Criswell Theological
Review 7.1 (1993) 99-117
[Copyright © 1993 by
digitally
prepared for use at Gordon and
THE CHALLENGE FROM PLURALISM
TO THE PREACHING
OF THE GOSPEL*
D. A.
During the
past several years I have tried to read a great deal of the
literature on
pluralism, and to think it through from an avowedly evan-
gelical stance. At the same time, my continuing
interest in evangelism
and in
evangelistic preaching have ensured that the two topics--plural-
ism and
the preaching of the gospel--would butt against each other.
Perhaps I should confess right away that what I am presenting to
you is a
small part of a much longer work.1 There are two entailments.
First, I
shall set aside the bulkiest documentation, reserving it for the
fuller
work. Second, I shall avoid in these lectures a host of topics that
concern the
student of contemporary pluralism. These topics have pro-
found
bearings on what we mean by "the gospel,” and on how we are to
preach it.
For example, there is a complex array of hermeneutical issues,
largely
packaged under the terms "postmodernity"
and "deconstruction,”
that I
shall barely introduce here. Moreover, the sheer empirical diver-
sity in
about the
prospects of the American experiment in democracy, if the in-
herited cultural baggage continues to fragment
and dissipate, leaving
behind nothing
more than individualism and pragmatism. These ques-
tions touch our school systems, the judiciary,
our legislative bodies, the
relations
between church and state--and thus they impinge both on our
* This is the first of two lectures presented at the
Criswell Theological Lecture series.
1 See
D. A
Rapids: Zondervan, forthcoming).
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100 CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
understanding of the faith, and on our attitude toward the Constitution.
Moreover,
the subject of pluralism must be probed not only as
it
describes the sheer diversity of the culture at large, but also as it
pertains to
the multiplying diversity within the confessional church.
Self-confessed
evangelicals now entertain, and defend, a wider range of
opinions on a
host of critical topics than at any time this century: the
fate of
the unevangelized, conditional immortality as opposed
to a self-
conscious
experience of an eternal hell, even fundamental disputes over
the
nature of justification.
But though I shall allude to many of
these topics, and more besides,
my
focus in these two lectures is narrower. I want to evaluate with you
the
kinds of impact the various forms of pluralism are making in this
country, and
consider some lessons we should learn from this evaluation.
The Impact of Pluralism
"Pluralism" is a surprisingly tricky word in modern
discussion.
Some use it
in combination with various spheres: cultural pluralism,
ideological
pluralism, intellectual pluralism, religious pluralism, and so
forth. For
our purposes, it will be useful to consider, not the spheres in
which
pluralism is found, but three kinds of phenomena to which the
word
commonly refers:
1. Empirical
Pluralism
This is what D. Tracy would prefer to call "plurality."
"Plurality,” he
writes,
"is a fact. Pluralism is one of the many possible evaluations of
that
fact."2 But although a few scholars have followed him in this
usage,
most
still use "pluralism,” in one of its uses, to refer to the sheer diver-
sity of race, value systems, heritage,
language, culture, and religion in
The
world; it
is the second largest black nation, and soon it will become the
third
largest Hispanic nation.
It is possible to overstate this diversity. J. Butler vigorously
demon-
strates how diverse American life and culture
were in the eighteenth
and
nineteenth centuries, and correspondingly depreciates the degree
of
diversity reflected in the nation today.3 But although his work is a
use-
ful foil for those who exaggerate modern
empirical pluralism, it must
be
insisted that the range of contemporary diversity is, on any scale,
2
"Christianity in the Wider Context: Demands and Transformation," Worldviews
and
Warrants: Plurality and Authority in Theology, ed.
(New York:
University Press of America, 1987) 2.
3 J.
bridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990).
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D. A
vastly
greater than has ever been experienced in the Republic before.
Religiously,
Roman Catholicism is increasing in numbers, owing in part
to the
influx of Hispanics. The best estimates of the number of Muslims
in the
of new
age religions and the revitalization of various forms of neo-
paganism.
Most demographers insist that if present trends continue,
WASPs
(White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants) will be in a minority (about
47%) by the
year A.D. 2000.4 None of this was foreseen
by the Founding
Fathers;
little of it was foreseen forty years ago.
For those who are interested in preaching the gospel, the result,
often
unrecognized, is that the kind of preparation undertaken to address
the
gospel to some parts of the culture may be woefully inadequate to
address some
other parts. The person steeped in, say, Southern, white,
Baptist
culture may have some difficulty relating to Catholic Hispanics
(even if that person successfully leaps the language hurdle).
I am not
referring only
to matters of personal taste. Very few of those who are lis-
tening to me today, I suspect, have spent much
time thinking through the
best way
to share their faith with devout Roman Catholics, Hispanic or
otherwise. So
the cultural barrier has a bearing on the preaching of the
gospel.
Consider another example. A graduate of a few years ago from
church.
Precisely how and why he was led to plant a church in a city of
800
churches, "the buckle on the Bible belt,” I am not sure. In any case,
he says
he spent an entire year in
who
denied being a Christian. It took him quite a while before he
thought
through what kinds of questions he had to ask to get by the pre-
liminary barrier, and discover whether or not
there was real, vital faith
in the
people with whom he talked, or not.
But these are still easy examples. Try witnessing to someone who
does not
believe that objective truth in the religious arena is possible; to
someone who
"hears" all your religious vocabulary in a new age matrix;
to
someone who is automatically repulsed by every instance of "prose-
lytism." Add in local Orthodox Jews, local
Muslims, local Buddhists, local
Mormons, and
so forth. Recall that witnessing in the
or in
the
ticipating in the outreach program of a Southern
Baptist Church in
and some
of the dimensions of the challenge begin to surge into view.
2. Cherished
Pluralism
By "cherished pluralism" I mean to add an additional
ingredient to
empirical
pluralism. While some writers and thinkers (though certainly
4 For
some useful statistical data, see G. Gallup, Jr., and J. Castelli,
The People's
Religion:
American Faith in the 90s (New
York: Macmillan, 1989).
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102 CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
not all)
on the New Right view empirical pluralism as a threat to sta-
bility, order, good government, and perhaps also
to biblical Christianity,
it is
important to remember that although many ordinary Americans do
not want
to know a lot of people very different from themselves, they
want
empirical
pluralism is not only a raw datum, it is a good thing. In the
words of
L. Newbigin, "It has become a commonplace to say
that we live
in a
pluralist society--not merely a society which is in fact plural in the
variety of
cultures, religions and lifestyles which it embraces, but
pluralist in
the sense that this plurality is celebrated as things to be
approved and
cherished."5
A catena of attitudes is borne along by this outlook. The more
this
diversity is
praised, the more one is inclined to look askance on some-
one who
appears to threaten it by "proselytizing" other citizens. But the
issue is
in reality much deeper. It is perhaps best understood by linking
together the
first two points. It may be helpful to stake out some terri-
tory by means of a quotation from McGrath.
Referring to earlier peri-
ods in the history of the church, he writes:6
The Christian proclamation has always taken place in a pluralist
world, in
competition with rival religious and intellectual
convictions. The emer-
gence of the gospel within the matrix of
Judaism, the expansion of the gos-
pel in a Hellenistic milieu, the early
Christian expansion in pagan
the establishment of the Mar Thoma church
in southeastern
these are examples of situations in which Christian apologists and theolo-
gians, not to mention ordinary Christian
believers, have been aware that
there are alternatives to Christianity on offer. Equally, it is
perfectly obvi-
ous that cultural pluralism exists. Yet this
poses no decisive difficulties for
Christianity, in theory or in practice. The ability of the gospel to transcend
cultural barriers is one of its chief glories.
But a couple
of centuries of cultural dominance by Protestants have
changed that
perception. We still expect to be in the driver's seat, and
thus we
overlook that throughout much of the church's history, inmost
parts of
the world, the gospel has had to make its way against alien
perspectives, and frequently a plurality of them. McGrath continues:7
It is quite possible that his insight may have been lost to
English and
American writers of the late nineteenth or
early twentieth centuries. For
such writers pluralism might have meant little more than a variety of
forms of Protestantism, while "different religions" would
probably have
been understood to refer simply to the age-old tension between
Protestant-
5 The
Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989) 1.
6 A.
E. McGrath, "The Challenge of Pluralism for the Contemporary Christian
Church," JETS 35
(1992) 361.
7 McGrath, 360-61.
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D. A. Carson: THE CHALLENGE FROM PLURALISM 103
ism and Roman Catholicism. Pluralism was situated and contained
within
a Christian context. . . .
This
perspective can lead Christian preachers to feel on the outside
of
things, and decidedly defensive, when they have no right to: they
should expect opposition, confrontation,
diverse perspectives. Of
course, the
popular cherishing of empirical pluralism is partly a self-
conscious
rebellion against the heritage of the Christian West, partly
an
ill-thought-out declaration of freedom, partly the fruit of rugged in-
dividualism that wants to determine
"spirituality" on its own terms.
Certainly it
is a novel development in the experience of
estants of the last two centuries or so. But in a
large historical and geo-
graphical
framework, the pressures of pluralism should not catch us by
surprise.
This set of values makes its impact both within the church and
without.
Within the church, there are many Christians who, while
retaining
orthodox beliefs at a theoretical level, are very uncomfortable
with any
sermon that excludes anybody or any view, except what they
judge to
be the most peripheral. Careful treatments of hell are rare,
because they
are felt to be embarrassing. People are often invited to
come, but
less often told what they must leave behind. Thus, the pres-
sures of pluralism have the effect of
surreptitiously encouraging us to
change the
shape of the gospel. The gospel is no longer good news for
those who
are rebels and alienated from God, telling them about the one
way by
which they may be reconciled to the living God. Far from it,
without ever
overly and candidly denying that there is only one way, the
gospel is
repackaged to become the good news that a domesticated deity
is
available on demand to give hurting people the abundant life. Thus
the
gospel is transmuted into something unrecognizable, while millions
are unaware
that it has changed at all.
Outside the church, the impact of cherished pluralism tends to
make the
more conservative of us circle the wagons; it tends to make the
less
conservative of us withdraw from evangelism (which is understood,
in this
framework, to be nothing more than inexcusable proselytism).
Neither
development fosters great gospel preaching.
3.
Philosophical and Hermeneutical Pluralism
This is, by far, the most serious development. Philosophical plu-
ralism has developed many approaches in support
of one stance: viz.,
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.
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104 CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
The dominant means by which this stance has been supported are
four: (a)
In the epistemological arena, all forms of positivism, in the
West, are
declared dead. The subjectivism of the "new hermeneutic,"
for all
its proper place, has largely triumphed; (b) The entailment is
not only
a philosophical pluralism, but a hermeneutical pluralism. Not
only is
the existence of objective truth called into question, but the
sheer
diversity of "readings" of texts is encouraged, with very little
check from
close study of the text itself; (c) This hermeneutical pot-
pourri has sometimes depended on certain kinds
of literary theory; and
(d) At the
same time, the social sciences have expanded their bounds
to
offer not only phenomenological data, but naturalistic explanations
of
everything that takes place--including religious conversions or pow-
erful revivals.
It would be inappropriate here to trace out the intellectual
heritage
of
deconstruction, and to introduce its major players. It will be sufficient
to
remind you that J. Derrida, viewed by many as the father of decon-
struction, is a brilliant master of paradox and
whimsy. To deconstruct a
text is
to analyze it for all sorts of individual semantic components
which are
then rearranged and fitted into other grids, producing
unpredictable and unforeseen semantic assemblages. The text (a word
that can
refer to paintings or sculptures as easily as it can refer to words
on a
page) is of relatively little independent importance; the reader is
everything.
Foucault stresses the inherent ambiguity of texts; the name
of S.
Fish is associated with the dictum that all "knowledge" is a social
construct,
belonging, as it does, to a body of cultural presuppositions
that
might well be challenged in another culture. P. Ricoeur
adopts
much the
same stance, but works out the theory much more closely in
the
field of literature.
Of the many distinctions that have been attempted between mod-
ernism and postmodernism, perhaps this is the
most common: modern-
ism
still believed in the objectivity of knowledge, and, in its most
optimistic
form, held that ultimately knowledge would revolutionize
the
world, squeeze God to the periphery or perhaps abandon him to his
own
devices, and build an edifice of glorious knowledge to the great God
Science. But
this stance has largely been abandoned in the postmodern-
ism that
characterizes most Western universities. Deconstructionists
have been
most vociferous in denouncing the modernism vision. They
hold that
language is a social construct. Its meaning is inherent neither
in
reality nor in texts per se. Texts will invariably be interpreted against
the
backdrop of the interpreter's social "home."
The new hermeneutic and deconstruction are complex and
difficult
subjects. It is tempting to think that at least some of their chal-
lenge owes not a little to a certain kind of
intellectual arrogance that
wants to
keep the masses at bay, excluded from the fine tone and subtle
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D. A. Carson: THE CHALLENGE FROM PLURALISM 105
argumentation of the intellectual elite.8 But whatever the origins
of
these
disciplines, many of the insights generated by them are ex-
tremely valuable, especially when deployed by thinkers
who are a
good deal
less skeptical than are many of the leading scholars in the
movements
themselves. Be that as it may, there are three entailments
beyond
reasonable dispute, and all of them have enormous impact on
anyone who
wants to preach the gospel.
First, in one form or another these ways
of looking at reality have
made an
impact on virtually all the arts disciplines, and on not a few phi-
losophers of science as well. Not only in English
101 are students intro-
duced to Derrida and Fish, but in sociology,
history, philosophy, law, and
anthropology. In every instance the net effect is predictable: while
rightly
decrying the hubris that thinks human beings can understand
anything
perfectly, that talks glibly about absolute truth without recog-
nizing that all human knowledge is in some ways
culture-bound, these
movements
unite in depreciating truth itself. Theory has thus buttressed
the
empirical and cherished pluralism of the age, generating a philo-
sophical basis for relativism. Unlike the old-fashioned
liberalism, which
took two
or three generations to work its way down from the seminaries
and the
universities to the ordinary person in the pew, this brand of lib-
eralism has made it all the way down to the
person in the street in about
half a generation.
The result is what S. Carter calls a "culture of
disbelief."9 Carter has
courageously and insightfully chronicled how we have moved beyond
mere
civil religion (to use the expression that R. Bellah
made popular
by his
famous 1970 essay) to the place where modern politics and law
trivialize all
values, all religious devotion. This stance is now in the air
we
breath. The extent to which it has invaded the church is troubling;
still more
troubling, for the preacher of the gospel, is the extent to
which it
is everywhere assumed, especially by middle and upper
classes, by
the media and print elite, by almost all who set the agenda
for the
nation.
Take, for example, the recent interpretations of the
Constitution's
“separation" clause. Whether or not these
interpretations have been
rightly
construed, the tendency in public education has been to be silent
on
virtually all matters religious. How can one be historically accurate
in
one's treatment of the Pilgrim Fathers if one knows nothing about the
history of
Western Christianity? My son attends grade four in a public
8 See
the provocative and analogous thesis of J. Carey, The
Intellectuals and the
Masses:
Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia
1880-1939 (
9 S.
L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How
American Law and Politics Trivialize
Religious Devotion (New York: Basic, 1993).
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106 CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
school
which, by most standards, is excellent. For their Christmas con-