Proverbs 1:20-23 Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises
her voice. 21 At the busiest
corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: 22 "How long, O simple ones,
will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge? 23
Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my
words known to you.
Introduction
The mission of the Church involves the proclamation of
the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the central truth of which is the good news that Jesus died on the cross
for our sins and was raised on the third day from the dead. The Gospel that we proclaim makes both historical
and theological claims about truth.
Proclaiming the Gospel as truth, however, has any number of
challenges—perhaps never so much as in our own day. We see different understandings of truth
today (Pontius Pilate is not alone in asking ‘What is truth’—Jn. 18.38). When erroneous views of truth are entertained
within the Church, however, the mission of the Church is itself under threat. This matter, so much discussed in the West,
is increasingly important in South Africa today, where a Neo-Colonial theology
and ethic that denies any higher authority than the community itself in endless
dialogue resettles long-held Christian convictions to obscure, under-developed
homelands where they can fade away in increasing irrelevancy.
A
Question of Truth
Truth
as Factual:
The truth of Christianity is based on
certain facts--facts that, if not true, undermine the foundations of the
faith. So, for example, Christians
believe that Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried. He was raised on the third day, was seen by
many after his resurrection, and ascended into heaven. These beliefs entail several factual
claims—claims that could be verified by eyewitnesses. People saw him crucified, saw the test that
he was dead when the Roman soldier pierced his side, and saw him placed in a
tomb. And numerous people testified that
they encountered the risen Jesus at different times and places until he was
taken up into heaven before another crowd of witnesses. Of course, the claim that he was resurrected
from the dead was doubted by many of those who did not see him and by those who
did not believe the testimony of those who did.
The factual testimony became a matter of belief.
The first challenges to early Christian testimony
about Jesus’ death and resurrection had to do with his resurrection: no one
doubted that he was crucified. What
religion would not only acknowledge but testify to the fact that their leader
was not only dead but was put to death by both religious and political authorities
and that his death was for insurrection as a would-be king? Thus, as Matthew’s Gospel tells us, when the
Jewish priests heard that Jesus was no longer in the tomb, they paid off
soldiers to testify that they were asleep at their posts when Jesus’ disciples
came and stole his body (Mt. 28.12-14).
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a philosophical distinction
between fact and truth was made that allowed some to disavow the fact of the
resurrection while affirming the truth of the resurrection, expressed in terms
of a ‘spiritual resurrection’ or an ‘existential truth’ (such as that there is
always hope after tragedy!). This
nuanced view of truth says everything about the interpreter in our day and
nothing about what happened around AD 30 in Jerusalem to a man named
‘Jesus.’ An applicant to a prestigious
seminary recently asked the faculty interviewing him, ‘Do you believe in the
resurrection of Jesus Christ?’—to which one of the faculty replied, ‘It depends
on what you mean by ‘the resurrection’.’
He might as well have asked, ‘What is truth?’
Later in the first and second centuries, the testimony
that Jesus had died was also challenged.
The greater distance from the events and original witnesses, the more
people could question the facts. An
early heresy, called ‘Docetism’ (from a Greek word meaning ‘it seems’) claimed that Jesus only seemed to die. Some later (and related), second century
Gnostic groups put out the idea that a man ‘Jesus’ died, but the divine
‘Christ’ was actually not on the cross. They
needed to invent this distinction because they believed that the material world
was something other than god, a mistaken creation, and either irrelevant or
evil—depending on which form of Gnosticism one has in mind. Some centuries later, following this Gnostic
teaching, the Quran claimed that Jesus did not die on the cross; in fact, it
was claimed, he was taken up into heaven without dying at all. This is, of course, a matter of making
factual claims in order to suit a given theology, rather than affirming the
eyewitness testimony of the facts and reflecting on their theological
implications. Note, however, that all
such perspectives can be verified on the basis of the facts of the case: truth
is understood as a matter of the facts.
Scripture
affirms other facts than historical facts. For example, Christians
believe certain things about the world and God that are taken as facts even if
not subject to historical analysis. We believe in God, that there is one
God in three Persons, that God made the world, that all authority in heaven and
on earth is under Jesus' Lordship, that Jesus is coming again, that there will
be a resurrection, and so forth. Among these beliefs are beliefs that
Christian ethics is based on God's plan for the world that He created.
So, for example, God made the world a certain way and not some other way,
and therefore to live according to His plan or not to do so is the basic
storyline of human history. If God created male and female to cleave together
and become one flesh in marriage to fulfill the mandate to be fruitful and
multiply, then Biblical sexual ethics is based on this understanding of
sexuality and rules out alternatives. This is not merely a 'belief' about
something uncertain, this is a belief that makes a claim about the facts as
they exist.
Thus, truth is understood in Scripture and by Christians to be about facts, whether
historical or theological or ethical. To say that 'we believe' is to say
more than that 'we think': Christian faith is to stake a claim, to assert
something as fact. If we say that we believe Jesus rose from the dead, we
assert an historical fact. If we say that we believe in God the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth, we make a claim that is equally factual but not
historically verifiable. It is a theological fact that, if not true,
undermines all the rest of Christian faith. Equally, there are ethical
facts. If God made the world a certain way, then we are to live within
those constraints. If God made marriage to be between a man and a woman,
then, as Scripture consistently asserts, humans are not to have sexual
relations with animals, engage in homosexual relations, commit adultery, and so
forth. This is not simply because this is our preference; we believe that
this is because God made the world this way and that 'those who do such things
will not inherit the Kingdom of God,' as Paul says (1 Cor. 6.9-11).
Truth
as Functional:
Another challenge to presenting the truth of the
Gospel in our day and in the West is that truth is often considered to be less
about the facts of a matter and more about something else. On the one hand, expanding our understanding
of truth as more than about facts is helpful. So, for example, it is not just important to
state that Jesus died on a cross but
to understand the significance of
this in terms of the theological fact
that his death was for us. It was
sacrificial and redemptive. Historical
assertions and theological claims go hand in hand; they are inseparable.
What good is it, for example, to argue that Scripture,
which speaks of miracles from beginning to end, is without error—inerrant—only
to deny that they occur today (Cessationism)?
In such a case, the facts of Scripture are affirmed but their relevance
for life today is denied. Scripture may
be factually ‘inerrant,’ but its
worldview is no longer functionally true.
Yet the helpful realization that facts are always interpreted
facts does not mean that there are no facts.
Empirical philosophers such as George Berkeley needed to ask for the
purposes of philosophical speculation whether a tree can fall in a woods if
nobody observes it, but everyone else knows full well that trees do in fact
fall over whether observed or not. My
relationship to the fact of such an event, moreover, does not affect the
truthfulness of the event. It may be
very significant for me, especially
if my house is in the woods and has been crushed under the tree. There may be implications for me that the tree fell over, such as that I now
have easy access to firewood. And there
may be important reasons to explore the causes
for the tree’s demise, such as that the ground has shifted or there are
termites. Yet none of these additional
matters pertain to the fact itself: the tree fell over. Truth may include more than the facts of the
matter; it may include the significance, implications, and causes. Yet none of this is relevant unless it is
also factual. Truth may be functional,
but it is also objective.
In ethics, the tendency in recent
scholarship and in Western society has been to deny any concrete ethic, such as
rules or norms. This shift might be
noticed in Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that morality was a construction of
persons holding power in society and asserting their views on others.[1] It was advocated by Emotivist philosophers,
such as A. J. Ayers, who likened moral claims to nothing more than our
individual preferences, since moral value adds nothing to facts.[2] Thus, to say, ‘Homosexuality is morally
wrong’ is, for Emotivists, nothing more than stating the (personal) fact that
‘I do not like homosexuality.’ For
others, the focus in moral claims is on moral ends—the purpose of our actions—or on the character of the moral actor.
In such ways, morality has not been understood as having to do with the
action itself. Stanley Grenz saw three
trends in moral theology over the past one hundred years (for Western
Christians): [3]
1.
‘Christian
ethics … has shown a marked movement from ‘doing’ to ‘being’.
2.
‘…Christian
ethics has displayed a marked shift away from the focus on the individual moral
actor to a relational ethic.’
3.
‘A
growing number of ethicists no longer see the task of ethical discourse as
determining the proper response to ethical quandaries the moral agent faces in
the here and now. Instead they see their
task as drawing from a vision of who we are to become and thereby setting forth
an understanding of the moral quest itself.’
These trends represent some important
developments for ethics, but taken as trends that are moving away from concerns
about actions and rights and wrongs, they entail the trend of moving away from
an objective, factual understanding of truth to a more function perspective.
Truth as Consensual:
In 1971, philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice.[4] Rawls argued that groups
may differ in their metaphysical arguments but still attain an ‘overlapping
consensus’ on certain principles or core commitments that differing groups
share. A related but different
perspective is that different groups may agree to disagree in order to achieve
common goals.[5] Rawl’s overlapping consensus seeks to
establish core commitments, whereas the latter view seeks to establish common
aims.
So take, for example, the
current South African Anglican Archbishop, Thabo Makgoba’s view on how to
handle the current dispute among Anglicans over homosexual practice. His view appears to involve two important
convictions about truth itself (though he does not state them in this way).
1. Objective truth can be
used to subjugate people, whereas consensual truth (dialogue leading to
consensus) is not oppressive.
Makgoba says,[6]
We have taken the
position that our differences over human sexuality are not such basic issues of
faith and doctrine that they should be allowed to divide us. We have maintained
a strong commitment to talking through the issues over which we differ. People
who experience their sexuality as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered are
God’s people, created in God's image, just as heterosexual people are, and in
our Church we are committed to dialogue with one another over how we respond to
the challenge of ministering to all of God’s people….
Now, I have to say that
as Africans we have over the past two centuries been subjected to Western
attitudes of cultural superiority, and I have no desire either to perpetuate
such attitudes or to promote new attitudes which assume that we in Southern
Africa have a monopoly on the truth. We should as a Province, therefore, be
hesitant to preach to our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the continent. We
should instead be offering them – and the Anglican Communion – our own model of
dealing with difference: patient dialogue in which we wrestle with difficult
issues for as long as takes to reach consensus on them. This must simply be an
offer to act as a bridge -- we cannot, neither should we wish to, impose our
model on anyone….
Not surprisingly—for such positions are never held
consistently—Makgoba continues in his speech to attack views reached by Ugandan
politicians (why not address views of the Anglican Church in Uganda?) on the
matter of homosexual practice. The
openness to using ‘patient dialogue’ to come to the truth, it turns out, is
predicated on the community engaged in this dialogue finally coming to the
position Makgoba himself holds to be true from the beginning!
Makgoba holds a second conviction about truth that
determines his approach to theology and ethics.
2. Core, Christian
convictions about love and human dignity and rights can create consensus
despite differing moral positions.
To quote Makgoba,
As Anglicans in Southern
Africa, we are calling for an intensification of the dialogue over our response
as Christians to the debate over human sexuality, both within Africa and in the
wider Anglican Communion. And as we wrestle with the theological, moral and
legal issues of the debate, our behavior towards one another must be modelled
on the imperative to love our neighbour. The persecution of anybody, including
minorities, is wrong. All human beings are created in the holy image of God and
therefore must be treated with respect and accorded human dignity.
Note, first, that both Rawls and Makgoba work with the
notion that justice is not objective but arises from a particular
community. Truth is what the community
says it is, what functions as truth for that community. As such, truth is not only distinguished from
facts but does not need facts; it might even oppose the facts. Second, both believe that abstracted principles
can hold together a group in which concrete differences in practice are
maintained. Third, the group’s
overlapping consensus (Rawls) or continuous dialogue (Makgoba) is superior to
conclusions about practices.
Some
Responses to Such Confusions
One response to such perspectives is to claim that
there is objective truth—truth is factual.
Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is either historically true, a matter
of fact, or it is not, one might argue.
This was Paul’s position. He
says,
… if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has
been in vain and your faith has been in vain.
15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we
testified of God that he raised Christ-- whom he did not raise if it is true
that the dead are not raised. 16
For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. 17 If Christ has not been raised,
your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have died
in Christ have perished. 19
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be
pitied (1 Cor. 15.14-19).
Given Paul’s understanding of
objective truth (whether applied to the resurrection or some other matter, such
as a natural law ethic regarding sexuality and marriage), the question for someone
like Makgoba is, ‘Why, in your understanding, are views on sexuality, as you
say, ‘not
such basic issues of faith and doctrine that they should be allowed to divide
us’?’ After all, in Paul’s view, there
were clearly issues that divided Christians from non-Christians. As Paul says,
But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone
who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral…. Do not even
eat with such a one (1 Cor. 5.11).
Moreover, Paul writes as a loving warning, that fornicators,
adulterers, soft men, and homosexuals (among other persons committing other
sins) will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6.9-10). The truth about ‘basic issues of faith and
doctrine’ (and ethics) is, for Paul, important enough to divide persons into
camps of Christians and non-Christians—whether or not they attend church—and
they are important enough that a loving person warns those who choose to deny
the truth.
The difference between Rawls and
Makgoba on the one hand and Paul the Apostle on the other hand is not only
something that can be expressed in terms of objective versus subjective
truth. If we approach the subject from
the standpoint of how people (interpreters, readers) get at the truth, we acknowledge that there is a certain degree of
subjectivity involved. That is, there
may be objective truth, but
interpreters do have their own perspectives. This is to introduce the question of
hermeneutics into the discussion: how do we access the meaning of someone else
when we are ourselves different and subject to our own perspectives?
Truth and Hermeneutics
At this point, Alisdair MacIntyre
is helpful.[7] MacIntyre insisted that getting at the truth
(at justice, at rationality, at virtue) depended on more than objective facts
and communal dialogue. Getting at the
meaning of justice, he observed, depended on more than an abstract notion of
what justice is (and we might add, what love is); it depends on the community’s
tradition in which all such notions are imbedded. So, for example, we know what we mean by love
because, in our Christian tradition,
love is shown to us in the story of Christ’s death for us on a cross. Communities have traditions, determined by
the narratives that give them meaning and help them to interpret the world as
well as their virtues, vices, truths, and ideas.
For Makgoba, a contemporary
community with highly abstract, core convictions needs to commit itself to
dialogue and never to oppressing anyone else with its perspectives. Such dialogue by necessity will not come to
concrete convictions or conclusions, since to do so would be a form of
intellectual and moral imperialism. For
MacIntyre, a contemporary community embracing such views will never reach any
consensus so long as it ignores the imbeddedness of its core values, virtues,
and truths in its own tradition, shaped by its essential narratives and
authorities. The orthodox Christian
responds to this liberal view of rationality—which says, ‘Let us dialogue to
reach consensus’—by saying, ‘This is
our tradition, these are our
authorities, this is what we
believe.’
Christian unity is not first a
sociological but is a theological matter.
The Commandments of God for the People of God
Only on MacIntyre’s view can one accept
that Biblical teaching is truthful.
Morality may well be the morality of given communities, but it may also
be objectively true. The Israelite ethic
expressed in the Mosaic Law was for Israelites, not Moabites. The Christian ethic expressed in Paul’s
letter to the Corinthians was for the Christian church, not for devotees of
Aphrodite down the street. For the
Israelites and for Paul—and for all the other Biblical authors and for
Jesus!—morality was both objectively grounded in God Himself and was a matter of a community, formed
by a particular narrative and tradition.
To claim that God made the world one way and not another way (such as
that sexual relations were to be consigned to marriage between a man and a
woman) was to claim objective (this is the way God made the world!), moral
truth. To recognize that the Christian
community interprets sexuality differently from other communities is not to
claim that ethics is relative but to claim that human beings interpret things
differently because of the authoritative traditions in which they live and by
which they are guided.
Makgoba, and other Anglicans like
him,[8] speak of having ‘dialogue’
instead of ‘interpreting Scripture’ because they locate authority in a
contemporary community rather than in the authoritative Word of God. Appeals often heard in Africa about how to
engage in dialogue through traditional, communal dialogue, indaba, rather miss the point: such dialogue, like the elders or
judges at the town gates in Biblical times, entails coming to a conclusion
based on communal laws and traditions, not on free expression and communal
consensus per se. This dialogue is inevitably unending (they
are ‘always being instructed and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth,’
2 Tim. 3.7); it is unable to make assertions precisely because dialogue is wrongly
understood to be a matter of communal conversation rather than hearing what the
community’s authorities say. They speak
of reaching ‘consensus’ instead of understanding their ‘Christian
tradition.’ They claim that revelation
(truth) is ‘generated’ from foundational teachings that are subject to the
community’s needs, desires, and designs.
They see truth as functional. If
anyone claims that Scripture is authoritatively definitive, they cry, ‘Colonial
oppression!,’ rather than acknowledge that there is objective truth no matter
how much human sin and limitations obstruct interpreters at times from reaching
it. ‘They know God's decree, that those
who practice such things deserve to die-- yet they not only do them but even
applaud others who practice them’ (Rom. 1.32).
Conclusion
Such misunderstandings of truth
threaten not only long-held Christian convictions and practices. They undermine the proclamation of the Gospel
itself, since the Gospel makes truth claims—both historical and theological. Moreover, they are ultimately inconsistent,
since those demanding endless dialogue on some issues make absolute assertions
about other issues (such as the claim that saying certain sexual acts are
sinful is itself not loving).
The old, mainline churches of the
West—including in countries such as South Africa—are not only dealing with
challenges to the convictions they once held unequivocally, they are dealing
with a challenge to their notion of truth itself. They not only have
flirted with philosophical notions that distinguish truth from fact to the
point that facts are no longer considered important, they have succumbed to the ultra-imperial position that they are themselves
the authority under none other. They believe that they can, like Adam and
Eve, determine right from wrong themselves, apart from God. This was the
major error of Colonialism, not first its refusal to include a wider group in
dialogue, endless dialogue, that never comes to a knowledge of the truth.
In Neo-Colonial theology and ethics, dialogue is a tool to avoid any
higher authority and so to exile the truth to some underdeveloped homeland or
prison island.
[1]
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of
Morals (German: Zur Genealogie der
Moral: Eine Streitschrift), pub. 1887.
[2] A.
J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, publ.
1936.
[3]
Stanley J. Grenz, The Moral Quest:
Foundations of Christian Ethics (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997), pp.
202-203. See also Rollin G. Grams, 'The
Case for Biblical Norms in Christian Ethics,' Journal of European Baptist Studies, Vol. 3.3 (May, 2003): 5-16.
[4]
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1971; rev. 1999).
[5]
As, for example, in the important and helpful ‘just peacemaking’ consensus
reached by pacifists and just war theorists in the work of Glen Stassen’s Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the
Ethics of Peace and War (Pilgrim Press, 2008).
[6]
Thabo Makgoba, ‘Address to Graduates of the College of the Transfiguration,’
(19 March, 2014). Accessed online, 5
December, 2015: http://archbishop.anglicanchurchsa.org/search/label/sexuality.
[7]
Two particular books by Alisdair MacIntyre are in view here: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Univ. of Notre Dame,
1988) and After Virtue (Univ. of
Notre Dame, 1981; 3rd ed., 2007).
[8] E.g., Gerald West, ‘Reading the
Bible Differently: Giving Shape to the Discourse of the Dominated,’ Semeia 73 (1996): 21-41.
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