I just finished reading a review of D.A. Carson’s Staley Lectures. The review was by David Mills (no, not the David Mills of Touchstone), and can be found here. The lectures were apparently the basis for Carson’s subsequent book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, which is also worth reading. David Mills shares some of the concerns that Carson has about the emergent movement, but at the same time believes that Carson did not handle the subject fairly, and spends the bulk of his time critiquing Carson. He says that he is not a defender of emergence, which I think is accurate, but I also want to say that Mills is defending a certain ethos that is helping to confuse the issues enormously. There are a number of reasons for thinking this, but I want to simply focus on one, which I think is really at the heart of this whole debate.
Mills objects to what he considers Carson’s reduction of the whole thing to epistemology, and in the course of the discussion he says this. “He [Carson] has said quite eloquently much of what I have been trying to articulate to my colleagues for some time now. I only wish he would not continue to call such knowledge certainty. It should be called knowledge, and it should be called true . . . For Carson to call this attitude ‘certainty’ is like trying to go back to using the word ‘gay’ to mean ‘happy’ (p. 24).
I think this really is the heart of the whole business. Now we here in Moscow have been maintaining (for years) that all claims to epistemic certainty, founded on an autonomous rationalism is intellectual idolatry simpliciter, and is a kind of sin that is as hard to get out of your brain as pine pitch is hard to get off your fingers. We have maintained that Christians can know the Absolute, but that we cannot know Absolutely. In order to know absolutely, we would have to be omniscient, and we are back to the temptation in the Garden — “you shall be as God.” But we cannot be and shouldn’t want to.
More than a few have seen the similarity between this stance and the pomo stand. But here is the crucial difference. Let’s pretend for a moment that Descartes stuck to math. Let’s pretend that the Enlightenment never happened. No great sacrifice, although it would have lost us Samuel Johnson’s witticism about Enlightenment thinkers (in French, lumieres). Johnson had attacked some freethinker, and someone remonstrated, “Allow him the lumieres at least.” “I do allow him, Sir, just enough to light him to hell.”
Anyhow, where was I? Okay, the Enlightment never happened, and the Scriptures would still be full of necessary words to express the Christian’s faith, and those words would include words like certainty (Heb. 11:1; 2 Pet. 1:19 NIV). Other translations might use words like assurance, but the bottom line is what Francis Schaeffer called true truth, take it to the bank truth. It is not enough to simply ask us to go back to words like knowledge and true, without sending in scriptural reinforcements. We live in a time when many tell us that all truths are local, and that there is no over-arching meta-narrative. But this is functional atheism.
Someone might complain that all that is being said is that no human possesses an over-arching meta-narrative. Well, yes and no. No Christian, who was not a ninnyhammer, in the history of the church, has ever thought that he possessed the whole story. But it is a matter of fundamental importance to assert that although I don’t know everything, I know someone who does. And it is that assertion that I see pomos or pomo-friendles rejecting, challenging, explaining away, or eroding.
When the homosexual activists coopt a word like gay, we can give it up or fight for it, depending on how attached we were to the old use of the word, or how hopeless the fight is. But when it comes to a word like certainty, which, outside of certain philosophy asylums at the universities, is a perfectly good English word for translating perfectly good Greek words for things like assurance and certainty, it is a different matter. In my view, giving up that word would amount to a devasting surrender to the spirit of this age.
But if you want to know my bona fides concerning resistance to the previous spirit of the age, an age that was whooped up for the sake of relevance by McLaren’s spiritual ancestors, I will reiterate them here. If you want to trample on phrases like Cartesian certainty, or autonomous certainty, or rationalistic certainty, or epistemtic certainty, go ahead, be my guest. I will help, and with hob-nailed boots on.
But for all that, there remains a certainty grounded in the fact that God has spoken to us in His Son Jesus Christ, inspired a perfect book for us to read, and sent His Spirit to lead us in these things. This certainty is the genuine article, of which all other papier-mache certainties are counterfeits, fakes and copies. When you tear down idols, you have to learn how to stop before you get to works of the true and living God. Do whatever you want to the papier-mache certainties. Why would I care? I am a Christian. But if the papier-mache house of Enlightenment certainties needs to be demolished (and it does) I for one do not intend to place any bets on the pomo crane with the papier-mache wrecking ball.
Our godly certainty was enjoyed by countless Christians before Descartes ever looked doubtfully at his porridge, or whatever it was that first set him off. And it will be enjoyed by countless Christians for centuries after our current set of the philosophical fantods wears off. Our scriptural certainty is the birthright of every child born of God. They can have my certainty after they pry my cold, dead fingers from . . . oh, oops. Wrong bumpersticker. Am I content, in this pluralistic age, with something that is mere “knowledge” and “true”? For pity’s sake, how many of you have heard the expression “that may be true for you“? Don’t you all see the play that is being run on us?