Interpret the Scriptures in a Pluralistic Age

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical interpretation in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

Let me begin by trying to answer some of the written questions that have come in, if I may. Then we’ll proceed to a few more entailments of the new hermeneutic, pluralism; the perspicuity of Scripture, which quite a few have written questions about; the role of the Holy Spirit in the interpretation of Scripture; and then we’ll turn at the end to how to distinguish absolute and relevant statements in Scripture.

This first lot of questions.… There’s a one-off, and then all the rest of them I’m going to deal with at the beginning have to do with literary genre and related matters. Let me run through these rather quickly, and then there are two or three other questions that have come in, but they all relate to something I’m going to say later, so I will reserve them for later.

The first question is this. “We believe [as I believe] the Scriptures are inerrant as originally given so that we may interpret them accurately; hence these lectures. Yet the Greek text has so many variants in readings, even if these rarely, if ever, affect major doctrine as such. How do we answer the charge that inerrancy is thus invalid today in the light of these variant readings?”

The question is a little off topic, but it’s clearly something that has come up in two or three conversations I’ve had, and it makes me think that in years to come it might be worthwhile to have a seminar on the doctrine of Scripture. That was something an earlier generation of evangelicals had thought through with some sophistication, and it’s probably something that needs rearticulating again so that we understand what is being claimed and what is not being claimed.

I don’t have time to answer that in detail, but let me say this. There are many variants in the manuscripts that have come down to us, but not only is there no major doctrine affected, there is no minor doctrine affected. There is no teensy-weensy, itsy-bitsy doctrine affected, for the simple reason that doctrine always depends on multiple attestation; that is, on something being taught, reiterated, in passage after passage after passage.

What is affected by variations in the text sometimes is the question whether this particular passage teaches this particular doctrine. In other words, in terms of the whole system of Christian thought there may be no doubt, because that doctrine is affirmed in place after place after place where the text is entirely secure, but it does make for some questions now and then about whether this particular text says, “of Jesus” or “of Jesus Christ” or “of Jesus Christ our Lord” what is exactly being affirmed there.

Occasionally, in a relatively small number of passages, there are variants that affect how you read a particular passage. Now sophisticated articulations of the doctrine of Scripture, even going back to the fathers, have always insisted that the final authority rests in the autographs, which admittedly we don’t have.

On the other hand, if you try to imagine it any other way, so that God had not only given us inspired autographs but then had so carefully protected and preserved every copyist who ever made a copy that there were no errors in any of the copies, one would have to look for perpetual miracles in the copying.

If you don’t believe me, go home and copy out of the NIV all of John’s gospel, and then get a friend to correct your work. I will be surprised if you can manage that without making mistakes. Then supposing you want to be perverse and really change things? Is God going to sort of zap you so that you can’t? You know, you want to change things, but your hand just won’t do it? What kind of miracle is going to be invoked? That is the kind of re-control again and again and again.

I suspect that if God had done that, we would have had a kind of adoration of Scripture’s qua paper and text and words that we do not want. At the end of the day, while we are affirming the truth of Scripture, the truth of Scripture is not an abstract end to be worshiped in itself. It is the means of taking us to God, who has disclosed himself not only in event and supremely in his Son, but also in great mercy through his written Word. In that framework, there is no doubt about any Christian doctrine whatsoever based on merely questions of textual transcription and the like.

Secondly, there are several who have asked this question. “What is the literary genre of Genesis 1 and 2?” Next question. Let me say just a little bit more about genre before I even try to say anything about that. Mercifully, there have been other seminars, including one by Roy Clements, that have been addressing at least some questions of science and faith.

When I said what I said yesterday about literary genre and interpretation and so on, I was giving, in some ways, a bit of a stylized outline, in that it has to be said that many, many literary genres are mixtures. That is, one can find pure literary genres, but there are also many mixed ones. The Gospels are amongst them. The Gospels are biography, but they are also confession. They are witness. They do not purport to be some sort of cool independent biography. They are proclamation.

As a result, there have been endless books written on the precise genre of the Gospels, and most of these discussions, except the most sophisticated, have been very reductionistic, because they’ve tried to draw parallel with one particular genre that’s out there in the literature of the first century, give or take, and, in fact, the Gospels take in many different genres, not only small genres within the whole genre of gospel (that is, you have parables and you have discourses of various sorts and so on), but then the gospel as a whole is something more than just one kind of thing. It’s a mixture.

If you push me to the wall, I would want to argue that Genesis 1, 2, and 3 are a mixture. You have to look for a number of different things. Those who simply dismiss them as, let’s say, mythology or something like that have to define mythology to begin with, draw comparisons from the ancient Near East (let’s say, the Marduk creation stories from Babylon or the like), and then note comparisons of similarity and also points of difference.

Within this kind of framework, I would want to argue that there is, in one sense, history, but history is not exactly the right word when you’re talking about creation. When you’re talking about the very beginning of things, I want to say there is real referent, but sometimes also in symbol-laden language. One must then work through the text line by line, paragraph by paragraph, to see what belongs to what. About that I shall say nothing more, not unless I had quite a few hours.

Then there is a question that is more complex. “We learn valuable things from the formal structures of, for example, Psalm 1, which we considered yesterday. Who is responsible for bringing these structures into being? That is, were they consciously constructed by the writer or was he used as a channel? How should Christians view secular literature and ideas of poets as channels of a higher source? Which source is this?”

Now there are really two or three questions interwoven there. The first question is.… Does the inspiration of Scripture embrace not only words, but literary genre, structure, grammar, and the like? The answer is surely yes. In other words, sometimes in our efforts to affirm the truthfulness of God’s self-disclosure in written Scripture all the way down to the words, we’ve forgotten that the words are not just lists of words, as one finds in a lexicon or a dictionary. They are in syntax. They are in structure. They are in literary design.

If God has given us these things, he is the author, finally, through the human mediators, not only of the words, but of the literary structure. Now that’s still working through a human mind, apart from cases where there are quotations, when God says to a particular author, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Write this down,’ ” so Jeremiah writes it down, and the king tears it up, and Jeremiah dictates it again to Baruch, and Baruch writes it down again.

Apart from places like that, where God is mediating through the human mind in some way, the result is simultaneously a product of the human mind, the human culture, the human language, but so suffused with God’s overarching, sovereign hand the result conveys what God wants to be conveyed and is none less than the very Word of God.

That is culturally conditioned, in that it is in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, and it comes in a certain literary form, and it uses certain words, and so on. All of those things are simultaneously, then, words of human beings and Word of God. Now in that framework, what is needed, again, is a re-articulation of the doctrine of Scripture, what we understand of how God discloses himself in words. I would like to pursue that one at great length but don’t have time today.

When we look at secular literature and ideas of poets as channels of a higher source and this sort of thing, then it seems to me there’s another whole area of biblical thought that is introduced that is worth thinking about in another context, but not really here, namely, what Christians in the Reformed tradition have often called the fruits of common grace.

What is meant by this is not that God’s grace is common, that is, profane or cheap, but that there are many elements of God’s grace he gives commonly. That is, not simply to those who are his people, not simply to the elect, not simply to those who have been born again, not simply to those who have believed, but he gives these things commonly, and he gives many gifts commonly. Many things are the fruit of common grace, including rain, sunshine, harvest, health, and food.

He doesn’t owe us any of these things. He could, with perfect justice, condemn all of us. He could take away our lives. He doesn’t owe us our lives. We stand, according to the Gospels, already condemned. Then there are the gifts of common grace that issue in creativity and restraint of evil. Most of us will acknowledge if we look inside of us that however bad we may be, none of us are quite as wicked as we could be with a little effort. That restraint is also the fruit of common grace.

So of course when people write things or create a David or paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or write a novel or a poem, there is creativity that is the fruit of common grace, but that does not necessarily mean such creative products are articulating God’s truth with the same kind of purity and authority as attaches to Scripture.

Again, what is needed is a doctrine of Scripture. These things can be perverted, distorted, twisted, so that there can be a very creative display of pornography or a discussion of God that actually finally ends up mocking him. That, too, is a creative act, even if it is taking the power of common grace and twisting it in service of the pit.

Within these frameworks, there are many things to be learned from literature and blessings to be taken from common grace. Of course. The technology we have, the food we eat.… These things are to be enjoyed, always recognizing that we have the immense capacity to twist and distort, and when it comes to truth claims, things must be tested by Scripture again and again and again. Now again, this deals with larger issues, but it’s worth a brief mention as we go.

Now another one on form and literary genre. “The parable stories. Is it legitimate or useful to update them? For example, the Good Samaritan. A provisional IRA man was robbed by thieves, and along comes an Ulster Freedom Fighter, etc. Is that useful, permissible, possible, or whatever?”

That’s a good question, and it’s a complex one. One of the stories I tell when I’m preaching from the parable of the good Samaritan is a bit of research done by an institute on religion in North America a number of years ago. In this research, they went to a North American seminary, mercifully not the one at which I teach, and they conducted a little experiment.

They divided students into two groups. One group was told that on a certain day they would go and hear a lecture on the Greek text of the parable of the good Samaritan delivered by a very famous New Testament scholar of stellar rank and excellent lecturing gifts. The other group was told it was going to study some other passage of Scripture and likewise hear a lecture by somebody of stellar capacity. So they’re the two groups, the Good Samaritan group and some other group.

Then in both groups, the time conditions were manipulated so that both groups were divided into three: those who thought they were arriving at their respective lecture early, on time, and late, whether for the lecture on the parable of the good Samaritan or for the lecture on something else. Then along the way, for both groups, they had an actor who looked like a hobo off the street but wounded, battered, beaten, stinking of alcohol, but bleeding profusely and groaning by the pavement.

“Help me.” Blood, stench. “Help me! I need a doctor.” For both groups. Which group stopped to help this chap as they rushed off to their lectures? Was there any statistical difference whatsoever between those who were heading off to a study of the parable of the good Samaritan and those who were heading off for something else? Nope.

But there was significant difference between those who thought they were early and had time and those who thought they were late and didn’t, for both groups. In between the two were those who just thought they were on time. A few more stopped, but not quite as many as in the group that thought they were early.

So we have the anomaly of people who have spent hours prepping on the Greek text of the Good Samaritan, stepping over a body on the sidewalk as they rush off to hear a lecture on the parable of the good Samaritan. Now the reason I tell you that is because it introduces something that is very important. There are many different kinds of parables, but some of Jesus’ parables are stories that start off on a fairly ordinary plane, suck you into the narrative, and then, as they were first told, explode your worldview from inside. Everything comes out wrong.

The parable of the good Samaritan is like that. A chap is heading down to Jericho and gets mugged. Well, it happens every day. People get mugged. They stripped him and beat him. They took all of his goods. There was a priest who went down that way. Of course he had to preserve his ritual purity. The crowd snickers. “Yeah, we know that lot. That happens.” You’re sucked into the story, and you’re interested in what’s going to happen. How will the plot develop? What’s the denouement? Is God going to pay them back? What happens?

Then Jesus talks about the Samaritan, and of course in Luke 10 where this is told, the original question that precipitated the story was, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells a parable not to answer, “Who is my neighbor?” but to change the whole question and say, “Who is the neighbor to him?” Thus the parable has served to explode a whole worldview and make you see something you would not otherwise have seen anywhere near as powerfully.

Not all parables do that, but quite a lot of parables do. The problem is we know the parables so well today that when we tell the stories they don’t have the same impact. So part of the preacher’s job is to try to tell the story or to give an illustration or to make it sing and sting, to make it wound and heal, to make it bite, with something like the power it originally had. That takes hard work. On the other hand, one should not simply go for the quick glamor conclusion.

The IRA man and the UDF man.… It’s not really like the Jew and the Samaritan. The ordinary Jew and the ordinary Samaritan didn’t really like each other, and they didn’t have common vessels. They didn’t eat together, and they both despised each other, and they both thought each other’s religion was wrong, but they weren’t in the business of shooting each other. Not normally. So suddenly the illustration has gone a bit over the top, and it doesn’t bite, because most of the people in our congregation are not IRA men or UDF people, at least not where I preach.

So yes, I do think it is sometimes helpful to make application that is opening a window on the text, so long as one sees that opening a window on the text is not destroying the historical particularity of the text but then is opening a window on the text to show us what that means in our day. That’s all possible, but it needs to be done with great care. Now going down that track would take us so far away from where we’re heading this hour that I can’t afford to give more illustrations, but it is an extremely important question.

Now we come to a batch of questions all related to what I now first want to say, so let me introduce this subject and then deal with these questions. You’ll recall that last day I ended up by talking about the new hermeneutic and the problems of subjectivity in interpretation. Let me make three further comments about that before we press on.

First, I want to say something about the nature of pluralism in contemporary society and its bearing on the new hermeneutic. Secondly, I want to say something about the perspicuity of Scripture. Several questions have come in about that. Is Scripture really clear if things are so fuzzy and require endless lectures on hermeneutics to understand them? Thirdly, I promised again and again that I would say something about the role of the Holy Spirit in the interpretation of Scripture. So let me take half the time this afternoon to deal with those issues.

First, something about pluralism. There are different kinds of pluralism. Sometimes people use the word pluralism simply to refer to the demonstrable fact that our society is becoming more and more diverse. I’m not dealing with pluralism at the merely empirical level. I’m talking now about what might be called philosophical pluralism. That is, the view that says no one has the right to say his or her view is right and others are wrong. That view is everywhere, and it has become the new absolute. It’s ironic.

If you’re a university student, you certainly know what I’m talking about. It is presupposed in all of our institutions of higher learning. In the older kind of liberalism, people might have thought you were dumb or stupid or ignorant, but they would have at least defended your right to articulate your view, for it was understood that there was a truth to be pursued. They might have thought you didn’t understand much and you didn’t have much of a corner of the truth, but there was a truth to be pursued.

So they might have disagreed with you while still defending your right to articulate your views. Thus they could accept you as a person while utterly disavowing and ridiculing your views. The new pluralism has changed all of that. The new pluralism says there is no ultimate truth to pursue, except for the truth that there is no ultimate truth to pursue, or if there is a truth to pursue, it is not capable of being articulated. It stands in some inarticulate swamp beyond all human articulation. We’re all saying the truth equally.

That means if you start giving your testimony to people influenced by this worldview or you start saying, “Jesus really did rise from the dead; that’s a fact of history, and we are going to have to confront him at the last day,” the response will not be, “Oh yeah, what’s the evidence for that?” The response will be, “Yeah, but what about the Hindus?”

In other words, there is a fundamental rejection in principle about your right to make a truth claim that is binding on a whole lot of other people. The effect, then, is that the very nature of tolerance changes. In the old view you tolerated the person but rejected his idea. Now you cannot tolerate the person who claims to have a true idea.

This new pluralism, this new form of liberalism, is so dogmatic on this point it generates what is now called political correctness, and unless you toe the line on what pluralism means, you are at least ignorant, nineteenth-century, Victorian, epistemologically out of date, and so on, and perhaps also hateful, spiteful, to be dismissed as a fundamentalist, or whatever, which means it becomes extremely difficult to start articulating the gospel in this new generation.

I look around at the different ages. We have a nice spread of ages in here, and I watch all of the university-aged students nodding their heads now. You know what I’m talking about. The really intriguing thing, it seems to me, is that the old liberalism didn’t ever quite track down through culture all the way to the ordinary church member. It never quite made it.

There are all kinds of fairly conservative believers in all kinds of liberal churches that never were finally swamped by the old liberalism, but this new pluralism is getting down to the bottom layers of society in about 15 years. It’s on the street. Now I would love to spend a lot of time talking about how we go about evangelizing in that kind of context. It interests me enormously, and in recent years, when I’ve tried to do university and other evangelism, I have tried to address that question again and again and again. It is something we have to come to grips with.

But my concern here is to show you this is both a feeder and the result of the new hermeneutic. It is part of this perception of such overwhelming subjectivity that one cannot envisage the possibility of objective truth. This hermeneutical cycle I referred to yesterday that goes around and around and around. There is finally no stopping place.

So whereas there are things to learn from the new hermeneutic, some of which I tried to articulate yesterday, the range of subjectivity in this respect now is so great it also has to be opposed at many, many levels as well. Christians, then, approach biblical interpretation because of this in a number of ways. Let me articulate one or two of them.

Some say (for example, Charles Kraft, missiologist) we should not treat the Bible as a quarry for a whole systematic theology. One should not treat the Bible as a kind of source book for a unified whole. Rather, it is a kind of case studies book. If, for example, you’re going into Africa, where polygamy is at stake, you don’t begin with Paul; you begin with David. Better yet, Solomon or Abraham. Those were God’s people. They believed. That’s where you begin.

Thus you try to find the right case story from the Bible to go into any particular culture and present God’s truth. “Well,” you say, “Brother Kraft, aren’t there any objective truths in Scripture that must apply to every culture without exception, without which a person can’t be a Christian?” He answers (he has answered in print), “Well, yes, there are a few. Just a handful. They’re the basic Christian confessions: Jesus is Lord. Jesus died and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. God reigns. Things like that. A few.”

What sort of response, then, will we give from the perspective of our criticism of the new hermeneutic from yesterday? I would want to say he has gone far too far in his adoption of the new hermeneutic and, ironically, he hasn’t gone far enough. I don’t think he’s nearly far enough in his understanding of the new hermeneutic.

You see, he has tried to say that there are certain statements that transcend culture. “Jesus is Lord,” and a few others. They transcend culture, and only they. I would want to say (in this sense, I’m more radical than he is) no statement uttered by any human being ever transcends culture. The very fact that I articulate it in a language means it’s culturally related. Language is a cultural phenomenon. Just ask the average Frenchman across the channel.

So take the expression, “Jesus is Lord.” Supposing now you decide to go to Thailand and learn enough Thai to be able to articulate in Thai, “Jesus is Lord,” and you stand up in a Buddhist temple and declare, “Jesus is Lord.” What will people hear you to be saying? They will hear you to be saying, “Oh, he thinks Jesus is not as significant as Gautama the Buddha.” You say, “What?”

“But that’s what you just said.”

“But that’s not what I said. I said Jesus is Lord.”

Yes, but in Buddhist thought, Gautama reaches the highest state of exaltation when nothing can be predicated of him. He is neither hot nor cold, nor good, nor bad; he is neither lord nor servant. Nothing is predicated of him. So if you come in and predicate of Jesus that he’s Lord, you predicated something of him; therefore, he’s less than Gautama the Buddha. What do you do with that?

Now not for a moment am I saying the truth of what we mean by “Jesus is Lord” can’t be communicated to the Thai. I am saying it must be communicated, but when I articulate it in English, it is culturally relevant. There is no expression, even the most absolute truth, that is not culturally relevant. If you articulate it in our language, it is culturally relevant. Nevertheless, it still must transcend cultures and capture the minds of people in every culture.

What you have to do in the Buddhist context is re-articulate for them an entire vision of reality. You have to destroy monism. You have to talk about a transcendent God who is there and exists apart from the world he himself made, to whom we are responsible, to whom we must one day give an account.

You have to express a whole worldview, and then you start talking about his self-disclosure in words and finally in his Son, and that his Son rose from the dead and he is Lord. Until you have done all of that, the mere clause, “Jesus is Lord” is simply incoherent. It doesn’t mean a thing. At least, it doesn’t mean anything useful or true.

Thus the new hermeneutic teaches us that things are relative. God has accommodated himself to human beings. It is what I talked about the first day: the scandal of historical particularity. God has accommodated himself to talk to us in human language, and in the first place, he did so in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek in particular concrete time and places, and we have to understand that context to bring it into our world. That’s what we’ve been talking about in terms of the new hermeneutic.

Then when we communicate it to the next generation or across another culture or to another worldview, we have to make similar jumps again to understand the culture and learn, “How do I get this whole truth across?” The magic is not simply in the words, “Jesus is Lord.” That is part of good communication as you move to the next stage, to the next rank, to the next horizon.