it’s an asymptotic approach. This line is an asymptote.
Let me give you an illustration. I’ll take it from the Christian world. You have a little girl. We’ll call her Celia. Celia has been brought up in a nice Christian home and has been introduced to Bible knowledge and Bible teaching. You go into the home, and you ask Celia, now age 7 or 8, “Celia, do you believe that Jesus loves you?”
“Yes!”
“How do you know?”
“Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
“The Bible tells you so?”
“Yes!”
“Where? Where does it say that Jesus loves Celia? Or that God loves Celia?”
Because this little child has been well taught, she thinks, and she thinks. Then she says, “Well, the Bible does say that God so loved the world, and I’m part of the world.” She’s doing not badly, isn’t she? Yes! Does she understand John 3:16 to which she still just referred? Does she understand what John means by the word world? That is, the whole moral order and act of rebellion against the Almighty. Does she understand that?
Does she know anything about the different Greek words for love? “God so loved the world.” Which Greek verb did John use? “God so loved the world that he gave his …” Oh! Now our versions differ. “That he gave his one and only Son.” “That he gave his only begotten Son.” Does she know what monogenēs means in Greek? You work right through the text, and you start saying, “Dear little Celia, I don’t know how much you really know about this.”
So on this graph, she’s way up there. At the age of 6 or 7, she’s way up there, isn’t she? But she grows up, maybe in St. John’s—St. Margaret’s, and she hears biblical teaching. She grows in her ability to understand the truth. Eventually she goes to Singapore Bible College or Trinity College here, and she gets a whole lot of exegesis and Greek and background. Now on this graph, she’s getting older, and she’s getting closer and closer to understanding John 3:16.
Then she comes to Trinity, where I teach in Chicago, and she does a PhD on Johannine notions of the love of God against a Jewish background … 280 pages of technical argumentation in fine print. Has this graph, this asymptote, now touched the line yet? No. She’s not God. Now we’ll spring forward 50 billion years into eternity. Has her knowledge of John 3:16 now touched the line so that she has perfect knowledge? No! Not a chance! Because perfect knowledge belongs only to God. It belongs only to God. Exhaustive knowledge is a function of being omniscient.
Now come all the way back to when she was 6 or 7. Would you want to say that she had misunderstood the text when she used it to prove that God loves Celia? I mean, in one sense, she got it in the right domain, didn’t she? She didn’t think that John 3:16 was talking about the sex life of sea turtles or about substitutionary atonement. She was in the right domain. She was a long way from the details.
Inevitably, all forms of our knowledge are cultural-laden; you cannot escape that. Although they are cultural-laden, that does not mean that we don’t know anything about the truth. It means that we sidle up to it with increasing approximations.
That’s why the Bible can speak of the faith once for all delivered to the saints, for example, and insist that the one gospel is to be preached among all nations, all ethnicities, and all tribes. It can actually cross cultural, racial, and temporal barriers. Even though every cultural manifestation of it might vary here and there in bits and forms or the other; nevertheless, there is an eternal gospel that is able to be talked about as we cross cultures.
In any given year, I end up speaking in at least 20 countries. If I stick my attention on the biblical text and teach it carefully, I discover that Slovaks can understand what I’m saying. Canadians can understand what I’m saying. Brazilians can understand what I’m saying. Even Singaporeans can understand what I’m saying. At least I hope so.
That’s because, not only are there commonalities in being human, but we have a common approach (if we’re Christians at all), across all the ethnicities and all the other barriers, to understanding what the text says. That’s why there can be orthodox standards across cultural barriers of history, time, and place.
Thus, a humble kind of modernism and a soft form of postmodernism actually begin to meet each other again and recognize that, yes, we can know the truth, speak the truth, and pass on the truth. To duck it in the name of a hard postmodernism eventually becomes just a wee bit silly. If you start saying, “No, no, you really can’t know the truth in any objective sense,” then my answer is going to be, “How do you know that?” The more strongly you know it, the more you defeat yourself because if you know that, then you have certainty in some domain or other where you say you can’t have certainty.
C. Then what shall we say about faith?
I said that in our culture, faith increasingly means something like a synonym for religion or a personal, subjective, religious choice. The word faith can be used in a number of ways in the Bible, but never, ever … not once … does it ever mean that. Not once.
One of the most interesting passages on faith is 1 Corinthians 15 where the apostle Paul is talking about the resurrection of Jesus. He discovers that some of his readers are not convinced that Jesus rose from the dead.
If you re-read this passage when you get home, you discover that what Paul says to them is this: “Supposing for argument’s sake that Jesus did not rise from the dead. Supposing Jesus really had not really risen from the dead. What would follow from this? Well,” he says, “first of all it would mean that the apostles and the other 500 witnesses who attested that the really did see Jesus after his resurrection are all a bunch of liars.
They are not telling the truth. Whether they hallucinated or whatever, they’re not telling the truth. Even though Jesus appeared sometimes to one or two, sometimes to the Twelve, sometimes in a locked room, sometimes by the side of a lake eating fish with them, showing the marks of his hands to as many as 500 people at once in different times and places, across a period of 40 days. They are all deluded. You have to infer that.”
Next he would say, “Secondly, you’re still in your trespasses and sins. In other words, you can’t be sure that Christ’s death actually paid for your sin if he didn’t rise from the dead, and thus show that he was vindicated by God himself.” Then he says, in the third place, “Your faith is in vain.” In other words, if you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, when, in fact, he didn’t rise from the dead, then your faith is useless.
For Paul, one of the things that warrants faith is the truthfulness of faith’s object. The Bible never, ever encourages you to believe something that isn’t true. Never. In fact, Paul goes on to say, “Not only is your faith useless if you believe something that isn’t true, but you are of all people most to be pitied.”
In other words, if you believe something that isn’t true, but it’s sort of meaningful to you.… It’s really religiously valuable to me whether or not it’s true. Paul says, “What a joke. Your faith is useless, and you’re just to be pitied.” No one in the Bible ever encourages you to believe something that isn’t true.
A couple of years ago, the then archbishop of Perth was asked on public radio.… He was known to be a pretty remarkable skeptic. He was asked around the Easter season, “Supposing somebody today managed to find the tomb of Jesus, and Jesus was really still in it after all. It was conclusively proved that this was Jesus all right, and he hadn’t risen from the dead. What would that do for your faith?” The dear archbishop replied, “Oh! It wouldn’t do anything to my faith because Jesus is arisen in my heart.”
Well, that’s not what the apostle Paul says. The apostle Paul says, “If Jesus is dead, and you believe that he’s alive, then your faith is useless. Quite frankly, your whole spiritual claims are a joke. You’re of all people most to be pitied.” In other words, biblical faith is encouraged by articulating and promulgating the truth. The way you strengthen faith is by articulating the truth.
Faith is more than believing the truth. After all, the Devil himself believes that Jesus rose from the dead, but it doesn’t do him any good. Faith is more than believing the truth. It also includes an element of self-abandonment to Christ, to God, and to trust him. Nevertheless, it never means less than believing the truth. The way you increase faith in the Bible is precisely by teaching, articulating, and defending the truth and encouraging people thus to come to faith to believe it.
D. As for rising multiculturalism and globalism today, what I have to tell you is that this brings us back to the first three centuries of the Christian church.
What Christians were condemned for most in the first three centuries was precisely that they were making exclusive claims about Christ. All the pagan religions around, although they articulated their own views, they insisted that there is no one view that is right.
Christianity from the beginning in the New Testament was viewed as narrow-minded and bigoted because there are all these texts in which Jesus says things like, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” The apostle Peter can say, “Neither is there salvation in any other name, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved.”
That was astonishingly offensive for the first three centuries of the Christian church. Why should we think we’re going to get off more lightly today? Ultimately, it is a truth claim. If someone says that the opportunities and challenges from technological society mean that somehow biblical faith, biblical study, and so on, just seem old-fashioned and archaic, I have to tell you …
E. When people are genuinely converted, not only are they justified before God, they are, to use language that Jesus taught us, born again.
They have the power of the Spirit to live in a transformed way. It changes what they do. It changes their priorities. This is why Christians ultimately, if they are genuine Christians at all, will want to learn more about the God they have come to love. Their hearts are changed.
Biblical Christianity is not simply a matter of a set of truths that you are to believe or set of laws that you are to obey. It is also bound up with the power of God that transforms our hearts so that we now want to go in a different direction. Without that, you are a long way from biblical Christianity.
F. As for these rising voices with popularizations about the Judas gospel and the like, I am going to stick them on the side.
If you want to raise questions about them in Q&A in a few moments, do it then. But I got the impression nobody was bothered about it here, so I’m not going to be bothered about it either.
3. How then shall we wisely wrestle with doubt when it arises?
The important thing here is to recognize that doubt has different causes. When I was a relatively young man and pastoring a church in Vancouver, Canada, we had at the time in our church between 50 and 100 university-age and just post-university young people who were full of energy. All of these energetic young people (quite a wonderful bunch) paled in comparison to one young woman by the name of Peggy.
Peggy. Well, if you stuck Peggy at one end of the room and the other 99 at the other end of the room (or however many there were), about 90 percent of the energy in the room was at Peggy’s end. She was one of those.… Do you know any Peggys? She was enthusiastic, vociferous, energetic, really keen in her Christian faith.
She thought in associative manners. She thought tangentially. Mercifully, she was not an engineer. She was a great art student, I am sure, but she thought in associative terms. She couldn’t rub two straight sticks together and get them in a line. She didn’t think in those terms, but within the framework of her thinking, she was a wonderful, young Christian woman.
She came to me one day while she was finishing up at the University of British Columbia, and she said, “Pastor Don, there’s a chap on the university campus. He plays football.” Now this is North American football, not soccer. He was a big dude. She continued, “His name is Fred, and he doesn’t know anything about Christianity. He wants to take me out so he can ask me questions about Christianity and Christ.”
I said, “Uh-huh.” “Oh, no, no, no. I don’t want to have any romance with him; I just want to be able to answer some questions and share my faith with him.” I said, “Uh-huh.” She said, “No, no, no. I mean, you know me. I really love the Lord Jesus. I’m not trying to do something disgusting off on the side.” I said, “Fine. Fine. Go out with him and have some coffee. Talk about Christ, and then bring him to see me.”
So she did. That Saturday night, I was in my study. It was already 10:00 at night, 10:30. I was studying late, and there was a knock on my door. In bounced Peggy, and behind her was this great big dude called Fred. She said, “Pastor Don, Fred wants to meet you.” Well, I could see right away that wasn’t true. I was merely a barrier on the way to Peggy. So we went out to one of the regional, all-night restaurants around and had coffee. I tried to get him to relax so I could find out a little bit about him.
He didn’t know anything about anything. Biblically, he was bone ignorant. The next Saturday night … same thing. A knock at the door. In they bounced again. Off we went to IHOP, the International House of Pancakes. We sat down. This time, he had a list of questions. So he was serious enough to have some questions. I was there until 2 in the morning with him, and with Peggy, answering questions, giving him some things that he should read, and trying to explain the rudiments of what the Bible was.
The next Saturday night … more knocking. In bounced Peggy, and along was Fred. We went to IHOP. Another list of questions. He had read everything that I had suggested during the week, and he had another list of questions. I was there until 2 o’clock in the morning, answering questions. For 13 weeks, this went on. What this was doing to my sermons on Sunday morning, I have no idea. But for 13 weeks, that’s what went on. At the end of it, he was as dour, as linear, and as logical as she was tangential, associative, and vivacious.
At the end of the 13 weeks, he looked to me, and he said, “All right. I’ll become a Christian.” I have not seen many people come to faith in Jesus Christ in such a linear fashion as that, but he really was wonderfully converted. And yes, he did marry Peggy! Today, interestingly enough, they’re both missionaries, too. That’s even more interesting, 30 years later. In his case, where did his doubt lie, his skepticism? In the first instance, it was grounded in sheer ignorance. He needed a lot of information to cure that kind of thing. Do you see?
But sometimes people take philosophical positions. This is what Michal Foucault did. This is what a chap called John Dewey did in North America. They took a stance that said, “I will not be curtailed in my spiritual walk. I will not be curtailed in my sexual preferences. I will not have anybody telling me what to do. Therefore, I will adopt some philosophy that moves me in such and such a direction.”
For Michel Foucault, it was in the direction of postmodern thought. For John Dewey, it was in the direction of the philosophy of meaninglessness. Here there is, in other words, a broad philosophical stance against Christianity and, therefore, it generates by itself another whole range of doubts.
Sometimes, doubt comes not from some large philosophical decision but from ten thousand choices, all of them bad. You are brought up, for example, in a strong Christian home. You are properly taught, and you’ve read your Bible. You get married, and you start rearing your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. You are involved in some outreach, service in the community, helping some poor folk, and so on.
Then the pressures of life, climbing up the slippery slope to middle-management and beyond, all of the pressures of a mortgage, and all the rest eventually so climb in on you that your prayer life dwindles, your reading begins to disappear. If you show up once for church in two or three weeks, you feel you are being generous with God. Pretty soon, your reading time and your associations are all elsewhere.
Then you discover that the secretary at work actually has a lot more sympathy for you and understanding than your wife does. Three or four years later you wake up one morning in bed with somebody you shouldn’t be in bed with. You get up. You look at yourself in the mirror, and you say, “I don’t believe all that Bible rubbish anyway.”
How did you get there? You didn’t get there from some huge, philosophical commitment. You didn’t get there out of bone ignorance. You got there out of ten thousand moral choices, all of them bad, because we are whole beings. I’m sure in a crowd this size, there are some of you that are having trouble with your faith because your morals are corrupt, and you don’t want to change them.
In other words, we are whole people. What we think about truth, morality, repentance, God, the faithfulness of the Bible, and all kinds of other things, these things are all tied together. There are few people more miserable than those who want to be Christians at some superficial level, but want to live like the world, the flesh, and the Devil at another level. They can’t be happy pagans, and they can’t be happy Christians. Ultimately, they will be destroyed. That is unstable and cannot endure.
There are many other causes of doubt. Sometimes doubt is generated by fatigue. You try holding down two or three jobs, taking night school courses, running on far too little sleep. You are right on the edge of a breakdown. Pretty soon you become really cynical about everything. You become cynical about the faith. You become cynical about God. You become cynical about Christians.
You have all kinds of doubts, and you wonder what’s going on in the world. You are mad at everybody. You know what you need? Go to bed! Don’t pray all night; get some sleep! Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the entire universe is get some sleep! Do you see? You cannot burn yourself out and be godly. If you need seven hours of sleep a night in order to be godly, you are morally responsible to get seven hours of sleep a night so that you’re not ungodly!
Coming to know yourself, knowing whether you’re a five-hour person, a seven-hour person, or an eight-hour person is part of personal responsibility. Why have I rabbited on about these things? Because doubt has many causes, and the solutions depend on the cause. In John 20, you find the account of Thomas (if I had time, I would expound it.), where Thomas doubts Jesus’ resurrection.
That passage does not answer all kinds of doubts. It answers Thomas’ kind of doubt. You have to understand what kind of doubt it is that Thomas had. All the kinds that I have talked about are discussed in one fashion or another somewhere in Scripture. They’re all there, in one fashion or another, in narrative or in exposition. The reasons for doubt are many, and the answers that are given to doubt depend on the diagnosis of the kind of doubt in the first place.
What I am sure is, ultimately, we must come to see who Jesus is, what his claims are, how he is worshipped as nothing other than one with God, that he did rise from the dead in the presence of many witnesses, and that he will return and every knee will bow. If you see only that, if you see it clearly, it is enough to recognize that everything else flows from it.
There are lots of other ways at getting at these truths, but everything flows from this. If he really did rise from the dead, then he is unique with his resurrection body, the authority that he claims. Worshipped by Thomas at the end of this event: “My Lord and my God.” Thus his teaching, his sanction, and his lordship become supremely, universally true. Denying it does not make us more sophisticated, knowledgeable, or mature; it makes us foolish, dangerously off track. This Christ demands that we put our confidence in him.
