Let's pray together. Have any father we want to thank you for this day for the glorious sunshine and for the way your beauty and majesty's revealed in creation. Father, we pray that as we continue to reflect on the moment in which we live, you'll grant us understanding, especially where we deal with difficult and challenging ideas, and help us always to think too about how these ideas affect us, not just the people around us who aren't believers, so that we may see how our own minds and hearts need to be conformed to your likeness and to live in your truth. And also Father Grant is not just understanding, but compassion. We ask this for Jesus' sake, our men. In our section on Tuesday, we were looking at the issue of postmodernism and style, and we came to the end of that section, and if you've got other questions on that, please hold them and ask them at the end of our class today. We're going to move now to our second section, which is on language and literary criticism, and I want to go through this very quickly. That'll be challenging for some of you, for whom this issue is a new one, about half of you were in biblical and cultural hermeneutics last semester, where I went over this section in much more detail, and then I'm going to do now, and I don't want to bore you by spending a lot of time on it. But for those of you who weren't in that class, if you've got particular questions, where you don't understand what I'm saying or why this matters, please ask them, because I don't want to leave you all behind. And those of you who find this particular subject interesting might want to consult one of your colleagues in the class, who was in the class last semester, and you could get some much more detailed notes from them, giving the background to this subject. Now, often in our universities today, English literature departments and also French and other literature departments, are sometimes the leading edge of the most radical kind of thinking, the most extreme kind of thinking. They often lead the universities, and you'll see why, as we go through some of these ideas, because obviously the question about the nature of language and how we're able to read a text, a manuscript, an essay, a book that's before us is a very important one, because anything you're studying at college anywhere is going to depend on being able to read and understand texts that are before you. And it's in this area of literary criticism and the nature of language that we see some of the most extreme ideas of post-modernism coming out in a very stark way. Now, to provide a little bit of background for this, if I asked you the question, how do you read a text, how may we read a text, probably all of you, except one or two who have studied literature at university, would reply in some manner like the following, you might say, well, it's obvious we can read a book and understand it. We have a common humanity, so even if we are reading a book from a culture the other side of the world, or from someone who wrote two or three thousand years ago, even though we recognize there are cultural barriers, there are differences in historical moments, we have to take those into account and think about the context in which something comes, yet a common humanity transcends those barriers of cultures the other side of the world and of cultures hundreds and thousands of years ago. So, as long as we are prepared to do a little bit of work to get into the setting and the mind of the writer of the author, we will be able to understand without too much difficulty what somebody else was saying. Of course, every time you read the Bible, you assume this, that it's possible for us to understand what Isaiah had in mind, or what the Apostle Paul had in mind or Moses had in mind, or Abraham 4,000 years ago. We assume that if we're just a little work, understanding the historical setting and trying to put ourselves into the mind of the writer, or the speaker, that we're going to be able to understand. Now, we might just very loosely and simply call that a traditional understanding of the commonality of human language and the possibility of being able to understand and relate to what other people think. And at the deepest level, as Christians we can say, that because we believe that all human beings are made in the image of God, that even though there are differences of race and culture and history, which sometimes pull us apart, yet because we see all human persons fundamentally as made in the image of God, that therefore there really is a common humanity, which unites us. What unites us is far greater than what divides us. We're all created in the image of God. We're all sinners. We're all in need of redemption. And so, without too much difficulty, we can understand what other people think. Now, for the past couple of centuries, everywhere in the Western world, that Christian foundation of our common humanity, and that Christian foundation, that there's an ultimate story, an ultimate truth, which binds us all together as human beings, that we are all really thinking the same thoughts, because we're living in God's world, the same thoughts about the most basic questions that face us. Over the past two or three hundred years in the Western world, and we'll look at this more carefully later in the semester, that Christian foundation was rejected by what we might want to call for the moment secular humanism, or what is called sometimes modernism, or what is sometimes called the Enlightenment project, in place of believing that we are created by God in His likeness, and that we are sinners who've rebelled against Him, in place of believing that we need God's revelation to speak to us, and account for who we are, and how we should live, and how we may find a way out of our problems of sin and the consequences. Secular humanism, or modernism, or the Enlightenment project, insisted that if God exists, He doesn't really matter, and He probably doesn't exist, but He hasn't spoken. But for several hundred years, the foundation which Christianity gave of our common humanity, and the possibility of understanding one another, was basically taken for granted. Modernism just assumed that we can understand each other, that it's possible to read books that other people write from other cultures, and grasp them because modernism had a tremendous confidence in human rationality. It put human reason in the place of God's revelation, and said human reason is the source of all truth. And that confidence in human reason, and that optimism about human persons that were basically good, where the issue of language was concerned, and literary criticism, reading a text, there was just the assumption that we can understand each other, that we can understand each other's language, that we have a common humanity, a common heritage, that we're all struggling with the same questions. And so there wasn't really a challenge to the notion that human beings can communicate with each other. But in postmodernism, that has all gone, and what we really have is an attempt to be more consistent to the rejection of the existence of a personal God, and the rejection of the notion that God has spoken to us to tell us about our human condition. That should be a sufficient background for those of you who weren't in biblical and cultural hermeneutics to understand these points we're going to go through here. As we look at this outline, number one, there is nothing transcendent, neither God, nor anything else, or anyone else that understands everything. There is no infinite person who created the world, or who understands the world, and who has revealed himself to us. Postmodernism attempts to be consistent to that position, and later in the semester we'll look at Nietzsche in some detail. And that's really the heart of everything that he says. What does it mean to live in a universe without God, a universe from which God is absent? That brings us to our second point, therefore because God does not exist and because God has not spoken, there is no story, no story, no account of the human condition, no account of who we are, of what our origin is, or what we're here for, or where we're going. There is no story, no narrative, no meta-narrative is the word that postmodernist use, meta meaning a transcendent narrative, that is a narrative which is coming from above and explaining everything for us. There is no story that makes sense of the human condition, and there is no story that gives texts or language ultimate meaning. You see the assumption, as long as the influence of a Judeo-Christian worldview held sway, was that all of our stories, all the books we write, all the texts that are there, all the poetry, all the drama, relates in one way or another, either agreeing with it or rejecting it, the basic biblical account of the human condition. You might say there are three great strains in the biblical account of the human condition. One is creation, the second is the fall, and the third is redemption, and almost all great literature across the whole face of the earth, whether it's been produced by Christians or by unbelievers, has dealt with those three great three. There are three themes in one way or another, and it still does. It deals with the themes of creation, of who we are, at the most fundamental level as those who have come from the hand of God, whether people believe in God or not, they're dealing with the account of the glory of our humanity and the wonder of creation. Secondly, all great literature, all great human texts deal with the reality of our fall, whether they accept Christianity or not, they deal with the problem of human shame, of our brokenness, of our lostness, of our alienation, of the reality of death, and the sorrow that that brings to our life. And also, all great literature from every culture and every age of history deals with the possibility or hope of redemption, the longing for deliverance, from the condition in which we find ourselves, and you can see this in endless books and drama and poetry and movies, and every other kind of human artifact, whether it's produced by Christians or not, because this is fundamental to who we are. Now, once Christianity is passionately rejected, and as the naïve optimism of a secular humanist position gradually loses its hold, that conviction that there is this ultimate story of the glory of who we are as creatures, creation, the shame of whom we are as those who are broken and fallen and failing, and the longing for deliverance, at which stands behind as I said all great literature, once that is completely gone in our culture as it has done at a very deep level, then we end up with the problem, this point to here, there is no story. There are no great themes of creation, fall, and redemption, which can stand behind literature or movies or anything else, that can give us an account of who we are or can even give our language any meaning at all. So there is a complete loss of the sense that there is any story which explains our situation and to which other pieces of literature, other cultural artifacts can be related, and that brings us to point number three, and I need to point number three. The meaning of a text or of any use of language resides completely in the person using the language or reading the text, what the postmodernist is saying is this, that it is impossible any longer to really understand somebody from another culture or from another moment of history. Because there is no story that unites us all, there are just fragmented individuals and groups of people. We have no possibility of genuinely understanding each other, whether we are reading about Abraham or about Moses or about David or about Jesus or about the Apostle Paul or about Julius Caesar or Hammurabi or about people the other side of the world today in China or Russia or Serbia or wherever. We are no longer able to truly communicate with each other or to understand each other. We are trapped in our individuality, in our own personal use of language in the way we individually see the world so that all of us bring to any text we read our own personal meaning. Of course there is an element of truth in this, you bring yourself to any text you read. But what this is saying is something more than that, not just simply emphasizing what we ought to recognize all along that we bring ourselves to a text when we read it. That is why Jesus says as long as you say you see your sin remains, the Christian or to acknowledge that I am always to read any text with humility and an awareness of myself and with the prejudices that I bring to reading a text. We have to do this as we read the Bible to read with humility rather than reading simply imposing our personal preconceptions on the text that we read. I emphasize this so you will all understand the nature of the problem here as Christians who know we are living in a universe made by God and the God who is spoken to us because we recognize the problem of our sin. We are aware that reading a text isn't always easy, the reformation, how that the conviction of the clarity of Scripture, that it is possible for anyone whether they are educated or not a little child to read God's word and understand the basic things that it teaches. And that of course we must hold to but the same time Scripture itself teaches us that reading isn't always easy because of our sin, because of our personal pride, because of our cultural prejudices. And so we must read a text with humility, the apostle Paul says, knowledge puffs up the man who thinks that he knows doesn't yet know as he ought to know and all of you must be aware as you read the word of God that you don't yet know as you ought to know, that you read it because you want to sit under it and have your prejudices wiped away by it so that you are really growing and learning. If you go to God's word thinking you already know everything it says you will not learn anything at all, you might just as well not bother to read it. It's the same with any other text, it's particularly true of course with God's word but it's true with any other text and because God's word challenges us in all sorts of areas of our sin some things are very difficult for us to read. And in a way there's a key to that for the Christian and the key is this wherever you read God's word and you don't like it but it says wherever you read God's word and you want to explain it away and make it mean something different from what it obviously says you need to stop and recognize right there. I have your own personal sins or your own cultural prejudices are preventing you from reading what God has to say to you let me take a practical example. If you turn if you've got your Bibles with you to 1 Timothy chapter 6 this is one of the best examples one could think of because of the kind of culture in which we live. 1 Timothy chapter 6 starting from verse 6 Paul in the context is dealing with false teachers who think verse 5 that Godliness is a means to financial gain they're teaching God's word and getting followers for themselves because they think they can make money out of it. Well there's lots of people in the church like that today to just turn on your television and you can see plenty of them. They think that Godliness is a means to financial gain but Godliness with contentment Paul says in verse 6 is great gain for we bought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out of it. You can't take your clothes and your cars and your house and your bank accounts and your pension funds and everything else to heaven they are not going with you. You are taking none of it with you at all that's the reality but if we have food and clothing we will be content with that. Which of you is content with food and clothing? I can't believe that probably any one of us in this room is because we live in a culture which teaches us so strongly that we need a lot more than that than food and clothing to be content. Every single commercial you ever see on television you hear on the radio you see in the newspaper or magazine every store you go into is devoted to making you think you are cannot possibly be satisfied with just food and a change or two of clothing. That's not what our culture thinks not what any of us think and then Paul goes on people who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. That's a challenging word for us living in this moment but Paul says we shouldn't desire to get rich.
It's not an appropriate desire because we need to recognize that it creates all kinds of problems for us. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. Later on in the passage in verses 1718 and 19 Paul goes on to say that God delights to give his children good gifts and he charges those who are wealthy to enjoy them and be generous and not be proud but the whole passage is extremely challenging to us because it says things which are exactly the opposite of what our culture is teaching us is a right that we have the right to desire prosperity and to work for it. And God's word challenges us in this area. Jesus puts it very simply he says you cannot love God and money. You cannot and we all try to. Now that example of money which we finished that section with points us to this challenge. The challenge that postmodernism recognizes that is that we come to a text with all kinds of cultural assumptions, cultural prejudices and all sorts of personal convictions which we don't ever think about they're just there as part of who we are. And the Christians have always recognized this. This is the problem of our sinfulness. That's why the Apostle Paul says don't be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds then you will know what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. When you learn to challenge the assumptions of the culture in which you live and of your own sinfulness and have your mind renewed by submitting yourself humbly to the word of God. This Scripture teaches us this everywhere but postmodernism goes much further because what it's saying is that it's not just that we are prejudiced and by humility we can deal with that prejudice. And that we are trapped in our individual isolation and in our cultural isolation and some postmodernist writers will emphasize the individual aspect of our being trapped in isolation more and others will emphasize more strongly the fact that we're trapped in various little cultural groups who as a group have a common way of seeing the world. The consequence is this point three here that when I read a text the only meaning that is available to me is the meaning that I put into and get out of the text. And that brings us to point four literary criticism consequently plunges into an abyss because meaning is lost that is the notion of objective meaning. Texts are completely inaccessible to us because every reading becomes a misreading that's what the postmodern theorist says to us that we can never know what the author originally meant. All we can know is what we read the meaning we put into the text. Every reading becomes a misreading you remember I spoke on Tuesday about studying art and at many art schools you no longer taught to draw to paint. Well it's the same issue. There are no objective standards there's nothing out there which says this is quality painting and this isn't. All there is is what the individual does that's all there is and there is no accessibility that's why if you go to an art museum with a contemporary art exhibit and you ask what does it mean. That's not the question you're supposed to ask because you cannot know what the artist meant it's exactly the point or you can do is bring your own meaning to the work of art. Rather than have something which is objectively there which you can look at and say yes this is what Michelangelo was trying to communicate when he did his magnificent sculpture of David. And what is being said is no that's not possible there's only the meaning that you bring to looking at that statue or to reading this text or anything else. So every reading becomes a misreading and one of the consequences of that is point five here literature in a postmodern context becomes a weapon in the culture wars for various groups to reinforce. And force there already held positions and to use against each other we start attacking each other and not just literature but speaking as well. Now this is one of the problems in the time in which we live when Christians go out on the street and wave banners and give protest speeches about various moral and social and political and economic and cultural issues. We are perceived in a postmodern time as just being a little cultural group you know stating our thing and trying to impose it on others. In a culture war and other people don't care they have their own agendas who do you think you are to impose your agenda on us. We have to be very careful how we try to communicate in the present context otherwise we're just understood in this way and that is how most non Christians understand us as just a little cultural group. Seeking to fight in the culture war imposing our own personal group agenda on other people it makes it extremely challenging to deal with moral and social questions at the present time because you can be simply written off. And if we speak stridently and aggressively we are especially going to be written off because so many of the people around us we know different let's say from a radical gay rights group that's marching down the street and waving its placards and shouting its position. You see that's exactly how many people regard us just the same with just another extreme group. So this makes communication very difficult that this is the context in which we find ourselves. Now down below and these you have in front of you I've got a whole series of quotations. One from Jack Derrida he is one of the major thinkers behind postmodern ideas with regard to literary criticism and the nature of language and you see some words some statements of his here he says there is nothing outside the text that is all there is is simply the text in front of my eyes. There is no meta language that is no language that can enable us to can enable us to stand above the text or to read it in any objective way because the writer had his personal language I have my personal language there are no rules to help us understand. There is no inherent meaning to a text or even to language itself and then there's a comment by Abrams and you've got this in front of you like all Derrida's key terms and statements this has multiple significations that is that there is no meaning outside the text. But a primary significance is that one cannot get beyond the sequence of verbal signs to anything that stands outside of an independent of the language system that constitutes a text. For example it's reference or else the intention of its speaker or writer that should have an hour in it or writer to express a determinate signification. And then below Abrams deconstruction results in the claim that the meaning of any text remains radically open to contradictory readings. And you have various critics doing this with the Bible of course making it mean exactly what they want to just ignoring what it says in all sorts of areas. So the text can have let's come down here I won't go through all of these quotations here. You notice the one on de-centering there is no center or reference point to anchor the meaning of a word not just of a text but of any word. Any word can mean anything you want it to mean. Free play any term has infinite semantic range. Every word is anchored to other words any word can drift anywhere in the ocean of meaning. So we cannot give a particular meaning to any word never mind a text as a whole. And in us the criticism that is thinking is nihilistic Derrida tries to deny this charge but he says elsewhere but he is trying to put himself at a point so they do not know any longer where I am going. Let's Derrida himself of course the irony is that Derrida writes these textbooks which are extremely difficult to understand with all sorts of terms that he's made up himself new words. And he expects his students and the people who buy his books to read them and understand them is a kind of fundamental ironic contradiction there at the heart of everything that he is saying. This next quotation is interesting Leo Tar Jean François Leo Tar says that now that the scientific meta-narrative is broken down all that we're left with is an infinite plurality of language games. We have moved from the muffled majesty of grand narratives the splintering autonomy of micro narratives. It's a beautiful statement despite the sorrow one might say of what he has to say. We've moved from the muffled majesty of grand narratives and he's referring to the modernist narrative which gives a scientific explanation of the universe in which we live, of the origin of the earth, of who we are as human persons, of our psychology. Of what we're here for and so on, of how we're to live. So he's not just rejecting the Christian meta-narrative of God who has created the universe, he's rejecting any meta-narrative and the primary alternative to the Christian one in western culture is the scientific one. Scientific in the sense that naturalistic science which seeks to explain the universe without any reference to God, historically the development of science in the west is deeply tied in to the period after the reformation and a biblical world view. The conviction that God made the universe that he made it in an orderly manner, therefore it can be studied and understood in science as possible. But increasingly over the last couple of hundred years, science has tried to set itself free from any kind of biblical moorings and insist that science is by nature naturalistic that is it rejects God. That's certainly not where it was historically, but Liotai is saying the scientific account of the world is just as suspect as a biblical account. There are no meta-narratives which explain the human condition at all. It's not just we reject that human beings are made in the image of God and have rebelled against him and need Christ for their redemption, but we reject to the evolutionary account of who we are that we are descended from. And this is who we are. There is no meta-narrative that gives an account of our situation. Or where left with he says is these micro-narratives, these little stories, the splintering autonomy, autonomy that is its own authority, a law unto itself. Everybody has their own account. Your next neighbor may be a Hindu, he may be a Mormon, you know, there may be a Jehovah's Witness, a Christian, a Marxist, whatever. All our culture is, is this, with no long-wenty grand narratives, the splintering autonomy of micro-narratives, and who is to say who's right? Nobody can. There's just this individual, this group, with their views. So an enormous problem here. Now theoretically this sounds very complex and difficult and to some of you may be bizarre. But to help you understand it, it's the easiest way to do that is to look at examples from literature, from movies, from poetry, from fiction, etc. Because in those you can see how this works itself out into the culture generally. And here I've given some examples. Some of you may have seen or read the play by Samuel Beckett waiting for Godot. Written I suppose about 30 years ago now, perhaps a little more than that, but at the time seen as extremist, today it doesn't seem extreme at all when it was revived here in St. Louis in the past couple of years. Oh, it's a couple of guys who don't really communicate with each other who are waiting for Godot who never comes. And nothing really happens. Nobody really communicates. It's a truly postmodern play, and in some of Beckett's later plays, the situations are even more extreme. One of them happy days has a couple who just chatter and don't communicate with each other or anybody else and eventually fall silent. One of them is called breath, and in that there is no language at all. Just the sound of a baby crying, the sound of a couple copulating and the sound of somebody dying. And that's the whole play. He is making the point very dramatically. There is no communication at all. There are many movies at the popular level that express the same kinds of things. Woody Allen is constantly dealing with this theme of the breakdown of communication and other movie makers as well. Like Fellini and Tony O'Neill and Dunel and many others. This is true in some of the popular music that some of you listen to. You listen to the words, careful alternative music is like this. It speaks about the breakdown of meaning, of the impossibility of communicating to one another as human persons. The group that one of my sons introduced me to the beautiful South, some of you may be familiar with them, a British group they were just over here recently playing. That's one of their dominant themes of their lyrics is the breakdown of communication, but the language we use no longer really communicates to other people that we are isolated from each other. In our little alienated lives. The fiction of James Joyce is another example, Ulysses of Finnegan's Wake, where the language breaks down and you remember I used at the end of class the other day the example of John Cage taking the text of one of Joyce's books and just taking the eighth word of the middle line in every page and stringing it together. And he's just was saying, you know, language is meaningless. So I will have a text to my opera where the words bear no relationship to each other whatsoever except they will happen to come from the same book. I'm just strung together regardless of whether they're verbs, nouns, adjectives, subjects, objects, whatever. I just strung together in any order without any meaning at all. And he's simply making this statement that communication is impossible, that we cannot communicate with one another. Then I've given you some examples here from T.S. Eliot. He's a very interesting example because he's writing the hollow men in the 1920s and dealing with this problem way back then almost 80 years ago. Talking about the way we don't communicate with each other. T.S. Eliot writes about the wasteland of Western culture in the 1920s where communication between people is breaking down because there's an ultimate loss of meaning. Now Eliot eventually became a Christian, but it's a problem that he addresses very carefully in much of his poetry. You can see this line here from the four quartets, these lines which were actually written after his conversion, but he's still addressing the problem. The problem, word, strain, crack, and sometimes break under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay within precision, will not stay in place, will not stay still, shrieking voices, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, always assailed them. Now that's really what the postmodernist is saying. Eliot is a prophet. Postmodernism, people like Derrida, don't come along until the 60s and 70s in terms of writing what they do about language and the decay of meaning in text, but Eliot already in the 1920s is recognizing the problem. And in his case, was that recognition of the problem, of the breakdown of meaning of the breakdown of communication is one of the things that God used to draw him to himself. And interestingly, the primary factor in Eliot's conversion to Christianity seems to have been literature by great Christian writers. John Dunin, George Herbert, and in particular the Italian writer Dante, but Eliot's basically converted through the language of Christians who communicated really well because this problem of the lack of meaning, the lack of communication, the lack of being able to understand created such a tension in him. And we need to understand that this is an appalling tension. Again, if you look at movies by somebody like Woody Allen, this is one of the fundamental issues that he's dealing with, the breakdown of communication, that we cannot understand each other. And our lives have lost their meaning. And again, it's true in lots and lots of contemporary music that kids are listening to all the time. Now obviously, this has enormous consequences for theology and I won't go through all these quotations, but I would like you to read them carefully. And then if you've got questions about them to bring them back, but let me just look at one part of them. You'll see that I refer to a writer named Francis Young. This comes down here. Francis Young is an English theologian who is still teaching theology, I think, at the University of Nottingham. And Francis Young applies what Postmodernism is saying to our reading of the scripture. And she says this, you'll notice I say first that she uses the idea of Arthur Kessler, who divided life into the trivial and the tragic. What Kessler meant by that was this, that the only things we can really know at all are what he called trivial things, that is what I ate for breakfast the day, how to drive here to work. The fact that the sun is shining outside, these are just the little things of our everyday life that we can have some knowledge about. But when it comes to anything of significance for our lives, then we can have no access to meaning or understanding at all. Things beyond that trivial level are completely beyond us, and that's why he uses the term tragic to express this. And so she says, in the realm of the tragic, that is the level of meaning, the meaning of our human condition, we can assign no literal or factual meaning to the language we use about God, when we theologize, when we speak about him or write about him, or that we use, when we worship him, when we sing hymns, or when we pray, or preach sermons, that all Christian language, all language that Christians use about God or to God, has no literal meaning to it. We can never know whether there is anything there about which we are speaking. And then this quote down below, she says, as Christian believers, we work one with a scientific model which finds explanations of phenomena behaving events in terms of natural causes. And two, what we can only describe as mythological or symbolic models, models which however inadequately represent the religious and spiritual dimension of our experience. To call them mythological is not to denigrate their status, but to indicate that they refer to realities which are not only inaccessible to the normal methods of scientific investigation, but are also indefinable in terms of human language, and in their totality inconceivable within the limited powers and experience of the finite human mind. See, for her, the problem is that we are finite. Now, if we are little, if we are finite, and this is the problem for the whole of postmodernism, if you have just a finite, a little individual, it is obvious to us that we do not understand the whole universe. You know, what we know is very small. It is very small. Now, if you believe in God, in the biblical God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is no problem at all. The great, one of the greatest scientists ever, Newton, put it this way. He is the one who studied the nature of the planets and how they have their different orbits around the sun, and he was a committed Christian believer. But he understood very well even though he was discovering all these marvelous things about the universe. He is really at the foundation of modern physics and astronomy, as we know them. Deeply committed Christian, but he said this, at the end of my life, after all that I have discovered and understood, I recognize that I am like a child playing on a seashore who has picked up one pebble that is I thought was a little prettier than others, and spent my life delighting in it. While all around me stretched this vast shore of knowledge which I haven't begun to touch or understand. That is a wonderful statement of humility by a Christian who recognizes his finiteness. But for the Christian, it is no problem because we know that there is a God who exists who understands everything and who has communicated to us. The things that are most important for us, so that my finiteness is not a problem. But for the unbeliever, for the postmodern person, finiteness is an enormous problem because I can never know, as Francis Young says here, whether the words that I use bear any relationship whatsoever to the ultimate nature of reality. I cannot know because I am alone here in this universe by my little self or with my little group of people. So access to any objective meaning of words beyond myself is truly impossible. And so she uses the image, if you turn over the page there to, or wherever you've got them on your page, she uses the image of music. She says that religious language works exactly like music. And she uses the example of Valios massed in more, that is mass for the dead. And she says this music, and all of you listen to music like this, has the power to convict me and terrify me if you listen to Brahms Requiem for example. It's like that. Some of the music is terrifying. It's very powerful, but she is saying that our Christian language is just like music. It's just something that moves us. We can have no notion as to whether it actually relates to anything true at all. We need to be moved, and so we go to church, just like we like to listen to musical concerts because the music moves us. But that's all that's happening. Our religious language is no different from music. Yeah, that's a good question. There are clearly as I said with regard to Derrida, a contradiction at the heart of everything that they're saying. They are saying that language has no objective meaning, and yet they constantly try to communicate to one another, to their students, to their readers. I'm sure if their professors, they assign exams on the basis of whether students have understood their books. And the most appropriate response if you're a student would be to write something totally unrelated to the book. How they would respond to it, I don't know. If you were to do that, people aren't usually that consistent. So your questions are a very good one. Of course it is, but it isn't enough for us simply to make that response, I would say. Because if you look at popular culture, you see how this expresses itself in a way which completely undermines a sense of meaning for ordinary people. And that's the real issue. Of course they're not going to be consistent. You can take somebody like John Cage, I used the other day who believes that everything is chance, and so his music is chance music. I heard him do a concert here in St. Louis in 1968 or 2009 when I was a seminary, and he had a huge computer on the stage. That point, computers were enormous, connected to a piano, and he, rather than having a person played a piano, he had a machine played a piano. But he had programmed the computer so that all the notes that came out of the piano bore no harmonic relationship to each other whatsoever. Now, again, there's a contradiction at the heart of it in order to get a piece of music in which there is no relationship whatsoever between the notes, no pattern, no harmony, no form, he had to use a computer, which is extraordinarily carefully structured and patterned. And again, there's a tension at the very heart of what he was doing, and that's always going to be present. You will find very few cultural artifacts that are absolutely consistent. Somebody asked a question about certain forms of jazz the other day and what you'll find is a mixture of dissonance and harmony, because people are not consistent. I've used an example in which I didn't read of the poetry of Ted Hughes on this paper. Ted Hughes died last year, he's one of my favorite poets, an Englishman, he wasn't a believer, he was the poet laureate in England for many, many years. And he is constantly writing about the loss of meaning and the decay of language and the alienation of persons, the breakdown of relationships, and emptiness of the human condition. But he writes in the most exquisitely beautiful language and with marvelous images. And there's this tension which he's quite aware of at the very heart of it, but for him, but for him the issue is that these loss of meaning, whether it's to words or meaning for the human condition, is a tragedy, and the tragedy, and I think somebody like Derrida would say this as well, is that personally we have this longing for meaning, we love to communicate with each other, we delight in all sorts of things about life and human relationships and everything else. But these are really only tricks, you'll see, I'm not sure if I handed that out and see if you have a copy of it, you don't. If I've got it, have some of my computer here somewhere, I think I've got it somewhere else, but I'll give you that example later. But what's important is not just that we point to the sort of contradiction at the heart of this, but to have some compassion for the tragedy, because so many of these people, this is not a game, but they're playing. I'm sure for some of them it is, and only God can judge the heart. But there are many people who are so deeply touched by this that it destroys their life as human persons. That they have this longing for communication, they have longing for meaning, and at this deep sense that ultimately nothing means anything at all. And you hear that in a lot of the music. There's just a terrible note of sadness in it. You see it in the movies of somebody like Woody Allen. They're really sad, even why he's mocking himself for the questions he's asking and the ultimate lack of meaning and lack of communication at the same time they're very sad. And we need to recognize that sadness that is there. But you're right, there is a contradiction. If you held this, you consistent, you couldn't use words at all. And that's why you have plays like Beckett's, where there are no words. Yes. It's a very good question that there, whether we look at pop culture anywhere else, we see lots of understanding as well as this emphasis on the breakdown of understanding. I think there are two answers to this. The most fundamental one is that human beings are made in the image of God. That's the reality. Whether they acknowledge it or not, whether they worship God or not, whether they bow before him or whether they refuse to have him in their knowledge, as Paul says in Romans 1. And because they are made in the image of God, they are going to continue to communicate, because fundamental to what it means to be the image of God is that we are created as communicators. This is why Schaeffer entitles one of his books. He is there and he is not silent. The ultimate issue is this, are we living in a universe which is silent or one in which words ultimately have meaning? And the question answered to this is that yes, God has existed eternally in the three persons of the Trinity, who have communicated with each other through all eternity. But this is fundamental to the very nature of God himself, that he delights in communication. Father speaks to the Son and the Son to the Father and to the Spirit and how they have been speaking to each other in language for all eternity. And the ability to use language to communicate with each other is part of what it means to be the image of God. So we know that this universe is not ultimately silent. It is a universe which is filled with sand, filled with language filled with communication and that words have an ultimate referent. They ultimately find their reference in God himself, the word holy, the word love, the word justice, find their meaning in the character of God himself, not in some arbitrary definition that we give to them here. But if you have rejected the knowledge of God, then the universe is ultimately silent. It's ultimately silent. And there can be no final meaning to words. I am trapped in my individuality. How can I ever know whether what I am saying is the truth about things out there? There is a dilemma that postmodernism is struggling with, that at the same time every postmodern writer or thinker or pop musician who may not have reflected on these issues at the same time we all have this longing for communication and we use words. But the practical reality is we are living in a culture where human relationships are breaking down. The most common problem for Americans today is personal loneliness. People don't know how to make relationships at the most basic level. So many people's closest relationships are ones on email and internet chat rooms where they never meet somebody face to face. There's an extraordinary proliferation of dating services because people don't know how to meet each other even and get to know each other. And so they have to pay somebody else to do it for them. And it still doesn't help. And most of the relationships break down afterwards because people don't communicate. The people are losing the ability to communicate with each other well. That's one of the things that is actually happening in the culture in which we live. Communication really is breaking down. But there is always going to be this dual reality, the sense of alienation and loss of communication and meaning and at the same time the longing to communicate. Because that's how God has made us. Now that's the fundamental reason why you've got both. Exactly. Because it's so fundamental to who we are. You see what postmodernism denies. And we've just been touching this one area of language and meaning. What postmodernism denies is every the possibility of is everything that you regard precious as a human person. It's not just language and meaning. It's the possibility of love. It's the possibility of moral order that there's a difference between good and evil. It's the reality of the significance of my choices. It's the possibility of beauty that there really is objective beauty out there. It's everything that is actually precious to us as human beings and makes our lives worthwhile. There is no longer any foundation for it. But everybody longs for those things. And so they will continue to reach for those things even though they have said there's no foundation for them. And that's the tragedy of the moment in which we live. People searching for things so which they have no answers. And you should be thankful they're still searching rather than simply attacking them as Christians and saying, we'll look how contradictory they are though they are. But the fact that they're still searching and they're still using language and they're still longing for relationships and longing for meaning and longing for beauty is the possible means we have the possibility of communication. Otherwise, they'd be in hell already totally. Hell is the complete loss of communication. The end of meaning. Total and final alienation. But thank God people aren't there yet. Our response should be to look at in people and see that they're Harris and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. They really are. That's a wonderful description of a postmodern culture. People are Harris and helpless like sheep without a shepherd and so we should have compassion on them.