Truth as a symptom

“The pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with ‘truth’ among emer­gents has often been pushed on them by their con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics, pri­mar­ily because truth is a cen­tral con­cern of theirs. And their pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with truth is a symp­tom of their mod­ernism. They want the Bible to be unswerv­ingly fac­tual (here, truth equals fact), for if it is, then its claims about eter­nal sal­va­tion can­not be ignored. So they pub­lish books against emer­gents titled Truth and the New Kind of Chris­t­ian and The Truth War, and blogs exco­ri­ate the emer­gents on the issue of truth.“[1]

The above comes from Tony Jones book The New Chris­tians: Dis­patches from the Emer­gent Fron­tier. What Jones says wor­ries me, not least because this is yet another blog ‘exco­ri­at­ing’ him and by prox­im­ity emer­gent Chris­tians on the truth question.

Al Mohler, in dis­cussing the role truth plays within the emer­gent church, has warned that, “if you get the truth ques­tion wrong, you’re going to be aber­rant in every dimen­sion of the life of the church and in your per­sonal under­stand­ing of Chris­tian­ity”. It comes as no sur­prise then that the “con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics” of the emer­gent church con­cern them­selves with how the emer­gent church views and under­stands truth (The ortho­dox church adheres to the cor­re­spon­dence the­ory of truth); the issue is para­mount. This ‘pre­oc­cu­pa­tion’ with the truth is not, con­trary to Jones’ claim, the symp­tom of one’s mod­ernism, it seems as if emer­gent speak­ers group together every­thing that came before post­mod­ernism as ‘mod­ernism,’ this is incor­rect. What’s dis­turb­ing about the quote above is its impli­ca­tions. It implies that emer­gent Chris­tians would not nor­mally be con­cern­ing them­selves with the truth ques­tion. It fur­ther implies that where the Bible speaks about “eter­nal sal­va­tion”, emer­gents would take a stance where “we could be wrong, we could be right;” they would call this epis­te­mo­log­i­cal humility.

We imme­di­ately turn our atten­tion to two ques­tions: (1) what is the cor­re­spon­dence the­ory of truth and (2) because emer­gent Chris­tians adopt the pre­sup­po­si­tions of post­mod­ernism, what does post­mod­ernism say about the ‘truth question’?

Accord­ing to J.P. More­land, “In its sim­plest form, the cor­re­spon­dence the­ory of truth says that a propo­si­tion is true just in case it cor­re­sponds to real­ity, when what it asserts to be the case is the case. More gen­er­ally, truth obtains when a truth-bearer stands in an appro­pri­ate cor­re­spon­dence rela­tion to a truth maker”.[2] We’ll need to unpack this state­ment. A truth bearer is a propo­si­tion, the con­tent of a sen­tence but not the state­ment, sen­tence or piece of lan­guage itself. “For exam­ple, ‘It is rain­ing’ and ‘Es reg­net’ are two dif­fer­ent sen­tences that express the same proposition”.[3] A truth maker is a fact, facts are what make the truth bearer (the propo­si­tion) true or false. A fact expresses a real state of affairs in the world. Sen­tences, which express propo­si­tions, are “lin­guis­tic objects con­sist­ing in a sense-perceptible string of mark­ings formed accord­ing to a cul­tur­ally arbi­trary set of syn­tac­ti­cal rules, a gram­mat­i­cally well-formed string of spo­ken or writ­ten scratchings/sounds”.[4] What this means, then, is that a state­ment is true or false accord­ing to its cor­re­spon­dence with real­ity, inde­pen­dent of the per­cep­tion or views of the per­son mak­ing the state­ment. What then of postmodernism?

“On a post­mod­ernist view, there is no such thing as objec­tive real­ity, truth, value, rea­son, and so forth. All these are social con­struc­tions, cre­ations of lin­guis­tic prac­tices, and as such are rel­a­tive not to indi­vid­u­als, but to social groups that share a nar­ra­tive. Post­mod­ernism denies the cor­re­spon­dence the­ory, claim­ing that truth is sim­ply a con­tin­gent cre­ation of lan­guage that expresses cus­toms, emo­tions, and val­ues embed­ded in a community’s lin­guis­tic prac­tices. For the post­mod­ernist, if one claims to have the truth in the cor­re­spon­dence sense, this asser­tion is a power move that vic­tim­izes those judged not to have the truth”.[5] Within post­mod­ernism there is a strong empha­sis on lan­guage, being “inside” lan­guage and as a result, we are pre­vented from know­ing the world as it actu­ally is. R. Scott Smith notes that, “there are sev­eral core philo­soph­i­cal ideas dri­ving post­mod­ern thought:

1. There is a real world that exists, but all we can know about it is what we know by our talk­ing about it.
2. This is because we are on the “inside” of lan­guage and can­not get out to know the real world as it truly (i.e., objec­tively) is.
3. There is no uni­ver­sal truths that we many know–true for all peo­ple in all places at all times. If we could know such things, this would mean that we could know some things that are true regard­less of lan­guage use. But this is not possible.
4. Thus, there is no essence, or nature, to lan­guage. There are only many languages
5. Mean­ing is not a mat­ter of what a per­son meant by a state­ment, that is, his or her inten­tions in mak­ing the state­ment. If it were, we each could have that same inten­tion in our minds. But that would mean that there is a uni­ver­sal truth we could know apart from how we use lan­guage. Instead, mean­ing is just a mat­ter of how words are used within a social set­ting, or com­mu­nity, accord­ing to the gram­mat­i­cal rules for its language.
6. Since we can­not know the real world as it truly is, and our only con­tact with it is by how we talk, each com­mu­nity “makes” its own social world by the use of its language.[6]

Thus, while a real world objec­tively exists, we can­not come into con­tact with this real world because we are bound by lan­guage con­ven­tions, social con­ven­tions, cul­tural con­ven­tions, etc. As truth is the prod­uct of lan­guage, soci­ety and cul­ture, who are we to judge another cul­ture? Who is to say that the truth claims of one cul­ture are applic­a­ble to the truth claims of another cul­ture? We can­not know. Thus, while an objec­tive world does exist, we are resigned to for­ever inter­pret that world, unable to know it as it truly is. Truth claims then become com­pet­ing inter­pre­ta­tions, all of which are equal. The view above is imme­di­ately self refut­ing for it is assumed to be absolutely true that we can­not know the real world as it exists, which would be an actual state of affairs for the real world as it truly (objec­tively) is. Thus, the very thing it claims we can­not know, it assumes to know. Fur­ther­more, this results in the absur­dity of know­ing the real world as it truly is, a real world which has the fea­ture of being unknowable.

Ulti­mately, such a view con­fuses our per­cep­tion of real­ity and truth with what real­ity and truth actu­ally are. The most obvi­ous con­fu­sion is between the arbi­trary nature of words, sen­tences, lan­guages, signs, etc., (semi­otics) and those things they describe. Using the green­ness of grass as an exam­ple, More­land writes, “Grass’ being green makes Sally’s thought true even if Sally is blind and can­not tell whether or not it is true, and even if Sally does not believe the thought. Real­ity makes thoughts true or false. A thought is not made true by some­one believ­ing it or by some­one being able to deter­mine whether or not it is true”.[7] To bring to atten­tion the less obvi­ous, con­trary to the pre­sup­po­si­tions of post­mod­ernism, sen­tences — lan­guage — is not nec­es­sary to express propo­si­tional con­tent, thus we find our­selves out­side lan­guage. As an exam­ple, babies think prior to their learn­ing a lan­guage. It’s very clear that babies per­ceive and under­stand the world, per­haps describ­ing it in gib­ber­ish until such time it’s taught lan­guage. Thus the only viable posi­tion for the post­mod­ernist would be to adopt an extreme skep­ti­cism, how can we be sure we’re per­ceiv­ing the real world? Though it seems to me this skep­ti­cism is wholly unnec­es­sary on the basis of our con­tin­ued  (suc­cess­ful) inter­ac­tion with the world.

Under­stand­ing the post­mod­ern posi­tion with respect to truth, we turn to the emer­gent Christian.

Keep­ing in line with the post­mod­ern view of truth, Jones denies that there is such a thing as objec­tive, uni­ver­sal truth, “in Jones’ opin­ion, in a post­mod­ern world there is no objec­tive, uni­ver­sal truth. Instead, all is rel­a­tive.… Jones writes that post­mod­ernism leaves us in a rel­a­tivis­tic sit­u­a­tion.… per­cep­tion is reality”.[8] Jones com­mits the same error, con­fus­ing per­cep­tion with what a thing actu­ally is. In The New Chris­tians Jones brings atten­tion to his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tives and frame­works. We all approach an event, the res­ur­rec­tion and empty tomb, for exam­ple, with cer­tain pre­sup­po­si­tions and its those pre­sup­po­si­tions which dic­tate our reac­tion to the event. While this is true to a degree, it is not so true that it negates our abil­ity to know the world as it actu­ally is. Keep­ing in mind, of course, that post­mod­ernism is sus­cep­ti­ble to the same crit­i­cisms it lev­els towards other ‘meta­nar­ra­tives’. What answer is there in say­ing, ‘I might be wrong that you’re wrong, or I might be right that you’re wrong, either way we’ll never know so here, adopt my world view!’ In the end, the emer­gent Chris­t­ian denies the pos­si­bil­ity of any uni­ver­sal or absolute truth.

This leads to a cou­ple clear impli­ca­tions. Firstly, that within emer­gent lit­er­a­ture there is great empha­sis placed on jour­ney, rather than des­ti­na­tion; jour­neys are inter­pre­ta­tions, the des­ti­na­tion can’t be objec­tively known. This empha­sis on jour­ney neces­si­tates the view that it doesn’t mat­ter what jour­ney one is on (Chris­t­ian, Islamic, Judaic, Bud­dhist, Hindu, etc.), as long as one is sin­cere in that jour­ney, God will honor that per­son. Con­trast what David Well’s has said about the notion of jour­ney in Pil­grims Progress with what Spencer Burke of theooze.com has said of the emer­gent journey:

There really is a dif­fer­ence between Bunyan’s notion of spir­i­tual pil­grim­age and the post­mod­ern idea of spir­i­tual jour­ney.… The point of spir­i­tu­al­ity is in the expe­ri­ence of the jour­ney­ing, not in the pur­pose of reach­ing the des­ti­na­tion. For Bun­yan, the pil­grim­age is about the cer­tain knowl­edge that Chris­tians have of “the bet­ter coun­try” to which they travel and of the way in which they must con­duct them­selves on the jour­ney in prepa­ra­tion for the One to whom they are traveling.[9]

Tour guides don’t feel free to devi­ate from the “route” other Chris­tians have set. What’s more, they’re apt to impose that same kind of rigid struc­ture on oth­ers. Becom­ing a trav­eler, how­ever, enables you to be true to your­self .… As a trav­eler, I am free to love and to be loved. I’m not wor­ried about tak­ing a wrong step or los­ing my posi­tion, I’m just one more per­son on the journey–a beloved child of God.[10]

Aptly sum­ma­rized by Kevin DeY­oung, “for emerg­ing Chris­tians, the jour­ney of the Chris­t­ian life is less about our pil­grim­age through this fallen world that is not our home, and more about the wild, uncen­sored adven­ture of mys­tery and para­dox. We are not tour guides who know where we are going and stick to the course”.[11] What wor­ries me is this idea that Burke (and by exten­sion, emer­gents who lis­ten to Burke) is not wor­ried about tak­ing a wrong step or los­ing his posi­tion. No men­tion of work­ing out our sal­va­tion with fear and trem­bling (Philip­pi­ans 2:12). No men­tion of ‘run­ning the race; (Hebrews 12; races are, as we all know, laid down on set courses with defin­i­tive des­ti­na­tions in mind). No men­tion that the ‘gate is nar­row’ and many miss it (Matthew 7). I sup­pose in the words of Eck­hart Tolle, “Love is not selec­tive.… It is not exclusive”.[12]

Sec­ondly, as men­tioned above by DeY­oung, there is an increased empha­sis on mys­tery and para­dox. As Jones has stated, “so a divine human being (Jesus) is truth. God is tran­scen­dent and imma­nent. Truth is both reli­able and con­tex­tual. Rel­a­tivism is rel­a­tively absolute. Para­doxes abound in the Chris­t­ian faith“[13] and the strong impli­ca­tion is that these should all be embraced. The prob­lem with this state­ment is the con­text within which it is made. Mys­tery and para­dox, for the emer­gent Chris­t­ian, is to be enjoyed and pur­sued but never fig­ured out. To make any def­i­nite claims about any of the above — Christs nature, the abil­ity to know a tran­scen­dent, immi­nent God, the nature of truth and rel­a­tivism — is to claim we can know some­thing about the world as it truly is, which is not only impos­si­ble but a power play. To  claim that we can know a thing is sim­ply arro­gant and igno­rant, we can­not be sure that we know a thing, we’ve been wrong in the past, after all. Whereas the ortho­dox Chris­t­ian will develop the doc­trine of the Hypo­sta­tic Union, or a doc­trine of rev­e­la­tion, the emer­gent Chris­t­ian will sim­ply revel in mys­tery and para­dox, lib­er­a­tion takes the form of igno­rance, not know­ing.

Andy Crouch of Chris­tian­ity Today wrote an arti­cle titled The Emer­gent Mys­tique, an inter­view with Rob and Kristin Bell. Crouch writes, “the Bells started ques­tion­ing their assump­tions about the Bible itself—“discovering the Bible as a human prod­uct,” as Rob puts it, rather than the prod­uct of divine fiat. “The Bible is still in the cen­ter for us,” Rob says, “but it’s a dif­fer­ent kind of cen­ter. We want to embrace mys­tery, rather than con­quer it. I grew up think­ing that we’ve fig­ured out the Bible,” Kris­ten says, “that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I feel like life is big again—like life used to be black and white, and now it’s in color.“[14] This seems to me to be the wrong approach, how­ever. When I have ‘no idea’ what most of some­thing means, I’m not embrac­ing it’s mys­tery, I’m embrac­ing my own igno­rance. I’m more in love with the idea than with attempt­ing in the very min­i­mum a basic under­stand­ing of the idea in ques­tion. I appre­ci­ate the mys­ter­ies of the Chris­t­ian faith more, now that I have even a lim­ited under­stand­ing of what they are.Whereas before any appre­ci­a­tion I had would have been directed at the mys­tery sim­ply because it was a mys­tery, not because I under­stood the mys­tery. Ulti­mately, such an empha­sis on mys­tery and para­dox might sim­ply be a way to avoid tough issues such as eter­nal sal­va­tion, as men­tioned by Jones above.

We must real­ize how­ever that there is a dif­fer­ence between embrac­ing and cel­e­brat­ing mys­ter­ies and para­doxes and embrac­ing out­right absur­di­ties and con­tra­dic­tions. Notably, the emer­gent church has done away with the law of non-contradiction which states that a thing can­not be both ‘A’ and ‘non-A’ (truth can­not be both rel­a­tive (A) and absolute (non-A), it is either/or, not both/and).While it may be a mys­tery and appar­ent para­dox that Jesus is both divine and human, prop­erly under­stood it is not a con­tra­dic­tion. God may be tran­scen­dent and beyond under­stand­ing, but through His rev­e­la­tion to us He is not unknow­able or unap­proach­able, again we find a mys­tery or an appar­ent para­dox, but no con­tra­dic­tion. On the other hand when dis­cussing the nature of truth and rel­a­tivism, Jones posits absur­di­ties and con­tra­dic­tions, rather than mys­ter­ies and appar­ent paradox’s. If by say­ing “truth is reli­able and con­tex­tual” Jones intends to say “rel­a­tive and absolute,” then Jones vio­lates the law of non-contradiction. We arrive at the same con­clu­sion when Jones says that “rel­a­tivism is rel­a­tively absolute,” a log­i­cal impos­si­bil­ity. It’s very shal­low the­ol­ogy, which is unfor­tu­nate as the promi­nent rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the emer­gent church are far from uneducated.

Thirdly and lastly, the denial of any uni­ver­sal, objec­tive truth removes the imme­di­acy and force of the claims inher­ent within Chris­tian­ity (such as eter­nal sal­va­tion being exclu­sive). It’s not sim­ply that every­thing is ques­tioned. It’s that every­thing is ques­tioned and given an answer: that may be good for them, but not nec­es­sar­ily for me. The dan­ger, of course, is that one can still say, ‘you must accept Christ’ but such a state­ment would be with­out foun­da­tion. As Brian McLaren always likes to drive home, ‘we’ve been wrong in the past’ well, what if we’re com­pletely wrong? Either way, accord­ing to post­moder­nity, we’ll likely never know.

So again I say, is it any won­der we’re con­cerned with truth?

[1] Tony Jones, The New Chris­tians: Dis­patches from the Emer­gent Fron­tier (San Fran­cisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), 154.
[2] J.P. More­land, “Truth, Con­tem­po­rary Phi­los­o­phy, and the Post­mod­ern Turn,” What­ever Hap­pened to Truth? (Illi­nois: Cross­way, 2005), 76.
[3] Ibid., 76.
[4] Ibid., 77
[5] Ibid., 79.
[6] R. Scott Smith, Truth and the New Kind of Chris­t­ian: The Emerg­ing Effects of Post­mod­ernism In the Church (Illi­nois: Cross­way, 2005), 30.
[7] Truth, Con­tem­po­rary Phi­los­o­phy, and the Post­mod­ern Turn,” 77
[8] Truth and the New Kind of Chris­t­ian, 70.
[9] David F. Wells, Above all Earthly Pow’rs (Grand Rapids: Eerd­mans, 2005), 122 (empha­sis orig­i­nal). Quoted in Kevin DeY­oung and Ted Kluck, Why We’re Not Emer­gent: by Two Guys who Should be (Chicago: Moody Pub­lish­ers, 2008), 33–34.
[10] Spencer Burke with Colleen Pep­per, Mak­ing Sense of the Church (Grand Rapids: Zon­der­van, 2003), 45. Quoted in Kevin DeY­oung and Ted Kluck, Why We’re Not Emer­gent: by Two Guys who Should be (Chicago: Moody Pub­lish­ers, 2008), 32.
[11] Kevin DeY­oung and Ted Kluck, Why We’re Not Emer­gent: by Two Guys who Should be (Chicago: Moody Pub­lish­ers, 2008), 32.
[12] Eck­hart Tolle, The Power of Now (Van­cou­ver: Namaste Pub­lish­ing, 1999), 155.
[13] The New Chris­tians, 162.
[14] Andy Crouch, “The Emer­gent Mys­tique,” Chris­tian­ity Today, Novem­ber 1^st, 2004, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/november/12.36.html?start=2 (accessed August 1^st, 2009).

Related posts:

1. Truth and unbelief
2. Galileo: Truth isn’t Absolute
3. Unable to Pre­pare for the Journey?
4. The Bible, Propaganda?
5. John Wilkin­son: “Truth is Manufactured”