[The following is an excerpt from “Is the Doctrine of Claritas Scripturae Still Relevant Today?” by D.A. Carson. Originally published in 1997, it was republished recently as chapter 5 of Carson’s Collected Writings on Scripture (Crossway, 2010). This is heavy going at points – but stick with it; you’ll benefit both from his analysis of what led to much in our present culture, and from his preliminary response to challenges to Scripture’s clarity – Coty]

Although “postmodernism” is now being applied to many areas of Western culture, at heart it pertains to epistemology. The rise of the Enlightenment, connected as it is with Cartesian thought, assured most Western intellectuals during the last three and a half centuries that objective truth could be discovered by unfettered human reason, that the best approach to doing so was bound up with foundationalism and rigorous method, that such truth was ahistorical and acultural, and that despite enormous difficulties and acknowledged differences of opinion, the discovery and articulation of such trans-cultural truth was the summum bonum of all rational and scientific enterprise. Over the centuries, cracks developed in this structure, but in large measure the structure held in most circles of Western higher education until a couple of decades ago. Gradually the Western world became more empirically pluralistic, lost many of its moorings in the foundational cultural presuppositions of Judaeo-Christian faith, became more secularistic (which permits lots of scope for religion so long as it is privatized and of little influence in the public discourse), and, in this century, increasingly committed itself to philosophical naturalism.

But now there has come about a shift in epistemology. In Germany this developed from the late 1930s to the 1960s, when the new hermeneutic became instrumental in moving the locus of meaning from the author to the text to the reader, and the model that describes the interpretive process became a hermeneutical circle. In France, inferences drawn from the fledgling discipline of linguistics developed by Ferdinand de Saussure came to be labeled deconstruction, with its various shadings (Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Lyotard) and its profound suspicion of “totalization.” In America, these developments developed into “radical hermeneutics” and were not only applied to central problems in theology but often shifted from the individual interpreter to the autonomy of the interpretive community.

The net effect of these developments is profound. In law, history, literature, theology, the philosophy of science, and much else besides, many of the leading younger scholars (and some not quite so young) are profoundly committed to the view that there is no such thing as public, objective, culture-transcending truth. All interpretations are necessarily constrained by the individual and/or the interpretive community to which he or she belongs. Texts are “open”; they do not convey one truth, but many truths, polyvalent meanings; the only heresy is the view that there is such a thing as heresy. Moreover, these developments, though not universal (history is always messy), have now reached through the media into the public marketplace. Millions who have never heard any form of the word postmodern are nevertheless postmodern in their epistemological approaches, because of the influences of the media. Many a scientist and technician, epistemologically still modernist in their own disciplines, are postmodernist in just about every other domain.

What we must see is the revolutionary nature, epistemologically speaking, of these proposals. By and large, children of the Enlightenment, i.e., epistemological modernists, found little reason to challenge claritas scripturae [that is, the doctrine that Scripture is clear]. So great was their confidence in reason, so deep their commitment to public and universal truth, that it was easier to doubt Scripture’s authority, inspiration, truthfulness, effectiveness, and power than it was to doubt its essential perspicuity. Reason could always find out what it truly meant. But that perspective is rapidly changing. If texts have no univocal meaning, still less their author’s meaning, it is far from clear what claritas scripturae might mean. In the epistemological universe of Luther and Calvin (and of the Middle Ages too, for that matter), the God of the Bible knows everything, and has revealed some things. Human beings come to know some small part of what God truly and exhaustively knows through the revelation that he has given. The question at issue is whether that revelation is “clear” or needs some special illumination or magisterium to comprehend it and make it known. In the epistemological universe of modernism, God may or may not exist, but so confident is the scholar of reason and intellectual effort and so assured is the view that there is public truth to pursue, that there is little sense in doubting claritas scripturae. But in the epistemological world of postmodernism, where reason is a culturally constrained phenomenon, where interpreters are culture-bound, where texts are polyvalent, where claims to universal interpretations are viewed as intrinsically manipulative and therefore evil, where language is perceived to be not something we use (“logocentrism”) but something into which we are born, it is far from clear that claritas scripturae is even a coherent concept, let alone a defensible one. . . .

A Preliminary Response . . .

One must begin by acknowledging that there is considerable truth in postmodern epistemology (if speaking of “truth” in this context is not an oxymoron!). It will aid no one if, alarmed by the sheer relativism that the most consistent forms of postmodernism open up, we retreat into modernism as if it were a sanctuary for the gospel. We may applaud modernism’s passion for truth, while doubting that its confidence in the neutrality, power, and supremacy of reason, and its reliance on appropriate methods, were unmitigated blessings. Similarly, we may applaud postmodernism’s recognition that we inevitably interpret texts (and everything else) out of a framework, that there is no escape from pre-understanding, while doubting its insistence that no knowledge of objective truth is possible. Even some correlative insights from postmodernism, such as the importance of the interpretive community, should be recognized for their value, even if they are pushed too hard. . . .

One of the most common devices in the postmodernist’s arsenal is the absolute antithesis: either we may know something absolutely and exhaustively, or our vaunted knowledge is necessarily relative and personal. Once that antithesis is established, it is so terribly easy to demonstrate that we do not and cannot have absolute and exhaustive knowledge about anything—after all, we are not God, and omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God—that the alternative pole of the antithesis must be true. But in fact, the antithesis is false. It is easy enough to demonstrate the wide range of things we may know truly without knowing them exhaustively. When we speak of “certainty” or “confident knowledge,” we are not claiming what can properly belong only to omniscience. The falsity of the antithesis underlying so much of postmodernist theory must constantly be exposed. . . .

Modernist epistemology, springing from the foundationalism of Descartes, attempted to provide a secure basis of human knowing without reference to an absolute. The God-centered epistemology of the Middle Ages and of the Reformation era was displaced with a finite “I”: “I think, therefore I am.” . . . It was only a matter of time before the limitations of this “I” became apparent: different “I”s think different things, and eventually the subject-object tension, so pervasive a problem in Western epistemology, generated postmodern epistemology. But this latest turn of the epistemological wheel is profoundly challenged if there is a transcendent and omniscient God, a talking God, who chooses to disclose himself in words and linguistic structures that his image-bearers can understand, i.e., can understand truly even if not exhaustively.

What is at issue is a worldview clash of fundamental importance. If you buy into a postmodern worldview, then even if there is an omniscient talking God, you cannot possibly know it in any objective sense. But the talking God of the Bible not only communicates, but establishes a quite different metanarrative. A metanarrative is nothing more than a narrative that establishes the meaning of all other narratives. Postmodernism loves narratives, precisely because they are texts that tend to be more “open” than, say, discourse; but it hates metanarratives with a passion, seeing in them oppressive claims of totalization that manipulate people and control the open-endedness of the postmodern world. But the God of the Bible so discloses himself that he provides us with a metanarrative: the movement from creation, through fall, Abrahamic covenant, giving of the law, rise of the kingdom, exile, etc., climaxing in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and ultimately in the parousia and the onset of the new heaven and the new earth. This metanarrative is given in words; it explains and controls the interpretation of other narratives. To claim this is “totalization” and therefore to be rejected as oppressive exploitation is a useful category only if the metanarrative is untrue; if in fact it is true, to accuse it of totalization is nothing other than the resurfacing of human hubris, the shaking of one’s puny fist in the face of God, the apex of sinful rebellion.

In short, we are dealing with a worldview clash of cosmic proportions. If Christianity simply plays by the rules of postmodernists, it loses; biblically faithful Christianity must establish an alternative worldview, which overlaps with both the postmodern world and the modern world at various points, but is separate from both, critiques both, and succumbs to neither.

Again, the implications for claritas scripturae are striking. At issue is not whether this doctrine is defensible within a worldview that makes it indefensible, but whether it can be reestablished within a worldview of biblical theology that thoughtfully confronts and challenges an age that is departing from the Judaeo-Christian heritage with increasing speed. In other words, claritas scripturae is certainly still defensible, but only if set within a biblical-theological view of God and the Bible’s metanarrative, deployed in a contrastive matter with the philosophical postmodernism on offer.

[For a simple summary of the story of the Bible – the metanarrative – see Creation to Culmination.]