‘A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!!!’ -Nietzsche
Three years ago I spoke with a Salvation Army officer about the apparently irreconcilable differences between Christian and secular philosophies of counselling. A professional counsellor had taught her that the only way to treat some clients is to remove any hopes they might have of complete recovery: admitting that you are not fully rehabilitatable is the precondition for any rehabilitation whatsoever. My officer friend felt that as a Christian she could not accept this principle.
To demonstrate that I took the point, I gave what I thought was a plain restatement of her position: ‘You prefer an approach that’s based on faith’. She returned, ‘I prefer one based on Truth’; and I guessed from her delivery and countenance that the last word was spelled with a capital ‘T’.
Christians, it seems, are addicted to the notion of the truth. John 8:32 is a favourite verse of Bible day calendars and Christian student newspapers: ‘Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’. But Christ’s use of the concept of truth by no means guarantees that we now understand this concept. The Greek word for truth is aletheia, the name Aristotle gave to the object of rational inquiry in Metaphysics—which, as he puts it, ‘no one is able to attain adequately’. Any faith seeking understanding cannot ignore the difficulties that so impressed this great thinker. Perhaps, in other words, the question posed by Aristotle, Pontius Pilate, and Postmodernity alike—‘What is truth?’—might not be a glib retort, but a serious expression of wonderment; aporia: we, who thought we knew what truth was, now find ourselves perplexed.
Perhaps this is how the truth sets us free?
Some say that truth is built like a house, on an unshakeable foundation. Descartes, for example, tried assembling a starter-set of indubitable beliefs upon which to establish something ‘firm and lasting in the sciences’. This is the implicit approach of many contemporary Protestant interpretations of scripture as well, which seem to regard the Bible as an agglomeration of incorrigible propositions. Typically, such readings can be identified by their insistence that the Bible is inerrant and scientifically prescient. Now the poetry of Job anticipates Copernican astronomy. Now the Law of Moses contains an early version of quantum physics. Now the Book of Revelation can be read as tomorrow’s newspaper, with the horns of the Beast representing the countries of the European Union. One website claims, for example, that 2 Peter 3:7—‘The present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men’—expresses Lavoisier’s mass conservation law.
Foundationalism is problematic simply as a philosophical doctrine since, as Descartes and his successors discovered, there is very little knowledge so certain that no reasonable person could doubt it, and many philosophers are uncomfortable resting the bulk of their beliefs on inference alone. In a word, foundationalism is the gateway to radical scepticism. And it is especially problematic in the case of Biblical truth, which is mostly narrative rather than propositional in nature: biblical truth fits the form of life—i.e., flux: becoming, passing away, change. Foundationalist readings of scripture are an ill-conceived variation on Platonism, an attempt to escape from this flux. This time around the perfect, unchanging entities are prophecies rather than forms, but like Plato’s forms, they must exist in another dimension if at all.
Another theory maintains that the truth of a set of beliefs lies in its internal coherence. Such a view raises difficulties almost immediately. First, mere logical coherence may be achieved by any number of entirely incompatible belief systems, forcing us either to abandon coherentism or to let it collapse into relativism. Second, coherence is itself a slippery concept, and not always a desirable one. Does a contradiction, for example, amount to a falsehood? For rather different reasons Hegel and Kierkegaard both urge us to accept contradictions. This makes sense coming from a pair of Christians, since scripture is full of what our logic calls ‘contradictions’. Perhaps, however, this need not be to the Bible’s detriment: many theologians and scholars see literary and theological merit in the Hebrew practice of telling a story in two or more very different ways. Narrative truth, once again, is not the truth of the axioms of geometry.
There is also the problem of relating a coherent belief system to reality. The ‘relativism dilemma’ described above reflects this difficulty: my doctrines are logically consistent, and your doctrines are logically consistent, but they are not compatible—so whose doctrines correctly describe the world? Unfortunately, a discussion of the connection between human thought and ‘objective’ reality raises a number of complicated metaphysical and epistemological questions and would take us far afield indeed. Terms like ‘realism’, ‘idealism’, ‘dialectic’, and ‘world-subject synthesis’ might arise. Suffice it to say here that many philosophers believe that in addition to logical consistency, our beliefs must correspond to reality. This is a tempting thesis, and one that most non-philosophers would likely suggest if pressed to offer a criterion of truth, since it presupposes our common-sense belief in an objective world. But in addition to the difficult questions raised by this presupposition, correspondence theories entail the difficulty of establishing some means of checking up on the correspondence between our beliefs and reality. How can we be sure that our knowledge corresponds to the objects of our knowledge? As Kant wrote, ‘I can only compare the object with my knowledge by taking knowledge of it. My knowledge, then, is to be verified by itself, which is far from being sufficient for truth’.
With such puzzles generated by our attempts to give an account of truth, we may be tempted to resort to an unreasoning appeal to authority—‘God said it, I believe it, and that settles it’, for example. Of course some appeal to authority is a necessary component of Christian faith, since Christianity demands that God revealed himself in Christ in a unique, privileged way. Nonetheless, if we accept that, say, the teachings of Christ are imbued with divine authority, we have not thereby solved the problem of truth, for there will still be disagreements as to what these teachings actually say. John chapter eight, for example—the passage from whence comes the beloved ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free’—is riddled with almost inscrutable sayings. The narrator informs us several times of the perplexed reaction of the audience to Christ’s words: ‘This made the Jews ask, “Will he kill himself? Is that why he says, ‘Where I go, you cannot come’?”’ (verse 22); ‘“Who are you?” they asked’ (verse 25); ‘They did not understand that he was telling them about his Father’ (verse 27). The difficulty of interpreting Christ’s teachings does not malign them; rather, no teachings capable of inspiring such enduring interest and commentary could do so without some amount of hermeneutical controversy. ‘All truth is simple: is this not a compound lie?’ asked Nietzsche. No transparent formulas will do justice to the mulifarious and complicated nature of truth. That we have difficulties interpreting the teachings of Christ is a testimony to their grandeur.
It is perhaps unfair to claim that we Christians are addicted to the notion of truth; better to say that we are addicted to the delusion that truth is something we have mastered. Far from possessing complete knowledge of the things that are true, we are not even in command of the concept of truth itself. Indeed, it is an error to think that such command is possible: like a great city, truth never reaches some final state of completion, but is always rearranging itself, always expanding and evolving, because if it did not do so it would die. If we are to achieve any grip whatsoever on the truth, we must first recognise that we can never grasp it absolutely. Again—perhaps it is in this way that truth sets us free.
