Podcast: The False Humility Threatening to Undermine Scripture (D. A. Carson)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Gospel and Our Modern World

In this episode, D. A. Carson talks about some of the key themes that have marked his career, including his enduring passion for knowing and correctly handling God’s word, for thinking carefully about culture, and for holding tight to the gospel as the center for all that we think and say and do as Christians.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• The Timeless, Universal Importance of Hermeneutics
• Doing Apologetics vs. Apologizing
• The Art of Imperious Ignorance
• Should We Be Suspicious of Systematic Theology?
• No Shortcuts
• Causes for Rejoicing

01:25 - The Timeless, Universal Importance of Hermeneutics

Matt Tully
Dr. Carson, thank you for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

D. A. Carson
The privilege is mine.

Matt Tully
In his introduction to a book with Crossway that’s essentially a collection of essays and articles that you’ve written over the years, Brian Tabb highlights some of the key themes that show up in your writings, and he lists a few of them. He says one is the countercultural nature of the Christian faith, another is the utter centrality of the gospel, and then another is the faithful reading and application of the word of God. So my first question is does that strike you as an accurate, comprehensive summary of some of the key themes for your work? If so, what would be a through line for those three things? How do those hold together in your thinking?

D. A. Carson
For a start, I wouldn’t try to defend those three as a comprehensive summary of what I write about. When I wrote those editorial sections for Themelios, inevitably I had my readership in mind. Themelios isn’t for everybody. It’s cast at about pastoral level; it’s a faithful reflection of my interests in that it’s all tied to the gospel. But if I had been writing those things for the area of Canada where I was brought up, French Canada, it would have looked very different. So the focus of those essays has to be measured by the choice of readership that I was handed—writing for Themelios. I hope that’s not ducking your question too much. It is true to say that I have focused a lot of my attention for the last thirty or forty years on what the gospel is, on cultural relevance, and other things that Brian mentions. But the topics are, in part, shaped by the readership.

Matt Tully
So if you were to think even more broadly about just your ministry to the church, not just to the academy or to pastors, what would be some of the other key themes that you would say characterize your thinking and reflection?

D. A. Carson
One aspect or another of hermeneutics, that is the art and science of biblical interpretation. Now there are some examples of that even within this book, but I haven’t tried to lay them out systematically. That needs to be kept in view again and again and again. It’s so easy to get on a hobby horse or to develop a test case of something or other, and everything is filtered through that test case. Whereas it seems to me that systematic Bible reading, where you as a Christian (let alone as a Christian thinker or a Christian leader) are reading many different parts of the Bible and as a result are forced to think about different literary genres and different emphases in pastoral care and different situations in life. A mixture of joy and gladness on the one hand, and sorrow and emotional bankruptcy on the other. All of those things come out of careful, thoughtful reading of holy Scripture. So if I were trying to summarize what I would be interested in, I would certainly throw in hermeneutics. I didn’t say very much in those essays on evangelism, but I’m always interested in evangelism and especially evangelism that takes into account where we live in time and history and culture right now. There are certain things that I do in evangelism now that I wouldn’t have done forty years ago. So in that sense, the material gets dated because it’s addressing people who are located at a certain point in history.

Matt Tully
How do you think about that task of the theologian or the Christian or the pastor to locate these theological issues within our context and understand them in that light and teach them even with that in mind without losing sight of the core of what it means to be orthodox?

D. A. Carson
Before turning to an understanding of today’s culture, when you are unpacking what the Bible means—how you understand the Bible, how you teach the Bible—it is important to understand how it was read at the time it was written, how it was read by different interpreters across the history of the church. Why did Calvin read the text the way he did? If Calvin had been born a Chinese gentleman from Shanghai, would he have said the same thing? If you had taken away a century of his location or added a century, what would it have changed? And so it’s important to try to understand the biblical text—where it’s located—and then from such experience to think through analogies today. It’s a study that never goes away. It comes back to you and cycles in again and again. I don’t have formulaic answers. I’m always suspicious of hermeneutics courses that have fifteen ways of getting your biblical interpretation right. There are lots of ways of increasing your sharpness and accuracy and faithfulness and so on, but it’s never reducible, finally, to a set of rules.

Matt Tully
That speaks to the importance of continuing to exegete the text afresh; every generation going back to the text itself, and doing theology afresh, not assuming that that doctrinal area has been completely settled and we don’t need to even pay attention to that anymore. Do you resonate with that?

D. A. Carson
I think that’s that’s exactly right.

Matt Tully
As you look at the evangelical church today—and like you said, you’ve been a leader in the evangelical church in North America and in the broader world for decades now—what would you say are some of the major theological or ethical or ecclesiological challenges that you see facing the church in the years to come?

D. A. Carson
It’s going to sound counterintuitive, but the first thing I would say is a lot of the things that people are looking at when they are hunting down peculiar emphases at the moment, what they’re really looking at is recurring themes. In other words, you’ve got to learn how to present the gospel in any particular culture, which means not only understanding the culture but understanding the gospel. You’ve got to have a good grasp of what Scripture actually says. What it says about Jesus, what it says about heaven and hell, and life and death, and good and evil, and so on. A lot of those things just keep recurring and recurring. So more important than asking the question, What are particular things we should be focusing on today?, it’s important to ask instead, What are the recurring things that show up in every day? Now, within that framework, by all means there are peculiar topics, slants, emphases that need to be understood in a particular generation. For example, if I’m speaking at a university campus on Jesus and the gospel and so on today, I guarantee that in the Q and A session, somebody will ask, “What is truth? You’ve got your truth. I’ve got my truth.” Whereas if I were speaking at a campus in the Middle East, nobody would ask the question, What is truth? They assume they know it. They certainly think they know what truth is. The question is, Who’s got it, and how do you defend it? That’s very different. So in one sense, you compare those two situations, and the two situations generate a different set of foci—of things that you need to come to grips with. But at the end of the day, behind both of those is still the truth of the gospel as it is in Christ Jesus. And unless you come to grips with that and are comfortable talking about the truth in a particular context, to talk about the relativities of such foci is premature.

09:25 - Doing Apologetics vs. Apologizing

Matt Tully
In this new collection of articles and essays published by Crossway, you have a chapter called “Subtle Ways to Abandon the Authority of Scripture in Our Lives.” And I found it really penetrating and insightful, and it connects back to some of the key themes that have marked your professional life. And you write in the beginning of that chapter, “Recently, I’ve been pondering the fact that many Christians slide away from full confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture for reasons that are not so much intellectual as they are broadly cultural.” And then you list a few specific things that we can be tempted to do with Scripture. Again, many of them not the result of an intellectual decision or logical conclusion that we’ve arrived at about Scripture; it’s just more of the cultural air in which we live that then leads us to think a certain way. And the one you start with is an appeal to selective evidence when it comes to reading our Bibles. I wonder if you could unpack that for us. What do you mean by “an appeal to selective evidence”?

D. A. Carson
In Christian circles, without wrestling yet with how Christian they really are, but in circles that still leave some place for Christianity, there is still some space reserved for honoring the Bible and honoring Christian heritage and so on. Not as much space as there used to be, but there’s still some. But the more that people want their own frame of reference to control the discussion, the Bible becomes a prop that is used to bolster and make to stand up certain perspectives. And instead of coming to the Bible to be challenged and to be forced to think things through from a ground level and so on, the Bible becomes itself merely a resource that props up a set of givens. If people disagree on what the Bible is actually saying on some particular point, then the response is, “Yeah, but that’s just what you say. That’s just your opinion.” And then the impact of postmodern epistemology kicks in, and it’s amazing how plastic our interpretations become. At
some point, that’s got to be challenged and say, “Is the Bible quite as flexible as that? Are there not some lines that it does draw that are to be observed? Are there not times when God says, ‘You shall do this’ or ‘You shall not do that?’” And it’s pretty straightforward and pretty clear what those things are in many cases, but we have ways of domesticating them, of shaping them, of packaging them so that they no longer speak powerfully.

Matt Tully
And as you said, we often take the example of Jesus, and broadly Christian people will love to quote Jesus and his comments about God being love and loving our neighbor as ourself and caring for the poor and the needy. But then how quickly that is almost pitted against, or maybe even just Jesus’s comments about hell or judgment are completely ignored. One of the related dangers that you highlight is the heart embarrassment that we can have before the text when we get to difficult passages. And you actually give an example of the pastor who’s preaching through the Gospels perhaps and comes up to Jesus’s teaching on hell and then says something—and we’ve probably all heard this—the pastor says something like, “This is a hard passage. These are hard teachings about hell and judgment, and it makes me uncomfortable. And yet it’s here in the text, and so I’ve got to preach it and so I’m going to preach it.” You write that “The preacher has formally submitted to Scripture’s authority while presenting himself as someone who is more compassionate or more sensitive than Jesus. This is as deceptive as it is wicked.” Unpack that for us. What does that embarrassment look like? And even that is getting at the subtle ways that we as Christians can want to affirm Scripture’s authority and yet also act embarrassed.

D. A. Carson
If a person has any genuine heritage in biblical Christianity, then obviously there are going to be times when Scripture says some things that are different from what we, with our steep roots in the culture, have come to believe are true. So suddenly, you find a preacher who nominally really does hold to the biblical authority but is gently embarrassed when he’s finding that that seems to imply that Scripture is saying some things that I really don’t like. And so we affirm them formally, but at the end of the day, we’re embarrassed by them. We twist a bit. And instead of talking about, in your example, hell or judgment the way the Bible does, with pretty bold language and with real threatening pictures of the future, we spent our time saying what the Bible can’t really possibly mean and thus evacuate it of any bite. So obviously, things have to be explained in such a way that they’re as winsome as possible, that they’re as clear as possible and so on. But at the end of the day, if we are spending a lot of our sermon time, in effect, making excuses for the Bible—

Matt Tully
Apologizing.

D. A. Carson
Instead of doing apologetics we’re doing apologizing. Then at the end of the day, we’re undermining the Bible. And if it’s undermining the Bible in things as important as judgment and hell and the wrath of God, it’s pretty serious. It’s diminishing God. It’s diminishing Jesus. It’s saying, in effect, I’m more sympathetic than Jesus is. And there’s not much that’s more wicked than that.

Matt Tully
I wonder if there could be a preacher listening right now who would say, “When I say something like that, I’m not trying to question the authority of the Bible or the teaching of the Bible. I’m trying to just demonstrate to my hearers that I too sometimes struggle with these doctrines, that these are hard for me too and I’m not coming at this from a perspective of this is easy to understand, this is easy to accept.” What would you say to that? Is that appropriate?

D. A. Carson
It may be. Candor in the preacher is usually a good thing. But genuine candor means that the preacher is also going to start wondering, Am I casting myself as giving advice to Jesus how to improve? And at that point, sooner or later, what is passing off initially as candor and humility is actually a form of subversion. But it depends on where the preacher is. If the preacher is just starting out and beginning to find his feet in how to shape something, you don’t want to be too harsh and so on. But if the preacher just becomes more and more self-distanced from what the text actually does say, then instead of the text reforming him, he is allowing his own cultural biases to reform the text. And then it’s very difficult to see what faithful, biblical teaching and preaching look like.

Matt Tully
This connects to maybe a broader topic that is maybe particularly relevant for pastors and preachers, for teachers, professors, and probably even for parents especially and their kids. That’s of the distinction between maybe formally accepting something—agreeing with something with regard to what Scripture teaches, or sound theology—the difference between that and embracing those things in our hearts and letting a love for Scripture’s teaching, a love for good theology, characterize our lives in how we communicate with other people who are under our care. How have you thought about that? The importance of going beyond just what you’re saying formally to the attitude that you’re demonstrating when it comes to Scripture and the gospel, in terms of your influence on other people?

D. A. Carson
What you’re suggesting is a piece of what we’ve been saying for the last ten minutes. It’s important to project what the Bible is saying, what Christ is saying, what God is saying in ways that are not implicitly undermining the authority of Jesus or God or Scripture. And that means understanding it so well in the context of Scripture that you never give the impression this can’t be said, or this belongs to an older time, or I’ll skip that bit. It’s too difficult.

Matt Tully
Or even that we have to accept it because it’s in the Bible, but we don’t really have to like it.

D. A. Carson
That’s right. To say that sort of thing is already halfway towards undermining it. But on the other hand, the gifted preacher, in dealing with passages like that, will try to set it up and communicate it in a way that is faithful to the text and is not unrealistically short-fused or angry or holier than thou. We’ve all heard of the Elmer Gantrys of the world that are characterized by anger and self-righteousness, and so that’s not the alternative. The alternative is to follow Jesus, who can denounce the sins of the culture, as in Matthew 23, and then end up weeping over the city. So you don’t want to be faithful in the formal sense of being aligned but not aligned in perspective, in winsomeness in loving broken people and wanting the gospel to advance to change people’s lives for God’s glory and people’s good. So you don’t want, in the name of gentleness and winsomeness, to end up contradicting the bite and sting of Jesus’s words. And on the other hand, you don’t want to preserve the sting in such a way that you just sound like one more cranky old man, without any winsomeness attached to it. You’ve still got to see the judgment of God through the focus of the cross. You’ve still got to see the threat of judgment through the tears of Gethsemane. And to hold all of those things together in biblically faithful tension is a big challenge for every preacher.

19:38 - The Art of Imperious Ignorance

Matt Tully
Another danger that you highlight, and you’re borrowing a phrase from the late Michael Ovey is “the art of imperious ignorance” when it comes to the Bible. What does that mean?

D. A. Carson
He coined that expression, as far as I know, and he is referring in particular to a council in the early church, the Council of Sermium in the fourth century. It was at the time when there were controversies about Christology and so on. And one of the big controversies was whether or not it was appropriate to say Jesus is homoousios with God.

Matt Tully
A very important distinction.

D. A. Carson
A very important distinction.

Matt Tully
Even though it sounds like all Greek.

D. A. Carson
If he’s homouusisos, he’s like the Father, he’s like God. If he’s ha mah oo see ahs ism, he really is God.

Matt Tully
The same essence.

D. A. Carson
And the council was trying to, it was given to taking the view that Jesus was only like God, but it was trying to preserve a space for both views to prevail.

Matt Tully
Very ecumenical.

D. A. Carson
It was very ecumenical. And two or three of the great stalwarts of the church insisted that not only was the council wrong but that it was blasphemous. And the reason they said it was blasphemous is because they were claiming that it was impossible to decide between the two, and therefore you couldn’t draw lines where the Bible itself does draw lines. So in the effort to sound more catholic (small c), more ecumenical, they end up being less faithful to Scripture than what Scripture itself says. So this is not merely claiming that they are ignorant, but that nobody can give the answer that the orthodox wanted. Nobody has the right. Nobody knows enough. So they’re not only touting their ignorance, but they’re insisting on imperious ignorance. That is, the ignorance itself becomes an imperious position that is so important to them that it’s more important than the truth that the Bible is actually teaching. It’s imperious ignorance, and they’re proud of the ignorance. Well, likewise today there are numerous ethical and social issues where it’s possible to say things like, “I don’t know what the Bible says here, and I can’t imagine anybody else knows it either. And I think it’s a mistake to try to push one particular view too hard.” Well, now they’re not only saying that they don’t know, they’re saying that it’s wrong to claim that you do know. That’s imperious ignorance. And there are a lot of issues like that today where the Bible is trimmed in its authority because it is claiming to know things and teach things that some of our contemporaries think cannot be known or taught.

Matt Tully
And the tricky thing about this is that trimming, that’s a great metaphor for what’s happening with Scripture, that trimming all happens under the guise of humility. That’s the name of the word of the day for this type is, “I don’t want to impose one interpretation. I want to be humble and acknowledge that there’s probably different perspectives on this, and Scripture maybe isn’t super clear on this issue.” How do we know where those lines are, or how do we even push back against that when it’s done under the guise of humility?

D. A. Carson
There’s not a formulaic answer to that, but what there must be is a heart open to the teaching of the word of God, that is captured by the word of God. You can spot two different people by the way they handle Scripture, by the way they listen to Scripture, by the way they’re humbled by Scripture, by the way they want to be corrected, rather than always pushing a certain point of view that tends to be culturally “with it” today. Such that they always sound as if they’re a bit removed from what Scripture is actually saying and justify it on the ground that you can’t possibly know for sure in any case. And the result of that is a fake humility that is, in fact, touting not only the importance of ignorance but insisting on imperious ignorance so that it controls other people and what they say too.

24:01 - Should We Be Suspicious of Systematic Theology?

Matt Tully
The last thing I wanted to highlight here is the tendency to allow the categories of systematic theology to domesticate what Scripture actually says. As I was reading through this section, I think that the error could be that people read that as you sort of being down on systematic theology and warning of its dangers in our lives, which is something that we can hear sometimes from people who are suspicious of the task of the work of systematic theology. What are you trying to say with this one?

D. A. Carson
Again, there are complimentary traps. Sometimes people don’t try to make sense of the Bible as a whole, of Christ competing passages where there are different emphases on a particular doctrine or teaching and so on that need to be held together. And because they feel no obligation to put things together, they pick and choose.

Matt Tully
That probably leads to the first thing we mentioned, the tendency to appeal to selective evidence.

D. A. Carson
Yes, that’s exactly right. On the other hand, there are others on the flip side who come to their conclusions about what the Bible is saying without listening very closely to the Bible itself, without being corrected by the Bible itself. So they’ve got their synthesis, they’ve got their package, they’ve got their location, they’ve got their position nailed down so firmly that if they stumble across a passage or an emphasis that is different from that, they don’t know how to integrate it.

Matt Tully
Do you find that a lot? Have you found that in the seminary classroom context, where you’ve got guys coming in who know what they believe about this or that doctrine, and you’re able to then challenge them with a particular passage that doesn’t quite fit?

D. A. Carson
Yeah. You can find it in a seminary, but you can find it in a local church too. You can find it in a discussion group. If something is seen as just too far removed from what I take as the given, then it’s hard for Scripture to be a reforming agent. So Christians are bound to be corrected by Scripture, but to recognize also that sometimes their blindness in this regard is because they’ve got a systematic theology in place too early, too soon, too lightly, too quickly to be challenged by Scripture itself. There are a lot of examples of that in the history of the church, and for that matter, in Scripture too.

Matt Tully
There’s a common sentiment that if you look back through the history of the church and look at the heresies that have sprung up throughout history over the years, so often these heresies start based on some kernel of truth. There’s something true that they’re getting at from Scripture even, but it’s unbounded from the rest of Scripture. It’s taken too far to its extreme. Because they don’t have that broader willingness to be corrected by the rest of Scripture, it leads into a bad spot.

D. A. Carson
Many, not all, but many heresies are nothing more than a part of the truth emphasized to the point of exclusion of other contributing truths.

27:04 - No Shortcuts

Matt Tully
So maybe as a final few questions reflecting on all that we’ve talked about, some of the challenges facing the evangelical church, some of the needs that we have, especially around the word of God and how we approach God’s word. What’s one piece of advice that you would give to pastors today?

D. A. Carson
If I had to answer that question, I would do so under protest.

Matt Tully
Why is that?

D. A. Carson
Because the expectation is that there is one crucial bit of information, one crucial bit of advice that resolves everything. Whereas in my experience, people bring different bits to the table. So let me take a parallel. I’ve had many seminary students come to me and say, “What are the ten books that I should buy? What are the five books I should read this summer? What are the most important sources that you’ve come across over the last thirty years?” And I never answer those questions. It’s not that there are no favorite books, but I find it easier to talk about the best 500 books I’ve come across, rather than the best five or ten. I don’t know that I’m equipped to do that, but it’s more than that. It’s who you are. If you are mystical and have no difficulty with your prayer life and have a steeped set of feelings that support your understanding of spirituality and so on, then the books that I would recommend for you are going to be books that are full of doctrine and Scripture knowledge and so on. If, on the other hand, you’re the sort of person who gets everything and all the ducks are in a row and your doctrine is strong and your knowledge of Scripture is strong, but frankly, you have no heart for the Lord Jesus, then the most important books for you are going to be a bit different. They’re going to be books that question your heart. And there are some books that do both of those things well, like Packer’s Knowing God. But not many books do both of those things well. And so which book is important for you is going to depend in part on my reading of who you are, what you need, what would bolster and perfect your own grasp of spirituality and maturity and so on. So that’s why I’m a little reluctant to give how-to answers that are just too formulaic.

Matt Tully
You’ve made a couple of comments about just resisting the kind of formulaic, pat answers that can sometimes happen. And you mentioned that you’ve gotten that kind of a question many times over the years from seminary students and I’m sure others. What’s behind that? What’s behind our desire to have a straightforward, simple, practical answer? I think we’ve all experienced that. We’ve all seen that in ourselves. What does that tell us about the way that we think about Christian ministry or even our lives as Christians?

D. A. Carson
Again, it may be for entirely good reasons. That is, a person begins to realize how much they don’t know and they’re trying to fill in some of the holes and to talk to somebody who’s a little older and with a little more experience. It seems a good thing to do, so it might be well motivated. On the other hand, it may be looking for a shortcut. I don’t have to do years of study and think things through and read people from different perspectives. Just the following three booklets. Basic Christianity in three easy lessons. And that is likely to be arrogant and not eager to listen or to be corrected and so on. So it depends an awful lot on who’s asking the question and at what point they’re finding themselves in their spiritual pilgrimage. Like so many things, we can be motivated for good or for ill on some of these matters.

30:45 - Causes for Rejoicing

Matt Tully
As a final question, as you think about the evangelical church today, what are a couple things that get you excited? What feels encouraging to you as you observe the landscape?

D. A. Carson
Well, a lot depends on what part of the world you’re talking about. There are parts of the world where the gospel is advancing quite dramatically. That’s always very exciting. And some of those places are in parts of the world where in the recent past there has been very little flourishing. And now it’s coming around again. That’s always very exciting. Or it may not be so much a big movement as clarity. Christians are suffering in this particular country or that particular country because of persecution or whatever, and they’re not giving up. They’re not capsizing. They’re being faithful. They’re thinking things through. When I think of some of my friends in parts of the world where there is quite a bit of suffering, to watch how these Christians are coping with incarceration and beatings and things like that and not capsizing but holding their heads high and considering what a privilege it is to suffer for Christ. “For this reason,” Paul writes, “you have come to such a point as this to carry the cross, to suffer like Jesus, to take up your cross and follow him. It’s been given to you, on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in his name but also to suffer for his sake,” Paul writes to the Corinthians. And they’ve seen that and are living it out. That, to me, is moving as well as exciting.

Matt Tully
What about as you think about the American church, where outright persecution and suffering like that is not as common?

D. A. Carson
No, but as we enter an era when more and more people are not just nominal Christians, the nominal Christians are falling away. But that’s making it a little clearer who’s truly a Christian and who’s not. That, on the long haul, I’m excited by because it’s costing something now in more parts of America than thirty years ago to be a Christian. And when it costs something like that, you begin to see things a little more clearly. So, far from being discouraged, I’m rather encouraged by such things. Even in concrete terms, some people are just naturally pessimistic. Some people are naturally optimistic. But the fact of the matter is that compared with seventy years ago, we have far more reliable commentaries, far more published books on theology and exegesis and godly spirituality and so on. Far, far more today than were available seventy years ago. Isn’t that cause for rejoicing? That doesn’t mean that we’re doing it all right and there are no dangers and there are not still things to learn and so on, but there are many reasons for giving thanks to God for the privilege of service in a difficult time.

Matt Tully
Dr. Carson, thank you so much for talking us through some of the challenges that face the church today, but also, as you said, ending on this note of optimism as we look at how God is clearly moving among his people. We appreciate it.

D. A. Carson
My privilege. Blessings on you.

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