From Australian Presbyterian, copyright February 2003. Used by permission.
Dr R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world.
A leader among American evangelicals, Dr Mohler was listed in a Time magazine cover story as one of its “50 for the Future”—50 persons under age 40 who are emerging national leaders in their fields. Dr Mohler is a theologian and an ordained minister.
He holds a Master of Divinity degree and the Doctor of Philosophy (in systematic and historical theology) from Southern Baptist Seminary. He has pursued additional study at the St. Meinrad School of Theology and has done research at Oxford University (England).
Dr Mohler’s writings have been published throughout the United States and Europe. He has contributed chapters to several recent books including Here We Stand: A Call From Confessing Evangelicals and The Coming Evangelical Crisis. Forthcoming book projects include works on the future of evangelical theology and on the evangelical responses to the cultural crisis.
As a regular syndicated columnist for Religion News Service and correspondent for the evangelical newsweekly, World, Dr Mohler’s articles on theological, moral, and cultural issues have been published extensively. He has also appeared on such national news programs as CNN’s ‘Larry King Live’, the ῠToday Show’, and ‘Dateline NBC.’
In addition to his presidential duties at Southern Baptists’ flagship seminary, Dr Mohler is Professor of Christian Theology and also serves as host of ‘The Bible and Life,’ a weekly television program which reaches over thirty million homes throughout the FamilyNet television system.
Peter Hastie spoke to him recently about people’s changing attitudes to the truth in the culture of the twenty-first century.
Many Christians today are wondering whether there is such a thing as ‘truth’. What’s going on? How did this controversy arise?
It’s certainly rather odd that the idea of truth has become a matter of controversy in the church. After all, the church is described in the New Testament as the “pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15). Jesus also spoke of his people as being sanctified by the truth (John 17:17). I suppose that’s why it comes as rather a surprise when Christians seem confused about the existence and nature of truth itself.
Why has this happened? I think it’s come about because Western culture has experienced a deep shift in world-view over the last few centuries since the so-called Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was the age of reason. During this period people came to believe that truth could be proved or disproved only by scientific/rational methodology. This approach to truth became known as modernity. For something to be true, it had to be capable of scientific or rational demonstration. Anything that couldn’t be proved or disproved by such a method wasn’t considered worthy of attention. It certainly wasn’t worthy of authority.
Of course, the downside of modernity is that any supernatural truth-claim is automatically dismissed as impossible because it can’t be proved in a scientific manner. This means that modernists regard the Bible as irrelevant to life because it’s truth-claims can’t be demonstrated by scientific methods.
However, cracks started to appear in the last 100 years in the assumptions of modernity. Many people came to see that scientific proof had some serious limitations and so abandoned it for what we now call ‘postmodernism’. Postmodernism consists of a number of basic ideas, one of which is that the scientific/rational method is just as imperialistic as the Christian claim that there are certain supernatural truths that God has revealed. In fact, postmodernists go so far as to argue that there’s no such thing as authoritative, objective truth. They claim that truth is something we make up as we go along. It’s our version of reality; it’s the way we see things. Of course, postmodernists believe that we need to be tolerant of other view-points as well and that we should accept responsibility for the truth we make up.
Why is the issue so important?
I think the importance of the issue can be best understood if you consider the Christian belief system as a multi-storied building. For instance, most of the debate that takes place amongst evangelical theologians occurs on the top-floors of the building. Debates on eschatology and the time of Christ’s return could be thought of as being on the top floor. A couple of floors below that there are debates raging between Calvinists and Arminians over the nature of the gospel, while other theologians are arguing about the nature of the atonement and the forensic nature of justification. Just below these floors is another debate on the person and nature of Christ: is he the God-man?
Down on the first floor the doctrine of revelation is under attack, and some theologians are questioning the historic doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Now I think it’s fairly obvious that if the solid rock of biblical authority and total truthfulness is forfeited, the arguments taking place on the upper stories are a little beside the point. Obviously, if we can’t rely on the Bible, then it’s impossible to come to a final decision on any of the other higher-order issues.
Yet even this is not the heart of the problem, because some people are attacking the very notion of truth itself. In other words, they are destroying the very foundation for any meaningful debate at all. Some of those who are contending on the first floor for biblical authority and inerrancy are unaware that there are others who are drilling away beneath their very feet at the foundation of truth itself. In certain evangelical circles it is almost impossible to discuss, debate, or defend the doctrine of biblical inerrancy because the very notion of truth has been abandoned. And so the entire debate has become nonsensical.
What we have to realize is that while no biblical truth is unimportant, there is still a hierarchy of truths. It all comes down to this: some truths depend upon the truthfulness of other truths. For instance, if you want to argue successfully about the nature of salvation and how sinners are redeemed, you must rely upon the truth that there is an objective reality called ‘sin’. Of course, this again presupposes the truth that there is an objective reality called ‘God’ who is holy and who defines what sin is.
Evangelicals must now face the fact that the most important controversies are taking place on the lowest floors of the building—these are the issues of revelation, authority, and the objective nature of truth itself. While it’s good for Christians to come to a common mind over something as important as eschatology, it only makes sense if you believe that there’s a divine Saviour who is returning to judge the world. So the issue of truth is fundamental. It’s the one thing the church cannot give up without literally robbing itself of anything to say.
How old is this argument over the truth? For instance, was Pilate a postmodernist? He asked Jesus: “What is truth?”
That’s right. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the postmodernist attack on the notion of truth is only a recent phenomenon. It’s important to note that this debate about the existence or nature of truth tends to wax and wane in different historical periods. For instance, if you look at the period of the Middle Ages, theologians and philosophers were having interesting debates about how we could actually understand or apprehend the truth; but they had very few arguments over whether the truth actually existed or could be known.
When you go all the way back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, you’ll find some discussion over whether truth was more or less an objective or subjective reality. But no one really argued that there’s no such thing as truth. It takes full-blown nihilism to get to that. And nihilism had to await the German philosopher, Nietzsche, to articulate it’s radical views in the last part of the nineteenth century.
But let’s get back to Pilate. I don’t think his question was meant to begin a serious philosophical inquiry; it was more an evasion. He didn’t want to be judged by truth because the result would reveal glaring inconsistencies in his life. When he publicly washed his hands after allowing Jesus to be crucified, he was symbolically suggesting that the truth was unknowable even it did exist. As such, he couldn’t be held responsible for a miscarriage of justice. We properly recognize his actions as inexcusable and cowardly. By refusing to deal with Jesus who was the truth, he was in fact rejecting the truth.
It’s easy to see how Pilate evaded the truth. But the same sort of hand-washing goes on today in many quarters. For instance, professors in the academy play a similar sort of game with the notion of truth because often their college or university tenure is at stake. So they refuse to take a stand on issues of truth and principle. Likewise, the media spend a lot of their time teaching us how to wash our hands collectively by convincing us that since all views are valid, we cannot pronounce any one view as wrong. But it’s the same evasion as Pilate’s.
Some evangelical scholars, like Stanley Grenz, are saying that Christians need to be more sympathetic to the postmodern view of truth. They claim that what we believe to be true has a lot of personal spin on it. Is this so?
Well, to be honest, there is some truth in this. Just as the modernists weren’t all wrong, so neither are the postmodernists. But this is assuming that postmodernism is basically one thing, which is debatable. At least it’s one, central gestalt or world-view.
Now I’ve said that the modernists are wrong and not wrong. Let me explain what I mean. Modernists are wrong when they say that the only things worth knowing are provable by scientific methodology.
But they’re certainly right when they say that if you want to split the atom, you’d better come to terms with what the atom is. That’s why it’s hypocritical to criticize all the insights of modernism and then go off and have a CAT scan. Modernism has done some very valuable things. I assume that we want doctors who at least are trained in modern medicine. We certainly don’t want people who deny the circulatory system or believe that the heart is irrelevant. Would any of us want such a person as our surgeon? At the same time, none of us would be happy with a postmodernist physician either, because we don’t want someone who picks up our X-ray and says: “Well, I know it looks like a fracture to Dr Smith, but it looks like something else to me.” If doctors dealt with medical facts like that, I can’t imagine that they’d have many patients. So there are some valuable insights in the modernist position.
Similarly, postmodernists are right and wrong. Where is postmodernism right? It’s right in that many claims to truth are disguised claims to power or preference, and this is also true in the church sometimes. I sometimes hear people say, “You know, that’s a bad piece of music” or whatever. When someone makes a claim like that we need to stop and ask the question: “Is this a claim about an objective reality, or is it merely a subjective statement? Is it simply a matter of taste?” There are matters of taste that are absolutely irrelevant to the issue of objective truth. For instance, there is no fundamental issue of truth involved in what colour the sanctuary of a church is painted. But there are people who make claims like that.
Similarly, many of the seemingly plausible truth-claims that are made in our society are nothing more than the disguised preferences of the majority. They are certainly not grounded in objective truth. So postmodernists are right to raise questions about such truth-claims. For instance, when postmodernists challenge racism, Christians should be quick to see that they have a point. We need to take a step back and see that racism is based upon a claim to truth that serves those in power and tries to privilege a certain group. And so we can look at racism and say, “Yes, we see that, and we should have seen it all along.” So postmodernism is helpful in reminding us that not everything that we think is true is in fact so.
But where are the postmodernists wrong? The postmodernists are wrong in asserting that there’s no objective truth by which we can judge anything. If they were right, how could we possibly call racism wrong if there is no objective right or wrong? If we have no objective reality called ‘truth’ by which we can judge racism, it simply becomes another personal preference like colour choice. And having a preference for one colour over another is hardly immoral. So postmodernists are wrong when they say that all truth-claims are to be suspected to the point of robbing them of authority. Such total skepticism takes us to the brink of pure nihilism, and even the most committed postmodernists usually don’t want to go to such an extreme position.
Now at some point we need to realize that Christianity makes a distinctive claim to truths that are not constructed but revealed. When Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, Jesus replied: “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, Peter, but my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt 16:17) Christianity is based upon a truth-claim that we are not smart enough to figure out. The doctrines of the Christian faith were not devised by human intelligence. They come straight from the mind of our Creator-Redeemer God who has the authority to speak and who has spoken. Once God has spoken, then we are obligated to make a decision about that truth: we must either receive and obey it, or deny and reject it. And revelation—as an entire concept—is incomprehensible without the notion of objective truth. Furthermore, the church is incomprehensible without the assertion of revelation.
How does the Bible want us to understand the nature of truth? Is something only true if it’s factual, or is there more involved?
Truth involves more than the factuality of a statement, but it’s never less than that. The correspondence theory of truth is indispensable to Christian belief, but it’s not sufficient to explain all that is meant by truth.
Let me put it this way: saving faith is not merely the belief that Jesus Christ is the incarnate God-man who had a sinless life, died in the place of sinners and was raised on the third day. Some people believe the factualness of these things yet they are not redeemed because they reject the claim made by that truth upon them. Simply believing that a doctrinal assertion corresponds with an absolute, objective reality is fundamental, but it’s not enough. Biblical truth makes a claim upon us too.
You see this in God’s covenantal arrangements in the Old Testament. For instance, Moses says to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” In other words, “Here’s the truth about God and here’s what it means.” But he goes on to say: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart … be careful to obey so that it may go well with you..” (Deut 6:3) Israel not only who had a God who spoke the truth, but his people are obligated to do what he has spoken and revealed.
Christians begin by saying that the Creator-God, the source of all truth, has established a body of truth, truth that is independent of us. And now that it has been established, it is addressed to us. Truth is not merely asserted in the Christian world-view; it’s addressed to God’s people.
Some say that truth is too great to be grasped by finite and fallible people. All we get is a very limited perspective which is usually wrong. Are they right in saying this?
No, I don’t think they are. Perhaps you’ve heard the story of six blind men and the elephant. People often use it to support this idea. The story goes that the first blind man grabbed hold of the elephant’s trunk and thought it was a big snake. The next one found the ears and thought they were fans. Another found a leg and said it was a tree. Still another took hold of the tail and thought it was a rope. Those who use this story believe that it demonstrates that what you believe to be true is limited by your perspective. However, I’m not sure that the story makes this point at all. What people fail to notice is that not one of the blind men got it right. So the illustration actually says nothing about truth. The fact is that there was an objective truth, namely, the existence of an elephant. But all the blind men got it wrong. So it’s a bad illustration that proves nothing.
Of course, there is a sense in which exhaustive truth about God will always be beyond us. As Paul reminds us: “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor?” (Rom 11:34) This is an old theological debate which theologians call ‘the comprehensibility/ incomprehensibility’ debate. To what extent is God comprehensible and to what extent is he beyond us? Martin Luther perhaps gave us the best way of articulating this by saying that God both reveals and hides himself from us. Our minds are finite: we cannot comprehend the infinite to the point that our knowledge of God is coextensive with his own self-knowledge. That would be an arrogance beyond anything we can imagine. So we have to begin by saying that our minds are simply not capable of deciphering God or tracing out his ways. Paul tells us in Romans 1 that we face an additional problem to our finitude and it’s called ‘sin’. So not only do we have to come to terms with our finitude, but we must also face the fact that it is a perverse finitude, a sinful finitude. However, on the other hand, we must affirm that God is comprehensible in the sense that he has shown himself to us. So here you have the doctrine of revelation again: this is God’s grace.
Carl Henry, who in so many ways was my theological mentor, made a statement once about the doctrine of revelation that I will never forget. He said: “You do not understand the doctrine of revelation until you understand that God has willfully and graciously forfeited His personal privacy so that His creatures may truly know Him.” And so we have no right to say, “We do not know what God has told us, shown us and instructed us about what we should know.” This is how Christians should meet the postmodern onslaught. We should say, “Listen, you’re absolutely right, there’s no way to figure this out. Left on our own we would come up with some kind of constructed idea of God, which is the essence of idolatry. But we’re not talking about that; we are talking about a knowledge of God that has been directly revealed.”
I spoke to a group of Christian leaders recently about the need for evangelical humility. I said: “It’s high time we asked this question, ‘What if we’re wrong?’” If we’re wrong, we are really wrong because we’re so wrong that we are claiming that we know the One, true and living God. We also claim to know what he wants. We go to people and say, “Hey, we are going to tell you how to organize your sex-life.” Or we say to them: “We’re going to tell you what is the most basic problem of your life because we know it before you know it. It’s the problem of sin.” And we’re going to get right in their face and tell them these things. Now if we are wrong, it’s almost impossible to calculate the harm we are doing, and the audacity by which we are doing it. We are robbing persons of their otherwise unfettered freedom.
On the other hand, if we are right, then it is an act of profound grace and love to tell them what they otherwise would not know unless we did the telling. So the question is: how do we know we’re right? This brings us right back to the doctrine of revelation. Our only authority is the word of God. If this isn’t God’s word, that is, if it isn’t inerrant, infallible, and the objective written word of God, then we really are not only odd; we are also dangerous. Now if you think about it in this way, you’ll understand why the postmodern world looks at us the way it does. They no longer see us as quaint. That was possible in the Victorian era when people no longer believed in Christianity’s truth claims. That’s no longer possible. These days the worldview of autonomous individualism is the standard across Western society.
Some people say that all religions are true; they’re just different routes up a mountain. What’s your response to that?
There was a time when this was an intellectually respectable hypothesis. But there are a lot of ideas that are intellectually respectable until we realize that they have no intellectual basis. Take this mountain illustration, for instance. It assumes that all the roads lead up and not down; it also takes for granted that religion is man’s search for God and not God’s search for man. But the Bible teaches us that Christianity is about God searching for man. Further, the Scriptures also make the point that we don’t construct the road back to God; God does that too. So as a hypothesis, it has some serious flaws.
The ideas about the validity of other religions arose particularly during the Victorian era when Europeans colonized many different parts of the world and came into vital contact with many people of different faiths. During the earliest period of colonialism, people from Europe believed that it was their responsibility to take the light of the gospel into the darkness of the heathen world and to bring the civilizing benefits of Christendom to the wider world. This was the “white man’s burden”.
But when the crisis of faith hit the church in the late Victorian era people started getting really cold feet about preaching to people from different religious traditions. They came to regard this as a new form of imperialism. The more people learned about Hinduism and Buddhism, the more they realized the long-established nature and religious complexity of these faiths.
And so round the turn of last century, people started coming up with different hypotheses of how to understand the existence of so many different religions. That’s when Christians who were already unhinged from the doctrine of revelation and were willing to embrace the spirit of that age said: “Maybe the different religions are like the steps of a staircase in which, as we climb towards one divine reality, there are higher and lower steps which form the way.” And so they claim that Christianity is the highest step of all or, to change the metaphor, the brightest light. There are dimmer lights, and some are really dim. For instance, when you look into Hinduism with its polytheism, you realize that you have found a very dim light indeed. Other religions don’t appear to be so dim.
Actually, a well-known Presbyterian preached a notorious sermon last year in which he advanced the view that all religions lead to God. He said: “We need to understand religion like a stained-glass window. There’s one light that shines through the kaleidoscope of coloured glass and it comes through yellow in this light and blue through that but they’re all basically the same light leading to the same source.” Now why is that no longer a defensible position? It’s no longer defensible for the simple reason that the closer you look at the various religions of the world, the more you realize their sharp differences as opposed to their similarities. And Christianity stands out as inherently distinct from everything else.
For instance, when you talk to the average person now in postmodern America, they will often say, “Buddhism is a religion, Christianity is a religion; they both have their gods.” Actually, that is not true. Buddhism, classically, doesn’t even have a theism. And these religions have completely different ideas of what God would require of us, and what his character is like. The same goes for Hinduism. Christianity and Hinduism are two entirely different religions. So it’s hard now to dignify the idea that all religions lead to God. It might be popular at the moment, but that’s only because it gives immediate and superficial intellectual satisfaction to persons whose hearts are already predisposed to forfeit the exclusive claims of Christianity.
Some people see a problem in having an absolute view of truth. They say that for something to be absolutely true they have to have scientific proof to demonstrate it. Is that true?
Well, here it depends on what we’re talking about. There are certain areas in life, what we call the hard sciences, in which we think that scientific methods are totally appropriate. Take gravity, for instance. None of us would doubt that gravity is a scientific reality or that it has a scientific explanation. It’s force-effects can be discovered in repeatable experiments in a variety of different conditions.
But there are other realities which can’t be measured in the same way. There are many situations where the honest scientist has to admit limitations to the scientific method. There are some things it can’t measure. For instance, it can explain what is happening in the laboratory, but it can’t explain in any comprehensive way how the human beings in the laboratory have the cognitive ability to even think about such things. There are always prior questions.
It’s when you get to the biggest questions of life that the scientific method starts to lose any kind of applicability. This is where Alvin Plantinga, the Christian philosopher, has some helpful things to say to us about what are properly basic beliefs. By this I mean that there are beliefs that are properly basic to thinking in any form. For instance, you can’t scientifically prove the existence of other minds. And yet it is impossible to live, in any respectable or meaningful way, without assuming the existence of other minds. And so realism, at some point, becomes a functional necessity that has to be taken on the basis of some kind of non-scientific assumptions.
Open-mindedness has become a virtue in our society, whereas maintaining a defined position, especially a religious one, is regarded as a sign of narrowness and insecurity. Is there any fallacy in that view?
That’s one of those axioms that falls in on itself immediately. It’s like the claim that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Well, that’s a statement that claims an absolute truth. Or it’s like the assertion that truth is not found in propositional form. The problem with that is that it’s only expressible in any understandable way in a proposition itself. And so all these statements collapse in upon themselves.
The issue of being open-minded falls in upon itself as well. No one wakes up with an absolutely blank slate, an absolutely clear mind, devoid of any content and using only the method of scientific investigation to negotiate their way through life. There are certain beliefs that for all of us are so essential to our understanding of reality that without them life itself would be unworkable. The question then becomes: are those operational truths on which we base our life grounded in an objective reality or are we misapprehending those? In other words, we perfectly understand that there are worldviews that are false; there are basic beliefs that are false. So it’s the Christian’s responsibility not to be so open-minded that we have no convictions; that would be nonsense, and it would be nonsense for anyone else. Our most important concern should be to make certain that our convictions are based upon the authority of the word of God.
Many people believe that the Bible is absolutely true in whatever it affirms. However, others say that while it contains errors, nevertheless it is faithful in leading us to Christ. Who’s right?
In the first place, the doctrine of revelation is not about the intention of the human authors. It’s about the intention of the Divine Author. That must be said upfront so that the discussion doesn’t get off on the wrong foot. But having made that clear, we do have a responsibility to discern the intention of the human authors.
The believing church understands that God sovereignly used the human instruments of Scripture by not only inspiring them, but also by shaping their lives in such a way that there was a perfect blending of the divine will and the human will so that God’s will was obviously prior and sovereign but the human will was led to desire to write the same thing. So, for example, when Peter decided to write 1 and 2 Peter —I do believe in the Petrine authority of those epistles—Peter desired to write exactly what he wrote. But how did Peter desire to write what he wrote? He was “carried along” by the Holy Spirit who caused him to write these words in perfect freedom (2 Pet 1:21). The Spirit did not violate his will. But the end-result was that the words that he chose to write were God’s word in written form. Deus dixit! God speaks, Scripture speaks. This is a clear doctrine.
Now some scholars think that the only important issue is “What did the human authors intend?” But these people are starting at the wrong point. The church has understood that God’s intention is greater than the author’s intention because the ultimate author of Scripture is God himself. So what are they really saying? I think that what they’re saying is that God is basically well-intended in Scripture, but he’s unable to fully communicate truth. It’s really up to us to find out which bits are true and which are not. What this doctrine of limited infallibility boils down to is this: the will of frail, faulty and fallible human authors prevails in the text and the divine author of Scripture is unable to overcome that human fallibility.
There’s another aspect of Scripture’s faithfulness that I want to mention. It’s simply not sufficient to say that Scripture is faithful if all we mean by that is a statement of intention. The faithfulness of Scripture is rooted in the trustworthiness of God. And so we must trust God to be faithful to the extent that what he calls and identifies as his word is faithful not only in the intention, but also in its substance. Of course, that means it’s true.
What happens to the Christian moral category of lying if we adopt a postmodern understanding of truth?
Richard Rorty, one of the leading postmodern thinkers, is also one of the most honest. He’s at Stanford University. In his most notorious statement about the status of knowledge he said that truth is made, not found.
You see, most people assume that truth is something we discover by investigation or deductive logic, or even by revelation. He said that’s wrong, truth is made. He’s the ultimate pragmatist. Truth is what we are making in the actual living of our lives when we find out what works and what doesn’t work; what’s meaningful and what’s not meaningful.
But if truth is made and not found, then all truth is to some extent a lie in that it’s artificial. It assumes something that doesn’t necessarily correspond to reality. And so if all truth is just a matter of opinion and nothing more, why does it matter whether I tell you the truth or a lie? I’m sure the Internal Revenue Service wouldn’t agree with this understanding of truth. They want our tax returns to be more than opinion: they want objective truth. However, postmodernism makes it impossible to tell the truth in any objective sense.
If the postmodern understanding of truth gains further ground in evangelical circles, what is likely to happen to the cause of Christian scholarship and preaching?
Well, we already see this at all three levels. First of all, we see postmodernism as a powerful attraction to Christians who believe that the only way to be effective in this postmodern world is to incorporate the postmodern worldview into the church. It’s a very seductive proposition because it allows Christianity to claim to be meaningful without imperialistically claiming to be true. It enables us to say to the world, “This works for us. Something else may work for you.” It transforms evangelism to saying at best, “We believe this will be better for you than what you have now because we believe it works better for us. We think it can work better for you as well.”
Some evangelicals find it less confrontational when challenging difficult moral issues such as homosexuality. It enables them to say, “Listen, homosexuality/adultery doesn’t work for us in our cultural, linguistic system. It doesn’t work for us in the grammar of our faith and morals.” This approach frees them from appearing to stand in judgment of certain sorts of behaviours. So I understand why it’s attractive, but it’s only attractive if you think accommodation to the spirit of the age is the way to be effective.
However, if you do that then you have to treat the Bible as something very different from what the church has traditionally understood it to be. The Bible is no longer the authoritative word of God. It becomes instead a human witness to the communities? faith: “this is what we believe. We’ve been struggling with this for a long time.” If the church goes down this route it basically throws away any doctrine of revelation, any authority whereby it can speak, and the Bible becomes a very interesting text-book.
Once you decide to adopt a postmodern stance, it flows over into the preaching. What do postmodern preachers like to preach? They love to preach narratives in which they tell you to find yourself in the story. “Here’s the story of Joseph … here’s the story of Jacob … here’s the story of Hagar … here’s the story of Tamar. Here’s the story, you can find yourself in it.” That’s why lots of modern preachers move away from the declarative statements and find refuge in inductive preaching whereby the say, “Hey, you can find truth in this.” That’s not to say that all inductive preaching is wrong; it isn’t. But it’s a favourite method for postmodernist preachers.
We need to face the fact that even evangelicals are succumbing to the influence of postmodernism. I was talking with someone the other day who said, “Listen, my preacher preached through all these gospels and narratives about Jesus and when he got to the resurrection, he said, ‘This is a very meaningful story. It doesn’t matter whether it happened or not, it’s very meaningful.’” And he said, “I went up to him and I said, ‘Well, what about all the miracles?’ and the preacher said, ‘I don’t know if it really happened or not; but it’s not really important. It’s the power of the story.’“ Well, it’s not the power of the story; it’s the historical event that is the established truth.
Some scholars such as Alister McGrath say that to limit truth to a proposition is misguided. Ultimate truth, he says, lies in a person: Jesus Christ. Does he have a point?
He may have a point we have to concede. Truth is not limited to propositions, and it’s not ultimately impersonal. I don’t know any Christian theologian in history who would disagree with that statement. It’s where you go from there. Personal truth may not be limited to propositions. But the question is: can it be less than propositional? I don’t think it can.
Let me give an example. I talk on college campuses about this. If a man says to a woman, “I love you,” does that statement cover the entire relationship? Is it co-extensive with all the emotions, all the affections and all the rest? Of course not. But for it to be true, what must be present? There must really be a love of that man for the woman. In other words, if the proposition is false, there’s nothing there. On the other hand, if the proposition is true, the proposition itself is indispensable, but it doesn’t include everything; it doesn’t claim to.
Take the statement : “God was in Christ, reconciling the world.” Is that propositionally true or false? It’s a proposition. So it must be either true or false. If it’s false there is no Christianity; if it’s true, what a marvellous truth it is! But the statement doesn’t encapsulate everything that can be known about Christ and is true of him.
There are people who act as if Christianity is nothing more than a set of propositions. They say all of it can be put into a box called ‘Doctrine.’ I don’t believe that, Calvin didn’t , nor did Luther and neither did the apostles. We are not saved by doctrine; but without doctrine, there is no understanding of how we would be saved.
To what extent is TV responsible for devaluing the truth?
In multiple ways. Television is more accessible, and people spend more time watching it than anything else. The medium of television has completely altered the way we convey information. Prior to TV, it was primarily verbal, but now it’s mainly image.
What did it do? Well, the first thing it did was that it blurred the lines between real and unreal. And so Americans begin to accept the authority of the unreal. The distinction between fact and fiction became blurred. In the United States, we had a famous case in which Dan Quayle, who was then Vice President of the United States, criticized Murphy Brown, who was then a TV character. He was trying to make a serious moral point about how the media glorifies extra-marital sex. But he undercut it by using a fictional TV character. The resultant debate got completely lost in the question whether Murphy Brown would or wouldn’t have done it. But she was a fictional character! This showed, I think, how the difference between real and unreal has been blurred through TV.
Neil Postman was exactly right when he says that: “We are amusing ourselves to death.” Television is also an amusement culture in which we expect anything important to be packaged in a way that is humorous and light-hearted. We have come to expect the truth to be reduced down to something that has a punch-line. It has also changed the basic way human beings think, at least at this point, because our attention span seems to get shorter and shorter. And so it is possible to use objective means to look at the attention span of the modern American and say, probably after 7-10 minutes, there is some kind of cognitive loss, some sort of mental checking out.
Postman also points to the fact that there is a formula in television by which the producer moves quickly from issue to issue. One minute we have regime change in Iraq, rebellion in Chechnya, then bombs in Bali. We have the development of a whole new understanding of physics, we have this and we have that. We have famine in Ethiopia and now this: the development of a new laxative. “Buy this!” Where is the meaning in any of this? How do people know what’s important and what’s trivial? TV is a great leveller of all issues to a point where people no longer care about them in any appropriate hierarchy of concern.
The key question is: is it possible to faithfully transmit Christian truth in this medium?
Do you think it can be done?
I think it can if you think of television as sort of a ‘Mars Hill environment’, it is important for Christians to be there, but what we do with that opportunity is very important. In other words, what we are not there to do is to entertain. We can’t just join that mentality. I do a lot of work in television in which I come on and say this, “I have only one thing to say and one authority with whom I speak” and then I say my piece. I’ve been on the Larry King Show, CNN 22 or 23 times …
How do they take you?
Larry King is a man of very great respect, that’s what’s different. He’s a genuinely interested person. The problem is, I think, his producers are constantly aware of the entertainment factor. This means that he has to have some ‘mob-bombshell’ on one night, and then be talking about President Clinton and the impeachment crisis the next. And that’s the way television works: you’ve got to keep an audience in all of this. So, I do think as Christians that we have to understand the limitations of television, but I think Mars Hill (Acts 17) is a very clear example for us.
I think Paul’s Mars Hill speech gives us the paradigm of how to confront postmodernism. Paul begins by conceding the reality: “I perceive you are very religious people. You are so religious you have an altar to ‘An Unknown God.’” And then he goes on to say, “You know, I understand that.” Postmodernism would say, “That’s pretty cool, he’s identifying with his audience by showing a basic understanding of their position. He’s dignifying their search.” But that’s where they would leave it.
But Paul didn’t leave it there. Paul said, “You know, we ought not to think this way about God.” He says, “ought not to think” and it’s a very clear in the Greek. He rebukes them saying, “You ought not to think that God desires to live in a temple made with human hands, or desire to serve him with hands. No, he’s the Creator God of the universe. It’s he who made you; you did not make him.” And then he begins to declare the saving purpose of God. Postmodernism will only go halfway with its audience, but Christians have to go the full distance like the apostle Paul.
Peter Hastie is the Minister of Ashfield Presbyterian Church, Sydney, Australia and the Issues Editor of Australian Presbyterian.
