×

The Intolerance of Tolerance (Part 2)

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


Increasing years teach me that there are many different kinds of introductions. I recall speaking once in DC when the introducer said, “Don Carson wrote this book,” and held up The Gagging of God. He continued with, “Hundreds and hundreds of pages of it, talking about the gagging of God. Who will gag Don?” That makes it pretty hard to figure out what to say next!

This talk is really the continuation of the first one. Before plunging in, however, if I may indulge myself for a few moments.… Originally in the second plenary session, I was supposed to have my two cents’ worth with respect to the papers on culture, as well, but I was squeezed out. So I’m going to merely control my own time here and say at least a few words. The advantage of coming in late like this is that nobody can stand up and refute me!

I have just a couple of comments. I was going to say more, but I won’t. I have just this one observation that I think might be helpful. Most of us, I’m sure, are at least familiar with the typology of H. Richard Niebuhr on culture: Christ over culture, Christ against culture, Christ in culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture. Then he has his own assessment of which one is most likely.

Over the last years, I’ve tried to do some thinking about these matters, for all kinds of reasons. A couple of weeks ago, I was in DC giving a public lecture on just war theory. There are a number of areas where we just have to engage in culture way beyond what we’ve already done. In addition to the Christians that came, there were inevitably FBI people, Pentagon people, war planners, war programmers, and so on because these are things that we are going to have to think about very seriously as Christians.

So because of these and other ethical issues (partly because the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity, the Branning Institute, is on the Trinity campus), we’ve been forced, increasingly, to try to think through cultural engagement in good and positive senses, as well as defensive postures.

One of the things that has struck me in thinking about these things is this: every one of the five elements of the Niebuhr typology can be justified extensively from Scripture. Every single one of them. I won’t take the time to do it, but it can be done. I do it regularly with my students. This means that what’s wrong with the typology is that he’s offering us these choices and demanding that we choose.

My suspicion is that if we’re going to make large-scale advancements in this area, we’re going to have to develop a theory of culture that is big enough to embrace all five typologies and then ask a different question.… When should one versus another have a certain kind of precedence in how we organize our lives?

Now there are huge entailments to thinking about it that way, but I will let that go. I would be prepared to argue that the two plenary papers this afternoon were working primarily out of a Christ against culture typology. There are implications for that and biblical texts that mandate that, but they are not the only ones. Thus, it seems to me that this larger question has to be addressed before we’re going to get a lot of agreement on these other kinds of issues. That bit was free; now we come to my third point.

3. Characteristics of the new tolerance.

So that you know where I’m going, after a bit of reflection on some characteristics of this new tolerance I will then suggest some ways of struggling back.

A.The new tolerance is badly misnamed.

Strictly speaking, to be tolerant toward another person requires prior disagreement. If one is a committed Marxist, for instance, one does not speak of being tolerant toward Marxism. If one is a committed Christian, one does not speak of being tolerant toward Christianity. A Marxist may tolerant a capitalist and vice versa. A Christian may tolerate an atheist, or a Muslim, and vice versa. But one cannot usefully speak of tolerating that with which one does not disagree, or those with whom one does not disagree.

Yet that is precisely what the new toleration attempts to do. It insists that there is no such thing as objective truth, but only truths that are true to particular individuals or to particular interpretive communities. That is why one cannot say that any other individual or group is wrong. If none is wrong, however, one cannot properly speak of tolerating them. We’ll merely applaud their individuality, their uniqueness, or their difference.

Ironically, the one thing that the new tolerance does think is wrong is the view that the new tolerance is wrong, which it brands as intolerance! So this new so-called intolerance, the new tolerance, had no tolerance whatsoever! Thus, the new tolerance cannot really be tolerant where it thinks it is and proves to be very intolerant in the one domain where it should be tolerant!

In other words, the whole new tolerance is massively misnamed and extraordinarily deceptive. It is coming across in all of our media this way, as if it has the high moral ground, when it is logically incoherent and morally bankrupt. Say it again and again and again.

B. The new tolerance simultaneously tends to open the door to broad discourse and to trivialize serious discourse.

On the one hand, it does broaden the door to larger discourse, precisely because you’re not allowed to say that anybody is wrong. You can’t even say that Christians are wrong (in certain contexts at least; we’ll put a caveat to that in a minute).

That means that in certain contexts, it’s now more possible to get involved in debate and interaction than it was 20 years ago. Even in university evangelism today, I have to say that it’s more fun than 10 years ago. I don’t think it’s just that I’m getting older. There’s less opposition. The previous generation was still reacting against Christianity.

Nowadays, they’re so bone ignorant that they don’t have anything to react against! So in one sense, you’re dealing with people who are so far off the scope that it’s a lot more enjoyable. It’s fun. In some ways, this appeal to tolerance makes it a lot easier, on many campuses and elsewhere, to put in your two cents’ worth.

On the other hand, the new tolerance trivializes discourse. Serious scholarship can flourish only when contrary opinions are permitted airspace, when people are willing to take a contrary position and argue their position publicly, and in the pursuit of truth.

Otherwise, we may merely express our views energetically and empathetically, with no profound significance to the stances we adopt. Who cares if you take this view and some other group takes that view? Nothing is at issue! There’s no importance to it. There’s no claim to it. It’s just a diversity of opinion. That’s all it is. So inevitably, all views get trivialized.

The primary thing that many postmodern scholars attack, however, is modernist scholars and their positions. In such cases, they are rarely advancing their own disciplines; they are merely attempting to justify postmodern epistemology. That is part of the frustration that calls forth the biting modernist riposte by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt called Higher Superstition. It’s old-fashioned modernism through and through, basically atheist, but it’s a great read. It is very funny. You just have to read that book. It was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1995.

The same point is rather amusingly put by Jewish talk-show host, Dennis Prager. “Liberals are always talking about pluralism, but that’s not what they mean. In public school, Jews don’t meet Christians. Christians don’t meet Hindus. Everybody meets nothing. That is, as I explain to Jews all the time, why their children so easily intermarry. Jews don’t marry Christians. Non-Jewish Jews marry non-Christian Christians. Jews for nothing marry Christians for nothing. They get along great because they both affirm nothing. They have everything in common: nothing. That’s not pluralism.”

In short, the new tolerance tends to trivialize discourse. The solution advocated by Stanley Fish in one of his books, The Trouble with Principle, is stunning. Writing from the postmodern corner, he insists that there are no neutral principles in social and political discourse. The great liberal project, he contends, acted as if there were neutral principles on which to stand. He spends most of his book trying to expose their emptiness.

But he does not conclude that all political discourse is, therefore, futile. Rather, he thinks that each voice should argue its position forcefully. Indeed, all voices, not least religious voices, should even be permitted and continue to argue their respective positions. But why? If there are no substantive criteria for evaluating the different voices, are we not reduced to merely personal preference or, worse, raw power?

That is Fish’s own conclusion after 9/11. If you recall, the newspapers began to introduce categories of evil after 9/11. It’s all gone now, but for a few weeks, we heard about evil in the newspaper. Then somewhere along the line, about three weeks into it, there was an op-ed piece by Stanley Fish in the New York Times. You can dig it out. He was asked, in effect, if he had changed his views on the relativity of all evil and the social construction factor as explaining evil in the wake of 9/11.

He said no, that it proves his point exactly. Obviously to the people on the tower, this was not a happy event, and to the people on the ground, it was to be regretted. No doubt we will think of it as evil, and no doubt the people jumping thought it was pretty evil too. But after all, there were hundreds of thousands of Arabs who thought it was pretty magnificent. There were worldwide pictures of children dancing in the streets in Cairo and elsewhere. So it all depends on your point of view, which proves his point entirely.

“Well,” he was asked, “does that mean that we shouldn’t try to defend ourselves then?” “Oh, no,” he says, “I insist that we must try to defend ourselves.” “Well, on what ground?” “Well,” he says, “I belong to the American tribe.” You’re going to have a hard time building just war theory out of that one!

C. Because the new tolerance is rooted in postmodern epistemology, it is especially unsympathetic to proselytism and religious conversions.

This one is extraordinarily important. It is considered entirely acceptable to hold to any religious view, or none, but to encourage anyone to convert to a different view is manipulative.

Implicitly, proselytism betrays that the one thing the proselytizing person holds is that his or her religion is superior to the other one. Under the definition of the new tolerance, that is intrinsically intolerant. Under the definition of the old tolerance, both sides must be free to discuss their differences with mutual respect, but that does not mean that both sides are equally right. In this instance, the new tolerance is both inconsistent and dangerous.

It is inconsistent because its adherents are busily proselytizing in the domain of epistemology while they condemn proselytizing in the domain of religion. The postmoderns are trying to convince everybody else that they’re right. Give me a break! That’s all they write about!

It is dangerous because it is unwittingly adopting the stance of the most religiously oppressive regimes in the world. For instance, in Muslim countries where sharia is upheld, it is not an offense to be a Christian, provided Christians obey the law, including avoiding criticism of Muhammad. However, it is an offense, even a capital offense, to become a Christian.

Have we learned nothing about the nature of religious freedom? There is a long heritage of law and experience that is pertinent. Freedom of religion must include freedom to convert and to proselytize, or there is very little freedom of religion.

Incidentally, something similar can be said about the nature of democracy. Democracy has become a slippery term. If democracy means rule by the people, there are many regimes where there is a rule by the people, all right (that is, the people do want that particular government), where it is not a liberal, law-based democracy.

Therefore, it is entirely different than what we mean by the expression. What we mean by the expression includes the presupposition of contrary parties, of rule of law to which all the leaders themselves must bow or be held accountable, and a free press. If you don’t have all three, you can’t have a Western liberal democracy. It cannot be done. Thus, of the 38 Muslim countries, only one approaches the standard of a Western liberal democracy: namely Turkey, because of the influence of Kemal Atat¸rk.

We are nearing the danger point in some of our own institutions. In the last few years for example (I keep files on these things).… At Dartmouth College, a decision was taken to forbid Campus Crusade for Christ from distributing 1,000 copies of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, on the ground that it might offend non-Christians. After vigorous protests, the decision was reluctantly reversed.

Note well that what was being distributed was not pornography, pamphlets advocating anarchy, or instructions on how to make a bomb. It was a book on Christianity, a rather famous paperback of which millions of copies have been sold. There was a similar crisis with InterVarsity at Rutgers that was finally resolved two years ago, and there are many more examples.

It’s possible to get into a cultural anthropology research group or into a history department and hold up your end of the stick. That’s not a problem. There’s more freedom. The problem is if you allow Christianity to make any exclusive claims such that you’re trying to convert people, then you’re intolerant. As long as you’re operating as a Christian and not trying to convert anybody, then you’re safe. You try to evangelize, and you’re damned.

D. The new tolerance seems to be particularly intolerant of historic, confessional Christianity.

Although this may sound like whining, it seems to me to be true. This owes something to the fact that confessional Christianity does make exclusive claims. To a postmodernist, that puts it beyond the pale.

In any case, we’re a long way from the clergyman in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, who said, “When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.”

Many commentators have drawn attention to the new trends. The Jewish scholar and activist, Michael Horowitz, has been publishing papers and holding conferences to demonstrate that, worldwide, the religious group most threatened by new holocausts is the evangelicals.

Ask Christians in North India. Ask the 2 million dead in Southern Sudan. Ask the 3,000 currently in incarceration in China. Ask the 8,500 that have been killed in the last three and half years in Indonesia. Ask the pastors who quietly disappear in Iran almost every month. Ask the tribal hill people in Burma. These are worldwide trends.

In an open letter to J. Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House, published on March 7, 2001, William Bennett and Michael Novak, two Catholic scholars, say the same thing. They go so far as to write, “Mr. Speaker, we regret very much that expressing contumely and disdain for evangelical Christians is the last permissible bigotry in American public life.

People who would be ashamed to utter anti-Semitic comments and mortified to be found guilty of anti-Catholic expressions seem to think nothing at all of casting insults at evangelical Christians. Every form of bigotry is deplorable, but especially those forms which still bask in the glow of public approval.” But it really just isn’t evangelicals.

In the field of painting and sculpture, for instance, contempt for Christian symbols is now so common it excites little notice. Recent examples include the Virgin Mary coming out of a vagina, Mary encased in a condom, Mary in pink panties with breasts partially exposed, an annunciation seen with the archangel Gabriel giving Mary a coat hanger for an abortion, Mary pierced with a phallic pipe, a Last Supper scene with a bare-breasted female Jesus, and so on.

This is all in the public domain; you can track them down. (You might begin to wonder what I do with my time, but you can track them down!) The list of vulgar plays with similar themes could easily occupy me for the next 10 minutes. Now I’m not saying that in a secular culture with freedom of speech, these things should be suppressed. That’s not my point.

My point is simply this: I cannot help wondering what uproar would ensue if similar creations played fast and loose with Muslim figures and symbols, or with Jewish figures and symbols, but provided confessional Christians are the ones being bashed, not that many people are upset. Now I have a couple of more points along those lines, but I’m out of time, so I’m going to press on to some ways ahead.

4. Ways of struggling back against the new tolerance.

A.Postmodernism enjoys certain strengths, and these are not to be despised.

I must begin by stating that, notwithstanding everything I’ve said so far, postmodernism has brought certain strengths to the table. Let me list some of them.

First, postmodernism transparently does a better job of acknowledging the patently obvious fact that people do look at things from different points of view. Hence the experiences in WEF (World Evangelical Fellowship) that I mentioned. Anybody who does much travel knows this is the case.

Second, postmodernism is pretty good at reminding us of some of the complexities of how people come to believe something, how they come to their positions. There’s a great deal of modernist epistemology (not all of it, but a great deal of it) that really does think that people primarily come to a knowledge of the truth by rational argument or by intelligent apologetics. That’s just not the way it works, is it?

In your own ministries and experiences, you who have done any evangelism or seen people converted, how do people get converted? Oh, I know you’ve given your best apologetics and have witnessed to them and all that. Then something screwball happens, and they get converted way out of left field.

I’ve had a few on the opposite line when I was serving a church in Western Canada 30 years ago. We had about 100 or 120 college-age young people in that church. They were all over the place and full of fun and life. We had, amongst them, a young woman called Peggy. She was vivacious, a stunning young woman with lots and lots of energy, pep, and creativity. She was really devoted to Jesus. She didn’t have two linear thoughts in her entire brain. She would have flunked out of any engineering course, but she was in something artsy, so she did fine.

She came to me one day and said that there was a chap on campus, at the University of British Columbia, who wanted to go out with her. He wasn’t a Christian, but he found out that she was and wanted to know more about Christianity. I said, “Peggy, be careful here, for goodness’ sake. Your heart can suddenly get taken away. Be cautious.”

“Oh, I know that! I’m not interested in just playing around, but I’d like to talk to him about my faith and about Jesus.” I said, “Fine, fine! Go out with him. Then after the date, bring him to see me.” She took me up on it. The next Saturday night at 10:30 or 11 at night, there was a knock at my study door, and in walks Peggy. “Hi, Pastor Don! Fred would like to meet you!”

Now Fred didn’t look as if he wanted to meet me at all. It was an optimistic reading. We went out to IHOP (International House of Pancakes) and talked about this and that. He was a football hunk on the University of British Columbia’s squad, a big bruiser. He was about as linear, logical, and coherent as Peggy was the opposite.

The next Saturday night, there was another knock, and in they came again. We went out to IHOP again and talked until two in the morning. This time, he had a whole list of questions. He was bone ignorant. We started from zero. We talked and talked. For 12 or 13 weeks, every Saturday night after their date, they came to see me, and we talked at IHOP until two in the morning. (I don’t know what my sermons were like the next day for those 13 weeks!)

Every time, Fred had another list of questions. I gave him stuff to read. I told him where to look things up. He would come back with the next level of questions the next week. At the end of that 13 weeks, at two in the morning, Fred ended up by saying, “All right, Don, I’ll become a Christian.” Now I have to tell you that’s not my usual experience in evangelism.

People really do become Christians for the most screwball reasons, don’t they? The way people come to know things is astonishingly complex. Our emotions are involved as well as little hints of something, mental association games, even how much sleep we’ve had. It seems to me that postmodernism recognizes a little more of the social complexities of epistemology than most modernists take into account.

Third, postmodernism successfully challenges the arrogance of many forms of modernism. Let us be careful. Modernism, after all, was not always the friend of Christians; just a lot of Christians though it was. I would like to say more about that, but I’ll pass by.

Fourth, postmodernism stresses some of the things that are sometimes ignored. For example, it stresses the importance of relationships. It stresses the importance of community. It stresses the importance of public declaration and of communal knowing. It is much less individualistic. That’s not all bad, for all kinds of reasons.

Fifth, postmodernism deals tellingly with power structures and the analysis of how they bear on our knowing. That really lies behind a lot of French la dÈconstruction (deconstruction theory). I wish we had time to explore that. It goes way over the top and loses control in all kinds of ways; nevertheless, it has some very important analyses that can be sometimes ignored, to our loss.

From my perspective, responsible Christian thought will not want to hitch itself to either modern or postmodern epistemology, though it has some lessons to learn from each. Probing this point in detail would take us down a rabbit warren which I find very interesting, but I’d better refrain, or I am going to go a long way from my topic.

My initial point here is, in any case, very simple. Here it is again: Postmodernism enjoys certain strengths, and these are not to be despised. In our rightful concern for the direction of many forms of postmodernism, we had better not adopt a knee-jerk conservatism that merely flips us back into modernism as if this is God’s own epistemology.

B. Nevertheless, because the new tolerance is so tightly linked to postmodern epistemology, I suspect we shall have to devote more time to exposing some of its absurdist tendencies.

I’m going to take two points here. Again, I’m going to cut out quite a few, but let me deal with two of them rather briefly.

First, avoiding the antithesis of postmodernism. I do not think that there is any way out of our current morass without restoring to our culture a greater place for the pursuit of public truth. I don’t think there is. At the same time, we want to pursue public truth (truth that is objectively true, truth that transcends the individual or the community) in such a way that we can avoid the antithesis that postmodernism has foisted on us.

This is extraordinarily important. Postmodernism, it seems to me, has foisted on us the following antithesis. If you buy into it, the most radical forms of postmodernism always win, so you have to destroy this antithesis. You have no choice. The gospel itself is at stake.

The antithesis is this: either we know something truly and exhaustively (one might even say omnisciently, although they don’t use that word) or you are lost in a sea of relativism. That assumption lies behind page after page after page in literally hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands, of books and articles on this subject. It’s never spelled out quite as bluntly as that, but it is everywhere.

If you claim to know the truth, then the opponents will take you through a careful demonstration that there are all kinds of elements of this truth that you can’t know, that your own biases have colored for you, where the relationship of this with other things is not properly seen, that you’ve come to this because of indigestion since you ate cheese the night before and didn’t get enough sleep, or whatever!

In other words, you will come back to this in great detail until you say, “Oh yeah, that’s true, I guess I don’t know that perfectly.” Then, if you’ve bought the antithesis and don’t know something omnisciently, you’re left over here and everything is open-ended. But that antithesis is profoundly manipulative because the best of the modernists never thought that we could know anything omnisciently.

Postmoderns are often working out of the worst exemplars of moderns. Moderns, the best of them, understood human finitude, but postmoderns have given us an option, an antithesis: either you can know something truly (read: omnisciently and exhaustively) or we are left over with a postmodern alternative.

Not only is this antithesis a false antithesis it is, frankly, idolatrous. It is laying out as the standard for human knowing the kind of knowing that can belong only to omniscience. It can belong only to God. I have no doubt that, in the arrogance of modernism, some people felt that they could go along those lines.

In fact, if you read some of the new physics, for example: “Then one day, we’re going to have a unified field theory. We’re going to put together relativity and quantum mechanics. Perhaps we’ll do it through string theory. Then our knowledge will be that of God. The equations will tell all.” Yes, yes, there’s some of that around.

Most people on the street, however, think of human knowing in human terms. It is intrinsically more modest. There are many, many, many ways in which we will speak of knowing that is appropriate to a finite human being. Thus, for example, the things we came to know under Newtonian mechanics, in fact, are all still true! Now they’re not true in every conceivable case. They’re not true in the limiting condition; then you have to appeal to quantum mechanics, and that’s not entirely stable yet either.

But in the conditions under which the theories were developed and the mathematics worked out, in fact, they are true. They are objectively true, repetitively true, and true in that they are testable. Of course, in terms of the underlying theory, you have to call them into question. In fact, relativity has some bearing on this and the relationship of time and space. It will never look the same this side of Einstein. On the other hand, in the limiting condition, it is, in fact, true.

That means that we need to develop models of how finite human beings know things. In my view, one of the most helpful models in a postmodern age is the so-called asymptotic approach. For those who are mathematically challenged, an asymptote is a curve that comes down to an axis. It gets closer and closer and closer, but never, ever touches it.

So if the x-axis represents a perfection of knowledge, and distance from the y-axis represents time, then a curve that is coming closer and closer and closer is saying that your finite human knowledge is getting closer and closer to omniscient knowledge of what some particular thing is, but the fact of the matter is, you never touch the line. It’s an asymptote. You’re finite.

Now we know this in just about every discipline, don’t we? Do you remember when you started taking Greek? L˙ō, l˙eis, l˙ei.… “Whew, this is tough!” L˙omen, l˙ete, l˙ousin. One of them is a letter; one is a diphthong. L˙ō, l˙eis.… It just seemed like a long time to get that under your belt. Then a few weeks of throwing contracts at you.… Give me a break!

Then eight or so weeks later, depending on how fast the course is going, it’s participles. What a bear! Their morphology is almost as confusing as their syntax. Participles! But you’re not having any trouble with l˙ō, are you? Then you proceed, if you take not only the next course and the next, but several courses, and then throw in some linguistics.… Lo and behold, you’re opening up your Greek New Testament to 2 Corinthians, some of the toughest Greek in the text, and you’re reading it without a dictionary.

Well, that doesn’t mean that you know everything there is about Greek, but the asymptote has got a little closer. In fact, if you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, become a Greek scholar somewhere, devote yourself, and this becomes your life and your discipline, then you will get that asymptote down a little farther, won’t you? With the passage of time, away from the y-axis, you get closer and closer, but you will never have an omniscient knowledge of Greek.

That is true of every domain. You will never, ever (not even in eternity) have an omniscient knowledge of anything, because omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God. You say, “Wait a minute, Don. What about 1 Corinthians 13? “Now I know in part, but then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

Oh, but in the context, that’s not talking about omniscience. It is talking, rather, about mediation. God has immediate knowledge of us. Our knowledge of God is mediated through a mirror, darkly, but then it will be face to face. We’ll have immediate knowledge of God, but it will never be omniscient knowledge of God (or of anything else). That does not mean that we cannot know truly; it means we cannot know exhaustively.

So you see, what has happened … as, for instance, with that young man from the conservative school that I mentioned in my first hour who was embarrassed by all of these biblical texts that speak of our knowing, our knowing, our knowing … is that he has, unwittingly, bought into the assumption of the postmodern antithesis. Because he has been shown again and again and again that you cannot know absolutely and omnisciently, every time he comes across these texts (“I have written you these things that you may know that …”) he’s embarrassed by them.

But why should we think that God would write Scripture through the hands of his human agents in such a way that what he is really demanding or promising or giving us is, in fact, omniscient knowledge? He’s not doing anything of the sort! If you buy into the antithesis so that you have no place for an asymptotic approach to knowledge, then you cannot speak anymore of real knowledge at all. You can only speak of the knowledge of your community, or knowledge as your community understands it.

Now there is a sense in which it is the knowledge of your community, but on the other hand, the question is whether or not what your community thinks is approaching, asymptotically, to something. Now of course, you say, “How do you know how close you are?” Well, that’s not really the crucial issue, is it?

When you find the categories of Newtonian mechanics, you don’t really know that Einstein is in the wings, quantum mechanics is coming after that, string theory after that, and something farther down the road to give us a unified field theory. I don’t know how close we are, but it works and is true, so enjoy it.

So you must find ways, it seems to me (and we are going to have to persuade our culture of this as well), in which we can speak of truth without claiming omniscient knowledge. Otherwise, what we will lose is not only confidence in the gospel as that which has been given once for all to the saints, but we’re also going to lose a coherent category for tolerance, and the end of that will be bloodshed. We cannot lose on this one. Now I wish I could give you a lot more illustrations there, but I’m going to press on.

Second, recognizing the distinction between church and state. I suspect that we’re going to have to return, as we talk about these things, to a fundamental Christian insight on the distinction between church and state, which is part of the heritage of all thoughtful Christians and one which we have sometimes forgotten in America.

It is hard for us today to appreciate how revolutionary Jesus’ statement was when he said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Up until his time, all states were in some sense theocratic. Yes, there were oligarchies. Yes, there were royalties. Yes, there were republican governments, as in Rome. But at the end of the day, you still answered to the gods.

In the case of Rome, for example, so concerned was Rome for peace throughout the empire that when they took over some new region, they actually arranged for god swaps. They took on some of the local gods into their pantheon and insisted that the locals take on some of the gods of the Roman pantheon. Because, at the end of the day, unless the gods sanctioned things, you’re in big trouble anyway, aren’t you?

Of course, ancient Israel was a theocracy: indirectly, sometimes pretty corrupted, and sometimes observed in the breach, but it was structurally a theocracy. The locus of the people of God was a nation. But when you come to the New Testament, suddenly you are in the situation where the locus of the people of God is transnational. Far from damning everybody else out of sight to complete oblivion, Jesus insists there is something still to be rendered to Caesar.

This produces, then, in turn, the kind of theologizing you get at the end of Romans 12 and the beginning of Romans 13. We have a chapter break there but, of course, when our Bibles were first written, there were no chapter breaks. We read chapter 12 in devotions today and then, tomorrow, when we open up our Bibles at Romans 13, we forget what we read in chapter 12 and go on with chapter 13. So we fail to see the connection.

Our first job as Christians is not to build or restore or retain a vision of Christian America. That doesn’t mean we withdraw. On the other hand, it is a false expectation; there is no expectation of that sort of thing in Scripture. There is an expectation of that sort of thing eventually if you’re a postmillennialist.

So suddenly, our eschatological structures do bear on this sort of thing. Yes, I understand that, for the small group represented by theonomy there is an entailment along those lines, but for the rest of us, no. For theonomy, I would say something else, but for this group, probably that’s not my first priority.

That means that we, nevertheless, do have to work out what our concerns are with respect to the state. “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” Our love for neighbor demands that we try to do what is good for the state. Because we are a democracy and not, as in the days of Rome, an autocracy, therefore, we have certain kinds of obligation toward the state that no Christian in New Testament times ever even thought about! So there are a lot of things to work out culturally that flow from this recognition that there is a church-state distinction.

In terms of international affairs, it is the failure to recognize a distinction between church and state in Islam that makes it almost impossible for us to have easy conversations on these fronts. There is no notion of church-state differentiation in Islam. The people are the ummah, and they are more important than any nation.

It is not as if Allah has separate domains or separate spheres of operation. He’s just sovereign over all. You finally get sharia, and everybody bends the knee. In which case, certain notions … such as freedom of conscience or different domains or a people of God that is not tied to any state but is genuinely transnational … are incoherent.

Thus, today, in the emerging world conflict, the vast majority of Muslims do not fear the West because we’re so Christian. They fear our church-state separation, and they fear our secularization. If you don’t believe me, read Muslim sources. The best access to them is on a website called MEMRI (memri.org). All they do is translate various Urdu, Arabic, and other sources. There’s no commentary; they just translate them. It’s an astonishingly important site.

Now I would dearly love to track down two more of these things, but I think I’m going to skip simply for want of time. It would also be useful, had we time, to sketch in differences amongst legal tolerance, social tolerance, intellectual tolerance, and other forms, but I’ll skip all of that too. So I come to my third point, then, under this heading.

C. Practically speaking, whatever epistemology we adopt, we need to restore a view of tolerance that permits civility with disagreement, respect with argument, and courtesy with candid debate, even over claims of non-omniscient truth.

Otherwise, what passes for tolerance, this new tolerance, is merely one more form of shoddy manipulation.

Frankly, I do not see how such restoration is possible without a restoration of the category of truth, in some sense. I agree with that, but at the same time, both by argument and by example, we must be exemplars of those who engage and engage and engage and engage and who are prepared to tell people they’re wrong and be told that we are wrong while still being courteous.

D. In one fashion or another, we have to restore, not only to the church but also to the nation at large, ways of talking about evil.

We have to do it. Sin has become a snicker word. Evil is largely a social construct. The hardest thing I do in any university mission is to get across the nature of sin.

There are some people who can help us. One of the most effective, in my experience, is Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan. If you have not heard him, order 20 or 30 of his tapes sometime. I don’t know if they’re on CD-ROMS or mp3 now, but order them. Listen to that man preach to contemporary twentieth-century Manhattan yuppies, and you will hear ways of getting across notions of sin that do not sound intrinsically old-fashioned.

Very often, they have to do with idolatry, and that, of course, is following the example of the apostle Paul himself. When he faces the Athenians, he does not introduce the category of moral law. He does not introduce the Decalogue. He does not introduce the Mosaic covenant. When he comes to dealing with sin, he introduces idolatry.

Because, after all, idolatry reigned from Adam to Moses. The rebellion was already there. It was so deep that it dealt out death. Isn’t that the point of Romans 5: “Death reigned from Adam to Moses”? The coming of the law brings transgression, but the fundamental iniquity is already there in the domesticating of God, in the trivializing of God, in the relational defying of God, and in the manufacture of idolatries.

We are going to have to have to think deeply and prophetically about the nature of idolatry and get that across today, for sin must be made ugly. As long as it’s cute, funny, merely socially constructed, then no one feels guilt or shame. It’s hard, then, to see the urgency of the cross. We’re at the trailing edge, now, of something that has got farther along in Europe and is really quite troubling.

The latest poll I read says that 76 percent of Americans still believe there is hell. It’s under 30 percent now in Europe. Although 76 percent of Americans believe in hell, only 0.012 percent conceive it possible that they could ever go there. This is not a function of spirituality or biblical literacy; it’s a function of a different view of sin. Unless we restore this view of right and wrong, I doubt that we can restore, simultaneously, any notion of truth and thus, a certain gospel-centeredness either. And last …

E. From a Christian perspective, I cannot emphasize too strongly that we have a category for what might be called “crucified truth.”

We worship him whom we claim is the truth incarnate, and he was crucified. We insist that he is the key to the metanarrative of all human beings, and he was crucified. We insist that God was made manifest in him, and he was crucified.

What that means, then, is a display of unimaginable power and authority in shame and ignominy. So much of the fear, at the social and relational level in postmodernism, is the fear of control. It’s the fear that is spawned by having lived through the twentieth century’s Nazism and Stalinism. It’s the fear of being manipulated by the media. It’s the fear of –isms.

What we have to keep saying is that the one we confess as Lord truly is Lord, but he’s a crucified Lord. And risen! But crucified. That is why the earliest Christians in the first three centuries of the church kept speaking, with massive irony, of Jesus reigning from the cross. It is hard for us to hear the irony today because we have a domesticated cross.

If you restore to your mind what cross and crucifixion meant in the first century, then you sense some of the irony of Jesus reigning from the cross. I suggest to you that that vision of Christ, of authority, of truth (objective truth to be proclaimed and believed) is far more credible today in a postmodern world than those which come in emphasizing authority and authority alone and who do not know a crucified Messiah.

Now, Mr. Chairman, I think we have some time for questions.

Male: I’ve been scribbling furiously and appreciate very much your talks today. I’m sure you probably would prefer that I bought all 50 of your books, but if I were going to buy one or two dealing with this subject, what would you recommend?

Don Carson: The closest to dealing with some of the epistemology is in The Gagging of God, but I said things today that went beyond that. In terms of the working that out in evangelism, there was a conference at Trinity that we held in 1999, and the primary papers of that went into another book that I edited called Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns.

That book has a lot of helps in it, including how to get across notions of sin and this sort of thing in a broken world that is characterized by postmodernism. The stuff on tolerance itself has not been published anywhere. I would like, eventually, to turn that into a small book a couple of years down the road.

John Franke: John Franke, Biblical Seminary. I appreciated much of what you had to say. I have three quick points that I think maybe you can comment on that might be helpful. First of all, when thinking about postmodern epistemology, as you know, one of the big challenges is specifying just what it is because there are so many claimants.

As one who is interested in appropriating postmodern epistemology for Christianity, I find it would be helpful to think in terms of non-foundationalism rather than just postmodern theology or epistemology more generally. I think to focus that question on the nonfoundationalist aspects of how we know truth fits very well with biblical revelation and Christian orthodoxy. So I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Second, I completely agree with you on the antithesis that we need to challenge, but ironically, I find myself feeling (and think I could support it with hundreds of pages) that that is actually a modern antithesis. It’s modernity that says that either you have this absolute certain knowledge or you’re left with skepticism.

It seems to me, when I talk to students about postmodernity (and, I think, when I write about it and when Stan and I have written), that what we want to say is, “Yes, that antithesis is a false one that’s imposed on us by the Enlightenment and, as Christians, we have to break out of it.” We find postmodern categories more helpful to do that than modern categories.

Maybe we just have a terminological problem, here, because your analysis of the problem with the antithesis, I think, is exactly right, but I think postmodernity is more helpful to break it (granting that much postmodern thought is atheistic, and I think we have problems there, but we can appropriate it).

My third and last point.… When I think about why I’m in this, much of it isn’t primarily concerned with reaching the lost (which I think is very important, and we need to be doing the things you’re talking about). My concern is in the problems with being properly ecumenical (properly ecumenical, not in the World Council of Churches sense) that are characteristic of evangelicalism as I’ve experienced it. We have war going on in our midst.

I think of this comment that Hans Frei made (I’ll close with this, and maybe you can just comment on any or all of this): “Generosity without orthodoxy is nothing.” I agree with that, but orthodoxy without generosity is worse than nothing. I just wonder sometimes if, in the context of modernity and foundationalism, our orthodoxy, which we’re good at, leads us to a rather combative, non-generous approach to Christian faith.

Don: Have you noticed that when people want to make points in a question-and-answer time, what they do is they make their points and then say, “Would you comment on it?” Isn’t English an interesting language that enables you to.… There are discourse rules as well. I’m giving you a hard time, John; you and I have known each other a long time.

Well, let’s come to the first point having to do with defining postmodernism as nonfoundationalism or defining a postmodern approach as nonfoundationalist. There’s a sense in which I agree with you. The trouble is that when I read Grenz, in particular, I don’t know what he is actually offering.

He tells me pretty clearly what he is against, but what he is for strikes me as remarkably squishy. While it is true that there are different forms of postmodern epistemological theories, coming partly out of different heritages (whether the French linguistic heritage or the German hermeneutics heritage or whatever), they do, in fact, have certain things in common.

When someone tells me (as it seems to me that both you and Stan Grenz are doing) that they’re trying to construct an evangelical postmodern epistemology or postmodern theology, one that is profoundly nonfoundationalist, there’s a part of me that wants to applaud … the part that is very suspicious of modernism.

The part that wants to jeer is the part that says, “Hey, after having been snookered for a fair bit of time with the one, why do you want to be snookered with the other?” There are better ways, so get off the bandwagon! It seems to me that unless you see at least equivalent dangers in postmodernism, as you do rightly see in modernism, then you will end up snookered. You will be part of the problem. Now you and I have talked about that before, but that’s how I would reply to that first point. Now what was the second one?

John: The antithesis …

Don: Oh, yes. There’s some truth to that too. Although, for the record, when I wrote The Gagging of God, which is now, after all, seven or eight years ago, I read about 1,100 books and articles in preparation for it. I found that antithesis in postmodern literature in almost every substantial piece. Now the reason it’s also in the modernist stuff is because, as I tried to indicate briefly in the first talk, there is a sense in which postmodernism is the outshoot of modernism.

In the book, I referred to it as “modernism’s bastard child.” It is the child, but it’s the bastard child. It’s illegitimate. It’s trying to cut itself loose, but there is a sense in which many of the problems in postmodernism really are extrapolations of the problems in modernism that have not been resolved. That’s also one of the reasons why I don’t want to see you going down that track. I don’t think it’s helpful.

So when I say that that antithesis was fostered by postmodernism, it really is. In my view, it’s pushed far, far more by postmoderns than by moderns. Late moderns were doing it; the early moderns were not. The early moderns were all theists. It seems to me that that antithesis came more and more to the fore as modernism become more and more attracted to philosophical materialism. That is also part of what, then, spawned the ability to use that antithesis to generate the defense of postmodernism.

Now on the last point, whenever any Christian leader or thinker primarily creates his or her structures in reaction to a perceived problem, and only one perceived problem, he or she is almost always introducing a pendulum swing. So again, I’ve heard you on this one before, that one of the problems you see is the combativeness of certain strands of evangelicalism in the past from which you yourself have sprung.

Well, yes, okay, we’ve all sprung from different bits and pieces, fair enough. You need to own yours and handle them. On the other hand, it seems to me that’s a very dangerous way of proceeding methodologically. When you look around at the world and confront a lot of different dangers, then there are different things to see. In some ways, that’s an in-house debate.

To my mind, the most important work that is being done (that is, work that will endure) is not sorting out who is winning and who is losing in-house debates in evangelicalism on this issue but who is learning how to communicate the gospel to outsiders: biblically illiterate and postmodern outsiders. There, there is a whole lot of work being done, some of which is, in my view, right, and some of which is extremely dangerous.

The so-called emergent church movement is trying to build off the work of Grenz and others. I would want to argue that, although they’re asking the right questions, some of what they’re saying and doing is leaving so much behind. I’m terribly worried about where that’s going to end up. I think the jury is out on whether that’s going to become more orthodox with time or become cultic and silly. Where are the Christian leaders that can be sympathetic to the good things that they are doing and yet rein them in a little bit? There are not many of them around.

So one of the things that I would encourage all of us to do, myself first and all of you men and women without exception, is that whenever we get too bound up with our in-house debates.… The shape of the in-house debate may depend on our heritage: for some, it’s whether you hold to your particular brand of presuppositional apologetics; for others, it’s your brand of eschatology; still for others, it’s what degree of separateness you are. There are all kinds of things that stem from our particular backgrounds and heritage.

One of the things that gives a certain of relativeness to such debates, however, is evangelism. All of us are in jobs where we spend so much of our time with people who are Christians … whether children, young adults, church people, seminary or Bible college people … that we can go for week after week after week and never explain the gospel comprehensively to anyone.

Now I’m not saying that to you in particular because I don’t know what your routine is. For all I know, you’re doing evangelism every Saturday night down in Philadelphia. I don’t know what you’re doing. I am saying that, as a matter of principle, unless you put yourself on the front line where you are forced to go way beyond your comfort zone and explain the gospel to outsiders, you will almost always end up making relatively unimportant things too important.

Within that framework, then, it’s not even how to win a postmodern to your position. That’s fairly easy to do with decent relational skills. Rather, it’s how to see them so genuinely regenerate that they actually believe this material is true and are willing to stake their life on it because it is true, not just because they’re in a nice community.

Within that frame of reference, I think all of us need to look to ourselves, not least those who have jobs like your job and my job. It’s one of the reasons why I still do university missions. It’s not just because it needs to be done; it’s because it’s one way that I try to keep myself honest. If I didn’t take on university missions and do a few other things along those lines, I could go from year end to year end and not talk to many non-Christians.

It’s why, when I get an invitation to engage in a public address at a university or with people in DC about various ethical issues, I take it. It’s very high priority for me, not because I like it, not because I’m good at it, and not because I’m comfortable doing it, but because it’s one brutal way that I can keep honest.

So I guess what I would say, in response to your last point, is yes, I’m sure that’s a problem that needs to be faced. However, the church is never facing only one problem, and if you think that it is, then all you do is create a pendulum swing and make another problem. Part of Christian maturity is getting things in relative importance. One of the ways of doing that is to make sure you’re evangelizing.

When I went and did my doctoral studies at Cambridge, I had already been pastor for a number of years, so I had large numbers of talks all prepared and this sort of thing. I faced some of the brightest skeptical minds on God’s green earth in biblical studies. We hashed over this and that and the other.

I remember writing home to my parents about how one particular chap (who was very, very bright) was giving me some difficult problems to face on how to understand John historically and this sort of thing. My mother wrote back and said, “Thank you for telling of this. We pray that the Lord will convert him.” That’s such a different stance. Not, “We pray that you’ll hang in there. We pray that you won’t be too swayed.”

I read that, and I burst out laughing. I remembered that the previous week, I had been up in the town of March, and I’d led a policeman to Christ. You see, it relativizes everything! So all of the intellectual stuff in the world, at the end of the day, takes on a different hue when you see broken men and women actually getting converted with the gospel. It’s the truth. First things first.

Male: I’ve recently been doing some reading, and it’s an area in which I’m wondering if you have some comment on. The book I’ve read is J. Budziszewski’s book, What We Can’t Not Know. I wonder if you see some hope in that line of reasoning, in terms of natural law. It came to mind when you presented the antithesis.

This is because I think that, at some level, everyone knows that’s true, that even though we can’t know exhaustively we can still know truly. We couldn’t live our lives if we didn’t know that was true. So I’m wondering what hope you see in that kind of inquiry that, at some level, there are a lot of these things that people do know and are just not facing.

Don: J. Budziszewski is a very interesting man. I don’t know if you’ve read any of his stuff. He did his PhD in postmodern ethics and then taught at the University of Texas for a number of years as a secular postmodern. He was really teaching, in effect, that all good and evil are social constructs. The story of his conversion was in his little essay “Escape from Nihilism,” which is well worth digging out as it’s a wonderful little piece. He’s a friend, an able man, and on the side of the angels.

His orientation is toward a fairly conservative Catholicism, so his understanding of natural law is influenced pretty substantially by Thomism. To my mind, you can get a lot of similar miles out of imago Dei theology, common grace, general revelation, and other categories than by natural law categories. I have some problems with the way natural law categories are developed in some of the heritage of Thomism.

However, as Budziszewski uses natural law, if every time you see natural law you put in one of those categories, almost always I can say, “Yes, I can buy that; I just don’t like the category.” So he’s on the side of the angels, and I like him a great deal. His writing is always fresh, vigorous, and stimulates me to thinking. It’s part of climbing back and getting into the game again. But I’d be careful of the Thomism.

Male: Sometimes people are willing to accept that there might be some objective truth in one area (you talked about domains earlier) but then not in another area. An example that I’ve used is that the earth was believed to be flat. The flat-earth proponents didn’t change the shape of it, and those who believed that it was spherical didn’t change the shape of it.

There could be a diversity of opinion about a thing, but that doesn’t destroy the objectivity of the truth about that matter. So I’m just curious about this: how would you respond to someone who would say, “Well, that can be verified empirically, but the whole issue of truth and religion and theology is a whole different area.”

Don: That’s a very good question, and it’s one that is posed pretty often. This has to do with one of the points that I left out of this talk as I was running out of time: it seems to me that one of the things that has to be restored in our talking about the discovery of truth that is non-foundational but is nevertheless prepared to talk about true truth, is the fact that different domains of inquiry have different roots, tools, and methods that are appropriate to the nature of that inquiry.

For example, in the case of sorting out the atomic weight of mercury, there are certain approaches that you take to find that out. You can find it out with great accuracy and great reliability. On the other hand, historical inquiry is intrinsically not like that. Historical inquiry is looking at matters that cannot be replicated, in the very nature of the case. Therefore, you are forced, in historical inquiry, to look at witness (that is, documentary eyewitness that is then reported through documents) and see their intrinsic credibility.

All Muslims believe that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. Most Muslims believe that Jesus didn’t actually die. The Qur’an is, in fact, self-contradictory on this point. In one place, it says that he didn’t die, and in two places, it says that he did. Quite apart from that, most street Muslims think that he didn’t die, that his disciples did take him down and he went away and lived in the wilderness for a long period of time.

Here is a historical claim: Jesus didn’t die. We make another claim: Jesus did die. How do you go about reconciling those things or arbitrating between them? At the end of the day, the only access you have to that kind of information, apart from a Damascus-road experience, is, in fact, witness. The fact of the matter is that the Muslim claim originated in the eighth century. Our documents were written in the first century with an eyewitness record of that time.

What we must remember is that biblical Christian turns absolutely on historical claims that have been mediated to us through witness. That’s not true of Buddhism. If you could prove that Gautama the Buddha never lived you wouldn’t destroy Buddhism. Buddhism depends, for its believability, on its internal coherence or its attractiveness or whatever but not on any historical claim.

With Hinduism, if you could prove that Krishna never lived you wouldn’t destroy Hinduism. This is because Hinduism has one massive truth that stands behind all the millions and millions of gods. If somehow (I don’t know how) you could prove that Krishna never lived, you can just go down the street to a Shiva temple. There are lots of gods left.

Even with Islam, if you talk to your friendly neighborhood imam and say, “Do you believe that Allah, in his sovereignty, had he chosen to do so, could have given his final revelation to somebody else?” Probably, he will initially begin by misunderstanding you and say, “No, no, no, no. We believe that Allah gave his final revelation to Muhammad.”

You say, “But I’m not disputing that. I’m a Christian and don’t believe that, but I’m not disputing it. That’s not my question. My question is if Allah, in his sovereignty, had decided to give it to somebody else as opposed to Muhammad, could he have done so?”

The answer will come back, “Well, of course. Muhammad is not the revelation. We believe that Allah gave a revelation to Abraham, who was a great prophet, and to Moses, who was a great prophet, and to Jesus, who was a great prophet. But the final revelation came to Muhammad. That’s what we believe.”

But if you ask a similar question of Christianity, whether God could have given his revelation to someone other than Jesus, it’s not even coherent as a question. Jesus is the revelation. Paul insists, in 1 Corinthians 15, on the historicity, not only of the death but of the resurrection, as being essential to the gospel. What is the gospel? “Christ died according to the Scriptures. He was buried. He rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures and was seen by various witnesses.”

Paul says, “If you don’t think there’s a resurrection category, then let me spell out the entailments. First, the apostles are a bunch of liars. Second, you’re still dead in your trespasses and sins. Third, your faith is in vain.” This presupposes that faith’s validity in the New Testament turns on the validity of its object. In modern culture, faith means subjective religious choice.

If you just encourage people to believe, what they’re hearing you say is not what you think you’re saying. They’re hearing you say, “Make a subjective religious choice” while, in Paul’s thought, it’s that you trust what is objectively true. Paul continues, “Fourth, we’re of all people most to be pitied because we’re believing something that isn’t true.”

All of that depends on historical witness. That’s how it’s been mediated to us. That’s how it’s come down to us. Thus the way you validate Christianity.… Yes, I know that there are subjective factors to do with the blindness of our eyes and it takes the work of the Holy Spirit to see things that we otherwise might not see. But, in fact, the way the public proclamation is mediated to us is precisely through witness. That’s the whole point.

In this domain, you have to say that because Christianity is a historical religion, the way it makes its claims is precisely through the claims of history. It’s at that point that you have to take on Dan Brown’s book. Are you familiar with The Da Vinci Code? We have neighbors up the street; they’re the parents of one of my son’s friends. They’re basically secularists, and they’ve been reading all this stuff and throwing all this stuff at my son.

Nicholas now knows enough that he says, “Yeah, but a whole lot of that is a lot of hokum. It’s not true.” “Well, we just like to get another perspective, another point of view.” That’s perfect postmodern response. It’s another point of view; it’s another perspective. The New York Times reviewer actually said it was “based on brilliant research.”

This is no longer the paper of record; it’s the paper of sheer idiocy again and again. That’s just at the level of fact, quite apart from political perspective. It’s just incompetent. At this juncture, the way you get back in the arena is by dealing with records, dates, times, and sources. There is no other way of getting back in. You have to get back in. Those are truth claims.

Jack Delivuk: I’m Jack Delivuk from Geneva College. When you quoted 1 Corinthians 15, you said, “Christ died according to the Scriptures,” which, at that time, meant the Old Testament. Isn’t Paul introducing a different kind of evidence there, the Old Testament prophecies, which are not historical documents in the same sense that the apostolic testimony is?

Don: No. Well, it depends what you mean. I’m saying that there is a.… Let me back off first. Don’t forget, Paul goes on from there to say “… and was seen by witnesses” and then goes on to list various witnesses. So my comment on witness all had to do with those things. The “according to the Scriptures” claim, however, is based on some fundamental structures of typology, which Paul would argue (and I would argue, as well) are grounded in the Old Testament Scriptures themselves. That is to say that the Scriptures themselves do predict.

The trouble, I think, in our wrestling with these things, is at the risk of oversimplification, the same New Testament documents which claim that the Old Testament Scriptures predict the events of the gospel and that those events fulfilled the predictions also claim that those things were hidden in time past and are now revealed. The question is.… How do you put them together?

The interesting thing is that denominationally and in terms of our heritage, at the risk of oversimplification, the Reformed types emphasize the former and the classic dispensationalists emphasize the latter. So all of the Ironside books.… Everyone was writing on mystery 50 years ago. That was part of the standard dispensational line at the time. Meanwhile, the Reformed types tend to emphasize the continuity line.

Interesting, Paul puts them together in the last three verses of Romans. Yes, I know there is a textual variant, but he says in this doxology, “Praise be to God who has given us this gospel which has been hidden for long ages past, but which is now disclosed in the prophetic Scriptures.” He has them both together in one breath.

I think that this is bound up with his understanding of the nature of typology. That is, the things are genuinely truly there but regularly not understood and, thus, overlooked, precisely because of the degree of God-granted hiddenness to them, which we nevertheless should have seen! Otherwise, you can’t make sense of the Luke 24 passage: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe.”

For what it’s worth, I have a long essay coming out on that subject in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 2. It’s the two-volume set in which we’ve been tackling The New Perspective on Paul. The first volume was on Second Temple Judaism. The second volume is on Paul. It will go to press in about 5 weeks and will be out this summer. My essay in there is called “Mystery and Fulfillment: Towards a More Comprehensive Paradigm of Paul’s Understanding of the Old and the New.”

In other words, I think that some of the debates over law and grace and all of that need to be nestled into this larger question of thought. So I would argue that there is historical groundedness, literary groundedness, exegetical groundedness, but it’s based on some things that sometimes make some of us a wee bit uncomfortable, like typology.