The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism

by D.A. Carson

The Gold Medallion Award-winning book that presents a persuasive case for Christ as the only way to God in light of contemporary religious pluralism. The Gold Medallion AwardGold Medallion Award-winning book that presents a persuasive case for Christ as the only way to God in light of contemporary religious pluralism.

A great majority of social commentators attempting to define modern Western culture land on a common characteristic: pluralism. This isn't unique to secular culture. Many modern approaches to Christian hermeneutics, or biblical interpretation, have given credence to contemporary pluralism. What began as a refreshing restraint and humility in modern theology has fallen more and more into irresoluteness.

It's no secret that the contemporary challenges to Christianity are complex and serious. Yet, far from simple fear-mongering, or cultural warmongering, The Gagging of GodThe Gagging of God takes a hard look at the background and intricacy—of pluralism, postmodernity, and hermeneutics—and equips thoughtful Christians to have intelligent, culturally sensitive, and passionate fidelity to the gospel of Jesus Christ.equips thoughtful Christians to have intelligent, culturally sensitive, and passionate fidelity to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In his contemplative, even-handed approach, Carson provides a structure of Christian thought capable of facing the philosophies of today and piercing their surface. It invites Christians to grapple responsibly with urgent questions of biblically-grounded theology, spirituality, and the defining lines of Christianity, along with its range of challenges from without and within.

The Gagging of GodThe Gagging of God offers an in-depth look at the big picture, shows how the many ramifications of pluralism are all parts of a whole, and provides a systematic Christian response.

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Paperback, 640 pages

Published February 18th 2002 by Zondervan Academic (first published January 1st 1996)

tags: theology, reference, faith, philosophy, christianity, religion, evangelism, nonfiction, cultural, christian

Book Quotes

“Having elevated self to the place where God is no longer needed, self now proclaims that language is inadequate to talk about objective reality, God included. Having damned interpretation for being manipulative, God, if he were to speak, becomes the arch manipulator. The gagging of God is complete. From a Christian perspective, this is not simply misguided, but lurks, tragically, at the heart of all that is evil.”

― D.A. Carson

“We have reached the stage in pluralization where choice is not just a state of affairs, it is a state of mind. Choice has become a value in itself, even a priority. To be modern is to be addicted to choice and change. Change becomes the very essence of life.16 In other words, the reality, empirical pluralism, has become “a value in itself, even a priority”: it is cherished.”

― D.A. Carson

“The Spirit is the , the downpayment and guarantee of the promised inheritance: there is an eschatological dimension to spirituality, as the bride, the church, joins the Spirit in crying, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22). And so we could go on, adding dimensions to any construct of spirituality controlled by the Word of God, correcting ourselves and our experience by Scripture, so that we may enjoy the fullness of the heritage that is ours in Christ Jesus, while remaining entirely unwilling to be seduced by every passing fad. Only then shall we approximate an all-of-life approach to spirituality—every aspect of human existence, personal and corporate, brought under the discipline of the Word of God, brought under the consciousness that we live in the presence of God, by his grace and for his glory. We shall cry to God that all our expressions of spirituality may be truly spiritual.”

― D.A. Carson

“The aim of this chapter has been to recognize, within a Christian framework, certain truths in postmodernity, without getting snookered by the entire package. The Scylla of modernity and the Charybdis of postmodernity are equally uninviting to those who want to follow another Way, who are convinced that in a universe made by and for a personal/transcendent and omniscient God who talks, the only reasonable stance is that of the apostle Paul: “Let God be true, and every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4).”

― D.A. Carson

“Despite the verve and wit of his writing, Fox is simply wrong on so many points it is hard to know where to begin. To argue that there is no “mystical” tradition within the heritage of orthodox Christianity is simply astonishing. His exegesis of biblical texts exhibits the kind and range of errors that a first-year seminarian would be worked over for—either that, or, more likely perhaps, his exegesis betrays a thorough commitment to the canons of postmodernity (but in that case, why is he so passionate about trying to convince the rest of us what ought to be?). There is no attempt to wrestle with the rising literature that places “green” concerns within the framework of the Bible’s story-line and the matrix of Christian theology;56 rather, there is an eclectic and emotional takeover of Christian terms, history, heritage, and language in order to serve an agenda fundamentally extra-biblical and finally anti-biblical. The real tragedy is that Fox’s analysis of the human dilemma is unutterably shallow. Even when he makes telling points about the earth, the best of them can easily be brought under the framework of responsible Christian living in God’s universe. But his thought, characterized by a kind of new paganism, does not deal with most of the human ills and sins that generate the very evils he is concerned about—and a lot of others to which he is curiously indifferent.”

― D.A. Carson

“The locus of the new covenant community was no longer a nation (as was the old covenant community) but a transnational fellowship seeking to live out the new life imparted by the Spirit in a world that could not be expected to share its values. Moreover, this world, politically speaking, was not a democracy in which ordinary citizens could have much direct say in the organization and direction of the Empire. It is impossible to draw straight lines from their circumstances to ours. Nevertheless it is impossible not to recognize that in the current unravelling of Western culture our drift toward pluralism is casting up many parallels to the situation Christians faced in the first century. More precisely, we find in our culture two opposing hermeneutical effects. At one level our culture is departing from the heritage of Judeo-Christian values that so long sustained it, and so we are removing ourselves from the worldview of New Testament writers. At another level we are returning, through no virtue of our own, to something analogous to the pluralistic world the earliest Christians had to confront, and so in this sense the New Testament can be applied to us and our culture more directly than was possible fifty years ago. The fundamental difference, of course, is that the modern rush toward pluralism owes a great deal to the church’s weaknesses and compromises during the past century or two, while the church in the first century carried no such burden. Moreover, the earliest Christians confronted their world from the position of the underdog; we are inclined to confront our world from the position of the once favored mascot who has recently become or is in the process of becoming the neighborhood cur, and expend too much of our energy on howls of protesting outrage. Even so, we shall be less morbid and despairing if we read the Scriptures today and recognize that the challenges of pluralism are not entirely new.”

― D.A. Carson

“Philosophical pluralism has generated many approaches19 in support of one stance: namely, that any notion that a particular ideological or religious claim is intrinsically superior to another is necessarily wrong. The only absolute creed is the creed of pluralism. No religion has the right to pronounce itself right or true, and the others false, or even (in the majority view) relatively inferior.”

― D.A. Carson

“When the people of God avoid syncretistic entanglements, it is a sign that the Lord is with them (Josh. 22:31). By contrast, when they oppress one another and follow other gods, it is because truth has perished (Jer. 7:28) and the people have rejected the word of the Lord (Jer. 8:9). Again and again Deuteronomy warns the people to be careful to follow all that the Lord has commanded, to avoid entanglements, including marriage, with the surrounding peoples, for fear of learning and following their ways (e.g., Deut. 4; 6:13-19; 7:21-26; 13:6-8). In part, the preservation of the covenant community depends on each generation carefully passing on to the next the exclusive greatness and covenant fidelity of Yahweh (chapter 6). The people are not even to inquire about how the surrounding pagans worship, lest they be tempted to follow them (12:30). “You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates” (12:31). God’s people are not even to have idols in their hearts (Ezek. 14:1-5). Some of the severity of Ezra and Nehemiah turns on the fact that the Exile was supposed to have obliterated any tendency toward compromise with idolatry, so that when residual hankerings reappeared, these leaders were struck with horror and fear.”

― D.A. Carson

“In one of his essays William Placher comments on a time when the theological use of the Bible presupposed a deep knowledge of what the Bible says.1 The example he serves up is from the final pages of Calvin’s Institutes, where the Reformer thinks through the issue of what Christians should do if they find themselves under a wicked ruler. Placher notes that Calvin reflects on Daniel and Ezekiel regarding the need to obey even bad rulers; he weighs the command to serve the king of Babylon in Jeremiah 27. He quotes from the Psalms, and he cites Isaiah to the effect that the faithful are urged to trust in God to overcome the unrighteous. On the other hand, he evenhandedly notes episodes in Exodus and Judges “where people serve God by overthrowing the evil rulers,” and texts in 1 Kings and Hosea where God’s people are criticized for being obedient to wicked kings. He cites Peter’s conclusion before Gamaliel, according to Acts: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). From these and other biblical passages, he proceeds to weave nuanced conclusions. We should disobey what governement mandates if it violates our religious obligations. By contrast, Christians should not normally go around starting revolutions. But those who are in positions of authority should deploy that authority to deal with those who exploit others. Even violent revolutionaries may in mysterious ways perform the will of God, though of course they may be called to judgment on account of their evil. Placher then comments: My point is not to defend all of Calvin’s conclusions, or even all of his method, but simply to illustrate how immersion in biblical texts can produce a very complex way of reflecting within a framework of biblical authority, compared to which most contemporary examples look pretty simple-minded. We can’t “appeal to the Bible” in a way that’s either helpful or faithful without beginning to do theology. Theology begins to put together a way of looking as a Christian at the world in all its variety, a language that we share as Christians and that provides a context rich enough for discussing the complexities of our lives. Absent such a shared framework, we can quote passages at each other, but the only contexts in which we can operate come from the discourses of politics and popular culture.2”

― D.A. Carson

“Old-fashioned hermeneutics belongs to the “modern” era in which science, scholarship, and serious study were thought capable of resolving most problems, of answering most questions, of understanding all of reality. Radical hermeneutics, by contrast, recognizes the subjectivity of interpretation, and how much of it is shaped by the cultures and subcultures to which the interpreter belongs.”

― D.A. Carson

“Some churches try so hard to be user-friendly and relational that the Bible is implicitly ignored or depreciated. In one evangelical church that I recently attended, the morning’s skit came in three secenes that devoured about fifteen minutes. The closing lines on true love and friendship emerged from a scene in which one woman was giving comfort and love to another who had just had a miscarriage. The latter thanked her for not quoting verses like Romans 8:28 at her, but just loving her. Now I realize that quoting verses “at” someone can be done in an insensitive and triumphalistic fashion. Yet the fact remains that no Christian who passes through deep waters draws much comfort from God until he or she realizes that God really is in control, God really does love his own people, God really is wise and good, God really can use pain in this fallen world in remarkable ways.77 To turn people away from such God-centered truths to appeal to purely human comfort I might have expected from a liberal church; it is crushingly disappointing in a church that nominally retains its evangelical statement of faith.”

― D.A. Carson

“When one reads the Gospels rapidly, one after the other, again and again, one cannot but be struck by the towering figure of Jesus. Though they reflect the churches’ convictions, the Gospels are not about the churches’ convictions: they are about Jesus Christ. His excellence, his uniqueness, his authority, his compassion, his love, his wisdom, his holiness, all shine through passage after passage. What is important for the present discussion is to observe how these excellencies of Jesus are tied to the central biblical story-line, combining to create a whole worldview in which Jesus is the culmination of God’s redemptive promises, the highest disclosure of God himself, the Word incarnate; Jesus is the one who saves us from our sin, who inaugurates the kingdom, and who will one day consummate it.”

― D.A. Carson

“One of the principal arguments of this book is that confessional Christianity cannot wholly embrace either modernity or postmodernity, yet it must learn certain lessons from both; it must vigorously oppose many features of philosophical pluralism, without retreating to modernism.”

― D.A. Carson

“Thus despite the best efforts we rebels can mount, God will not be gagged. We invent new ways of gagging God, of silencing him, of marginalizing or dismissing his revelation. But God has spoken, and by his Spirit through the Word still speaks.”

― D.A. Carson

“At time of writing, the National Education Standards and Improvement Council, set up by the Clinton Administration,61 is due to prescribe what students in grades five through twelve are supposed to know about American history. Not a single one of the thirty-one standards set up mentions the Constitution. Paul Revere is unmentioned; the Gettysburg address is briefly mentioned once. On the other hand, the early feminist Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments receives nine notices. Joseph McCarthy is mentioned nineteen times; there is no mention of the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Robert E. Lee; Harriet Tubman receives six notices. The Ku Klux Klan is mentioned seventeen times; the American Federation of Labor comes up with nine appearances. The role of religion, especially Christianity, in the founding and building of the nation is totally ignored; the grandeur of the court of Mansa Musa (King of Mali in fifteenth-century Africa) is praised, and recommended as a topic for further study.62 Such standards are linked in the minds of many with “outcome-based-education” (OBE). If the “outcomes” were well balanced and not less than thoroughly cognitive (though hopefully more than cognitive), there would be few objections. But OBE has become a lightening-rod issue precisely because in the hands of many it explicitly minimizes cognitive tests and competency skills, while focusing much more attention on attitudes, group conformity, and the like. In other words, granred the postmodernism that grips many educational theorists and the political correctness that shapes their values, this begins to look like one more experiment in social engineering.”

― D.A. Carson

“The situation is so serious that many pundits are commenting on it (though with no observable change thereby being effected). One of the best of these is the essay by Robert Brustein, which includes this memorable if slightly hyperbolic sentence: “The time is nigh when 8-year-olds will have more knowledge about Native American totem rituals than about the multiplication table and will be better instructed in how to use a condom than in how to apply the rules of grammar.”63”

― D.A. Carson

“To be perfectly blunt, sin is being redefined within the evangelical tradition. What was sinful a generation ago is no longer sinful today. When confronted with this reality, evangelicals will more or less trivialize their heritage by saying, “Those behaviors were not really sinful, but a mere religious and social quirkiness of our forebears.”…Contemporary society is more permissive than that of the past, and the evangelical community is being affected by that permissiveness…. [T]here is less and less continuity with the past.58”

― D.A. Carson

“in the same way that confessing Christians are constantly challenged by pluralists to justify the authority of their position in a world characterized by so much demonstrable empirical pluralism, so pluralists themselves must be challenged to justify the authority of their position. They are claiming things about God, truth, the nature of reality. The question is, How do they know?”

― D.A. Carson

“Perhaps the most powerful challenge in this regard is how the relativist can avoid destroying his own position. Any statement of relativism, whether grounded in culture, linguistics, or hermeneutics, is fundamentally self-destructive.”

― D.A. Carson

“There is no faith relation with Christ free of doctrinal content. The knower must have some knowledge of the known, or no relation exists. That seemingly redundant and self-evident statement should underline the issue. Jesus Christ and our knowledge of Him are not in any sense coextensive. But one cannot have a relation with Him without knowledge, and that knowledge represents incipient doctrine… If one does not believe the truths concerning the Christ as revealed in Holy Scripture, one cannot have any authentic relationship with Him. Doctrine, we eagerly concede, does not in itself save…But, on the other hand, one cannot truly worship Christ and seek to live as an authentic disciple and deny, denigrate, or neglect in any sense the biblical teachings concerning Him.13”

― D.A. Carson

D.A. Carson

Donald Arthur Carson is a Canadian-born evangelical theologian and professor of New Testament.

Carson served as pastor of Richmond Baptist Church in Richmond, British Columbia from 1970 to 1972. Following his doctoral studies, he served for three years at Northwest Baptist Theological College (Vancouver) and in 1976 was the founding dean of the seminary. In 1978, Carson joined the faculty of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he is currently serving as research professor.

Carson has written or edited 57 books, many of which have been translated into Chinese.
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