In my lifetime, I’ve lost things.  I found them by searching between two places on the extreme of where I’d been.  Some call it retracing your steps.  It couldn’t have been somewhere beyond the two places, so I looked in between, somewhere in the middle.

In the same way, we do not find or know the truth by searching somewhere between two extremes.  Jesus said, “Thy Word is truth” (John 17:17).  Scripture tells the truth.  That’s how we find or know the truth, by looking at the Bible and understanding what it says.

When I was a boy, my family ate through a sheet cake until one piece was left.  My brother and I both wanted the piece, so we must split it in half.  We had a deal.  Whoever measured, the other got the first choice of his piece.  The goal was to cut the cake exactly down the middle.  That was fair.  It was the closest to what both sides wanted.  If you wanted both sides happy, you had to look to the middle.

Men want what they want.  The best way to get closest to what most people want is by looking to the middle somewhere, to moderate somewhere between the extremes.  Men don’t get along because they want what they want and they clash over their desires.  To find peace between men, it makes sense to get as close as possible between two contradicting opinions.

Scripture starts with the wants of God.  Usually we call this the will of God, which is also the pleasure of God, what pleases Him.  Very often God’s desire is one of the extremes, even more extreme than the most extreme desire of men.  Not always though.  Sometimes the will of God is one of greater liberty than what man will give.  Because of lust, man doesn’t want what God wants.  Men would want whatever extreme that they could get if possible, but to live with one another, they negotiate somewhere between each other for the greatest satisfaction between them.

As a method, is this moderation or negotiation the will of God?  Is this how God operates?  It isn’t.  Very often the way of God is foolishness to man.  He rejects objective truth, because it clashes with what he wants.

What I’ve described so far, you can see in history, and I give you three explanations that are essentially the same, known by different names.

Dialectics

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, born in Stuttgart in 1770 and died in Berlin in 1831.  Hegel said that nothing was truth that could not pass a test of experience.  He believed self-determination the essence of humanity.  In seminary in Tubingen, Hegel disliked the strictness or narrowness and rejected orthodoxy.  He viewed mystical experience instead as the reality of Christianity.

Philosophers give Hegel credit for dialectic methodology, which he considered “speculative.”  Johann Gottlieb Fichte took Hegel’s method and refined it with three terms — thesis, antithesis, and synthesis — which are now called a Hegelian dialectic.  The idea behind this is that truth arises from error in the course of historical development.  A constant refinement occurs through moderation, which is a synthesis of thesis and antithesis.  This replays again and again, forming a new synthesis, which becomes a new thesis and so on.

Many believe American pragmatism, as seen in John Dewey (father of Dewey decimal system), the founder of modernist American education system or philosophy.  Subject matter came from intellectual pursuit, tinkering and improving, all according to human reason.

I believe man comes to these compromises with a yearning for absolute truth, while rejecting objective truth.  The receipt of objective truth starts with God.  Because of his rejection of God, man becomes God and formulates truth according to his reason.  Since men cannot unify around one truth without God, they invent a new way to grasp truth, which they need for satisfaction.  The quest and the outcome never fulfill.  As Paul wrote, he ever learns but never comes to the knowledge of the truth, indicating the longtime existence of a kind of dialectic.

Triangulation

The first I remember hearing of triangulation came when President Bill Clinton reshaped his politics to win the 1996 election.  He was very unpopular during the 1994 midterm election, but with the counsel of his political operatives, he employed what they called, triangulation.

I did not know that triangulation already existed as a scientific or philosophical concept.  It actually started, as you might assume, as a geometric concept, used in surveying.  Triangles have three points, and if you have two points already, you triangulate to get the third.  You very often now hear the language, “finding the sweet spot between two points.”  I use this in economics, when the economists look for the perfect sweet spot for a tax rate.

In Clintonian politics, triangulation involved incorporating the ideas of a political opponent.  If you stand at 43 percent and can’t win a popular election, you try to raise your popularity by attracting more people by using their ideas.  You come to the right position by triangulating between two opposing opinions.  This surely sounds similar to Hegelian dialectics.

Churches now use triangulation and I have noticed they do this by stating core values.  The core saws off the extremes.  Someone reading the core values won’t be offended by certain specifics.  Those offenses are left out.  You see the brochure with the very happy family, leaving out the hard parts.  The core attempts to draw together as many people as possible in a Dewey-like pragmatism.

Triage

Triage is like triangulation, but proceeds from a medical analogy.  I had not considered triage before I heard Al Mohler use the metaphor to describe the balance between apparent essential and non-essential truths.  What you imagine is a bad war situation where casualties arrive and are prioritized according to how serious the wounds and how close they are to death.  The doctors can save this one, not this one, and they shuffle people into their various places, using the triage to save the most possible.  It is a form of pragmatism or what some might call a hierarchical ethic, the ethic of doing the most good for the most people.

The triage reminds me of the tomato trucks that drive down Highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley of California.  As you follow one of these trucks, tomatoes are hopping off onto the road and the side of the road all over the place.  The drivers don’t stop to retrieve the lost tomatoes.  They are casualties of this method.

Al Mohler’s triage treats certain truths like so many tomatoes falling off the back of a tomato truck.  The thought is that we can’t keep or follow everything, so we choose what is most important.  This creates a coalition of the largest number of people based upon a fewer number of truths.  Man need not live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, just the ones he deems important.

Maybe you with me notice the shrinking number of important truths and the growing number of less important.  With this method, churches decide whether to keep their homosexual members.  They relegate wokeism with the triage to non-essential.  This pulls together a larger coalition, which allows for bigger offerings and a larger work.  This must be what God wants to do.  He wouldn’t want smaller would He?

The Text of Scripture

Today men determine what the Bible says according to two poles, radical skepticism and absolute certainty.  They say those are both wrong.  This is read from Dan Wallace in the introduction of a book, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism.  He wrote:

These two attitudes—radical skepticism and absolute certainty—must be avoided when we examine the New Testament text. We do not have now—in our critical Greek texts or any translations—exactly what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Even if we did, we would not know it. There are many, many places in which the text of the New Testament is uncertain. But we also do not need to be overly skeptical. Where we should land between these two extremes is what this book addresses.

This isn’t new.  I heard it a lot.  It reflects the above three concepts I laid out.  As you read, you might think God works in absolute certainty.  You would be right.  This is a Christian worldview.  It arises from scripture.

The goal in modern textual criticism is to fall somewhere between radical skepticism and absolute certainty.  It sees “absolute certainty” as an extreme.  If the text of the Bible is not certain, and men defer to that position, somewhere, however, north of radical skepticism, one would see how that the inspiration, interpretation, and application of scripture are also not certain.  How does someone live by faith in something uncertain as such?  This occurs when man applies his dialectic, triangulates, or forms a triage based on human reason.

Man-centered philosophies are not faith.  They also put man above God.  Rather than follow the truth of scripture, man judges God and comes to a better, more pragmatic position.  It’s a way to preserve Christianity from itself.