Author Interview
Alister McGrath
Alister McGrath, author of A Passion for Truth
IVP: As you both know, North American evangelicals following Van Til have for decades been suspicious of Barth. Postliberals like Hans Frei, Stanley Hauerwas and George Hunsinger lean considerably on Barth. Where do you see evangelicals on Barth today? Put more pertinently, is Barth a possible bridge or a roadblock between evangelicals and postliberals?
Alister McGrath: I don't think that Cornelius Van Til has really helped North American evangelicalism to understand Karl Barth. Today I certainly sense that North American evangelicals are increasingly seeing Karl Barth as a potential dialogue-partner, while nevertheless wishing to distance themselves from certain of his ideas. I sometimes wonder if there is some confusion among some North American evangelicals between Barth and Brunner, both of whom are very often lumped together in a rather unhelpful way as "neo-orthodox." It's helpful to draw some distinctions between Barth and Brunner at a number of critical points. The idea of contentless revelation, for instance, is found in Brunner, but in the case of Barth we have something much more positive.
George Hunsinger: I agree very much with Alister. The term neo-orthodox is one of the most useless terms in the theological lexicon. It lumps together all sorts of disparate views. But, more important, there are three main areas where Barth has been looked on with suspicion by evangelicals: his attitude toward historical criticism, his opening up the possibility of a hope for universal salvation, and his democratic socialist and antimilitaristic political views. Although these are controversial matters, we do see an increasing convergence among evangelicals toward Barth on some of these matters. John Stott, for example, is not far from Barth politically. He's closer to Barth than many with his rather modified view of the nature of eternal damnation. On historical criticism, I'm not sure. The evangelical-postliberal discussion still has much to clarify on the status of historical criticism within the life of faith.
IVP: Alister notes in A Passion for Truth that Bill Placher has identified three fundamental features of postliberal thought. First, the primacy of narrative as an interpretive category. Second, the hermeneutical primacy of the world created by the biblical narrative over the world of human experience. And third, the primacy of language over experience. George, do you see these three things as distinguishing features of the school loosely labeled postliberal?
Hunsinger: If these are descriptive features of postliberalism, I think postliberalism is in trouble. There can be an overemphasis on the category of narrative. We have to give primacy to Jesus Christ and not to narrative and other formal or methodological categories. Narrative is important only insofar as it helps us interpret and illuminate the New Testament witness to Jesus Christ. When we take categories like narrative or doctrine, or whatever, and speak about them in and of themselves as giving some kind of unity to Scripture, it skews the discussion. Then we should begin to have serious reservations about the interest in narrative that Hans Frei, to some extent, spawned.
IVP: What if postliberalism were understood to emphasize the primacy of Christ as an interpretive category? And then the other two features were somewhat modified along similar lines—say, a Christocentric hermeneutical primacy over the world, the world interpreted Christocentrically through the scriptural narratives, and the primacy of a Christian language over experience. Would you then be more comfortable or are we still focusing too much on formal features and not enough on substantive ones?
Hunsinger: It is the substantive categories that are important. Postliberalism wants to recover the older, premodern way of reading Scripture, which is to read it as Christ-centered. Only as it is Christ-centered is Scripture unified through its narrative and through typological interpretation. And all this takes place in and is guided by the Trinitarian rule of faith. In other words, both Nicaea and Chalcedon are taken for granted and affirmed as a hermeneutical construct, as a framework of reading and interpretation. It's through Nicaea and Chalcedon that we have a Christ-centered and Trinitarian reading. From there we go on to see Scriptural unity in terms, for instance, of typological interpretation.
IVP: Alister, hearing George qualify the three features of postliberal thought set forth by Placher, do you as an evangelical find yourself resonating?
McGrath: I find myself very much attracted to the interpretation that George just placed on postliberalism. Certainly this kind of focus on Christ is going to attract positive evangelical attention.
IVP: Let's elaborate. What features of postliberalism draw you to it as a potential ally in the work and mission of the church?
McGrath: I'm drawn to it because it represents a movement which is prepared to take seriously the collapse of what I'll loosely call the Enlightenment worldview—that is that there are certain absolutes or universals to which somehow all people are innately beholden. That postliberal move is attractive for several reasons. It's attractive because it's right: all of us have to operate in this area where there are no absolute foundations of the kind supposedly provided by universal reason. Postliberalism really does enable us to regain a sense of confidence by showing that we don't need to feel ashamed or embarrassed about Christianity being distinct and particularistic. I also find myself warming to what I take to be a genuinely serious postliberal attempt to wrestle with Scripture as Scripture actually is. Evangelicalism to a certain extent has run the risk of making its understanding of Scripture dependent on a prior theory of Scripture.
IVP: George, what features of evangelicalism draw you to it as a potential ally in the work and mission of the church?
Hunsinger: Above all, it has been the work of evangelical New Testament scholars and the wonderful commentaries that they have produced, commentaries that have been a great asset to the whole church. I have in mind people like F. F. Bruce, I. Howard Marshall, Gordon Fee and N. T. Wright. These are people that I can read and learn from with great profit.
IVP: Alister, you have worried that postliberalism, at least as represented by George Lindbeck, leaves some vital questions open. These include: (1) What is truth? (2) On what ground or with what justification can the postliberal say the Bible is uniquely and finally authoritative? And (3) on what ground or with what justification can the postliberal say Jesus Christ is uniquely and finally revelatory of ultimate reality? In the course of the 1995 Wheaton Theology Conference, were any of your concerns allayed?
McGrath: At that meeting George Lindbeck said that he saw postliberalism, as represented in his The Nature of Doctrine, as being in effect a pretheological exercise. It's about how we do theology and is not theology per se—which helps to explain why the book does not contain so many out-and-out theological assertions. I find that quite helpful, but I want to enter a caveat: The Nature of Doctrine was published in 1984, quite a long time ago. I wonder if postliberalism actually is going to deliver some theological as opposed to pretheological writings. That would be the kind of thing that evangelicals would find much easier to engage.
IVP: George, what about the three concerns that Alister raises? Would you have anything to say from a postliberal perspective that might address these concerns on the part of evangelicals?
Hunsinger: I suspect that there are no finally divisive stances between evangelicals and postliberals on these questions. The vocabularies might differ—I'm thinking of terms like "inspiration" or "infallibility" or "inerrancy." But if the idea of uniquely and finally authoritative is really what we're after, and these other terms are somehow subsidiary to that, I doubt there are any postliberals who want to deny that the Bible is uniquely authoritative or that Christ is uniquely authoritative.
There may be an issue here about the Enlightenment and about the place of historical criticism within a faithful reading of Scripture. Ironically, it may be the postliberals who want to uphold the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura a little more strictly than some evangelicals. The postliberals insist that Scripture is sufficient in itself to give us a true picture of Jesus Christ, and that we don't need to validate or justify that picture on grounds external to the gospel. Postliberals think Christians just need to be sure that historical criticism does not disconfirm the New Testament witness to Jesus Christ and that a strong case can be made that Christians can, from our own framework of understanding, account for the evidence on historical critical grounds as well as anyone else. But I don't think any postliberals feel that it's as important as, say, Carl Henry seems to feel it is that we actually defeat skepticism on historical critical grounds as a kind of precondition for affirming the truth of the gospel.
McGrath: I believe that most evangelicals would say that they are very happy to agree with postliberalism as far as George here takes it. But does it go far enough? There's a real need for intrasystemic consistency, but nevertheless there is the question as to what the Christian language refers. In other words, is there something outside the system to which our language is ultimately responsible, which actually in some way governs the meaning of the words that we use and the way in which we use them? Evangelicals suspect that at least some postliberals are a bit hesitant about affirming that there is something outside the Christian language to which that language actually refers.
Hunsinger: I think that it's not really a question as to whether there's an extratextual reference. There are ambiguities in some of the things especially that Hans Frei has written, but I'm sure that he himself believed, and showed in his writings, that there is an extratextual reference. The question really is, what is the extratextual reference and what access do we have to it? To what extent does Scripture give us sufficient access to the truth of that about which Scripture speaks?
IVP: And how would you want to work with those questions?
Hunsinger: This is where sola Scriptura and the principle of the sufficiency of Scripture comes in. The historical critical question is then greatly relativized and downgraded. It's not as if historical reason, so to speak, gives us some secondary and independent grounds on which to affirm the truth about which Scripture speaks.
IVP: It is on related grounds, George, that your essay in The Nature of Confession sees promise in constructive engagement with evangelicals like Kuyper and Bavinck. Why do you think that may be the case?
Hunsinger: Kuyper and Bavinck seem to have more flexibility on the question of historical reference than do some other evangelicals. The term "history" has tripped us up. If we ask whether the Incarnation was a historical event, we're inclined to say yes. If we ask whether the Incarnation was a natural event, we're inclined to say no, because we realize that there's something supernatural or something other than natural, some form of divine agency here which cannot be accounted for in terms of natural processes. One way of trying to get at the postliberal insight that people like Bavinck and Kuyper in spirit were closer to than someone like Carl Henry is to observe that the word historical in some ways is not that different from the word natural.
Let's phrase the question a little differently: Was the assumpsio carnis a historical event? That is, was the assumption of the human existence of Jesus into the life of the eternal Son of God in such a way that they are now in inseparable unity, was that a historical event? Obviously the word history begins to reach its categorical limit when we're talking about something like the assumption or the Incarnation or the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, or the creation of the world out of nothing. There was a sense in which Carl Henry and people of that generation seemed to feel so much anxiety about the sort of skepticism deriving from modern critical historical methods, that they went to excessive lengths to try to make a case on historical-critical grounds that these matters were just as the biblical record depicted them. And in a certain way that skewed and misconstrued the very reference that was at stake in these New Testament narratives. We don't find that kind of heavily rationalized or historicized understanding of just what the reference is in people like Kuyper and Bavinck. So they may present a more a more fruitful avenue of discussion between evangelicals and postliberals.
IVP: Following up on George's comments, Alister, do you basically agree with George's reading of Bavinck and Kuyper? And if you do, would you be reasonably comfortable with using the likes of Bavinck and Kuyper as an interesting bridge between postliberals and evangelicals?
McGrath: Yes and yes. There's one very important thing that emerges from what George has said so far, in listing the evangelicals he appreciates: F. F. Bruce, John Stott, I. H. Marshall, N. T. Wright, Bavinck and Kuyper—they're all Europeans, and that's not accidental. One of the things that we notice about North American evangelicalism from our European perspective is that it's been very heavily influenced by a series of extrabiblical presuppositions. As far as I can see, they are presuppositions deriving from the Enlightenment. This goes back to the old Princeton school in America. It is significant that the line of dialogue that George is asking to be opened up is really between postliberalism and a form of evangelicalism that has never really taken on board the Enlightenment agenda to the same extent that North American evangelicalism has. Recently, North American evangelical theologians such as Donald Bloesch are complaining in quite a major way that some of their predecessors, for presumably the best possible reasons, bought heavily into the Enlightenment worldview in order to defend the authority of Scripture. So you're left with this remarkable situation in which Scripture is actually being defended on the basis of Enlightenment ideas and values. Certainly in Europe we've never wanted to do that. In many ways what George is saying is that there is a style of evangelicalism which actually has been much more faithful to the kind of pre-Enlightenment approach to Scripture that Hans Frei describes in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. So I think there could be a very interesting dialogue here.
IVP: I have a concluding question. What next step, if there should be a next step, would you propose for the engagement of postliberals with evangelicals?
Hunsinger: I would like to see structures for long-term dialogue and study and interaction set up between theologians and biblical scholars—both Old Testament and New Testament scholars—on which evangelicals and postliberals would be represented at every point.
McGrath: It seems to me that the most important thing is to keep talking. The evangelical-postliberal dialogue is important for three reasons. First of all, because in many ways, postliberalism and evangelicalism are reacting against perceived inadequacies in approaches to Christianity which we might loosely style liberal or modernist. The adjectives don't really matter, but certainly they represent an approach to Christianity that both evangelicals and postliberals would say is inadequate. And it's very important that that is heard—that there are two major movements in modern Christian thinking which are simply saying that approaches which came into a fairly major position in Western theology during the sixties and beyond have spent themselves and no longer deserve to be given the high profiles they once had.
Second, it would be very good for evangelicals to be made aware of the extent to which they may have bought into extrabiblical presuppositions in defending the authority of Scripture. I think the postliberal approach is offering us a way of realizing how there are strong elements of foundationalism in certain evangelical approaches to theology.
And third, I think dialogue genuinely would be of value to postliberalism as well, because I think evangelicals would want to continue to press those key questions. What is truth? Why Scripture? Why Jesus? In doing, so possibly they would help themselves understand why Scripture and truth and Jesus matter so much to evangelicals, but they'll also provide a stimulus for postliberals to begin to explore these issues in more detail than they have thus far.
It would be a profitable and interesting dialogue, and I would like to see it continue.