Lecture 4: Postmodern Epistemology: The Stage of Truth

The lecture, section by section

1. A paradigm shift

   Something is changing in the way the whole world thinks, slowly enough that we barely notice, large enough that historians and philosophers compare it to the Renaissance. You can feel it in ordinary conversation: you may speak of Jesus and the Bible freely, so long as you never claim they are objectively true, because the cardinal sin of the new culture is intolerance. If the ten commandments were rewritten today, the first would read, you shall tolerate one another. Truth, people now say, is yours for you and mine for me.

2. The man downtown

   Patton tells of a street conversation in which a man gave him as clear a gospel presentation as he had ever heard, Christ's bloodstained hands covering our sins so that God sees only the blood. Then, almost as an afterthought, Patton asked whether Christ is the only way, and the man answered, by no means: he is my way, but not the only way. A perfect articulation of substitutionary atonement, wrapped in the epistemology of the age. The sins of the culture become the sins of the church, so this way of thinking must be understood, not just denounced.

3. What epistemology is

   Epistemology is the theory of knowledge: the inquiry into the nature and source of knowledge and the justification of claims to know. Every field runs on one. Medicine trusts a new procedure when it has been tested, documented, and published where it can be challenged; publication is part of medicine's epistemology. The church's problem is that the culture's epistemology has shifted underneath its vocabulary: the first of the four spiritual laws, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, is still true, but the hearer may now mean by God the trees, or an inner force, so the basis of truth must be re-established before the sentence can even be heard.

4. The vocabulary of truth

   The key terms: relativism, truth determined by a group or society; subjectivism, truth defined by the individual alone; skepticism, the claim that truth cannot be known with certainty; perspectivism, truth found only in the combined perspectives of many, like a landscape painted from several angles; pragmatism, truth as whatever works to reach the goal you have set, the end justifying the means; and objectivism, the belief that truth is an objective reality that exists whether anyone believes it or not. The classroom of the age teaches the first family: Patton's sister's literature course failed students who said what the author meant and rewarded those who said what it meant to them, deconstruction in its bad sense.

5. The self-defeating creed

   An old dialogue between Protagoras and Socrates plays out the modern conversation: what is true for you is true for you, says the relativist, until Socrates offers his own opinion, that truth is absolute and the relativist absolutely wrong, which the relativist must now grant is true. The lecture names the pattern: a self-defeating statement, false by virtue of its own construction, like saying I cannot speak a word of English. There is no truth is a truth claim; truth cannot be known with certainty is offered with certainty; nothing can be known about God is itself a claim to know something about God.

6. The stage of truth: the premodern arrangement

   Three volunteers stand on stage as Scripture, tradition, and reason. In the fourth century, where Western epistemology begins to be articulated, Scripture and tradition stand side by side at the front and reason waits in the back. Tradition's place was no accident: few possessed the Scriptures, many could not read, and the church relied on the testimony of those who had received the apostolic writings. And tradition could be relied on for the reason this course keeps repeating: one and the same Spirit filled the church in every century, and the Spirit has learned nothing since.

7. Arius, Athanasius, and the council

   Then two men read the same Bible. Arius reads that the Son is begotten, as in John 3, and reasons that what is begotten must have come into being: there was a time when he was not. Athanasius reads the same word as describing not the Son's origin but his eternal relationship to the Father: eternally begotten, and therefore equal with God. The Council of Nicaea in 325 sided with Athanasius and pronounced the contrary view accursed, and it worked: the church stood on the statement. Heresy, note well, came from inside, from reading the Bible, which is exactly why tradition stepped forward as the champion of orthodoxy, the church serving as the pillar of the truth, and why the very words we still confess, one God in three persons, were hammered out and handed down to us.

8. The printing press and the Reformation

   A thousand years on, the printing press put the Bible into everyone's hands, and Martin Luther looked at the stage and said tradition had stepped too far forward and abused its power. The Reformation, acted out, is a rearrangement: Scripture to the front, tradition honored but behind it, reason brought up as well. Sola scriptura never meant Scripture alone on the stage; it meant Scripture first. Rome's warning was accurate: put the Bible in every hand without the governing authority and you will reap divisions, opinions, and churches beyond counting. Luther did not deny it. He judged the cost worth paying, because the other arrangement was losing the gospel itself.

9. Modernism: man to the front

   Enlightened, literate, discovering, humanity warmed to its own powers. Natural law explained what had seemed immediate miracle; the earth circled the sun; the age of the earth and the story of human origins were read against Genesis, and Scripture was thanked for its morals and ushered off the stage. Man stood at the front alone, evolving, essentially good, building toward utopia. The seventeenth through nineteenth centuries told him he was something else.

10. The betrayal of reason and the empty stage

    Then the twentieth century: the unsinkable Titanic sank, the World Wars came, the Holocaust, the space shuttle. Man was not getting better, and reason too had betrayed its trust. So the postmodern stage stands empty: no source of truth outside ourselves, pessimism where there was optimism, fear where there was hope. The distrust is everyday: the food pyramid rewritten, everything causing cancer one year and curing it the next, trusted voices contradicting each other. Yet the lecture notes how September 11 cracked the frame: for weeks the whole culture said one word, evil, and meant it objectively, before easing back into its relativism.

11. Spock, Data, and the umpire

    The contrast in traits: modernism was intellectual, rational, optimistic, objectivist, exclusivist, scientific, and evolutionary; postmodernism is anti-intellectual, pessimistic, subjectivist, pluralist, distrustful of science, and inclined to see man devolving, readier than its parent to admit human sinfulness. The ideal modern man was Mr. Spock, logic without feeling; his postmodern successor is Data, the perfect android who wants nothing more than to be human and feel. And the three umpires: the premodern calls balls and strikes as they are; the modern calls them as he sees them; the postmodern says they are nothing until he calls them. By the numbers the lecture cites, a majority of Americans now belong to the postmodern generation, and some four out of five students leaving high school, evangelical homes included, believe all truth is relative.

12. The virtues, and the task

    The teachers refuse simply to condemn. Postmodernism is honest about something modernism denied: no one in the room evaluates truth from pure objectivity, free of experience, emotion, and agenda; the stage always had subjective realities on it. Its instinct toward acceptance grows from a real virtue, wanting hope for everybody, and tolerance itself is a biblical virtue, Ephesians 4's bearing with one another, before the culture redefined it. The Christian task is therefore double: admit confusion where Scripture leaves things unclear, as with Paul's puzzling word about baptism for the dead, which the lecture suggests God may have left in part to humble our black-and-white confidence, and draw lines with courage where there is certainty, knowing the difference, and unifying on the essentials. Next session: a Christian epistemology.

1. The man downtown could articulate the atonement beautifully and still deny that Christ is the only way. Where have you met that combination, in others or in yourself, and how would this lecture teach you to respond to it?

2. Walk the stage of truth in your own story: which arrangement were you raised under, where do Scripture, tradition, and reason stand for you today, and what moved them?

3. The lecture says the church must admit uncertainty where things are unclear and draw firm lines where they are certain. Name one of each from your own convictions, and consider how holding them differently would change your witness.