Faith and “The Truth”
An aspect of diminishing biblical truth, so that it is not “the truth” anymore is the biblical doctrine of faith. Knowledge or wisdom gained by faith is less than the truth according to empiricism, which says that access to knowledge comes through the human senses. If you can’t see it, touch it, smell it, hear it, or taste it, then it isn’t “the truth.” Now exists a separate category for faith and that is, your truth, or just “truth,” without the definite article, “the.” This puts biblical truth as something lesser, still including it as religious truth, but not “the truth.”
What I’m describing about biblical truth being less than “the truth” is a feature of leftist ideology that proceeded from an earlier modernism and liberalism. Because of a postmodern construct of empathy, leftists may accept biblical truth as truth and not “the truth.” Since truth itself is a manifestation of power, out of empathy, the left won’t begrudge what you want to believe as long as you don’t force it on someone else. Still, however, the academy has not and will not accept faith as a legitimate arbiter of the truth. It is diminished according to the Nancy Pearcey designation to the upper story in a two story construct.
The Truth, Lower Story, and Truth, Upper Story
To both liberals and the left, which essentially is modernism and postmodernism, faith cannot reside in the engineering department. When civil engineers construct a bridge, they don’t base it on faith or belief. They need “the truth,” just like pilots who fly planes. Perhaps this makes sense to you as a matter of judging the difference between the two. Now many evangelicals have acquiesced to this system, which is difficult to distinguish because the language very often is the same. Pilots and engineers operate in the lower story of “the truth” and pastors and theologians live in the upper, ethereal story.
You ask, “Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?” If the one answering can skip what belief means and what you mean by Jesus Christ, then the answer is “yes.” When he answers, “yes,” he really doesn’t mean that Jesus rose from the dead. It reminds me of the lyrics of a country western song I heard when I was a teenager, “I believe what I believe in and I believe in Santa’s Cause.” In other words, I believe in Santa Claus, but that doesn’t mean I believe he’s real. People do the same with Jesus. I like to say that Jesus is the ink blot in a Rorschach test. You can see in Him what you want to see. All this is truth, but not “the truth.”
Different Approaches to Truth
In part one, I mentioned the doctrine stated in hundreds of years of confessions or creeds that state a verbal plenary belief in the providential perfect preservation of scripture. They knew about textual variants or the empirical evidence. Still, based on faith that scripture was “the truth,” they believed that doctrine. That was more than tolerable. It was the method of the premodern, where truth, goodness, and beauty are transcendental. Everything starts with God, like it did with science for Isaac Newton, who also fell out of favor completely until a recent return for some to the God hypothesis.
The rejection of perfect preservation is an attack on the Christian way, the biblical way, of accessing and understanding the truth. It’s not all that happened in the realm I’m addressing. Many embrace now the resurrection through a psychological, archetypal lens, viewing it as a profound metaphor for personal transformation rather than necessarily a literal, historical event. Preservation of scripture is a small “p” preservation with small “c” confidence in the Bible rather than large “C” Certainty in it. The same treatment applies to cultural issues, so that someone can obey without actual obedience.
A Return, Only Partial, to the Truth
The ground for what I’m addressing goes way back. People still held on to a literal approach to scripture with faith as a means to the truth through all history, but this viewpoint declined in the medieval period, middle or dark ages, whatever you want to call it, and up to the Reformation. Reformers somewhat saw the death of some of what occurred without a wholesale return. It was enough a return that it led to some good consequences after the invention of the printing press. However, the seeds of doubt still held as it kept an ambiguous nature still to many biblical doctrines.
Reformed wrote most of the confessions and they saw the suicide to ejecting from faith as a means to the truth. Faith is truly superior to all other means of knowledge. Of course, this is biblical faith, not the existential concoction of faith as a leap into the dark.
The break down of the family today directly relates to what I’m addressing here. The church itself became culpable to applying ambiguity to the male and female roles in part by inventing a term such as complementarianism. It sounded right, very much like the inerrancy of the original manuscripts position on perfection, invented by Warfield and Hodge of Princeton. These are “truth” versus “the truth.” They fall short of a biblical position, because they are a kind of triangulation or dialecticism. Triangulation uses geometry to describe what Hegelian dialecticism does with philosophy.
Triangulation, Dialecticism, and Doctrinal Triage
Triangulation hearkens back to successful political theory. People aren’t going to accept patriarchy anymore, so triangulate between patriarchy and egalitarianism and find truth in a new position. The dialectic is the thesis of patriarchy and the antithesis of egalitarianism yielding the synthesis of complementarianism. All this is truth, but not “the truth.” With the preservation of scripture, triangulators and dialectics chose the preservation of the Word or the message without the actual preservation of the Words that scripture teaches. This is an ejection from true faith, so it doesn’t please God.
One can explain the wrong or false approach I’m addressing with either the doctrinal triage or the hill someone might die on. With truth, you can die on various hills — it’s up to you. With the truth, every hill is important. You aren’t ranking doctrines for the sake of keeping people within broader boundaries and a larger coalition. For a doctrinal triage, you elevate the dismissal of the doctrine of the Deity of Christ over the rejection of divine role design or young earth creationism. You already evicted reverent worship, something long ago the triage determined minor or tertiary.
Apostasy and a Call Back to “The Truth”
Everything I’m describing is a recipe for apostasy. Instead of standing for the faith once delivered or as Jesus said, “all things whatsoever I commanded you,” you negotiate in a kind of spiritual detente with the enemy. In the end, you can pick up some cheap doctrine at the local Goodwill at a reduced price.
Brethren, biblical truth is “the truth.” God will not allow the disappearance of the truth, but in our cooperation with God, whoever we are, we won’t be a part of “the truth” without “the truth.” To start though, you’ve got to accept this, what I’m writing here. Do you?