Truth In the Fire
I have written appreciatively twice of Dallas Willard lately. Now I turn to his article, Truth in the Fire: C.S. Lewis and Pursuit of Truth Today: Publications: The Independent Institute. Originally delivered as a lecture ten years ago at the C.S. Lewis Centennial at Oxford University, this paper springboards from Lewis’s understanding of Truth, and attacks being made upon it in Lewis’s time, to a more contemporary discussion of the same issue. (Dallas Willard is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California.)
Everything we believe, everything we understand about the world, hinges on this issue. A colleague of mine has written a book (now out of print), God Is the Issue. I do not intend to say that Truth is above God, or more important than God. But God is consistently identified in his Word as the source of Truth, and as Truth himself (2 Samuel 22:32, Psalm 18:30, John 5:31-32, John 7:18, John 14:6, 1 John 5:20).
The Truth that is in God is multi-faceted: it involves his personal faithfulness, his consistency, his keeping his word, his integrity. It also involves what is technically, somewhat coldly perhaps, called propositional truth: that which allows us to affirm or to deny that something is in fact true in a meaningful sense (see Deuteronomy 18:22, 2 Samuel 7:28, John 19:35, Acts 26:25, 2 Corinthians 7:14).
Propositional truth itself is “In the Fire,” the phrase Willard uses in the title of his paper. Postmodern-leaning Christians often dismiss it: “How can you reduce the truth of God to mere propositions?” But that of course is a straw man. To insist on the reality of propositional truth is not to deny the other various aspects of God’s truth, any more than to insist that birds can fly is to deny they can sing. God can be (and is) personally faithful, at the same time that statements regarding him (or other subjects) may be true or false.
Rumors of Relativity
Of course the question is not raised only in regard to God. Propositional truth is denied on general terms, or is accepted only on the understanding that it is not objective. Truth is relative, they say. As Willard puts it:
In the face of present attitudes, however, even earnestness about truth—also about goodness and beauty—is definitely uncool. It might be tolerated in a Freshman. But he or she would be expected to wise up quickly, and might pay a stiff price for not doing so. The idea of devoting one’s life to truth, goodness or beauty is now quaint if not ridiculous, on the campus as in the corporation. They are not considered to be objective realities against which human life is or can be measured.
To encourage you to read the whole article, I’ll pick up a few points from it. First, on this belief that all truth is relative, Willard disagrees, to put it mildly. I stand with him.
All this puts us in position to see that, while belief is relative—a fact or statement is believed only if someone believes it—truth is not relative. One believes something, one does not truth it or fact it. Again, we can and should experiment with this. Try getting your car to run by believing gas is in your tank. Or by also enlisting others to believe it, or by generating a social movement in favor of it.
Pilate’s Question
But what do we mean by “truth?” Willard dares (such audacity!) to suggest an explanation, including,
When the object of our belief or statement is as we believe or state it to be, when it “matches up” to that object in the familiar way already indicated by cases, our belief or statement is true. Truth is just this characteristic of “matching up.” Otherwise our belief or statement is false. Truth and falsity are, then, objective properties of beliefs and statements….
For a belief, thought or statement to be true is simply for its subject matter to be as it is represented, or as it is held to be, in that belief, thought or statement. When we confirm that a hitherto unconfirmed belief or statement is true, we do not create the relation (correspondence) it actually has to what it is about, any more that we create the fit of a wrench to a bolt head by placing the wrench on the bolt head, or the fit of a door to a frame by putting the door in the frame….
Moreover, truth, as we have seen in the case of fact and reality, is totally unyielding in the face of belief, desire, tradition and will. There is no such thing as a belief or statement whose quality of truth or falsity is modified by mere belief or disbelief, desire or aversion, habit or tradition or social practice or professional opinion, or will and intent. We state it once again: belief is relative, as are our perceptions, but truth is not. Truth is a relation, a “correspondence,” but not one that depends upon belief or attitude….
A dignitary such as Pontius Pilate or a university professor can well say, rhetorically, “What is truth?” But that is never accepted as a response from a child being interrogated about vanished cookies, nor will a child accept it as an explanation of a broken promise. They know what truth is very well, even though, as they also know, it is not easy to determine in some cases. —Is it true there is a Santa Claus, for example, or a tooth fairy?
Is that so complicated, now? Well, of course there are issues attending this matter of truth, which Willard acknowledges in his paper. But the central foundation of it was never challenged for century upon century. It was only when men began to doubt everything except the evidence of their senses that they began to doubt such a thing as truth exists. Intuitively it is obvious even to a child; but intuitions don’t boil in a beaker, and they don’t generate a satisfyingly measurable electrical field, so the empiricists thought they must not be real. Never mind that (as Willard points out) they could not determine they were unreal without depending on their being real.
Why It Matters So
And why is this such a crucial matter? Simply this: without the ability to speak a true statement, to affirm a true proposition, then one cannot say things like,
- “God is love.”
- “Jesus Christ is the Word of God become flesh, full of grace and truth.”
- “Eternal life is found in Jesus Christ.”
These things cannot either be affirmed or denied. They are without content. They may be opinions, but they can be neither right nor wrong.
Further, without the ability to affirm something as true (even potentially), the following cannot be said, even to disagree with them:
- Opinions about God are without content.
- They may be opinions, but they can neither be right nor wrong.
- These things cannot be said, even to disagree with them.
- Nothing in fact can be affirmed as actually true, or denied as being actually false.
I hope you’ve noticed this is turning self-referential, as the philosophers put it. A self-referential statement is one like, “The sentence I am now writing is ten words long.” That happens to be true, if I counted right. Here’s another self-referential statement. “The statement I am now writing is false.” That one is not only false, it is incoherent, impossible; it cannot be true unless it is false; it cannot be false without being true. A better description for it is nonsense.
In a similar sense, if all truth is relative then the last several bulleted statements above are true, but if they are true propositions, then there are no true propositions. They are in the same condition as “This statement is false.” If they are true, then they are false.
Desperate Separation
One who denies truth denies all affirmations, all denials, all discourse. The result is not only to remain desperately separated from God, also to create a whole new kind of separation from each other. We can talk to each other, but your words and mine have no common referent, no meaning in common. You speak your language and I mine, but we can have no shared understanding: for there is no objective reality out there for us to share in.
It is a philosophy of absurdity. More grievous than that, though, it is a philosophy of utter alienation.
Hat tip (three weeks ago, saved until I had time to work on it): Victor Reppert
