French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is famous, or infamous, for his technique of “Deconstruction”. He made the provocative claim in his book Of Grammatology that “There is nothing outside the text”.
By this, he didn’t mean that the things around us – people and trees and knives and forks – don’t actually exist, that there aren’t really any material objects, just ideas. Rather, he was criticising the idea that we can ever read something without interpretation. We usually only talk about “interpretation” when we encounter something we find hard to understand. I interpret the book of Revelation, but I just understand the newspaper.
Derrida is saying that everything is interpreted – not just words on a page, but all our experiences. There is no way of getting at the world in an entirely objective way, apart from our pre-existing knowledge, experiences, beliefs, culture and so on.
The worry for Christians is that one interpretation becomes just as good as any other. People say “That’s just your interpretation” to end a discussion, to imply that it’s just a subjective opinion and there’s no meaningful way of judging one interpretation as more true than another. If the Gospel is an interpretation, it is not objectively true in the modern sense of being self-evident or universally demonstrable.
But if we look at what the Bible says, it doesn’t portray the Gospel as objective in this sense. As Abraham says to the rich man in Jesus’ parable in Luke 16:
‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’
Or think of the reaction of the people to God speaking from heaven in John 12 – some said it was thunder, others an angel.
There’s no neutral position free from prior assumptions and faith commitments, as various Christian writers and apologists such as Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til recognised. Modernism pretends to be objective, but even that has to begin from a position of faith in autonomous human reason. Postmodernism rightly tries to reveal the underlying assumptions of supposedly neutral and objective positions, but goes too far if it says its impossible to make any kind of rational judgement between positions them.
- Nothing Outside the Text? Taking Derrida to Church – article by James K A Smith
- Is there a meaning in this text? : the Bible, the reader, and the morality of literary knowledge by Kevin J Vanhoozer (Apollos, 1998) – detailed examination of the epistemology of literary knowledge from a Christian perspective