I’ve had numerous conversations over the past few years, and even some in recent weeks, which cause me to think that I need to start a long series of more elaborate posts on what I mean when I argue against “absolute/objective” truth. At a deep level, since I speak mostly with Christians, this kind of talk is scary. For me to have reached this conclusion, and still remain a Christian within a strong confessional tradition, appears from the outside to be a contradiction in terms. Yet it’s been a long journey. As such, when I have one hour to converse with someone, there is literally no possible way for me to help a person understand how I’ve reached my conclusion, even worse, to have them be able to share my conclusions.
So, in an effort to extend some of those conversations onto this blog, and in fact, to inspire more of them, I’ve put together an outline of what I’ll be developing in the coming days/weeks/months to lay out the issues in this particularly sensitive and complicated topic.
No doubt, as the list of posts develops, some of the material will overlap. As I write, I may feel the need to amend this outline, which I will simply do without notifying the reader. Every post will be linked to the points on this outline, and I’ll begin every post with a link to this outline, so the reader (whether s/he has been following the whole time, or is new to the convo) can keep up with where we’ve been and where we’re headed.
The outline below is meant to divide the journey up into manageable chunks. Each point is strategically placed so that by the end of each post, some of the questions raised in the reader’s mind will be anticipated within the next post. This will give the reader time to read, reflect, and wrestle with the content before I post again. Thus, not every post will answer everything, but I hope by the end, I will have answered most things and provided both some tools to find other answers and great fodder for further conversation.
So without further ado, the tentative outline. The first post should appear within a few days.
Situating the Conversation about Absolute Truth
- Foundationalism
- Non-(or anti-) foundationalism
- The Enlightenment
- Trying to argue like science
The Affective Element of the Conversation
- Fear of real doubt
- Is morality up for grabs?
- I stake my life on the promises of God – does all that go our the window now?
The “Suppressed Binary Opposite” – what are you trying to protect?
- The God who “must” be
- Logocentrism – words “hook up” with reality
- Correspondence and Coherence
- Morality and our way of life
Descriptive and Prescriptive Arguments
- Logic as a construct
- The “self-referential argument” accusation
- What type of argumentation we’re actually practicing here
- What type of argumentation contemporary apologetics is using
Belief and Presuppositions
- The intimate connection
- Faith as fundamental to all knowing
- The a priori and how we can’t escape it
- Some examples of the a priori
- Examining our presuppositions like Socrates
Certainty, Knowledge, Doubt
- Whether or not Certainty is possible
- Whether or not we’re stuck with only radical doubt
- The kinds of knowledge
- The marginalization of certain kinds of knowledge
- The provisionality of knowledge
Language, Discourse, Discursive Practices
- The “Prison-House of Language”? – are we all stuck in language?
- Discourse as our way of getting along in the world
- Discursive practices as constitutive of life, learning, knowing
Claiming, Asserting, Believing
- Exploring what we’re actually up to
- Tolerance and other beliefs/believers
Persuasion, Argumentation, Justification – Reasons to Believe
- What makes beliefs believable?
- If knowledge is provisional, why try to argue?
- If knowledge is provisional and we can’t be certain, what counts as justification?
Postmodernism
- Do you really want to understand it?
- Once you label me, you negate me
- What postmodernism is actually up to
- Logically prior to modernism
Pluralism as Reality
- If knowledge is provisional, there is room for a variety of views
- Does that mean that all are equally valid?
- Are various practices within one tradition valid, or must there be uniformity?
- Does unity equal uniformity?
Christianity as one view among many
- Is this a descriptive argument or a prescriptive argument?
- What are the consequences?
Religion and Truth
- The religiousness of all views (or, all views are faith based, or faith is constitutive of all knowledge)
- Truth as a concept internally defined by every world view
Radical Faith
- If there isn’t any absolute truth, what now?
Chad, thanks for doing this outline. Since my talks with you, I have been challenged and forced to wrestle with a lot of my presuppositions. I am hoping that a better understanding of post-modern thought will help me on a pragmatic level as i try to speak to a new generation of people. I guess i say all of this to let you know that i will be reading and i am excited for your thoughts.
Chad, no doubt the title of this post is attention grabbing. In hopes of understanding your claim, let me start with a few clarifying questions. Are you making a theological or philosophical claim? Are you being descriptive or prescriptive? I am trying to reconcile your claim in light of Jesus’ own claim that he alone is the Truth. His claim is one of objective truth coming from the Father. I am not suggesting a fundamentalism but remaining completely in the Lutheran doctrine of the Word of God. Granted we have not had the opportunity to talk about this in person but I would like to banter this about some as you unfold your outline over time. We haven’t talked for some time, since my family and I visited the Crave while at the sem. Thanks for your response.
Rob, thanks for writing. You’ll just have to read to see how I work it out. But, let me just point out what you say yourself. “His claim is one of objective truth coming from the Father.” The key word there is claim. That’s what we’re doing in making our claims. We have no access to a privileged position. We’re only claiming one. My argument is thus philosophical and theological. It’s primarily descriptive of how we argue.
Thanks Chad. I look forward to the conversation rolling out. Denying access to truth or a privileged position is not the same as denying its existence apart from us. Theologically, no one has access to the truth of God apart from God coming to us externally. Your arguments echo Stanley Fish in many ways.
To follow up on Gabe, while it is great to learn how to engage post-modern thought, we should not grant them the right of defining all the ground rules. It’s about getting into the lives of others.
Rob and Chad,
My study of the Apostle John’s use of truth with regards to Jesus concludes that truth is more than just opposite of falsehood, but rather it is reality; further, truth is more than an accurate description of reality, but is a relationship to reality (to the Father by Jesus through the Holy Spirit). This, it seems to me, implies that seeing Jesus’ claim to absolute truth as objective in a scientific (Enlightenment) sense is inadequate. I must say that my reaction to this study is to be confused. I don’t know how to think about truth in the way I described it above, and yet I trust the sources used to arrive at this conclusion (Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels’ article on Truth; Raymond Brown’s Commentary on John, NICONT John by Morris). Well, I am very interested in what you have to say, Chad.
And to muddy the waters a bit further, many read Jesus’ assertion to be truth in a way that makes him sound like a post-Enlightenment-Modernist-something-or-rather, which he wasn’t.
Granted, I’m making a classically postmodern move by pointing this out…
I am very pleased to see the influence of Derrida in word choices such as “binary opposite” and “logocentrism”. You don’t get many readers of Derrida this side of the globe. Where some scholars might think that Derrida is passe in the States, most South African scholars haven’t even read him.