I came across a quote by Jeremy Campbell in The Liar’s Tale that seemed significant in light of the lengthy dialogue taking place in the post about epistemology below. Campbell says:
It is a creeping assumption at the start of a new millennium that the are things more important than truth.
As I read the healthy dialogue being volleyed back and forth between Zac and Jennifer, it seems to me that the elephant in the room is that at least one party is holding tightly to a worldview that values something (you fill in the blank) more than truth (I am sure the question will then be asked, “What is truth?” and “How are we to know truth?”)
Are we living in an era where people, particular postmoderns or post-postmoderns, value the journey toward truth – which they believe is ultimately unknoweable in a definitive, absolute sense of the word – more than they value truth itself? Do we value our subjective, relative experiences more than we value the truth claims of Scripture, especially when we find said truth to be incompatible or irreconcilable to our experience? This is a more important question to me than whether or not one can define or defend what truth, which is always under assault in both secular and spiritual circles, is because I’m convinced it is the preservation of some value other than truth that erodes the foundation of truth as revealed in God’s Word.
So the question would then be, if there are things that people value more than truth, what are those things that we value so supremely that we are willing to compromise truth in order to maintain our grip on them?
Promise & Pleasure 
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 8, 2008 at 8:08 pm
hensleyzachary
I will say this:
I actually have some sympathies with some of the things that the emergents are saying. They are critiquing what I would call the objectivist (not Ayn Rand) project of knowledge. Not only does the objectivist claim that there is objective truth; he claims that he has object access to it. I would not have a problem with the former claim (obviously); it’s the latter that I think is a problem.
The emergents point out, like I said in the other post, that there are skeptical concerns with claiming some kind of objective access to truth. However, they are merely playing the same game as the objectivist. The emergent wants objective access to knowledge; just not as much as does the traditional evangelical. They can’t have it both ways.
The way that I see it is that the objectivist is continuing on Descartes’ project to place knowledge on such a secure foundation that even if God wanted to deceive you it would be impossible for God to do so. This, I think, is beyond our lot as creatures. If God chooses to deceive us–and the Scriptures do attribute to God the darkening of hearts, the sending of lying spirits to deceive prophets, etc.–then there is no remedy to this (of course this is making a major distinction between deception and lying).
I whole-heartedly affirm Clark’s view of our situation. In order for any thought to get off the ground–so to speak–one must make arbitrary assumptions and these arbitrary assumptions are just that: arbitrary. They are equally arbitrary. Jennifer thought that reliability of senses wasn’t arbitrary because–I presume–she thinks it’s more important or necessary than Clark’s axiom of revelation (though she only inadvertently proves my point in making this claim).
I think that for far too long Christians have assumed that the biblical position was the Cartesian position. It is not. I think that the emergents recognize something is wrong with the Cartesian position, but they end up mired in the same mess.
It is interesting that no one in the Scriptures ever tries to give a defense of the existence of God nor the divine authorship of the scriptures. They are merely assumed to be so. Even when Paul argues against the Athenians, he does not set about defending his axiom of revelation; rather, he proclaims his axiom of revelation. It is not the job of the apologist to prove Christianity to be true or even likely to be true–these are fictions in the mind of the objectivist who thinks that there is something given that must not be assumed. Even if we can agree on the right logic by which to adjudicate our competing positions, this logic is still assumed for you cannot prove the consistency or the completeness of formal logic without using your system.
God is sovereign. May He cause me to choose correctly in my axiom–which includes the meaning of the Scriptures as well. So, while I agree with the emergents that one cannot have what I would call meta-criterial certainity–i.e., certainty that one has chosen the correct presuppositions–one certainly can have criterial certainty–i.e., given my assumption of the axiom of revelation then I can be certain of a great many truths. This does not mean that every system is correct; for as Karl Popper has said, when you are on a mountain you may not be able to tell if you are at the peak of the mountain, but it certainly does not change the fact that there is a peak.
So, perhaps someone doesn’t like the situation that I’ve described, but what is one to do? Gordon Clark put it this way: you’ve, then, got a choice between dogmatism (this view) and suicide. I prefer dogmatism.
May 8, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Jennifer
Haha, well thanks for not mentioning me by name.
I certainly do not speak for every “emergent” or “post-modern,” but I personally don’t value anything more than truth. Well, that’s not true, but intellectually, I don’t value anything above it. But when I say truth, I mean the way things really are. I do not mean the doctrine of the Trinity or justification by faith alone or the inerrancy of the Bible or the hermeneutical priority of Romans 5 in establishing one’s soteriology, and those are the things we’re really talking about when evangelicals throw around phrases like “objective” and “absolute truth.” I value and seek truth in such a way that if I find the truth to be something different than I set out thinking it was, I adjust my belief. This has led to the deconstruction of just about all of Christian theology for me, and do you want to know why? It’s because somebody told me it was all based on the Bible, and that made me feel safe and secure. And then I read the Bible. If they hadn’t made such a big deal about the absolute unerring authority and perfection and pure Godness of the Bible, and if they hadn’t pretended that all of orthodox Christianity comes straight from it, then I might still be right on board. But when I found out they were wrong, everything fell apart from me, and I had to start looking for something new, something I’m still working on. I still love God a lot, and Jesus, and the Bible. But I’m not quite sold on what evangelicals are saying about them. And the very reason for that is reverence for and amazement at the Bible.
Here is one of my favorite quotes:
“There has been a tendency to treat this ‘principle of experience’ as unique to feminist theology…and to see it as distant from ‘objective’ sources of truth of classical theologies. This seems to be a misunderstanding of the experimental base of all theological reflection. What have been called the objective sources of theology: Scripture and tradition, are themselves codified collective human experience.” – Rosemary Radford Ruether
And no, I don’t value the journey over the destination. But I have found that in my youth, I was naive about where the destination was, and I have adjusted my course accordingly. But I am picking up truths all along the way, I’ve got tons of truths. They’re just different from your Truth. But we both value truth. And it’s the Bible that’s divorced me from your Truth.
May 9, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Tim
Nice blog site with some good exchanges- I’ll contribute a little more when I get settled in my new place of ministry. Blessings and peace.