3. Refining Culture and Redefining Postmodernism
Refining Culture and Redefining Postmodernism
I have argued that the great turning points in salvation history, taken together, constitute a bundle of non-negotiables as we try to navigate our way toward a stable grasp of how Christians should think about the relations between Christ and culture.
To advance the discussion, in this chapter I circle around to reflect at greater length on two terms, “culture” and “postmodernism.” We have already seen that under the influence of Niebuhr’s scheme the meaning of “culture” is not consistent throughout his five patterns. After a while, this inconsistency begins to hinder the discussion. At the end of the preceding chapter, I briefly indicated the direction in which the discussion should go — but this needs fuller exposition. In line with the title of this chapter, I would very much like to refine culture, but in fact my aim is much more modest: I seek to refine not culture but “culture” — that is, I am attempting to refine the term, not the reality. As for “postmodernism,” although (as we have seen) the expression means quite different things in different parts of the world, so many are clamoring to take this movement into account in the assessment of culture (especially in America) that something further must be ventured. In this case I actually have a proposal to make.
Virtually all serious consideration of the nature of culture today abandons the “high culture” approach that dominated discussion more than fifty years ago. By and large, Niebuhr was part of that change. Nevertheless, the more sophisticated and less elitist definitions of culture currently in vogue tend to raise several important questions pertinent to our theme. I have hinted at one or two of them, but perhaps it will be useful to put four of them out in the open by asking four questions.
(1) Doesn’t the specificity of “cultures,” each with its odd assembly of bric-a-brac, suggest that sweeping questions about “culture” (in the abstract singular) are too theoretical? Is it not the case that the bric-a-brac of one culture overlap with or sometimes contradict the bric-a-brac of another culture? In reality, how many people belong to one culture is surely indeterminable. After all, individuals assemble their bric-a-brac in individual ways. These individuals might be quite like one set of people in some ways, quite like another set of people in other ways, quite like a third set in still other ways — or quite like all of them in some ways, and quite like none of them in other ways. What, then, does “culture” (in some abstract or theoretical sense) mean?
To put the matter another way, Georges Devereux has argued that almost all cultural values develop and sustain themselves in conflict, in reaction to certain pressures — a sort of cultural form of Newton’s third law of motion, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.1 Since all of us face different mixes of pressures (i.e., of “actions”), all of us emerge with different “cultures.”
Henri Blocher suggests an analogy.2 We often say that language is an element of culture. But since the time of Ferdinand de Saussure, linguists have distinguished between langue and parole. This is roughly the distinction between competence and performance. A parrot may be said to be speaking French; it would be misleading to say that a parrot is a French speaker. A person learns, say, English, and thus is said to be an English speaker (langue), but the English he or she speaks is not English in the abstract, or the totality of all that goes by “English.” The language spoken by an individual may be said to be English (langue), but what is actually spoken is the performance of that individual (parole). One of the things that has long interested linguists is the relation between langue and parole. Now insofar as language is an element of culture, what might it mean to say, under the rubric “Christ against culture,” that Christ is against language? To say that Christ is against langue is as silly as saying that Christ is against English (or French, or Arabic). For the fact remains that as language constitutes an element of culture, it is to be thought of not only as langue, but as parole: that is, not only the language as a whole, but all the words, speeches, speech-acts, printed utterances, and so forth, of all the highly diverse people in that culture, all their individual expressions of parole. In some instances Christ might well be against specific paroles — hateful speech, for instance, or racist speech, or words inciting idolatry. But in that case, we have returned to the challenge of specificity. Is it any more coherent to think of “Christ against culture” than of “Christ against langue”? Isn’t the construction too abstract? We can meaningfully speak of “Christ against culture” only when we bring culture, or parole as one essential element of culture, down to the level of the constituent elements.
Several facets of this critique of culture rather miss the mark. All of the definitions supplied in the first chapter ruled out the applicability of “culture” to the beliefs of a single individual. Recall Redfield’s “shared understandings made manifest in act and artifact,”3 for instance, or the definitions that speak of intergenerational transmission of culture, such as the one provided by Geertz: “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about life and attitudes towards life.”4 Of course, how big the circle of a shared culture is can vary considerably: one can speak of French culture, but one can also speak of Parisian culture, or the culture of the French Riviera, or the culture of a prominent French clan. One can speak of American culture and distinguish it from French culture, but one can also speak of Western culture over against, say, Chinese culture, and somehow include France and America under one umbrella. Within America, one can easily speak of the culture of New York City, of the Midwest, of the Louisiana bayou, of the Kennedys. We cheerfully admit that these various cultures may overlap in many interesting ways. In this sense, any culture can be thought of as filled with odd bric-a-brac, I suppose, and these bric-a-brac will inevitably be like and unlike the bric-a-brac of another culture — though the term “bric-a-brac” is a bit condescending. What we cannot do, if we are to remain with the definitions already established in these chapters, is reduce “culture” to the level of the isolated individual. Culture, as developed in almost all contemporary discussion, is essentially communal, even though the size of the community is highly variable.
The linguistic analogy is partly helpful, partly misleading. It is helpful in that the distinction between langue and parole reminds us that our consideration of culture in the abstract (analogous to the definition of language as langue) must soon descend to particular cultures (analogous to the definition of language as parole). If one wishes to evaluate what “Christ against culture” might mean, it is helpful to think beyond “culture” in the abstract to, say, the culture of Stalin’s Russia, or the culture of Nazism, or the culture of Zen Buddhism, or the culture of the corporate West. But the linguistic analogy is misleading in that, at the level of parole, linguists are usually thinking of the language performance of the individual, and that is too narrow a focus when we think of culture. Still, performance is important. Québec French is distinguishable from the French of France. Even so, the French of the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris is also distinguishable from the French of Toulouse, just as the French spoken by lecturers at the Université de Montréal is distinguishable from what is spoken in the Gaspé. Linguists, as I’ve said, may keep narrowing the field down to the individual; those who study culture will not. If one tries to think through what “Christ against culture” might mean, it makes no sense to read this as “Christ against the particular culture of Joe Bloggs.”
On the positive side, these questions about the significance of the specificity of particular cultures remind us that at least one of the reasons why Niebuhr identified no fewer than five distinguishable patterns of the relationship between Christ and culture stems from the fact that “culture” is never experienced in the abstract. Our experience of culture is invariably highly specific. If we extrapolate from our own experience — say, in a violent culture that persecutes Christians, where “Christ against culture” seems like an appropriate category — to the experience of others whose assumptions of “culture” are very different, we will be hard pressed to defend the priority of our choice of model. At least some of the differences in the New Testament in the approach of the earliest Christians to “Caesar” stem from radically different experiences of Caesar. So if we are going to uncover a broad, theoretical understanding of the relationship between Christ and culture, it is going to have to be complex, subtle, and flexible enough to embrace the specificity of cultures.
(2) Does the diversity of cultures around the world permit us to make any evaluation whatsoever as to the superiority or inferiority of any specific culture?
The question is interesting in its own right, of course, but insofar as we are allowing for the possibility that “Christ against culture” might be the best category in some cases, and not in others, doesn’t that imply that some cultures are worse than others (and concomitantly that other ones are better)? To put it baldly: can we not agree that it is better to greet one’s neighbors than to eat them?
Reacting against the condescension intrinsic to the colonial past, cultural anthropologists have for decades attempted to describe cultures in entirely neutral, purely descriptive, terms. Sometimes this passion for neutrality, for objective description without moral judgment, becomes, itself, a moral judgment: the only “good” cultural anthropology is the sort that refuses to make any moral judgments. The child sacrifice of the Incas gets a pass: the system was significant to those who lived under it, so who are we to condemn it? Even the Holocaust must be thought of from various perspectives: it was an unimaginable obscenity to those who were being gassed, but for the Aryan supremacists its chief failure was that it was halted before its task was complete. It all depends on one’s point of view.
When I gave some of this material in lecture form, the first Q&A session found an international student, from a former French colony, asking whether I thought that any culture was superior to any other culture. It was a good question, of course, and stacked with layers of assumptions and tensions, granted the West’s imperialism in Africa. In much of French West Africa, the mid-twentieth century witnessed a powerful movement called la négritude, in which young French West African intellectuals challenged the alleged superiority of French European culture. In their attempt to make space for West African culture, it was found useful to relativize all cultures.5 This, of course, is very much in line with many of the assumptions of current cultural anthropology. But if there are contexts in which I am prepared to speak of Christ being against culture, is Christ equally against all cultures, or is he rather more against some than others? Is our meditation on Niebuhrian categories opening a very large can of worms?
In private discussion after the public Q&A, I asked my African interlocutor if he thought that one could responsibly make any judgments as to the relative superiority or inferiority of the culture of the Nazis as compared with, at the same time in history, the culture of the Netherlands, whose citizens were among the most generous and risk-taking in their commitment to hide Jews. He thought for a moment and suggested that this was a distinction in ideology, not culture. But that distinction is exactly what our definitions of “culture” will not allow. Labeling anything we want to condemn or praise “ideology” and the rest “culture” is a cop-out, undertaken for no other reason than to preserve the indefensible mantra of many cultural anthropologists: no culture is superior or inferior to any other.6 So strongly is this held, in some circles, that any culture which challenges this mantra, such as a culture with a strong missionary vision, is necessarily colonial and therefore inferior — all without any sense of the sad irony in the position.7
None of this suggests that every assertion of cultural inferiority or superiority is wise or penetrating or true. Far from it: indeed, many such assertions constitute the fulcrum on which the most barbaric forms of racism, colonialism, and unrestrained nationalism turn. Six observations may bring some clarity.
First, any evaluation of a culture depends on a set of values — even as that set of values is in turn shaped by the culture that informs the evaluation. This is as true of the philosophical materialism of some cultural anthropologists as it is of Marxism, as it is of Christian faith. The broader the coalition of people who agree on some point — say, that the Holocaust was an enormous, barely comprehensible, evil — the wider the consensus evaluation.
Second, from a Christian perspective, everything that is detached from the sheer centrality of God is an evil. It is horrifically God-defying. In that sense, from a Christian perspective every cultural stance that does not sing with joy and obedience, “Jesus is Lord!” falls under the same indictment. In this sense, all cultures this side of the fall are evil.
But third, equally from a Christian perspective, God in his “common grace” pours out countless good things on all people everywhere. Though they may not acknowledge him, people enjoy the gifts he gives them, and these gifts are themselves good (James 1:17).
And fourth, as Christian revelation certainly insists that there are degrees of punishment meted out by a good God, we must assume that some cultural stances are more reprehensible than others — whether in and of themselves, or because of the increased responsibility of privileged people, or for some other reason. We need not resort to Dante’s images of descending circles of hell: Jesus himself insists on the reality of relative degrees of punishment (e.g., Matthew 11:20-24; Luke 12:47-48), which presuppose relative degrees of good and evil in different cultures.
Fifth, many of the distinctions among Niebuhr’s five patterns turn, at the end of the day, on one’s assessment of how evil any culture is. In other words, differentiation among the possible stances of Christ to culture turn, at least in part, on one’s assessment of the values of each culture. I doubt that any probing analysis of the possible relations between God and culture can ignore such differentiated assessments about the moral value of a particular culture, however difficult or tentative such assessments must be.
Sixth, we human beings have a dismal propensity to corrupt good things, all good things. Consider one example. Springing from Steiner’s provocative reflections in After Babel,8 Henri Blocher raises the question whether the imposition of languages at Babel was a good thing or a bad thing.9 If a bad thing, then presumably the unity of language before Babel was a good thing — yet it was this unity that enabled the people to attempt the massive rebellion symbolized by Babel. If that unity was so bad, then perhaps the diversity is itself a good thing. At the very least, even though the imposition of the diversity of languages was a rebuke and a restraint, it is not transparently clear whether the multiplicity of languages in itself was a good or bad thing. It was good in that it broke up this cabal of rebellion; it was bad in that it led to disjunctive groups (tribes? nations? races?) that were often at enmity with one another. In other words, we human beings can corrupt the unity and turn it into rebellion, and we can corrupt the diversity and turn it into war. One cannot fail to remark, however, that at Pentecost God did not give the gift of one language, a kind of restoration of the pre-Babel situation; rather, he gave the gift of many languages, so that the one message could be heard in all the relevant languages, thus preserving the diversity. Though it is true that the Apocalypse can picture many languages among the loci of ongoing rebellion (e.g., Revelation 10:11), it also pictures the great host of the redeemed made up of every tribe, people, nation, and language (e.g., Revelation 5:9; 7:9). There is no reason to think that the glorious unity we will enjoy in the new heaven and the new earth does not embrace the equally glorious diversity of race and nation and language.10 (Perhaps no one will be offended if it takes some of us a few thousand years to get Mandarin under our belts!) Until then, we persist in our ability to corrupt unity and to prostitute diversity, the same unity and diversity often portrayed as “good” things.11
In short, from a Christian perspective, one must say that culture, like every other facet of the creation, stands under the judgment of God.
(3) But Christians themselves inevitably constitute part of culture. Is it not grossly misleading to try to sort out the relationship between “Christ” and “culture” if there are not two entities, but only one?
We have sidled up to this question before. Now we must push a little farther. The challenge is not simply that the Bible and Christianity are no longer, in the West, as culture-shaping as they once were,12 but that Christians themselves, and thus the Christ they claim to represent, are unavoidably part of the culture.13 Doesn’t this mean that it is unrealistic to talk of “Christ” and “culture” as if they were two entities?
Yes and no. They are distinguishable entities, but not mutually exclusive entities, in the same way that the Hispanic-American culture is distinguishable from the broader American culture yet an integral part of it. The broader American culture influences the Hispanic-American culture, and vice versa. Similarly Christ and culture: Christians (representing “Christ” in the “Christ and culture” formula) are simultaneously distinguishable from the larger culture and part of it; Christians influence the culture, and vice versa.
This is the sort of model advocated by Colin Greene. Greene criticizes “Niebuhr’s typology” for its “tendency to put Christ and culture over against each other as ‘two complex realities’, whereas [he says] we wish to argue for the inevitable interaction and interdependence of both realities within a more comprehensive and hermeneutically intellectual framework.”14 Greene proposes instead a “critical interaction of Christ and culture” — similar to, but critically different from, Niebuhr’s “Christ the transformer of culture.” “This new model includes the postmodern experience of fragmentation and multiculturalism, which Niebuhr’s study could not address.”15
Greene’s book is full of insight, yet his discussion of models, including his own “new model,” is more than a little confusing. We have already seen, in chapter 1, that Niebuhr himself was fully aware that Christians are unavoidably bound up with the larger culture in which they are embedded — though doubtless he could be criticized for not developing that insight more fully. But to say that Greene’s “new model,” which focuses on “critical interaction of Christ and culture,” is akin to Niebuhr’s “Christ transforming culture,” is scarcely obvious: if there is “critical interaction,” one might have thought that one could just as readily speak of “culture transforming Christ” as of “Christ transforming culture.” Of course, it is true that fragmentation and multiculturalism constitute part of the cultural mix today, and neither term dominated discussion when Niebuhr was penning his work. Yet it is hard to see why either fragmentation or multiculturalism threatens Niebuhr’s typology, which spans twenty centuries of cultural phenomena and is certainly flexible enough to incorporate fragmentation and multiculturalism in the twenty-first century. Exactly how both developments should be incorporated will depend at least in part on what is meant by each term. For instance, “multiculturalism” may simply refer to the cultural and perhaps ethnic pluralism that is evident in many large cities today. For Christians accustomed to anticipating a new heaven and a new earth with “members of every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9), multiculturalism may be perceived to be something wonderful developing in the culture that biblically faithful Christianity can latch on to. On the other hand, where “multiculturalism” is a sloganeering word associated with left-wing social agendas that relativize all cultural values and all religious claims, except for the dogmatic claim that all such values are to be relativized, the word may bespeak a culture diametrically opposed to the exclusiveness of Christian claims — and in that case Christians will gravitate toward a “Christ against culture” paradigm. One could engage in similar musings with respect to fragmentation. But it is difficult to see why either fragmentation or multiculturalism, however understood, threatens Niebuhr’s analysis.
Every culture keeps changing. Changes can be brought about by an almost infinite array of factors: fresh immigration, international events, economic trends, educational trends, the popularity of various political and economic ideas, developments in the media, pop entertainment, whether the people of that culture live their lives in a time of peace or a time of war, and much more. Inevitably, some groups within the broader culture will react to such changes in different ways. Some, for instance, may be delighted by the influx of new immigrants; others may resent them in some ways but lust for the cheap labor they represent; still others, driven perhaps by xenophobia, ascribe all fresh ills to the newcomers. New patterns, relationships, and symbolisms are called into being by such diverse responses, which are then passed on to the next generation. How people within the culture respond to the new immigrants, then, depends on complex commitments and ideologies that differ from group to group — commitments and ideologies that serve as the discriminating authorities in the minds of the various groups responding in different ways. Similar things could be said about how different groups respond to every other cultural change.
Transparently, Christians who constitute part of the broader culture are never immune from such cultural changes. How they think about the dominant emphases in this culture of which they are a part, and how they think about changes that take place within the culture, will largely be determined by their commitments and ideologies. Insofar as these commitments and ideologies are substantially shaped by the Christian Bible, Christians’ “filters” and evaluative mechanisms and responses will differ, in smaller or larger ways, from those whose commitments and ideologies are substantially shaped by, say, the Qur’an, or by philosophical materialism, or by hedonism.
Clearly, then, it is useful to be able to speak of, say, the reactions of the Muslim community in France to some development or other in the broader French culture. Such discourse recognizes that not all Muslims in France will have the same reaction; equally, it recognizes that not everyone in the broader French culture will approve or even participate in some development or other. Moreover, all will agree that one may usefully describe these Muslim responses (generalizations though they may be) in two different ways: one might speak of them as the responses of the Muslim community within the one broad French culture, understanding that Muslims constitute an important part of the French culture. Alternatively, one might speak of them as the responses of the French Muslim culture to the broader (yet implicitly non-Muslim) French culture — that is, a clash of two cultures within the broader culture of France that embraces them both. Similarly, one may speak of how Christians in, say, America, understand cultural developments within the broad American culture. We may speak in this way even while we recognize that not all Christians will view things the same way, that the so-called developments within the culture may not impact every part of the culture the same way, that American Christians are in any case unavoidably part of this broader culture, and that American Christians themselves can be divided into an array of subcultures. It is not inappropriate, in another usage, to speak of the American Christian (sub)culture, over against the broader (non-Christian) American culture, once we understand that further divisions and alignments are possible. Once again, all the appropriate caveats need to be understood, but clearly such discourse is not incoherent or useless.16 Equally clearly, it would be tedious to keep entering these caveats on every page.
The diversity of cultural commitments, then, within broader French or American (or any other) culture have different values, different ideas of the good, different voices of authority, and therefore different goals. That is what makes it possible to talk about “Christ and culture.” Far from implying that the Christians who are aligned with the “Christ” half of this pairing somehow transcend culture or are perfectly uniform in their views, the “Christ and culture” formula is simply an easy way to summarize the possible relationships between Christians and non-Christians, not at the personal level or at the narrowly ideological level, but at the comprehensive level of “culture” as developed in this essay.
(4) But aren’t there so many different “Christian” views on so many cultural issues that it is futile to speak of “Christ and culture”?
But that is just the point. It is this diversity that Niebuhr (and others who have indulged in similar analyses) try to categorize into a number of patterns. Like all such social categorizations, they are in some ways idealized and simplified. But they are all trying to isolate the dominant patterns of justifiable relationships between Christ and culture.
Consider an easy contrast. The American Amish view of the relationship between Christ and culture is very different from any of the dominant Calvinistic views. Both are claiming to be Christian, yet one is advocating a very substantial withdrawal from (the rest of) American culture, and the other is advocating a very substantial transformation of culture. Unless we opt for the postmodern stance that refuses to privilege either position and thinks they are both “right” or “true” for their respective adherents (on which more below), we must ask how we can even begin to favor one ostensible Christian position over against another ostensible Christian position.
Although in setting up this contrast I have chosen the admittedly extreme form of withdrawal advocated by the Amish, there are milder (and more rigorously argued) forms of cultural withdrawal, still within the Anabaptist tradition, such as those advocated by a biblical scholar such as John H. Yoder and a systematician such as Stanley Hauerwas.17 By “withdrawal,” I am not suggesting that the Amish, or any others in the Anabaptist tradition, are withdrawing from culture: such withdrawal is of course impossible. By their own lights, those in the Anabaptist tradition are establishing communities with an alternative culture, a radically Christian culture.18 Yet in their diverse theories of how to go about it, the Anabaptists are “withdrawing” from the broader culture in the sense that, at some level or other, they are convinced that active participation in that culture inevitably compromises Christian claims. The only way to be faithful to Christian commitments is some form or other of “withdrawal” in order to constitute a superior Christian culture.
Of course, one finds similar diversity among Calvinistic views of culture. One thinks, for instance, of the sharp differences between Abraham Kuyper and Klaas Schilder.19 But common to the thought of all of these thinkers is the view that the Lordship of Christ over all of culture demands that Christians, even while they pursue evangelism and disciple-making, must earnestly seek to establish Christ’s claims within the broader culture in which they live, not by withdrawing and setting up counter-models, but by engaging and transforming the culture. I shall return to these questions in the last two chapters.
Three kinds of issues must be addressed here; the broader challenge of postmodernism I will take up again in a few pages.
First, that stance is most likely to be deeply Christian which attempts to integrate all the major biblically determined turning points in the history of redemption: creation, fall, the call of Abraham, the exodus and the giving of the law, the rise of the monarchy and the rise of the prophets, the exile, the incarnation, the ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the onset of the kingdom of God, the coming of the Spirit and the consequent ongoing eschatological tension between the “already” and the “not yet,” the return of Christ and the prospect of a new heaven and a new earth. One might expand or contract this list a bit, but the point itself must not be ignored.
We have already seen that at least one of Niebuhr’s patterns should really be discounted, largely because it is so “liberal” that it discounts more than one of these turning points. But it is easy to see how downplaying these turning points can introduce other massive distortions into one’s understanding of cultures and therefore of how to interact with them. For example, if creation is ignored, it becomes easy to develop a quasi-gnostic view of salvation and much more difficult to grasp that human responsibility is fundamentally grounded in the fact that we owe everything to our Creator. What is lost is a sense of indebtedness. Equally sad, people might be tempted to a purely non-corporeal vision of “salvation,” with devilish consequences in the physical world. Or again, if the fall is minimized, including the way that it is developed across the canon, sin is diminished. Worse, the fundamental nature of idolatry — the de-godding of God, the desperate failure to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength — fades into a ghostly image of itself, and this in turn dissolves one of the most central and controlling aspects of salvation described in the Bible, namely, being reconciled to God on God’s terms. It has long been recognized that a weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is inevitably tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross — in particular, that dimension of the cross that is sometimes labeled “penal substitution.” Such steps make it much easier to adopt Niebuhr’s second category, “the Christ of culture,” or, alternatively, his third, “Christ above culture” in the “synthesist” sense.
Failure to integrate, say, the exodus and the giving of the law robs us of the great Old Testament paradigm of liberation, of God-revealed norms, of a notion of holiness tied simultaneously to God and to the maintenance of what God has prescribed and proscribed, of the tension between being saved from something and being saved for something, of a people peculiarly belonging to God, of an entire covenantal structure that turns on a tabernacle/temple, a priesthood, a sacrificial system — all of which are taken up and modified in various ways in the New Testament. It is not difficult to imagine how these elements, rightly understood and integrated into contemporary Christian believers’ self-understanding and outlook, contribute crucially both to their view of their Christian culture (i.e., the culture of the subgroup with which they most strongly identify) and of their place in, and relations with, the broader culture (of their country, region, ethnicity, etc.).
It would be easy to go through other turning points in the biblical history of redemption in order to observe how the omission or dilution of one or more of them easily generates a truncated or distorted vision of Christianity, and therefore of the relations between Christ and culture. Indeed, much of the rest of this book can be read as a meditation on how a robust biblical theology tends to safeguard Christians against the most egregious reductionisms. Not for a moment should this be taken as a claim that a full-blooded biblical theology can, by the expenditure of a little energy, be read off the text with universal assent. My claim is more modest: that stance is most likely to be deeply Christian which attempts to integrate all the major biblically determined turning points in the history of redemption.
One cannot forget that “offbeat” interpretations have been and are being advanced regarding every major Christian teaching, every major turning point in biblical theology — and, correspondingly, complex rebuttals have been offered. The problem is that in the contemporary climate, these offbeat interpretations convince some observers that all doctrinal matters are “open,” and therefore that rigorous biblical theology is impossible, and therefore that biblically based worldview formation is also impossible, so much so that where it is attempted, the result is merely parochial. In part, this objection anticipates discussion in the second section of this chapter. Nevertheless, Christians committed to the attempt to synthesize biblical theology, however humbly advanced and however corrigible the result, must not be intimidated by the mere existence of an endless parade of offbeat interpretations.
For example, in support of his “straight line” extending from the creation to the consummation, Wolfhart Pannenberg interprets the fall (Genesis 3) as an element of the unfolding of creation, rather than as a catastrophic failure or as the onset of heinous rebellion. The “real point” of Genesis 3 is to provide an explanation of death’s origins, of the difficulties intrinsic to birth and work — and this, not as a function of “real” rebellion, but in the context of his own critical assessment of how etiological tales arise.20 Pannenberg’s approach to Genesis 3 is compounded when he links “uncompleted” and “unredeemed,” when he treats evil primarily as “risk” entailed by human independence, which is the “condition of [God’s] purpose for the creature,” and when his theodicy is entirely eschatological.21 Because he is a systematician, at least Pannenberg is trying to paint a coherent picture, even if it is one that is rather farther removed from the context of the Pentateuch, not to say from Paul (see especially Romans 5:12-21; 1 Corinthians 15:21-22, 45-49), than he thinks.
A further problem is introduced by Walter Brueggemann,22 who not only adopts a fairly “soft” reading of Genesis 3 but then argues that Old and New Testament writers present fundamentally conflicting visions of the passage and of God’s response to human rebellion.
I mention these examples as mere illustrations of tendencies that run in the wrong direction. By contrast, I am arguing that that stance is most likely to be deeply Christian which attempts to integrate all the major biblically determined turning points in redemption — including creation, fall, the call of Abraham, and so forth.
Second, that stance is most likely to be deeply Christian which attempts to balance the various turning points in the history of redemption. In other words, it is not merely a matter of including all the turning points, but of how they hang together. Eastern Orthodoxy assigns a higher place to the incarnation than does the West; correspondingly, it diminishes, relative to the West, the place of the cross. Various cultural self-understandings flow from these commitments. As some Christians put their Bibles together, they place dominant emphasis on evangelism, with social improvement a more distant mission; others reverse these priorities. Transparently, these commitments will shape one’s understanding of the “proper” relationship between Christ and (the broader) culture.
Third, unavoidably the location of contemporary Christians within their corners of the world will have a shaping influence on which elements of the Bible’s story line they wish to emphasize. Christians facing overt persecution in southern Sudan or in northern Nigeria will necessarily develop a different outlook than their brothers and sisters in Geneva, Switzerland, in Vancouver, Canada, and in Tulsa, Oklahoma (respectively, a thoroughly international city, a highly secularized Pacific-rim city, and a Bible-belt city in which it is sometimes difficult to find someone who will admit to not being a Christian). Christians pondering how best to interact with the broader culture, and bear witness to it, in Oslo or Helsinki, will necessarily have a somewhat different set of priorities than Christians in, say, Haiti, with its endemic poverty, or in Johannesburg, with its devastating AIDS statistics and staggering numbers of orphans. But wherever they live, those who are best informed should not be insisting that theirs is the only way to think responsibly about the relations between Christ and (the broader) culture. Rather, they should be striving simultaneously to grapple with all the turning points in redemptive history, even while they recognize that their own cultural location demands that certain biblical emphases must have a higher priority than others. This way of putting it allows for three things: (a) a greater cross-cultural Christian consensus on what Scripture says, (b) a flexible accommodation to the demands of particular enveloping cultures, and (c) an implicit understanding that when the broader culture changes — when, say, persecution stops, when a Constantinian revolution takes place, when the church is in greater danger of being seduced by power than by being pummeled by brutality — the comprehensiveness of Scripture’s story line and the multiplicity of its interlocking emphases still allow it to exercise a reforming, shaping, correcting function in the way Christians should think of themselves in the world. It follows that that stance is most likely to be deeply Christian which not only recognizes the comprehensive turning points in redemptive history but reads its own times well and ponders deeply how best to respond and take initiative within that (broader) cultural setting.
To sum up: Recall, once more, the definition of culture provided by Geertz: it is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about life and attitudes towards life.”23 Culture is not the idiosyncratic possession of the individual, even though an individual may well embody a particular culture. Transparently, the locus of a particular culture is variable and may overlap with other cultures, but this does not mean that one culture cannot be usefully compared and contrasted with another culture.24 Because Christians self-consciously look to Scripture (not least as interpreted in the “transmitted pattern of meanings” understood in their Christian group), even while some of the “transmitted pattern of meanings” in their group may have more to do with the fact that they are the citizens of Burkina Faso or Pago Pago, they will inevitably find themselves in continuity with, and in discontinuity with, their fellow citizens who do not share their Christian heritage and commitments. Equally, they will find themselves in continuity with, and in discontinuity with, Christians living in other parts of the world who are embedded in quite different cultures. For this reason we can usefully speak of the relations between (a particular form of) Christianity and (other) cultures — or, so as not to drown in caveats, we may simply say we can think about Christ and culture, with the caveats understood from here on in this book.
Moreover, the Christian heritage of meanings and values turns on disclosure from God that makes us look at everything differently.25 In the much-quoted words of C. S. Lewis, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”26 That is why consideration of Christ and culture promises to be fruitful and revealing: it is a consideration of a different way of seeing, of a different vision, even when we are looking at the same thing.
Redefining Postmodernism
The discussion so far still leaves open whether each ostensibly Christian culture can legitimately claim to be as Christian as any other ostensibly Christian culture. If not, then the best that a discussion of Christ and culture can do is talk about the options — which is, of course, what Niebuhr does. But where Christians agree that Scripture is the “norming norm” (to resurrect a beloved Reformation expression), then we ought to be attempting a more comprehensive synthesis — not only a description of what the relation between Christ and culture is in particular times and places, but a probing of what the relationship ought to be in the light of Scripture. Such an effort must result in a synthesis that is flexible enough to account for the diversity within Scripture itself; it must also be unified enough to hold the diverse strands together. Otherwise there is little hope of Scripture correcting us on these matters; there is little hope of Scripture functioning as the norming norm.
One of the impediments to this quest, however, at least in the English-speaking world, is the widespread perception that such grand syntheses are impossible. Postmodernism has rendered them obsolete. It is worth mentioning again that while “postmodernism” is virulently healthy in North America, where it enjoys many complementary and sometimes competing definitions, as a category in France it is largely dead. This springs in part from the fact that in France, postmodernism was tightly connected with certain literary and critical readings of texts, which readings are no longer in vogue, but never gained control of the philosophical schools: the analytic tradition of philosophy, regnant in much of Europe, never succumbed to postmodernism’s reductionisms. Further, the influence of François Lyotard, who taught his readers to be deeply suspicious of all “big pictures” or “metanarratives,” made it inconsistent to speak of postmodernism, any more than of any other “ism.” A very recent French work, written by an able philosopher, can speak of “postmodernity” as a phenomenon,27 but certainly not of “postmodernism.” By contrast, postmodernism in America has become a sloganeering word that touches almost every human domain. Still, it must be said that some strands of European thought are profoundly anti-metaphysical — a stance that, in America, would be labeled postmodern, even if the label does not quite work in France. More important yet, owing to the power of global communications, highly diverse forms of “postmodernism” appear as outcroppings in places as diverse as French West Africa and Taipei, Taiwan, where I have been asked to speak on “ministry in postmodern churches.”
Even within the evangelical community, the diversity of voices regarding the place and even the meaning of postmodernism continues to rise.28 More broadly, the number and range of really unyielding and sometimes virulently shrill sirens show no sign of diminishing. The recent work by Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty, and Santiago Zabala on The Future of Religion,29 a combined European and American project, is profoundly anti-metaphysical. Religion in general and Christianity in particular, they say, is moving to the place where it must abandon “onto-theology,” “realism,” and “objectivism,” and as a result it is losing any capacity it once had to order the public square. Its function is merely to provide private comfort, and in that capacity it performs a civic duty, it displays civic virtue. The authors disagree on how Christianity arrived at this point — Rorty thinks Christianity is capsizing owing to progressive Enlightenment pressure, while Vattimo thinks that the change springs from Christianity’s own message: the “actual message” of Christianity has nothing to do with metaphysics but only with love understood in ways congruent with postmodern nihilism — but they agree on the central thesis. And if they are right, then it is entirely inappropriate to enter into a discussion of the relationship between Christ and culture.
Others happily adopt the postmodern turn, but, noting postmodernism’s reluctance to speak about the true reality of God and equally suspicious of metaphysics, they argue that the only way forward is a return to the process thought of Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Ogden.30 Certainly when there is so much suspicion that all constructs say much more about the human knowers than about what is ostensibly known, it is terribly easy to take the next step and infer that we ourselves establish reality — nicely captured in Rifkin’s biting summary:
We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else’s home and therefore obliged to make our behavior conform with a set of preexisting cosmic rules. It is our creation now. We make the rules. We establish the parameters of reality. We create the world, and because we do, we no longer feel beholden to outside forces. We no longer have to justify our behavior, for we are now the architects of the universe. We are responsible to nothing outside ourselves, for we are the kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever.31
Even in the slightly more subdued prose of a broadly Christian writer such as Franke,32 the problems are acute. Constantly they place much emphasis on our finiteness, on our cultural location, and on the context-specificity of each knower, and very little emphasis on the content of the divine revelation (however much that content is disclosed within and to human cultural contexts). The result is predictable: the authority of the divine revelation is progressively domesticated, while scarcely a word is heard about how this divine revelation is able to critique culture.
Inevitably, this stance is eliciting strong rebuttal. Franke’s latest book was strenuously taken apart by Paul Helm,33 and that review has set off a flurry of exchanges.34 Others have joined in sometimes scathing denunciation of the strongest postmodern voices, intent on preserving a place for “objective truth” and for the possibility of knowing it.35 On the face of it, we seem set, at least in America, for an unyielding confrontation between modernism and postmodernism, between foundationalism and postfoundationalism — a “take no prisoners” war in which there can be only winners and losers.
But there is another way. A chastened modernism and a “soft” postmodernism might actually discover that they are saying rather similar things. A chastened or modest modernism pursues the truth but recognizes how much we humans do not know, how often we change our minds, and some of the factors that go into our claims to knowledge. A chastened postmodernism heartily recognizes that we cannot avoid seeing things from a certain perspective (we are all perspectivalists, even if perspectivalists can be divided into those who admit it and those who don’t) but acknowledges that there is a reality out there that we human beings can know, even if we cannot know it exhaustively or perfectly, but only from our own perspective. We tend to sidle up to the truth, to approach it asymptotically — but it remains self-refuting to claim to know truly that we cannot know the truth.36 To set such a modest modernism and such a chastened postmodernism side-by-side is to see how much alike they are. They merely put emphases in different places.
In fact, though they do not always recognize it themselves, there are writers who think of themselves as moderate foundationalists and others who think of themselves as cautious postfoundationalists who are approaching this center from opposite sides. One of the striking elements of the book by Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism,37 is that they refer to none of this moderate foundationalism, the “soft” postmodern literature, still less interact with it.38 Foundationalism, as they caricaturize it, becomes for them a mere whipping boy — and this is pretty common among some postmodern writers. It is almost as if they cannot defend their own position unless they can demonize modernism and its attendant foundationalism, usually cast in its most extreme form. But as there are chastened foundationalists, so also there are modest or “soft” postfoundationalists. For all that Alvin Plantinga sets out to disown foundationalism, his careful insistence that belief in God may be properly basic suggests that postfoundationalism may be more flexible than some think possible39 — indeed, in this instance, D. Z. Phillips goes so far as to argue that Plantinga’s critique of foundationalism never quite escapes the grip of what he sets out to deny.40 Kevin Vanhoozer is fully aware of the strengths of the assorted forms of postmodernism but finds ways to preserve a place for meaning and truth conveyed through texts.41 Science has learned to speak of “deflationary” or “minimal and piecemeal realism.”42
More broadly, Christian Smith adopts a “perspectivalist realism”: “Things are not of human construction and interpretation all the way down; there does exist an ordered reality objective of human consciousness of it, which provides materials which humans then interpret to construct what for them is reality.”43 A recent book by Esther Meek44 offers thoughtful criticism of both merely rationalist approaches to knowledge, and of the postmodern drift toward skepticism, but ends up with a complex epistemology that is full of hope and joyful knowing. On the one hand, she critiques the common Western stance in which “people think that knowledge has to be something you are sure of, that can’t be wrong, or it isn’t knowledge,”45 which finally makes the verb “to know” and its cognates “a success word: when we use it we imply that we were successful at getting the truth right.”46 The quest for truth rapidly becomes a quest for infallibility and absolute certainty. The result, as Talbot puts it in his useful review of Meek, is this: “Classical and modern philosophy both cycle from an initial state of skepticism through some proposal for attaining certainty back to skepticism as the result of the proposal’s failure to deliver.”47 In this light, postmodernism is merely the “newest capitulation to skepticism” when it claims there is “no absolute truth, no metanarrative, no single grand story, no single way-things-are.”48 But by adopting a more modest stance regarding what is required to speak of the human capacity to know, and by recognizing the plethora of faculties, sensibilities, integrations, and cultural realities that go into all human knowing, it remains entirely appropriate to speak of human knowing. Whether one follows Meek in all her arguments or not, at the very least one is made aware how outmoded, simplistic, and painfully reductionistic much of the debate between modernism and postmodernism really is. That the problem remains acute in many parts of North America is exemplified by a debate, recently held in Michigan, between a well-known “emerging church” leader and a more “traditional” Christian thinker. As part of the structure of the debate, each party was allowed to ask the other some questions. The more “traditional” Christian actually submitted his questions two months in advance. One of them was this: Can you list any beliefs that are necessary to genuine Christianity? If so, what are they? The “emerging church” leader hemmed and hawed and eventually provided a list of several things demanded by orthopraxy — but not one demanded truth or belief. This reluctance to speak of truth is notoriously distant from the biblical writers.49
This is not the place to engage at length the ever-widening lists on postmodernism. For the purposes of this inquiry, it is sufficient to suggest that there is ample intellectual space to speak of human knowing, however finite and contingent human knowledge may be when measured by the limitless knowing of Omniscience. Moreover, to be able to talk about Christ and culture in the ways I am suggesting, it is necessary not only to be able to talk about particular truths that are essential to Christianity, but to be able to talk about the Bible’s story line, the Bible’s metanarrative, the big picture. To put the matter negatively, we must reject, in the strongest terms, the idea that there is no big picture. One of the most amusing yet penetrating brief treatments I have read on this subject is that of Ian Rose.50 In the tradition of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Rose depicts the legions of hell being instructed on how to convince everyone today that There Is No Big Picture, precisely because that one Big Lie is sufficient to destroy Christianity. This lie is far less shocking than a crass “God is dead” or the like, so it is more believable, but no less destructive.
In short, a “soft” postmodernism is likely to win widescale assent that there are two kinds of perspectivalists in the world, two kinds of postmodernists: those who admit it and those who don’t. Both our finitude and our fallenness drive us to this conclusion. We see through a glass darkly. Nevertheless, we do see. If an unchastened postmodernism extends its claims toward raw relativism and denies the possibility of knowing the big picture, it is not only idolatrous and anti-Christian but borders on the self-refuting and the silly.
Concluding Reflections: Worrying over Worldviews
In recent years, a rising number of authors have pooh-poohed the notion of “worldview” in general and of “the Christian worldview” in particular. Some are suspicious of worldview reasoning on the grounds that no finite human being can ever capture a true view of the world. And if we cannot capture a true view of the world, then isn’t our “worldview” nothing more than an idol we have set up to worship? And isn’t that idolatry all the more transparent if we try to impose it on others, even other Christians, who live in other cultures? Sometimes the assault on the legitimacy of worldview thinking is more sophisticated than this,51 but it never falls far from this set of objections.
A “worldview,” after all, is nothing other than a view of the “world” — that is, of all reality. A worldview is comprehensive only in the sense that it tries to view the whole. But no one, to my knowledge, ever suggests that a worldview “captures a true view of the world” (!). This is the oft-repeated postmodern trick of erecting a straw man: either one captures a true view, or there is no such thing as a valid worldview.52 The very notion of “capturing” a true view sounds demeaning and domesticating; worse, if “true view” smuggles in notions of perfection, that is, a view of all reality that accords perfectly with reality itself, then transparently a “worldview” in this sense is the prerogative of Omniscience alone. But the bar has been raised too high. There is a lesser but entirely coherent sense in which a human being may see the “whole” of reality — for this is, in fact, what the Bible’s storyline provides. A worldview must be comprehensive enough to address the question of deity (If there is a God, what is he like?), the question of origins (Where do I come from?), the question of significance (Who am I?), the question of evil (Why is there so much suffering? If things are not the way they’re supposed to be, why not?), the question of salvation (What is the problem, and how is it resolved?), the question of telos (Why am I here? What does the future hold?). It does not purport to identify all the subatomic quarks; it does not claim to say all that might be said about God. It merely claims to cast a broad enough vision to be able to see the shape of the whole. And that, I have argued, is precisely what the Bible provides.
I have not attempted to address the epistemological question, that is, to provide a detailed map as to how one comes to this biblically grounded worldview. Such reflection belongs to another project. Nevertheless it must be said that a Christian worldview, a Christian theological vision, is more than a system of beliefs (though it is never less): it also includes the volition that self-consciously thinks and acts in line with such beliefs. The biblical story line, which finally centers on the gospel of Jesus Christ, establishes the summum bonum, the highest good, the thing we actively cherish and pursue. That is why John can speak both of believing the truth and of doing it. But to argue, with Raschke, that in this postmodern age we need to go “beyond” worldviews into a stance in which we admit God is so Wholly Other that we can receive him only by faith, and that this response is entirely in line with the Reformation’s insistence on sola fide,53 is confused at several levels. In particular, once again it has distorted “worldview” into something unrecognizable by any side in the discussion. After all, the attempt to take the Bible’s story line seriously leaves plenty of space for what is unknown about God: modernists, too, read Deuteronomy 29:29 (“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever”), the end of Romans 11 (“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!”), and many similar passages. Still more importantly, faith, according to the Bible, is often nurtured and strengthened precisely by the bold articulation and defense of the truth. Trust in God, fostered and nurtured by the power of the Spirit, is grounded not so much in what is unknown about him but in what he has disclosed of himself — not only in supernatural acts, the chief of which is the resurrection of Jesus, but in words of promise and instruction, which are to be believed and acted upon. Raschke’s view of faith has more in common with Bultmannian existentialism54 than with the Reformation, let alone with the New Testament.
Perhaps this is the place to point out that the postmodern penchant for affirming the unknowability or the incomprehensibility of God, often with pious reference to Calvin’s affirmation of the doctrine, habitually overlooks some fundamental distinctions. In particular, there is an enormous chasm between what Calvin means by “God is incomprehensible” and what Kant means by “God is incomprehensible.” For Calvin, God extends immeasurably beyond what human beings may know, but that does not mean that human beings may not know any true things about him, the more so since this God has graciously chosen to reveal to his image bearers some true things about himself. Kantian distinctions between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world head in a very different direction and end up making our conception of God little more than the result of the ordering power of our minds, with only the most uncertain connection between our mental construals and the reality.55 To adopt the Kantian view of God’s unknowability and bless it with Calvin’s name is somewhere between a historical blooper and a sleight of hand. Moreover, even though we regularly speak of God in analogical language, some elementary distinctions steer us around some avoidable pitfalls.56 One can say true things by means of a metaphor.57 Further, if Scripture necessarily deploys analogy to refer to much of what God has disclosed of himself in Scripture, it is useful to distinguish between univocal analogy and equivocal analogy. Thus a statement such as “God exists” is not, for Christians, a metaphorical statement (i.e., it is not a product of human creativity), but a univocal analogical assertion: the spiritual being “God” can be said to “exist” in many of the same ways that we say that we ourselves “exist.” The statement “God is our heavenly Father” is, by contrast, an equivocal analogical statement: that is, although God is not univocally what we mean by “father,” yet mutatis mutandis (“equivocally”) God is the “heavenly Father” to those who are his children.58
In sum: I have been arguing in this chapter that neither current discussion on culture nor current dependence on certain strands of postmodern thought may be permitted to dissuade us from reflecting on Christ and culture. Inevitably, any Christian belongs to and embodies, in some sense, the broader culture of his or her tribe or language or nation or group. Nevertheless, by virtue of adhering to, with greater or lesser fidelity, the vision of reality set out by the Bible, and structured by the Bible’s story line, such a Christian enjoys a worldview — a view of the world — that necessarily conflicts with the assorted worldviews of surrounding people who do not adopt that vision of reality and the trust and obedience it elicits. Discussion would become unbearably tedious if I were to reiterate constantly the limitations and essential corrigibility of all worldviews, the kinds and degrees of overlap with other worldviews, and the like. I cannot continually say that by “Christ and culture” I really mean “a Christian culture and its relation to its surrounding culture, understanding that every Christian culture is necessarily shaped by its surrounding culture even while it forms part of it, and even while it has strong ties to Christian cultures in other parts of the world by virtue of shared allegiance to the Bible and its story line, to which all Christian cultures lay claim, which authoritative text has, for Christians, a norming authority that enables them in substantial measure to withstand the pull in the direction of other elements in the broader culture,” and so forth. We will usually take such caveats as the “givens” and speak, more economically, of Christ and culture, but do so in such a way that these broader considerations are not ignored.
At this juncture it may be helpful to reflect on several large visions that compete with the Bible and the gospel it trumpets for the allegiance of men and women. Such competition demonstrates why it is worth thinking hard about Christ and culture. In each case I shall try to delineate some of the ways in which these visions of the good interact with and compete with a Christian vision grounded in the Bible’s story line. Insofar as these different visions of the good shape different cultural groups, we are discussing competing cultures — more precisely, in our case, Christ and culture. That is the purpose of the next chapter. For those who are addicted to matters epistemological in the current debates surrounding postmodernism, however, the following few pages will either cure their addiction or feed it.
One (Epistemological) Step Further
Debates on these matters have become, in North America, so steeped in subtlety that it may not be misguided to probe the intricacies a little further. Readers who are uninterested in current debates entangled in epistemology, postmodernism, and faith may safely skip these few pages without loss.
I shall proceed by interacting with a recent book by James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church.59 Smith reads the contributions of the seminal thinkers Jacques Derrida, François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault in such a way that they become helpful to Christians rather than ogres or demons.
Begin with Derrida. Derrida’s unpacking of deconstruction is in some ways summarized in his much-repeated slogan “there is nothing outside the text” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). But Derrida is not a linguistic idealist, holding that there is literally nothing outside text or that all the world is somehow nothing but massive text. Rather, he is insisting that there is no access to uninterpreted text, to uninterpreted reality. As Smith puts it, “[E]verything must be interpreted in order to be experienced. . . . [Derrida] is what we might call — for lack of a better term — a comprehensive hermeneuticist who asserts the ubiquity of interpretation: all our experience is always already an interpretation” (39). In fact, this stance “can be considered a radical translation of the Reformation principle sola scriptura. In particular, Derrida’s insight should push us to recover two key emphases of the church: (a) the centrality of Scripture for mediating our understanding of the world as a whole and (b) the role of community in the interpretation of Scripture” (23). Of course, Smith knows that some might well respond that if we have only interpretations, including interpretations of the gospel, we cannot know that the gospel itself is true. In fact, he charges me with maintaining “a version of this criticism” (43).
Carson is clearly worried that because folks like Stanley Grenz, Brian McLaren, and other “hard postmodernists” (as he calls them) reject modern notions of absolute or “objective” truth, they are giving up on truth altogether. But in his criticisms, it becomes clear that Carson simply conflates truth with objectivity: for Carson, one can only [sic] be said to know “truly” if one knows “objectively.”60 While Carson rightly notes that human knowledge can never pretend to omniscience, this doesn’t mean we can’t claim to know in a finite but real manner. But his affirmation of finite knowledge always elides into an affirmation of objective knowledge. Although he does not define objectivity (quite an oversight, given his project), Carson clearly means this to carry some connotation of self-evident givenness: if a truth is objective, then it is not a matter of interpretation. (43)
Smith has so completely misrepresented me that I scarcely know where to begin. Perhaps a few observations will suffice.
(a) Absolutely nowhere have I affirmed “if a truth is objective, then it is not a matter of interpretation.” I spent scores of pages in The Gagging of God denying this point, and even in the more popular Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church I repeated, in various ways, that there are only two kinds of perspectivalists: those who admit it and those who don’t. We cannot escape our finitude; indeed, Christians have an even more profound analysis of our limitations than do the most radical postmoderns, because we confess not only our finitude but our fallenness.61
(b) I cheerfully admit that “objective” and “objectively” are slippery words, and in Becoming Conversant I did not take as much time as in The Gagging of God to make some necessary distinctions. Nevertheless I would have thought that an alert reader would get the point that I repeatedly made in the larger work: human beings may know objective truth in the sense that they may know what actually conforms to reality, but they cannot know it objectively, that is, they cannot escape their finitude and (this side of the consummation) their fallenness, and therefore the limitations of perspectivalism, and thus they cannot know anything completely or from a neutral stance. What is this but another way of saying that all of our knowledge is necessarily interpreted knowledge? That is why I developed at some length the long-discussed nature of the hermeneutical spiral, of asymptotic approaches to knowledge, of distanciation and the fusion of horizons. We may know some things truly, that is, our knowledge of them may conform to reality, not because we have omniscient knowledge of them (that standard belongs to God alone), but because the knowledge we have of them, however partial, however mediated, is predicated on the revealing words and acts of God: human knowledge is still knowledge of the truth. To put it another way, all interpretations are not equal. If they were, then the strongest criticisms leveled against “hard” postmodernism necessarily return. Two interpretations may, of course, be equally valid renderings of what actually is the (“objective”) truth, even if we cannot know it “objectively,” because they are looking at the same reality from different perspectives; but some interpretations actually distort the truth, or betray the truth, and thus are false interpretations.
(c) That is why the Bible so constantly emphasizes the importance and reliability of truth. What we proclaim is the truth of the gospel. Of course, it is possible, one more time, to insert all the footnotes and readily acknowledge that apart from grace and the work of the Spirit we would not have come to discern this truth and bow to it, that our interpretations are necessarily partial and potentially flawed, and all the rest. But if we spend all our time in such footnotes, then we betray the massive biblical emphasis on truth and on proclaiming the truth and bearing witness to the truth.
(d) Many of the leaders of the emerging church movement — though certainly not all, as I have frequently insisted — have begun with the true insistence (now there’s irony for you) that all our knowledge is interpreted and have drifted toward very substantial relativizing of all interpretations. I do not see how that point can be disputed. The example I gave in Becoming Conversant of the college student who as a result of reading their material had become embarrassed by all that the Bible actually says about truth was merely one painful example. All of the biblical verses on truth that I included at the end of the book were offered in answer to his dilemma.62 That is becoming a pastoral challenge of very considerable proportions.
So now we turn to Lyotard. Many postmoderns identify with his “incredulity toward metanarratives,” what he calls the grands récits, the “big stories.” Smith argues that metanarratives have a peculiar meaning for Lyotard. They are “a distinctly modern phenomenon: they are stories that not only tell a grand story (since even premodern and tribal stories do this) but also claim to be able to legitimate or prove the story’s claim by an appeal to universal reason” (65). Thus what he ends up opposing is one variety or another of the “big story” behind the modern science of modernism — whether the grand narrative is Hegel’s dialectics of Spirit, or Kant’s emancipation of the rational, or whatever. These grand narratives are meant to be legitimating; they constitute the basis on which other knowledge claims are built. Nevertheless, Lyotard contends, these grand stories have no independent status; they are themselves the product of certain people and cultures. “Lyotard very specifically defines metanarratives as universal discourses of legitimation that mask their own particularity; that is, metanarratives deny their narrative ground even as they proceed on it as a basis. . . . [T]he problem with metanarratives is that they do not own up to their own mythic ground. Postmodernism is not incredulity toward narrative or myth; on the contrary, it unveils that all knowledge is grounded in such” (69). Postmodernism wishes to overthrow the universalizing pretensions of modernism.
All of this, Smith contends, is a very good thing for the gospel. It is reminiscent of Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til. Lyotard was not trying to overturn Christianity; he was trying to overturn modernism, and Christians should be grateful for his effort.
This is both correct and naive. It is correct insofar as Smith rightly summarizes Lyotard’s thought. Yet it is naive. Smith thinks that he has defined metanarrative so tightly that what we thought to be the biblical metanarrative turns out to be something else. But most Christian thinkers have seen in Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarrative” a destructive threat to the sweeping authority of the Bible’s controlling story line. In fact, Smith acknowledges that Christian thinkers such as Middleton and Walsh, Grenz, Ingraffia, and others detect in Lyotard a very considerable danger for Christian claims. But Smith judges that these thinkers are worrying about nothing, because “the biblical narrative is not properly a metanarrative” (69). Frankly, I doubt that, were the question put to him, Lyotard would agree. Certainly popular writers like McLaren are now so suspicious of metanarrative in some comprehensive sense that they refuse to present Christ’s claims as grounded in the sweeping story line of Scripture. Not once do they come out and say that this story line is true.
Smith goes on to excoriate the many Christians who, he says, “have bought into the modernist valorization of scientific facts and end up reducing Christianity to just another collection of propositions. . . . Knowledge is reduced to biblical information that can be encapsulated and encoded” (74). He then returns to my list of texts that use “true” or “truth,” a list that seems to irritate him: “The chapter is a collection of lists of proof texts that are supposed to have the self-evident force of criticizing ‘hard postmodernism’ just by documenting the texts — a sort of miniconcordance of Bible verses that use the words ‘true’ or ‘truth.’ Carson’s critique of McLaren on this score, particularly on questions of narrative ([Carson], 163-66), is an epic adventure in missing the point” (74 n. 17). He then asks, “But isn’t it curious that God’s revelation to humanity is given not as a collection of propositions or facts but rather within a narrative — a grand, sweeping story from Genesis to Revelation?” (74). Frankly, I do not find it curious at all; it is glorious, and I have emphasized the importance of the narrative, this big story, this — yes, let’s call it that — metanarrative, in the strongest terms.63 Not once do I pit propositions against the biblical narrative. All I have done is insist that the sweeping narrative includes propositions that cannot be ignored by appealing to the narrative. When truth is mentioned, McLaren is inclined to say that Jesus is the truth, and thus the truth is personal and relational. Well, yes, that is one use of truth in one New Testament writer. That same writer nevertheless uses “truth” and related terms to refer as well, and more commonly, to propositions. My list of references was not provided to construct a list of propositions that together constitute the sum of Christian belief, over against biblical narrative. Few have insisted on the non-negotiable importance of the biblical narrative more than I have. I provided the list to show the extent to which biblical writers are happy to talk about truth in propositional terms (although those are not the only terms), propositions that accord with reality (i.e., propositions that are “objectively” true, even though we cannot claim to know them objectively). I confess I am sorely tempted to characterize Smith’s response as an epic adventure in missing the point.
And so, at last, to Michel Foucault. Smith nicely traces Foucault’s publications from his earliest efforts. Foucault’s studies of institutions of power — prisons, schools, hospitals, and factories — taught him that “power is knowledge.” At the heart of all such institutions, and no less at the heart of sexual and financial relationships, are networks of power. Much in line with Nietzsche, Foucault insists that only one drama is ever played out, “the endlessly repeated play of dominations.”64 Foucault seems to have become less Nietzschean with time, almost (it appears) returning to a classic liberal or Enlightenment position, and Smith carefully draws attention to the debate among Foucauldian scholars as to who the real Foucault is.65 Still, Smith’s concern is to identify the ways in which Foucault may be a positive influence for what Smith calls “a postmodern church.” Preserving Foucault’s usefulness among postmodern Christians requires us to “stand him on his head a bit” (Smith’s expression, 103). We must see the evils that Foucault sees — Smith himself primarily applies Foucault to capitalism — and yet reject Foucault’s warnings against all forms of “disciplinary society.” Rather, precisely because God does exercise authority, God’s people must form disciplinary societies that are able to stand up and pull away from the seductive and destructive attractions of, say, MTV. Certainly the need for godly discipline, empowered by the Spirit of God, is very great. But of course, Foucault himself makes no exceptions for God. Elsewhere Foucault explicitly ties everything that he finds wrong with the exercise of power to what he understands of Christian institutions. In other words, despite the fact that Smith wants postmodern Christians to learn something valuable from Foucault, even he has to admit that Christians must go directly counter to Foucault when it comes to Christian discipline and the exercise of power intrinsic to it. I suppose it is not entirely misleading to think of this as “standing Foucault on his head a bit,” though it seems a bit of an understatement.
Smith’s own proposal is that the emerging church align itself with the movement known as Radical Orthodoxy (109-46).66 Postmodern thinkers such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault have rightly taught us to be deeply suspicious of traditions that anchor truth, claim authority, or exercise coercive power. Smith writes, “We must appreciate the sense in which many advocates of postmodern theology or religion are deeply critical of particular, determinate formulations of religious confession” (117-18). The entire Cartesian project is over, they insist, a failed dream. They reject “the Cartesian equation of knowledge and certainty” (118) and follow instead the wisdom of Derrida, who once wrote, “I don’t know; I must believe.”67 Smith describes their position as follows:
In other words, the postmodern theologian says, “We can’t know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. The best we can do is believe.” Why? Because to know would mean being certain. We know that such certainty is an impossible dream; therefore, we actually lack knowledge. We don’t know; we can only believe, and such faith will always be mysterious and ambiguous. But this isn’t a bad thing; quite to the contrary, it is liberating and just. It is precisely when we think we know something about God that we start erecting boundaries and instituting discipline. (119)
Smith does not quite buy into this postmodern analysis, yet he is sympathetic to broad swaths of it. “Much in this critique,” he writes, “has been rightly affirmed by many who have tried to think through the shape of the emerging church in postmodernity” (119). There is, he says, a similar “refusal of the Cartesian paradigm that characterizes Radical Orthodoxy” (120). This is the direction in which he wants to steer postmodern theologians. Human beings cannot finally live and make sense of anything without being grounded in some tradition — and that is the concern of Radical Orthodoxy. In fact, there is some kind of connection between Derrida’s “I don’t know; I must believe,” and the famous adage of Augustine: “I believe, therefore I understand.” In that sense, postmodern Christians are properly “dogmatic”: they are rich in the doctrinal beliefs of earlier generations of Christians, even while rejecting Cartesian certainties. In this way of looking at things, Smith asserts, ancient Christians of the patristic period were perennial postmoderns. Of course, even this much “dogmatism” is offensive to most emerging church leaders, but at this juncture Smith tries to correct those leaders and nudge them in the direction of Radical Orthodoxy:
This is not to advocate a return to an uncritical fundamentalism or the triumphalist stance of the Religious Right. Rather, it is to affirm that our confession and practice must proceed unapologetically from the particularities of Christian confession as given in God’s historical revelation in Christ and as unfolded in the history of the church’s response to that revelation. To be dogmatic, then, is to be unapologetically confessional, which requires being unapologetic about the determinate character of our confession, contra the Cartesian anxiety exhibited by much postmodern theology. This should translate into a robust appropriation of the church’s language as the paradigm for both thought and practice. (123)
To all this, seven things must be said.
(1) Smith has described the classic weakness of all “hard”68 postmodernists, but he does not refute it; he comes very close to adopting it. “We can’t know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” the postmodern theologian says. “The best we can do is believe.”69 And why is that? “Because to know would mean being certain.” And then this theologian adds, without a trace of embarrassment, “We know [sic!] that such certainty is an impossible dream.” The harder the postmodernism, the more absolute the claim, and the more internally illogical it is. If the postmodern theologian knows that such certainty is impossible, he or she must know it certainly. But that means certain knowledge is not impossible after all. On the other hand, if the postmodern theologian merely misspoke, and merely believes that such certainty is impossible, then perhaps he or she is mistaken. I have seen many “hard” postmoderns fall into this trap of internal incoherence, but rarely so unambiguously and in the space of two adjacent sentences. There is no reason to think that Smith himself wants to follow this line of reasoning without caveat, even though he says that much in this postmodern stance “has been rightly affirmed.” Yet he has bought into it enough that he can write, “It is precisely this refusal of the Cartesian paradigm that characterizes Radical Orthodoxy” — and this becomes his warrant for siding with Augustine (whom, it appears, he misunderstands: see below). In other words, if Smith had exposed the internal incoherence of the archetypal postmodern theologian he is discussing, instead of adopting this rejection of “the Cartesian paradigm,” he would have found it far more difficult to make his next moves toward Radical Orthodoxy.
(2) The notion that all Cartesians think that knowledge is tied to certainty is so easily falsifiable that it is a little tiresome to see it trotted out again. In fact, a substantial number of “soft” postmoderns avoid this pitfall the way they would an E. coli infection. But once we acknowledge that many moderns seek “certainty” in relative terms only and distance themselves dramatically from implicit claims to omniscience, then the polarity that drives Smith’s argument breaks down. I have already discussed the ways in which “soft” postmoderns and chastened moderns can listen to each other more sympathetically, and need not repeat the argument here.
(3) Once again it is important to return to the actual language of Scripture. Biblical writers are not embarrassed to talk about truth, including propositional truth; equally, they are not at all hesitant to speak about knowing people, knowing God — and knowing things and knowing truths. When Luke introduces his Gospel, he tells Theophilus that he is writing “that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:4, emphasis added). After his resurrection, Jesus “presented himself to [his disciples] and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive” (Acts 1:3). Of course, many biblical writers also stress the crucial importance of faith. My point is that they can talk about faith and truth, about believing and knowing. Clearly this knowing is not the knowledge of omniscience; the “certainty” that Luke wants Theophilus to enjoy is not the certainty that belongs to God alone. But this is the language of Scripture, and it is entirely appropriate to the modes and extent of knowing of which human beings are capable.
(4) That brings us to Augustine, “I believe, therefore I understand.” Since Smith does not tell us what he thinks the noun “faith” or the verb “to believe” mean, I am not quite certain that I have understood him aright. But in common with other theologians in the Radical Orthodoxy movement, I think he has slightly skewed the meaning of these words from the semantic range found in the New Testament and in Augustine.
Begin with Paul’s statement in his letter to the Corinthians of what the gospel is (1 Corinthians 15:1-11). One of the non-negotiable components of the gospel, Paul asserts, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As part of his argument, Paul dares to ask what the implications would be if Jesus had not been raised from the dead (15:12-19). He lists several: (a) The eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the resurrected Jesus turn out to be liars. Note: the issue is truth-telling, that is, witnesses giving reports that conform to reality. Obviously, neither the witnesses nor the Corinthians claim an omniscient grasp of the resurrection: the witness is necessarily perspectival. But Paul insists that it must be a true witness, that is, that the report must conform to reality, or else the witnesses are liars. The truth of Jesus’ resurrection, then, is “objective” in the sense that it takes place out there, in space/time history, in the real world, even if human beings can never claim epistemological objectivity of the sort that belongs only to Omniscience. (b) If Jesus has not risen from the dead, then people are still lost. The assumption, of course, is that other realities the Bible talks about remain true, including the fact that we are lost in our trespasses and sins unless Jesus died and rose again on our behalf. (c) The faith of the Corinthian believers is futile. In other words, part of what validates faith, in Paul’s understanding of faith, is that faith’s object must be true. If the Corinthians believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but in fact he did not rise from the dead, their faith is invalidated by the fact that faith’s object is false. Of course, faith is more than recognition that something is true. In the Bible, faith characteristically involves trust in God and his Word, trust in God’s Son. In Hebrews, faith includes the element of perseverance (see how strong that element is in Hebrews 11, for instance). But without exception, faith is invalidated if its object is untrustworthy, or, where ostensible facts are concerned, if the object of faith is not true. The Bible never encourages us to put our faith in what may or may not be true. (d) It follows that if we believe something that is not true, “we are to be pitied more than all others” (15:19). In other words, Paul does not think faith is virtuous because those who exercise the faith are sincere or devout. Faith without a true object, Paul asserts, is pitiful.
In much of the Western world, however, faith is not at all tied to the truthfulness or reliability of its object. Faith is little more than personal, subjective, religious preference. Many people think that faith is utterly nonfalsifiable, and therefore competing faiths cannot usefully or realistically be discussed. Mercifully, Smith does not go so far. Yet for him, “faith will always be mysterious and ambiguous.” Well, yes and no: faith is mysterious in that where it is true faith (in the Pauline sense) it is not only something that we exercise but also a gift from God (e.g., Ephesians 2:8-10). I suppose we might say that there are ambiguous elements in faith in that we trust God and his Word even where we cannot clearly see the way ahead. But the point to observe is that in the Bible it is right to trust this God with the future, not because of what we do not see or know, but because of what we have come to know of this God — including such truth as the fact that God raised his own dear Son from the dead for our justification. Faith enables us to have confidence in God where we do not see, because it is grounded in the immutable character of God that we have come by grace to perceive as utterly reliable. Smith does not work this out, for he is too busy trying to distinguish faith from knowing, introducing a polarity utterly unknown in Scripture.
When Augustine writes, “I believe, therefore I understand,” he thinks of faith in a biblical sense, not in Smith’s slightly woolly sense, still less in the street sense of much Western subjectivism. Over against modernism’s autonomous human thinker, Augustine knows full well that we Christians are finite, dependent, created, redeemed beings. The beginning of all understanding is faith in the God who has made us and redeemed us in Christ. Neither in Augustine nor in the New Testament does this mean that we should abandon offering “many convincing proofs” in Luke’s sense (Acts 1:3), or “reason for the hope you have” in Peter’s sense (1 Peter 3:15). We still follow Paul when we say, “Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade people” (2 Corinthians 5:11). At the same time, we recognize that if anyone is in fact persuaded and comes to understand these things, it is because of the gracious work of the Spirit of God in their lives (1 Corinthians 2:14). And always we insist that what we are urging people to believe is the truth, not because we claim to have gained access to this truth from an epistemologically neutral vantage point, but because it conforms to what God has given, whether people acknowledge it or not. Augustine’s “I believe, therefore I understand,” is therefore a world away from Derrida’s “I don’t know; I must believe.” Augustine, like Paul (e.g., Galatians 2:15-18; Romans 3:27-31), emphasizes the epistemic necessity of faith; but, like Paul, he insists that what he is talking about is “the truth of the gospel” (Galatians 2:14), which is precisely what Derrida could not affirm.
(5) Where Smith carefully distances himself from his imaginary interlocutor, from the “postmodern theologian,” it is over the former’s commitment to confessional orthodoxy. At one level, this is immensely reassuring. On what basis, then, does Smith espouse this confessional orthodoxy and commend it to his postmodern contemporaries? I must take up again the second block quote cited above, and this time highlight one repeated word:
This is not to advocate a return to an uncritical fundamentalism or the triumphalist stance of the Religious Right. Rather, it is to affirm that our confession and practice must proceed unapologetically from the particularities of Christian confession as given in God’s historical revelation in Christ and as unfolded in the history of the church’s response to that revelation. To be dogmatic, then, is to be unapologetically confessional, which requires being unapologetic about the determinate character of our confession, contra the Cartesian anxiety exhibited by much postmodern theology. This should translate into a robust appropriation of the church’s language as the paradigm for both thought and practice.
So near, and yet so far. This is typical of Radical Orthodoxy: it simply isn’t very “radical,” for it fails to get to the radix, the root, of anything. It rightly applauds Christian belief structures and Christian conduct, in line with historic orthodoxy and orthopraxy. For this we are grateful. Yet it cannot give a reason for this move other than saying that we affirm that our confession proceeds from the particularities of Christian confession — unapologetically, even! Well, yes, that is not exactly false: Christian confessionalism ought to be in line with historic Christian confessionalism. But is the content of historic Christian confessionalism true? Do we believe this merely because earlier Christians have believed it? I do not think that Smith would want to be so minimalistic. This confession, he writes, is “given in God’s historical revelation in Christ and [is] unfolded in the history of the church’s response to that revelation.” Great. Is the revelation true, or do we confess the revelation simply because others have confessed it? Both the New Testament writers and Augustine unambiguously affirm the truthfulness of this revelation and are prepared to give reasons for holding to it, even while they insist that faith is necessary to come to terms with it — not faith in some subjective sense, nor merely in some confessional sense that is divorced from truth claims, but faith in the robust epistemic sense that has objects proclaimed to be true.70
(6) Smith’s last sentence in that block quote, “This should translate into a robust appropriation of the church’s language as the paradigm for both thought and practice,” is his way of tipping his hat in the direction of the postliberal theology characteristic of the Yale school. Once again there is much to be thankful for in this appeal. Christians ought to be familiar with the cultural-linguistic language of Scripture, using it comfortably such that it shapes our thoughts and conduct. But if that is all that is said, it simply does not go far enough. In fact, it is a disturbingly intellectualist approach: let us align our cultural-linguistic expressions with those of Scripture, and we will think in line with Christian confessionalism and all be better people for it. Yet the biblical cultural-linguistic matrix is not an end in itself. We are not saved and transformed by linguistic expressions that talk about God and Christ and the gospel. Rather, we are saved and transformed by God, by Christ, by the good news of Christ crucified and risen, and all that flows from this triumph of grace. Of course we should be steeped in the cultural-linguistic matrix of the biblical revelation, hiding Scripture in our hearts, reflecting on and delighting in God’s words and ways. But we ought to do so because what this biblical revelation tells us of God and his ways is true. We proclaim it because it is the truth. We are not saved by words about the cross (no matter how biblical), but by the cross. Of course, we do not have access to the cross apart from words: in that sense, Derrida is right. But the words themselves insist that we trust the God and his actions to which the words point. Failure to see and emphasize the extratextual reality is merely an intellectualist idolatry. We proclaim the God who is there (as Schaeffer taught us to say), the incarnated Word, the death and resurrection of God’s Son, the historic bestowal of the Spirit — even as we cheerfully acknowledge that we cannot make such proclamation apart from words. Like Radical Orthodoxy, postliberalism typically stops one crucial step too soon.
(7) Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Smith’s title asks. Well, not I, though I confess I am getting a bit bored with it. Surely thoughtful Christians should avoid too close an alignment with either modernism or postmodernism, for both are far too heavily dependent on the “I” or the “we” of Cartesian thought. Yet there are things to learn from both modernism and postmodernism (though Smith wants to learn only from the latter). It does no good to camp out with those moderns who demonize postmodernism, for in fact, whether we like it or not, we are all perspectivalists; equally, it does no good to camp out with those postmoderns who demonize modernism, for in fact, within the limitations of what it means to be a finite creature touched by grace, we can know and proclaim the truth.
1. Georges Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences, Studies in the Behavioral Sciences 3 (New York: Humanities Press; The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 210. Cf. also pp. 212-15, 224-25.
2. He advanced this at the colloquium in Vaux-sur-Seine where some of the material in this book was first presented. His material has now appeared in print, in his “Discerner au sein de la culture,” Théologie Évangélique 4/2 (2005): 50-52.
3. Cited by Richard A. Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 10.
4. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89.
5. I am indebted here to a former student, Mabiala Justin-Robert Kenzo, “The Dialectics of Sedimentation and Innovation in Theology: A Study in the Philosophical Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur with Implications for an African Theological Discourse” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1998).
6. See the important essay by Thomas Sowell, “History Versus Visions,” in his Black Rednecks and White Liberals (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), 247-91; e.g., p. 248: “The central doctrine of multiculturalism — the equality of cultures — cannot be sustained when that means equality of concrete achievements — educationally, economically, or otherwise.”
7. See the thought-provoking essay of Robert J. Priest, “Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, Postmodernist,” Current Anthropology 42 (2001): 29-68, and the discussion it provoked.
8. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), esp. 57ff.
9. Blocher adduced this example in his formal response at the conference in Vaux, to which reference has already been made. See his “Discerner au sein de la culture,” 52.
10. Some have argued that Zephaniah 3:9 anticipates a time when all will speak one language. More likely it anticipates a time when all will use only pure speech.
11. Of course, that is why “unity” is not an invariable good in Scripture: it may be nothing more than the fruit of some wretched compromise or other. For a thoughtful survey of the Bible’s varying assessments of unity, see John Woodhouse, “When to Unite and When to Divide,” The Briefing 279 (December 2001): 13-17.
12. Many, of course, have commented on this development. For an interesting recent discussion, see D. Spriggs, “The Bible: Cultural Treasure or Cultural Obstacle?” Anvil 19 (2002): 119-30.
13. The same point was powerfully made a quarter of a century ago, with somewhat different purpose, by Andrew F. Walls, “The Gospel as the Prisoner and Liberator of Culture,” Faith and Thought 108 (1981): 39-52.
14. Colin Greene, Christology in Cultural Perspective: Marking Out the Horizons (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 26. In n. 78 on the same page, Greene suggests that Niebuhr’s fivefold typology can be reduced to three: (a) the “apostolic model,” more or less the same as Niebuhr’s “Christ against culture”; (b) the “Christendom model,” which approximates Niebuhr’s option, identifying Christ with the culture; and (c) the “pluralist model,” which “unfortunately” entails “the capitulation of Christ to culture.” Not only is this threefold typology less nuanced and therefore less comprehensive than what Niebuhr offers, but it is misleading on more than one front. For instance, to assert that the “apostolic” witness uniformly supports “Christ against culture” is terribly reductionistic.
15. Greene, Christology in Cultural Perspective, 26.
16. I therefore reject the approach to discussion of culture exemplified in, for instance, the influential book by Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology, Guides to Theological Inquiry (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997). Tanner surveys how “culture” is used in many recent works, especially those of cultural anthropologists, climaxing in the postmodern “cultural turn” (the expression has become influential owing to the work of Dale R. Martin and Patricia Cox Miller, eds., The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies [Durham: Duke University Press, 2005]). Tanner sketches what theology might look like from the perspective of a postmodern view of culture with its attendant values of diversity, tolerance, freedom, and equality. This vision goes beyond what is proposed by the Yale School, that is, the postliberal theology represented by such figures as Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. The latter assume that local cultures enjoy a certain homogeneity, which leaves space for Lindbeck’s proposal that theology be treated as a cultural-linguistic construction, each construction reflecting a particular local culture. By contrast, the postmodern “cultural turn” insists that diversity is far more radical: the diversity pulsates within local cultures, thereby destroying any notion of homogeneity on which Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic theology is based. This feels a bit like peeling the onion. One can always take off another layer, but my point is that there are invariably cultural parameters that bring subcultures together into recognizable identities, even if those parameters change from time to time. For this chapter, my purpose in spelling these things out is to make clear how it is coherent to talk about Christ and culture, despite the more extreme postmodern views of culture.
17. For example, John H. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993); Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2000); and Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today: Essays on the Church, World, and Living in Between (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001).
18. See, for instance, Duane K. Friesen, Artists, Citizens, Philosophers — Seeking the Peace of the City: An Anabaptist Theology of Culture (Scottdale: Herald, 2000).
19. Most of the voluminous writings of Kuyper have not been translated from the Dutch into English. For an English introduction to his thought, see Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). The one important contribution of Schilder has been published in English as Christ and Culture (Winnipeg: Premier Printing, 1977). Henry R. Van Til (The Calvinistic Concept of Culture [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1959]) attempts a via media between the two, while Brian J. Walsh and J. Richard Middleton (The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1984]) try to show what is involved in putting such a vision into effect.
20. Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991-98), 2:263.
21. Cf. 2:59-275, esp. 2:127, 2:132-36, 2:166-69.
22. For instance, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 32, 37-39.
23. See Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 89.
24. This point is recognized by the use of the word “culture” found in many titles of books and articles that simply assume the point I have been making — e.g., Joseph Bottum, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano: Catholic Culture in America,” First Things 166 (October 2006): 27-40.
25. One recalls the words of Günther Dehn, Man and Revelation (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936), 7-8: “Theology is not promoted by culture but by the belief in God’s revelation as an event beyond all human history, to which Scripture bears witness and which finds confirmation in the Confessions of our Church. Only a theology that clings inexorably to these most essential presuppositions can help build up a Church that really stands unshaken amidst all the attacks of the spirit of the age. And such a Church alone will be the salt of the earth and the light of the world; any other church will perish along with the world.” One may quibble with his use of certain terms: for example, “culture” for Dehn is in this context naturalistic, but he does not mean to deny that the fundamental revelation took place outside of or apart from all human culture, that is, outside all lived human experience — any more than by the expression “beyond all human history” he means to say that the revelation of Christ is not historical. It is his way of underscoring the supernatural origin of the revelation, rather than a denial of the locus of its self-disclosure.
26. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Essays (1949; San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), 140. Lewis may be thinking along similar lines in one of his allegorical novels. In Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 101, he writes, “We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge — the last thing we may know before things become too swift for us.” I am indebted to Michael Thate for making this connection for me.
27. See Luc Ferry, Apprendre à vivre: Traité de philosophie à l’usage des jeunes générations (Paris: Plon, 2006), chap. 5, pp. 169-227.
28. See, for instance, Myron B. Penner, ed., Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005).
29. The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
30. So, for instance, John W. Riggs, Postmodern Christianity: Doing Theology in the Contemporary World (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2003).
31. Jeremy Rifkin, Algen: A New Word — A New World (New York: Viking, 1983), 244.
32. Most recently, see John Franke, The Character of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005).
33. It was published in the online journal, reformation21: see http://reformation21.org/Shelf_Life/Shelf_Life/113/?vobId=1184&pm=247.
34. See further: http://www.generousorthodoxy.net/thinktank/2005/11/response_to_hel.html; http://reformation21.org/Front_Desk/Helm_s_Response/121/; http://reformation21.com/Front_Desk/Postmodern_Blues/133/; http://sacradoctrina.blogspot.com/2005/11/character-of-theology-john-frankes.html.
35. The literature is now voluminous. From the perspective of Christians, see, most recently, the essays in Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and Justin Taylor, eds., Reclaiming the Center: Confronting Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004); Andreas Köstenberger, ed., Whatever Happened to Truth? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005); and many of the essays of J. P. Moreland, e.g., “Truth, Contemporary Philosophy, and the Postmodern Turn,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48 (2005): 77-88. Sometimes these voices speak from the perspective of a deep commitment to natural theology: e.g., see J. Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know (Dallas: Spence, 2004), and Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience (Dallas: Spence, 2004). There are also blistering (and very funny) attacks from scientists committed to philosophical materialism (see especially Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994]) and from literary critics (e.g., John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989]; and Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997]).
36. I have tried to spell these matters out in The Gagging of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996) and Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).
37. Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000).
38. The point is well made by Millard J. Erickson, “On Flying in Theological Fog,” in Reclaiming the Center, 330-31. The moderate foundationalists to whom Erickson points are William Alston, “Two Types of Foundationalism,” Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 165-85; Timm Triplett, “Recent Work on Foundationalism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1990): 93; Robert Audi, The Structure of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Audi, A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1998). Others who belong to the list are former anti-foundationalists who now mount a strenuous defense of chastened foundationalism, none more important than Laurence Bonjour et al., In Defense of Pure Reason: A Rationalist Account of A Priori Justification, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See the penetrating essay by J. Andrew Kirk, “The Confusion of Epistemology in the West and Christian Mission,” Tyndale Bulletin 55 (2004): 131-56.
39. Of Plantinga’s many books, see especially his Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
40. See especially Phillips’s Faith After Foundationalism: Plantinga-Rorty-Lindbeck-Berger — Critiques and Alternatives (San Francisco: Westview, 1995), esp. 29, 45, passim.
41. Perhaps Vanhoozer’s most important work for our purposes is Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).
42. The expression belongs to Sergio Sismondo, Science Without Myth (Albany: SUNY, 1996).
43. Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xvi.
44. Esther Lightcap Meek, Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003).
45. Meek, Longing to Know, 32.
46. Meek, Longing to Know, 26.
47. Mark R. Talbot, “Can You Hear It? Esther Meek’s Longing to Know as Skillful and Joyful Activity — A Review Essay,” Christian Scholar’s Review 34 (2005): 367.
48. Meek, Longing to Know, 31.
49. See, among others, chapter 7 of my Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. The failure to recognize — both at the popular level and in some serious scholarship — that postmodernism is frankly embarrassed to talk about “the truth” and “knowing the truth” and the like, is one of the reasons why it is sometimes difficult to interact with more moderate postmodern thinkers, who seem constantly driven to place the best possible construction on even the most unreconstructed and immoderate postmoderns. See, for instance, S. Joel Garver, “D. A. Carson on Postmodernism: A Critique and Explanation,” http://www.joelgarver.com/writ/revi/carson/htm. Garver is certainly right to say that when the best postmodern theorists disown “objective truth” they do not wish to disown every theory of truth, but only that which buys into a strong form of the subject/object dichotomy. Nevertheless I still think he is far too soft in his reading of Derrida and others — and more importantly, he fails to recognize how widespread is the reading of Derrida and others that engenders suspicion of any truth claim in which “truth” conforms in some measure to reality, however much it is mediated through the cognitive processes of finite, culturally located human beings. David T. Koyzis (Political Visions and Illusions: A Survey and Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003]) rightly recognizes how strong is the modern denial of objective meaning, combined with the promotion of group identity and individual will. Alvin Plantinga thinks of perspectivalist epistemology as the product of a worldview he calls “creative anti-realism”: that is, we the users of the language, we the knowers, are responsible for the fundamental lineaments of reality (“On Christian Scholarship,” in The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University, ed. Theodore Hesburgh [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994], 276). See also the important book edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
50. The Briefing 325 (October 2005): 13-14.
51. For example, Carl Raschke, The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), esp. chapter 4, “Sola Fide: Beyond Worldviews.”
52. I have briefly described the penchant most postmodernists display for argument by absolute antithesis, in The Gagging of God, 106-17, and elsewhere.
53. Raschke, The Next Reformation, chapter 4.
54. Recall Bultmann’s unwillingness to include no more than a bare “das” as the content or object of Christian faith.
55. For an example of the failure to observe this distinction, see, for instance, John R. Franke, The Character of Theology: An Introduction to Its Nature, Task, and Purpose (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 13-15.
56. See, among others, Donald Bloesch, The Battle for the Trinity: The Debate Over Inclusive God-Language (Portland: Wipf & Stock, 2001), esp. 13-27, 61-64, 101-4, and the bibliography at 108-9 n. 2.
57. See the elegant work of Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
58. I am indebted to Robert Yarbrough for some discussion on these matters.
59. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006). Hereafter, page references to this book will be given parenthetically in the text.
60. Here he cites my book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, 105, 130-31, 143 n. 46.
61. See especially chapters 2 and 3 of The Gagging of God.
62. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? 43 n. 10, fails to wrestle with this pastoral dilemma when he refers to my “concordance of passages,” charging me yet again with an “unwarranted conflation” of truth and “objectivity.” But I have repeatedly distinguished “objectivity” in epistemology (which I have consistently denied that we have) and our (necessarily interpreted) knowledge accurately reflecting what is “objectively” out there, even if we cannot know it exhaustively, immediately, or non-interpretatively.
63. For a start, see chapters 5 and 6 of The Gagging of God.
64. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? 87, citing Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 150.
65. The same point was recently made in a useful article by Richard Wolin, “Foucault the Neohumanist?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 September 2006, B12-B14.
66. Smith himself has written a helpful introduction to the movement that discusses the major players: see James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004).
67. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? 118, citing Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michel Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 155.
68. By “hard” in this context, I have in mind those postmoderns who set the modern/postmodern polarity in sharpest antithesis, insisting that moderns seek certainty and that the only viable alternative, postmodernism, eschews it. See the earlier discussion.
69. All of the ensuing quotations are from the two block quotes above, so I will not repeat all the references here.
70. Implicit in Smith’s position is another obscurity typical of Radical Orthodoxy: it masks distinctions that must be made between the authority of Scripture and the authority of later tradition. This is not to give in to the sort of “Bible alone” approach that is willfully ignorant of how Christians across the ages have wrestled with the “givenness” of Scripture or that acts as if contemporary interpreters of Scripture somehow stand outside cultural location. None of the Reformers who robustly espoused sola Scriptura aligned themselves with such ignorance. Yet the Reformers were right to locate final authority in the God who has given Scripture, not in the people who articulate their confession.