Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of tolerance in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
To speak of the intolerance of tolerance might strike some people as nothing more than arrant nonsense, an obscure oxymoron perhaps, as meaningless as talk about the hotness of cold or the blackness of white. Tolerance currently occupies the same place in Western culture as apple pie and motherhood did during the 1950s. It is considered rather gauche to question it; or to put the matter in a slightly more sophisticated way, tolerance now is part of the Western, and especially American, plausibility structure.
The expression plausibility structure was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his book, The Heretical Imperative. He uses it to refer to structures of thought widely and almost unquestioningly accepted throughout the culture. One of his arguments is that in tight monolithic cultures, like Japan, the reigning plausibility structures may be enormously complex because so many people share so many things in common. As a result, there may be many stances that are widely assumed, more or less unquestioned.
In a highly diverse culture, like that which dominates much of the Western world, the plausibility structures are necessarily far more restricted for the very good reason we don’t have all that much in common. The plausibility structures that do remain tend to be held with extra tenacity, almost as if people recognize that without such structures the culture would be in danger of flying apart.
Tolerance, I suggest, in much of the Western world is part of this restricted, but tenaciously held, plausibility structure. To come along and question it in some way or other is not only to tilt at windmills, but it is culturally insensitive, lacking in good taste, decidedly rude. So here we go.… I press on, regardless, persuaded that the emperor has no clothes or at best is sporting no more than Jockey shorts.
I shall argue that although a few things can be said in its favor, the notion of tolerance has changed, and the contemporary tolerance is intrinsically intolerant and is blind to its own shortcomings because it erroneously thinks it holds the moral high ground. It does not. Worse, this tolerance is, perhaps, socially dangerous and is certainly intellectually debilitating. There are better structures of thought for achieving the desired ends.
My argument will unfold in four steps, two now and two at the third plenary. If I merely succeed in mucking things up in the first hour, have faith; we’ll try to un-muck them later.
1. The old tolerance and the new.
I begin by stipulating I am not talking about every form of tolerance; rather the meaning of tolerance has changed in the last three decades or so and it is this new view of tolerance that must be challenged.
Under the old view of tolerance, which had its own problems.… I wish I had more time to unpack them … a person might be judged tolerant if while holding strong views he or she insisted others had the right to dissent from those views and argue their own cases. Under this older view of tolerance, the assumptions were three-fold.
A. There is objective truth out there, and it is our duty to pursue that truth.
B. The various parties in a dispute think they know what the truth of the matter is.
C. Nevertheless, they hold that the best chance of uncovering the truth of the matter is by the unhindered exchange of ideas no matter how wrongheaded some of those ideas seem to other parties.
This assumption demands all sides insist their opponents must not be silenced or crushed.
Hence, the famous saying of Voltaire, “I disagree with everything you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That’s the old view of tolerance. Free inquiry will eventually bring the truth out under this view. Phlogiston will be exposed. Oxygen will win. Newtonian mechanics will be bested. Quantum mechanics will triumph, and so forth.
One version of this older view of tolerance … one might call it the secular libertarian version … has another wrinkle to it. In his famous text, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill opts for a secularist basis to tolerance. “In the domain of religion,” Mill argues, “there are insufficient rational grounds for verifying the truth claims of any religion. The only reasonable stance toward religion is, therefore, public agnosticism and private benign tolerance.”
For Mill, people should be tolerant in the domain of religion not because this is the best way to uncover the truth, but precisely because whatever the truth there are insufficient means for uncovering it.
A well-known parable told by another eighteenth-century thinker, namely Lessing, of course, nicely illustrates this perspective. A father owns a magic ring and must bequeath it to one of his three sons, all three of whom he loves equally. Not wanting to be charged with favoritism, he makes two imitation rings. At his death, the three rings are passed on to his sons. Each of the three sons thinks his is the magic ring, and the other two are false.
Eventually, they take the matter up with Nathan the Wise, who patiently listens to their arguments and then offers his famous judgment. “Let each think his own ring is the true and magic one, and in the meantime, show forth gentleness and heartfelt tolerance toward the others.”
My point is both Mill and Lessing think there is objective truth out there. After all, there is at least one magic ring, but their rationalist and secular presuppositions drive them to infer in some domains, at least, the truth is not accessible. One can think something or other is true and argue the case, but if one cannot prove this something is true in a manner that conforms to the verification standards of public knowledge, the best stance is simply benign tolerance.
In short, the older view of tolerance held either that the truth is subjective and can be known, and the best way to uncover it is bold public tolerance of those who disagree since sooner or later the truth will win out, or it held while truth is objective and can be known in some domains, it probably can’t be known in other domains, and the wisest course in the latter case is benign tolerance grounded in the superior knowledge that recognizes our limitations. Two additional observations I should tack on are …
First, we arrived at this point in Western culture after centuries of struggle. We just didn’t happen into it. This is part of the fruit of the Enlightenment for better or for worse. This view of tolerance does have its problems. I wish I could unpack it. It has some great strengths, but it does have some problems.
Secondly, some have argued these developments have, in any case, been entirely pernicious. For example, in the recent book on tolerance by A.J. Conyers, he says these views of tolerance have made it impossible to talk seriously about deep truths. In my view that goes a bit too far, though he has something to say about it. I’ll come back to that one a little later. In any case, that’s the old view of tolerance.
The new view of tolerance is quite different. Under the impact of postmodern epistemology, about which I’ll say more in a moment, people are more likely to be thought tolerant if they do not hold strong views. The reason for this is many thinkers in our world are pretty certain the notion of objective truth is incoherent. If there is no objective truth to which all people owe allegiance, precisely because it is intrinsically objective, then strong opinions are no more than strong preferences for a particular version of what we call truth.
This postmodern approach to tolerance sports another wrinkle in the domain of religion. For various reasons, despite all the predictions of the naturalists, there is a rising interest in something rather ill-defined called spirituality, but because there is no reason to think one particular approach to spirituality captures the truth in any objective sense, there is a drift toward the view that all perspectives on spirituality are equally valid.
To return to Lessing’s parable of the ring, Lessing himself wanted people to be tolerant because (according to him) we cannot be sure which ring is the magic one, but he didn’t deny there is a magic ring. The new postmodern approach to tolerance, especially with respect to spirituality, argues that all the rings are equally magic.
That means the reason for being tolerant is not that we cannot know which ring is magic, nor the best way to find out which ring is magic is by free discussion, but rather since all the rings are equally magic or non-magic, it is irresponsible to suggest any of the rings is merely imitation and without magical power. We must be tolerant not because we cannot distinguish the right path from the wrong path but because each path is equally right.
If you begin with this view of tolerance and then elevate this understanding to the supreme position in the hierarchy of moral virtues, the supreme sin is intolerance. Intolerance now is understood to be any questioning or contradiction of the view that all opinions are equal, that all worldviews have equal worth, that all stances are equally valid. To question such postmodern axioms is, by definition, intolerant. For such questioning there is no tolerance whatsoever, for it is classed as intolerance and is, therefore, to be condemned.
The importance of the distinction between the older view of tolerance and this postmodern view of tolerance cannot easily be exaggerated. I do not think my summary of the new view of tolerance is exaggerated. Leslie Armour, philosophy professor at the University of Ottawa states, “Our idea is that to be a virtuous citizen is to be one who tolerates everything except intolerance.” The United Nations’ Declaration of Principles on Tolerance boldly asserts, “Tolerance involves the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism.”
Edwin Delattre, dean of the Boston University School of Education, defines the new tolerance as.… It’s a good definition; he does not buy into that camp, lest I give the wrong impression. He defines it as the elevation and evaluation of all values and beliefs to a position worthy of respect. One cannot help but ask if this includes Nazism, Stalinism, child sacrifice. The most rigorous thinkers along these lines would answer, “Yes.” I’ll come back to that one later.
Note well the cumulative effect of such definitions. Heresy is no longer possible, except for the view that there is such a thing as heresy. “That’s heretical.” No absolutism is permitted, except for the absolute prohibition of absolutism. Tolerance rules, except there must be no tolerance for those who disagree with this particular definition of tolerance. Thus, tolerance becomes the most massively intolerant movement in Western culture.
As Gaede puts it in his very useful book, When Tolerance is No Virtue, he writes, “In the past political correctness generally centered on issues that were quite substantive. The Victorians were prudish about sex because they were enthusiastic about bourgeois morality. In the fifties, many Americans were intolerant of any notion that seemed remotely “pink” (socialistic) because they assumed communism to be a major threat to their economic and political freedom.
Today’s political correctness, however, is intolerant not of substance, but of intolerance itself. Thus, although the politically correct would have a great deal of difficulty agreeing on what constitutes goodness and truth, they have no trouble at all agreeing that intolerance itself is wrong. Why? Because no one deserves to be offended.” I want to use most of the rest of my time in this first session to talk about …
2. The sea change that helped bring about this new tolerance.
This does not have happen in a vacuum. This is tied to much broader movements, and it’s worth thinking about them before we start trying to plod our way back in the second hour.
Doubtless, there are many things that have contributed to this new view of tolerance. To be included in any full-blown discussion would be such phenomena as the changing immigration patterns during the past half century, which have brought to our shores millions of men and women who have contributed to the rich diversity of our citizenry; the invention of the computer and the Internet, which exposes us to all kinds of ideas and stances and perspectives much more rapidly than could have possibly been done a bare generation ago; the invention of the Net itself, not just the computer, which links people together. They enhance the feeling that the world is nothing but a global village, and much more.
The change to which I wish to draw attention is the change in epistemology. At the risk of oversimplification, let me distinguish premodern, modern, and postmodern epistemology.
A. Premodern epistemology,
by which I mean, epistemology that dominates in the High Middle Ages through the end of the Reformation. That is, through the Renaissance and the Reformation, up to the beginning of the Enlightenment, which marks the beginning of the modern period.
At this point, Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin are on the same page. They’re not on the same page in everything, but on this point they’re on the same page. That is to say, all human knowledge is a subset of God’s perfect and exhaustive knowledge. God knows everything. We human beings know only a part of it. Therefore, necessarily, all human knowledge is a subset of God’s exhaustive knowing; therefore, necessarily, all human knowledge is a function in some way or another of revelation.
That is, if God knows it all then the question is how God, who knows it all, shares some bits of it with us. Call that revelation. Whether it is through Scripture or by the Spirit or in science (what was then called natural philosophy) or by whatever means, by providential steering of things … whatever … all of this is revelation, which then teaches finite beings to know some small part of what God knows.
Because there was not necessarily any huge empirical element to this view of epistemology, at the street level it was regularly and regrettably tied to a great deal of magic and superstition, but in one sense it leaves the central presupposition being the omniscient God. That is its strength. Its weakness is, nevertheless, in a fallen world there is very little way of testing anything except by appeal to authority.
B. Modern epistemology.
When historians of intellectual heritage talk about the shift to the Enlightenment, they regularly focus on Rene Descartes and the onset of Cartesian thought. In some ways, that’s not fair. There was a whole movement that was going on. History is messy. You can’t simply drop a line and say, “Before this it was like this, and after that …” It just doesn’t work like that. Nevertheless, for convenience, we’ll focus on Descartes.
Descartes was not himself, of course, a secularist or an atheist. In fact, he was a devout Roman Catholic. There’s pretty good evidence that when he came across his vast theory he went and spent some days in retreat at St. Ann’s monastery to thank God for his insights. Every first-year philosophy student is exposed to them under the rubric, cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”
It’s worth pointing out he was not the first person to say that sort of thing. Saint Augustine had said something rather similar more than a millennium earlier. He had said, si fallor sum, “If I err, I am.” Saint Augustine never connected this with a vast theory of epistemology, and so it never became a slogan in the Western world.
At the risk of oversimplification, however, in due course what came out of Descartes emphasis can be summarized in six characteristics to what we will call modern epistemology.
First, unlike premodernism, it begins with the “I.” That is, it begins with a finite knower. Premodern epistemology begins with God. In that sense, premodern epistemology is much more like Van Tillianism. There are some big differences, but in that respect it’s much more like Van Tillianism.
Here, he begins with “I.” In fact, there’s pretty good evidence that Descartes wanted to go down this track because he was finding rising numbers of atheists and other heretics in the universities who did not share the common epistemology anymore and he wanted to convert them to the true church. Therefore, he was seeking some sort of common foundation on which he could build structures.
When he set himself to doubt everything, it was not because he was a systematic skeptic; it was because he was setting himself to doubt everything in order to find some sure foundation where he could no longer doubt, and he came to his cogito ergo sum. “I cannot doubt that I exist; I am thinking.”
Whether you think that’s good logic or not is irrelevant. He did, and he tied it to an entire structure of argumentation that is now entirely obsolete and we needn’t pursue here. The point is it begins with a finite “I.” It does not begin with God and the reservoir of omniscience. It begins with a finite “I.”
Secondly, it assumes and eventually articulates knowledge of truth is simultaneously attainable and desirable. This it shares with premodern epistemology, but on the other hand its ground is different. In premodern epistemology, the pursuit of truth is attainable and the pursuit of it is desirable, precisely because God who exists does disclose stuff.
Once you’ve moved to “I” being the beginning point, then it’s no longer quite so sure how you get there. You’re no longer appealing to revelation. There was equal certainty that in fact human beings can know the truth, can know it truly, and thus, the pursuit of truth is still held up as a desideratum, as a summum bonum.… It’s something to pursue. Truth is both desirable and attainable.
Thirdly, it became profoundly foundational. That is, it sought certain foundations on which to build, foundations which were judged to be self-evident. That is, axiomatic. He set himself to doubt things until he could doubt no more, and his foundation was cogito ergo sum, but in many disciplines that sort of approach had already been established.
Long before Descartes that was the approach to Euclidean geometry. You begin with axioms and then from the axioms you draw some inferences and build up some rules and prove theorems until you eventually have a complex system. You begin, thus, with the self-evident. Those foundations then eventually control everything.
Fourthly, precisely because it did not depend on revelation, except what you can discover to be revelation, it became methodologically rigorous. It becomes the foundation for what we mean by modern science. It becomes methodologically rigorous. All of this, until very recently, still dominates all our universities. So if you write a dissertation on some topic the issue of the grade you get or whether or not you pass or fail will turn, perhaps, not even quite as much on your conclusions as on the rigor of the methodology you apply to the task.
You establish the foundations for your discipline, and then, of course, you become rigorously controlled (methodologically-speaking), and then you turn the crank and out comes truth, so if somebody then wants to disagree with your conclusions then, sooner or later, they must assault either the methods or the foundation. Those are the options. In other words, if everything is rigorous at the methodological level and yet you still disagree, then you have to go after the presuppositions, the foundations. You have no other choice.
With time, of course, that discipline may revise the methods or reanalyze the foundations. It’s not as if everything is set in concrete. Nevertheless, methodologically, epistemologically, that’s how Western thought has developed. That’s how science has, in large part, developed. There are lots of little kinks that are put in.
People long recognized before Thomas Kuhn that sometimes people made leaps of logic and jumped to a new insight. It didn’t all fall out logically. Nevertheless, in terms of establishing something as truth, you still sought your self-evident truths, your axioms, your foundations, and then you developed your methodological rigor, and then you turned the crank and out popped the truth.
Fifthly, that meant you were pursuing truth that partook of ahistorical universality. That is to say, truth that is true everywhere, in every time … ahistorical, transcultural universality. It’s easiest to see in the domain of the hard sciences, partly because the international scientific community has common language.
If you discover the water molecule has two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen in Lima, Peru, low and behold, the same is also true in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Truth is truth. It’s true everywhere. With that kind of perspective, you want the same thing to operate in every domain. That, of course, was at the heart of Marxist historiography in the days of the Russian Empire.
The reason why a lot of Christians, for example, were excluded from university education was exactly the same that you would exclude someone from university education in a science faculty in the West. If despite spectacular GPAs and spectacular test scores and all the rest, he said, “I do have to tell you, I don’t believe in the atomic theory of matter” he’s not going to get into a chemistry course in the Western world. It’s not going to happen. You’re going to wonder what sort of kook this is.
Supposing he writes in and he says, “I’d really like to do astronomy, but quite frankly, I think the earth is flat.” Again, he’s not going to be admitted, because there are certain things that are now givens in those disciplines, and people who don’t fall in with the givens are excluded.
From the point of view of Marxist historiography, once it is established for Marxists that a historical scientific view of things … that is, a scientific view of history grounded on cultural movement and economic analysis … is true, then if you have some kind of Christian coming in saying, “I don’t really believe it’s true. I think you also have to take into account the power of God and the Reformation and all of that,” then obviously, they’re such twits that no matter how bright they are in their test scores they can’t possibly be admitted to a university.
What you have then is a profound commitment in discipline after discipline to truths that partake of ahistorical universality, so that even where you have a discipline which is changing stuff all the time, like biblical studies, where you move from the beginning of the century to various forms of source criticism, tradition criticism, redaction criticism, and now the new literary criticism … all these things. It’s presented again and again, until the last 20 years ago, as progress in the science.
It’s extra rules that are put in, extra foundations that we’ve come to discover, and we’re moving as a body to new insights and deeper grasps. The model is still from the hard sciences. It’s very difficult for somebody to get a hearing who comes along and says, “Good grief. This is a really silly thing. It’s not an advance at all. It’s a retrograde step. Very technically impressive, but at the end of the day, it butchers the text and should be thrown out forthwith.”
You can’t say that sort of thing because it’s outside the camp. You can say it in your narrow-minded, right-wing, bigoted, fundamentalist schools, but apart from that you’re not allowed to say that sort of thing, because it’s just too ignorant by half. All of this depends on a certain notion of the progress of revelation.
Sixthly, though it was not true at the beginning, the Western epistemology became increasingly committed to philosophical materialism. It wasn’t that at the beginning. Most of the early serious scientists were Christians in some sense, certainly theists, and many of the most profound thinkers were deeply committed not only to theism, but precisely to the Christian revelation. Increasingly, there came to be in the Western world (not quite so much in America as in Europe, but in many parts of the world) a commitment to philosophical materialism.
C. Postmodern epistemology.
Postmodernism either overturns or modifies all six of those parameters. It’s impossible, in my view, to get a very good grasp of postmodern epistemology without seeing that sort of thing, whether it’s cast in these terms or otherwise. The reasons for it are complex. Some of them turn on the intrinsic weakness of the system itself. That’s why there are some very reputable thinkers who treat postmodernism not as a new epistemology but merely modernism gone to seed. It’s just the extrapolation of it.
You begin with the “I,” you being with this focus on self, you begin with self-reverentiality, and then you ultimately don’t have any mooring. You don’t have any gauge. You don’t have any lever on which to wield Archimedes lever at all. As a result, modernism is inevitably going to drift to postmodernism.
In that sense, there are quite a few people … popularizers like Tom Oden, but also more serious analyses like that of Netland and a number of others as well … who are convinced that postmodernism is not really a useful label. It’s really modernism gone to seed. There’s some truth to that.
It’s still worth using the postmodern label, in my judgment, because there are some differences that can usefully be talked about that need to be understood. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing that postmodernism is the fruit of modernism in many respects. It is exposing the instability of modernist epistemology.
Moreover, there were three or four movements in Western culture that came together and contributed to this shift. People have been thinking about these things for a long time. Immanuel Kant was no postmodernist, but on the other hand, he made the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal.
That is, the phenomenal is what you know by the senses directly by measuring something or weighing it or the like, and the noumenal was the mental structure you imposed on it to give it a certain kind of order. That is, making a distinction between the actual sensory data and the structure in which you put it together. It became one of the steps that moved toward a distinction between our constructs and reality.
In France, especially, you had movements that really came through development of linguistics. For want of time, I won’t go down that rabbit warren. It interests me a great deal. In my view, there’s a great deal in contemporary linguistics we just cannot do without. There have been some wonderful discoveries that have been made. On the other hand, as they have moved to the more radical forms of deconstruction, there is an awful lot of silliness built into it as well.
In Germany, it was through redefinitions of hermeneutics. The older hermeneutics, up to about the end of the nineteenth century, was understood to be the art and science of interpretation in which “I” am the knower and the thing to be known is the “it.” It’s the “I” and the “it.” Hermeneutics, then, is the set of rules in which I develop structures in order to understand it appropriately.
If I have the right tools as I approach the biblical text, if I ask the right questions, if I bring the right rigor and the right discipline, then as I approach the text, I will ask certain kinds of things and it will give me true answers. If I ask the wrong kinds of things, or I don’t have the right kind of rigor, then it might give me wrong answers, so you’ve got to keep refining hermeneutics.
But hermeneutics is basically the discipline in which I, the subject, establish rules.… That’s part of the methodological rigor … granted the foundation of the truthfulness of the text, there’s the foundation and the methodological rigor. I develop the rules to understand it. The new hermeneutic people (1930s and on) started saying, “Yes, but don’t forget the person asking the questions is not himself or herself neutral. We carry our own baggage. We are open to hearing only certain kinds of things.”
For 10 years or so I worked with the World Evangelism Fellowship. Part of my job was to bring people together from around the world, different races, different continents, different denominations. We were all evangelical, all with a high view of Scripture. I sent everybody papers on some project or other. They wrote their papers and came back to me.
I circulated them to everybody, and then we got all the people together and we criticized each other’s papers for days. We took notes on all of this, and we revised them all and out popped another book. We did this five times over ten years … five books. It was very interesting. It was interesting just watching people come into a room.
Have you ever watched internationals coming into a room? In would come the German and shake everybody’s hand. If he had to go out to the car, he’d shake everybody’s hand on the way out and come back in. In would come the Latin, “Brother! Kiss … kiss!” I was brought up in French Canada. I can get away with that. The Arab Christian would come in, and it was usually three kisses. I can never remember which cheek to start on. That gets really embarrassing as you get close.
Of course, the Indian has his greeting ritual, and the Japanese is bowing. So many complicated rules! How far down you go. It all depends on age and education and seniority and who’s up and who’s down and who’s president and who’s not. You sort of aim to bow in roughly the right measure. It’s complicated.
I remember watching Pablo Perez from Mexico, all 300 pounds of him, bounding into this room, coming up to an Englishman, whose name I shall not mention (though you would know it), who stood there in a corner with his hands behind his back in his tweed coat watching this descending hunk of humanity. Pablo had his arms stretched out, about to give him a warm Latin embrace, and the English brother said, “Have we been introduced?” Then in pops Ed Clowney, who most of you will know, “Hi, everybody! Sorry I’m late,” and you knew the American had turned up.
Just how people greet each other. Then when they get down to arguing.… I was always in the chair. I would start trying to get responses. I remember turning to one dear brother from Japan one day and saying, “Brother, I haven’t heard your judgment on this matter. What do you think?”
“Well, it seems to me that, perhaps, we might consider the possibility that the blessed apostle Paul might, perhaps, have been construing things in a slightly different way. He might, perhaps, have been thinking such and such.” The brother from Norway weighed in, “Of course, that’s not what he thought! I mean, anybody can see it means such and such! After all, Luther said it!” Meanwhile, my Japanese brother is wondering what group of barbarians he’s fallen into. All of this is before you get to any of the substance.
The African we had there that particular year came from what was then Upper Volta. It is now Burkina Faso. Many of the Pauline metaphors, which we in the West saw as intrinsically individualistic, he saw as intrinsically communal. In other words, our own experience does teach us that we bring our own baggage to things. In what sense is it true that we are on some sort of neutral ground, and we ask a question of the text, use our methods, bang it around a little bit, and out pops the right answer?
It’s more like we ask the question of a text, but the answer we hear … whether it’s right or wrong or indifferent, it’s what we hear … subtly shapes us so we’re now slightly different so when we approach it the next time around we’re just a bit different and ask slightly different things with slightly different sets of tolerances, so we go around and around in what came to be called the hermeneutical circle.
If you push the hermeneutical circle far enough it gets difficult. All of a sudden you start talking about the faith once for all delivered to the saints. People started talking about hermeneutical spirals. You can see there’s a problem here that has to be addressed somewhere.
In America, the drive came much more through the social sciences: cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, and so forth. I’ve long told students in this country the most dangerous departments for their faith in current Western universities are not science departments. Science departments have far, far more Christians in them than the arts departments.
In some universities, the most challenging department is the English department, followed pretty closely by cultural anthropology, and after that three or four notches down by sociology and so on. That’s the way it is. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go after them, I’m just saying objectively that’s the way it is.
How have these six points been overturned or changed? Let me go through them quickly.
Now you begin with the “I,” but far from being assured that this “I” grants an access to truth, we recognize the very subjectivity of the “I” means we have no easy access to truth. That is the shift in postmodernism. It doesn’t deny you begin with the “I,” or in some forms of postmodernism the communal “we,” but at the end of the day it says that unnecessarily limits our perspective and, therefore, any access to truth.
Furthermore, while modernism says knowledge of the truth is both desirable and attainable, postmodernism says it is not attainable and it is not even desirable. That is to say, it’s not attainable precisely because we are so finite we can’t cross those barriers. It’s become more sophisticated. We’ll put contexts in which we can know truths in simple ways and simple formulas and how to build airplanes or something like, but in terms of the large structures of thought that enable you to give a metaphysical undertaking of reality, you just can’t do it.
It’s just not possible. And it is regularly argued, not only is it not possible, it’s not even desirable, because as soon as you try to go down that track you become totalitarian. You become absolutist. There is far more color and diversity and happiness in the multiplication of diverse perspectives. It is rigorously anti-foundational.
That is to say, it argues very strongly that our foundations are themselves, human creations and, therefore, not secure. Methodologically, though there are rules that can be applied, they are themselves, creations that are tied to the subjective creations of certain approaches and certain kinds of foundations, and they have no objective status themselves.
For example, in biblical studies, let’s take study of the gospel of John. Up until 25 years ago in Society of Biblical Literature or something like that, the vast majority of papers were either doing exegesis or they were doing recreation of the Johannine community or they were doing source criticism or they were comparing the theological emphases of this book with that book, or something like that.
Today, the vast majority of papers begin by saying, “I’m approaching this now from the perspective of the new literary criticism. I’m not saying anything about history. I’m not saying anything …” Somebody else comes along and says, “I’m looking at this from the point of view of feminist theology. I’m not saying anything about the new literary criticism. I’m not saying anything about source theory.” Everybody comes in with a separate set of tools.
All of the tools have their own certain internal coherency and consistency, but they have no objective status for finding the truth about John. Thus, having cut ourselves off from foundationalism and calling in question the validity of our methods in any sort of transcendental sense, postmodernism climbs higher to the top of the intellectual heap.
For the same reason we cannot speak anymore of truth in ahistorical universal terms under postmodernism. Part of the irony is where as modernism was drifting toward increasing philosophical materialism, as far as I can see, the new postmodernism is more interested in this vague thing called spirituality, with both good and bad results. It’s far more interested in alternative realities than merely the physical world, but it is open to every kookish thing under the sun, too.
Astrology multiplies again.… “I’m really quite a spiritual person, you understand. I just love the vibrations of crystals. They settle me for the whole day.” Whether there’s any foundation in anything beyond what some crackpot has said somewhere is irrelevant, because you don’t have the right to question that person’s sincerely held spiritual beliefs.
There are also some correlatives to this postmodernism. Let me list a few. By correlatives, I mean things that have neither caused it nor been caused by it but both. That is, they have contributed to the development of postmodernism, and they are strengthened by post-modernism, but it’s not a one-to-one relationship. It’s messy. We’ll call them the correlatives of postmodernism. Let me mention three or four.
The first is biblical illiteracy. I’ve been doing university missions now for 25 years or so. Twenty-five years ago if I were dealing with an atheist on a university campus, at least he or she was a Christian atheist. That is to say, the god in which he or she was disbelieving was the Christian God, which means the categories were still on my turf. You can’t even presuppose that nowadays.
I always do expository preaching in university missions and provide the text complete with chapter and verses. I have to begin by explaining the big numbers and little numbers. They don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. In many parts of our society, that’s where it is. If you are in a conservative part of the country, God bless you. Go in peace, but that’s not what’s going on on the East Coast or the West Coast, and it’s not what’s going on in our universities.
I was on a TV set for something on Discovery Channel a few years ago, the token evangelical in this religious discussion. I was there for a couple of days doing my thing, getting painted up for the nice cameras and all that. During the course of those two or three days, I made a point of talking, I think, to everyone on the thirty-person crew. Twenty-nine of them didn’t know the Bible had two Testaments. In certain subsets of the culture, the biblical ignorance is even more profound, and not least in the media.
The thirtieth was the lady who interviewed me, and she knew because she had been prepping for this interview. She told me she had been studying the Bible now for six weeks and felt she had a pretty good handle on it. Boy was I impressed. I’m not knocking her. I’m saying this is the level of engagement nowadays. You’ve got a lot further back to start with.
Clearly, if there is no biblical literacy operating at a high level, then you’re going to be open to the more open-endedness of postmodernism, but similarly if you are more open in your epistemology, deeply committed to postmodernism, then there is less and less reliance on what claims to be an authoritative text, which is supposed to shape your thinking.
I was giving the Staley Lectures in a conservative Christian college, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, not too long ago. One of the students came to me after some long discussions on some of these matters and said, “I see the Bible does say things like ‘these are written that you may know, dear old Theophilus, the certainty of the things …’ I see the Bible says that, but I’ve got to tell you, everytime I read that stuff I get really embarrassed. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t like it. It makes me feel uncomfortable.”
What I said to him was, “Look, there are some things to work through, but your first step of homework, which I hereby cheerfully assign, is to go home and look up every single passage in the Bible, write it out, where it says ‘that you may know [a proposition].’ Not so we know God, but know a proposition.
Write it out. Either that you do know it, or you should know it, or shame on you if you don’t know it. Then look up all the words that talk about certainty along the same lines. Write them all out, too. Read them all through and feel very uncomfortable, and then ask yourself, ‘What’s the matter with my epistemology that I’m feeling uncomfortable when I read the Bible?’ ”
The fact of the matter is you cannot get across the gospel unless you get across the gospel’s view of sin. You cannot get agreement as to the solution unless you get agreement as to the nature of the problem. You cannot see how the cross answers to our biggest problem, and our biggest problem is God and his wrath, unless you see that wrath must be assuaged, and it is God himself, who tackles it. You cannot do it. You will always end up finally diluting the gospel.
Next, there is a profound suspicion of metanarrative. Metanarrative is to narrative what metaphysics is to physics. Metaphysics is the big worldview that explains the physics. It’s the frame of reference in which your physics is done. Metanarrative is the big story in which you explain all your little stories.
Postmoderns love narratives (“You tell your story, I tell my story, we all tell our stories”), but they very much despair of the big story that explains everything. Whatever else the Bible is, it is a metanarrative. It’s a big story that explains everything, and sooner or later we have to come to grips with that one as well.
There is, of course, also rising secularization. That needs to be understood. This does not necessarily mean there are fewer people who go around calling themselves Christians. It just means it doesn’t matter. Secularization, as understood by sociologists, is not the process by which we abandon religion; it’s the process by which we squeeze religion to the periphery of life.
You can be ever so religious on Sunday; it just doesn’t matter a fig. In a culture in which evangelicals now have the same divorce rate as the rest of the culture, that’s secularization. I don’t care how many people go to church. It’s secularization. It doesn’t matter what you believe anymore. It just doesn’t matter.
One of the correlatives, a very tight correlative, is tolerance. You knew I’d get back to the subject in the end, didn’t you? This new view of tolerance finally is grounded in postmodern epistemology. It is precisely because we are not in a place where we can say any view is truly right or wrong that it becomes immoral to say that anyone is right or wrong for holding a view.
Lest you think I’m going to spend the rest of the day jumping all over postmodernism, I’m not. In my view, Christians who are thoughtful about these matters should be neither modern, nor postmodern in their epistemology. There are some ways in which we have to combat both the new tolerance and modify the old. We’ll come back to that. Let me finish off with a couple of remarks.
This has been the sketchiest of outlines. Its bearing on the question of tolerance is nevertheless immediately obvious. We could not have moved as a culture to substantive adoption of the new tolerance if we had not undergone a fundamental shift in epistemology, a shift that will quite possibly prove as epochal as the dawning of the Enlightenment, although in my view it won’t last nearly as long.
In his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper argued that the belief that you have the Truth is always implicitly totalitarian. The utterance, “I am sure I have the Truth” easily drifts towards the tyrannous conclusion, “Therefore, I must be obeyed, and I have the right to crush you if you do not obey.”
From quite a different tradition, Michel Foucault, one of the founders of modern postmodernism, developed this perspective at length. All claims to explanation or understanding always entail what he calls totalization, and totalization is invariably manipulative and destructive. Foucault was shrewd enough to recognize that if his explanation is true, it is true even of his own explanation.
If his own explanation is true, then of course, he has succumbed to totalization. He was shrewd enough to acknowledge it. “All one can do,” he says, “is recognize the intrinsic limitation and try not to be manipulative and try not to be manipulated.” That explains a great deal of contemporary stances.
It explains the recent showing on TV of What It Means To Be Cool. If you didn’t watch it, go and order it. You can get it on CD. You will not understand young people unless you understand what’s going on in that kind of production. Observe carefully.
With Popper, not to manipulate is more important than truth. With Foucault, manipulation is inevitable in human communication, but in any case, there is no objective truth accessible to us. Tolerance in such a rÈgime must come at the expense of truth, and those who disagree with it must be crushed because they’re intolerant. There’s the irony.
I hasten to add that nothing I’ve said is meant to downplay the sheer complexity of contemporary epistemology. It is not as if everyone has shifted from one paradigm to the other, from modernism to postmodernism. Within our universities, there is considerable diversity.
Thinkers operating with a postmodern epistemology on the whole are more likely to be found in English departments and sociology departments and anthropology departments and the like, religion departments especially, and often history departments than in physics, chemistry, engineering, math, computer science departments.
Professors in the latter departments are often unreconstructed modernists, or still more commonly, they are modernists with respect to their own disciplines, but postmoderns everywhere else. There are also groups that have sort of gone through a postmodern phase and have come out the other side.
They don’t want to consider themselves postmoderns anymore, but when you try to probe to find out what their epistemology is, as far as I can see, it’s merely subjective eclecticism. There’s a bit of this and a bit of that. Thus, there is no etiology that is controlling the flow. It’s astonishingly pragmatic and eclectic. Moreover, vast numbers of citizens who could not define epistemology if their lives depended on it inevitably adopt some epistemology or other or mix of epistemologies coherent or otherwise.
In other words, just because I’ve put these things in university frames of reference, because this is an academic conference, does not mean you don’t find the same thing with Joe Smith who changes oil at Jiffy Lube, because they watch the same TV programs, and they read the same newspapers. The cultural matters are everywhere. They merely take on a slightly different form when you get out of the university framework.
The mass media are largely formative. Many shrewd commentators … this one has been around for 15 years … have pointed out the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist epistemology was well testified to in the move from the first Star Trek series to the incarnation of the Star Trek: Voyager series.
You know, to boldly go where no one’s ever gone before and, thus, define the truth. Despite the splint infinitive, there’s a certain kind of modernist interest in exploring the truth. Program after program in the Voyager series was really quite different. It was designed to show that all cultures are all right; it just depends on your point of view.
For the sake of one brief talk, I have avoided the subtleties and the complexities and speak of postmodern epistemology as the reigning paradigm, or at least as the paradigm that currently has most vitality, one we really do need to come to grips with, and then when I come back I shall try and refer to both modernism and postmodernism in equally disparaging terms so as to be as evenhanded as possible.
