- [Don Carson] When somebody says,
"That's just your interpretation," the first thing you've got to do is ask
yourself, "Where is this coming from? Where is this objection coming from?"
It might, conceivably, be a serious desire to engage about post-modern epistemology
and talk about whether that's possible to know anything and under what
conditions can one know anything. Even if one cannot know anything
exhaustively with the perfect omniscience of God, surely, one can know some things
truly up to the level of human capacity and so on. It could be an invitation to
a serious conversation of that sort. On the other hand, sometimes, it's
merely a flip switch. It's merely saying, "I don't want to talk about this," or
"I think you're just too narrow," or "I'm going to show that you don't
have any ground to stand upon." It's not a serious request for engagement
on the subject at all, in which case if you try to get too heavy in your
response, you just turn people off. So if somebody says that, and it's not
much more than a desire to dismiss you from the field, I might say, if they say,
"Surely, that's just your interpretation." I might say, "Oh, well, is it
your interpretation that interpretations are always subjective?
Isn't your interpretation of interpretations therefore subjective?"
And that's a purely ad hominem argument. It's not really all that serious, but
I've yet to see somebody answer it seriously. It shows the folly of the
approach that tries to dismiss people with a one-liner. Beyond that, I think
that there are some useful things to say, provided you're dealing
with somebody who is serious. You can show that in just about every
domain of life, we can know some things in measure. If you want to begin to
study nuclear physics or you want to begin to study classical Greek or microbiology
or carpentry... Now, there are some things that you you come to know with time.
You might know very little at the beginning of the course or at the
beginning of the trade craft, but after 6 months or a year or 2
years or 10 years or an apprenticeship, you know a great deal more. You've
also come to know all the kinds of things you don't know yet.
A great deal of learning consists in finding whole vistas where you don't
know much. But as part of getting there, you learn many things about some things,
and some things about many things, and that is simply part of human
experience. All you have to do is point out that there was a time when you
couldn't read, and now, you can read. Maybe, there was a time when you could
read English, but you couldn't read much French. And then you learn the language,
and so you could read a lot more French. So it is possible to know more
things, and likewise in the domain of interpretation. There are tricky bits
where experts will disagree about what's being said, but if we read John
3:16, "God so loved the world," then surely, it's possible to know,
if you take the text seriously, that God loved the world. Now,
you might want to define that more by asking, "What does John mean by world,
and are there different ways in which the Bible speaks of God's love?"
And you can ask all kinds of refining questions, but surely,
it's not a purely subjective interpretation that says, "This
text means that God loved the world." It doesn't mean that God wears
nightshirts, or it doesn't mean that God is angry with people all the time.
It doesn't mean that God created everything in the beginning.
It doesn't mean any of those. It means that God loved the world.
That's something that is a valid interpretation of John 3:16. So when
somebody says, "That's just your interpretation," then if you have that
kind of reasoning in the back of your mind, you may be able to engage
the party in serious discussion. You might be able to say, "Oh?
what's your interpretation?" And if they commit themselves,
say, "Well, what does the text say? Let's look at some passages together,"
and then you're getting them into the text and context of the Bible itself. "Well,
I think the text means such and such. "Well, what about this expression?
Is that what is meant? Is this what Samuel means?"
Or whoever it is that you're quoting. So if it's not just a flip question that
is designed to shut you down, it is sometimes possible to get the party
to engage in serious discussion regarding the text itself. And even
if you get them to the place where they say, "Well, okay. I see
that that's what the interpretation of the text is. It's just that I don't
like it. I just don't agree with it." And I would reply, "Well,
that's a different argument. If you disagree with it,
you're still agreeing that this interpretation is correct, even if you
don't like the entailments or the conclusion or you don't like
what the text is actually saying. But that is a faithful interpretation of
the text, in which case you're not arguing with me. You're arguing with the one who
gave us the text, with God himself."
