Killing the Postmodernism Boogeyman

John Armstrong has an excellent trio of posts [here and here and here] on the postmodernism issue and the inappropriate reaction from Christians that the word "postmodern" often triggers. He begins by responding to the common misconception that a postmodern Christian must be apostate or deluded, discarding the premise that such a Christian must "reject truth claims and moral absolutes and embrace relativism." The real misunderstanding, he continues, is that much of the American church has been co-opted by the modernist methodology for discovering and knowing truth:

Conservative Christians . . . reasoned that if you used the Bible correctly, studying the text of Holy Writ with a proper (scientific) method, then you would get the very mind of God about every thing that you could discover in this treasure house of divine (inerrant) revelation.

The problem with this approach to knowing the real truth that Christianity indeed does profess and testify to is that,

a Christian knowledge of God rests not on precise understanding or biblical equations but on personal knowing. We come to God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, based upon a personal relationship with the risen and reigning Christ. . . .

Modernity gave us confidence in our method. It told us that we could have precise understanding about every mystery that we encountered in the revelation of God. But the gospel calls us to place our total confidence in Christ, not in a system. . . . In modernity we figure something out and get hold of it. In the gospel someone gets hold of us and reveals himself to us.

Wrapping up the second post, Armstrong acknowledges the benefit that a postmodern stance can yield, and reiterates the key difference between the relationships with absolute truth that secular and Christian postmodernists can have:

The developing postmodern critique has helped more and more Christians become aware of a simple fact: God knows the truth in a way that we humans do not. The right use of postmodern suspicion is to employ it to combat the notion that we have easy access to the truth. When conservative pastors tell their people that solid exposition and Bible study will make them into mature disciples then they get very close to this danger! (This is not an attack on study and Bible exposition so read the statement carefully.)

A secular postmodernist deduces that there is no absolute truth. The reason for this is that the person has not yet met the one who is the truth in Jesus Christ. But no postmodern Christian, who knows the one who is the truth, will ever claim that there is no absolute truth since they have a personal relationship with the one who incarnates the absolute truth.

This difference is crucial. Knowing God is not the same thing as knowing about God. Our knowledge about an eternal, transcendent, and spiritual being is necessarily incomplete and likely flawed, particularly when much of it is obtained and limited by our human ability to read and interpret written text; but if this God adopts us into his family, we have access to an entirely different way of knowing him: relationship!

How Necessary Is the Bible?

There has never been a time in history at which we have all had the same Bible.

Ponder that one for a moment.

Setting aside that fact, consider that millions of believers both throughout history and today have lacked some or all of what Christians now call the Bible. The "New Testament church" did. The masses before the printing press (c. 1440). Much of the underground church still does. Many who have been imprisoned. Many who are poor, or blind, or infirm. Those who are illiterate. Those without a Bible in their own language (200 million people, at present). Those without a written language, even.

If the emphasis (or even overemphasis) placed on the written scriptures by some parts of the modern Christian church is correct, and if the near-legalistic expectation of "personal" Bible study—even if only for a trivial number of minutes or verses per day—is correct, then several questions come to mind regarding those who go and have gone without, those already in the prophesied "famine of the Word," as some might call it: What is their Christian life focused on? How are they to truly know God or hear his voice? And if faith comes by hearing, and hearing (by?) the word of God, then on what basis can they come to faith in the first place? Are they inevitably stunted in their spiritual growth, compared to those who have the complete Bible? Weaker brothers and sisters, to be pitied, perhaps?

It seems that we should conclude thusly.

And if we insist that any challenge a specific passage of scripture presents can be made sense of by "the whole Bible," and that the whole Bible is required for proper understanding of (any of? much of?) its contents, then what must we conclude about those without the whole Bible, now and throughout history? And those without any Bible? That these unfortunates are doomed to misinterpretation and misunderstanding on "all matters of faith and practice"? Even on essentials, such as ... the Trinity; the relationship between sin, faith, grace, and works; or the nature of their own relationship to God?

It seems that we should conclude thusly.

And what if our own favorite translation of the Bible contains mistakes? Or if, someday, we were to find the autographs (the original books of the Bible), written in the very hands of the original authors and/or scribes—depending on your view of how the Bible was written—and different from any of the manuscript witnesses (the later copies of the books), from which all of our various and varied translations have been made? Should we conclude that we have not had—have never had—the true "Word of God"? That nobody has ever had the correct Bible?

It seems that we should conclude thusly. That we the privileged, despite our feast of Bibles and Bible study tools, have actually been in a similar position to those who lived before the closing of the canon, or those behind the Iron Curtain, or those with no Bible in their own language. That we didn't have every answer at our fingertips. That we didn't have every last word. We should conclude that some of our opinions may have been misguided, some of our emphases misplaced. We should conclude that some of our knowledge, our certainty was actually error, or naivety. Or perhaps even arrogance.

And what would this mean about God—if he has allowed all of us to wander in such imperfect light?

Or what would it mean about the Bible—if a perfect, loving, and holy God has not thought it necessary to provide one complete, uniform, and error-free Bible for all of us and for all of this time?

Despair not, gentle reader! More on this topic later.

How We Read the Bible

What happens when we read the Bible? How do we interpret what we read? In other words, how do we understand? Let's break down the process a bit and consider some theories about what might be happening:

First, our eyes look at the words--translated into our own language, of course. And then ...

1. We understand the exact meaning intended, because that's what always and automatically happens when we read.
2. We understand the exact meaning intended, because of good intentions and careful concentration.
   
3. We understand, because of a miracle, the one exact meaning ever and always intended.
4. We understand, because of a miracle, the unique meaning that God wants us to have at that moment.
5. We understand something, based on our understanding (= our interpretation) of what the words mean to us in our own culture and time, but the meaning may be different from what was originally intended by the author--or the translator--or what was originally understood by the original audience of native speakers from those cultures 2,000 - 5,000 years ago. Therefore, only the history scholars and language experts among us can aspire to perfect understanding.
6. Even if we are scholars and experts, what we understand is filtered through our own personal experience (as per Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading), and will change as our experience changes. Our understanding of verses about God as father, for example, is affected by our own experiences with our own fathers and our experiences with or without children of our own.
   
7. We understand something, but not necessarily the complete and perfect, higher-than-our thoughts of a supernatural, eternal, and omniscient God.
   

Experience should tell us that options 1 and 2 are ridiculous. Those of us who have ever taught students at any level know this full well.

Theories 1 - 3 are also contradicted by our experience of doctrinal arguments between different denominations. Universal understanding even by well-meaning clergy and laity is not what history reveals.

Theory 4 is harder to refute, since we don't know what voices people are hearing in their heads. Any argument against personal experience is difficult unless we can read minds. However, most honest people would admit to errors in their personal understanding of scripture, to thinking God had told them something but realizing later that it was fear, emotion, or their own desire to believe, and not the voice of God. This happens to even the brightest among us.

The perfect understanding held out to us in theory 5 would appear to be contradicted by the lack of agreement among scholars and experts.

Theories 6 and 7, then.... For us mere mortals, we appear to be left with incomplete understanding, and no certainty about how accurate we actually are when interpreting a given passage. And this uncertainty, this ambiguity is very threatening to some.

Interestingly, this is our condition even if we hold to the most extreme doctrines of Biblical inerrancy and infallibility. Every word may be the exact and perfect one, and perfectly true and authoritative, but this doesn't mean that we understand fully or that we all have the same understanding. Confidence in the Bible is different than confidence in my ability to fully grasp the thoughts of God after carefully reading it once--or a hundred times.

I love and believe the Bible. My argument here is not that the Bible is irrelevant or that we read it without hope of understanding. Rather, I see the need for patience and care when reading, for diligence to learn more about the language and context, for prayer that the Holy Spirit would aid in the understanding, and for humility when interpreting or when disagreeing with somebody's interpretation.

More importantly, I love and believe in the Lord himself--amazing mystery though he may always be to me. I believe that I can know him--as I am fully known. This is different from knowing about him through reading the Bible. I can know information in a book, or a book itself, but those will always be qualitatively different from knowing a Person. As in other relationships, perfect knowledge and perfect understanding on my part are not requirements or priorities. We know in part, and ultimately, knowledge will pass away.