Throughout my late high school years, my college years, and even today I hear about a crisis of truth in America. This is mainly an evangelical cry in response to moral subjectivism, postmodernism, and scientific ambiguity. Books upon books have been released such as "True Truth", "The Truth War", "Total Truth", and countless ones on postmodernism to fight the loss of truth in America. Now these scholars mean that absolute truth - something that is reflective of reality whether or not you think so - is slowly becoming instinct because of relativism. Truth, for these people, is the battle ground.
And they have been losing. Our culture has not become wiser about truth, nor has it really cared about these scholar's arguments. Such studies as "The Truth Project" have only helped Christians feel more secure in their faith. This is not bad, but it is not helping the "truth crisis". People more than ever are choosing their own truths, and even in the church this mindset is taking hold. Why is this so?
Jesus gave us the most useful information about this "crisis" and we have let it slip. We have possibly been too calloused by our own scholars on the subject to really take a fresh look at Jesus' words on truth. I believe Jesus would say to us what he said to his disciples years ago:
"To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, 'If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'" - John 8:31-32
You see we have taken these verses to mean: "We must tell people the truth; we must fight for truth so that people can be saved and go to heaven." Let me open up our assumptions and point to something that Jesus may be wanting us to get from this.
Why say, "and the truth will set you free?" I think Jesus said this because freedom is an intrinsic desire for human beings. We are in bondage to sin, and we want freedom - or, better yet, we are in bondage to lies, and we want freedom. We want moral freedom, social freedom, and personal freedom. The word that commonly debunks absolute truth nowadays is autonomy.
We find ourselves in a truth crisis because people are searching for freedom. They are searching for freedom from sin by making sin virtuous. They are searching for freedom from oppressive religion by making that the evil. We search for truth in our lives to find freedom. I have seen this in my life constantly. People changed their views to be freed, not to be in truth.
The less we offer the truths of the Gospel for the sake of living in truth and the more we offer the truths of the Gospel for the sake of living in freedom, the more we will find the Gospel being a liberating force in our culture. There is no truth crisis, I believe, because that is not the real problem. The problem is that people want to be freed and look anywhere to get it. Our goal is to offer true freedom.
4 comments:
I really appreciate these thoughts, Philip. reminds of presuppositional apologetics and Van Til a little also.
I'm not too familiar with Van Till other than his influence on Schaeffer. I hope I'm not making too many presuppositions about people. More just trying to help people see an alternative focus in the world apologetics. I think apologetics will have to be less philosophical for it to be effective nowadays.
I have not studied him at length by any means, but what I do know is that presuppositional apologetics doesn't just try to prove Christianity scientifically from external things (like Josh MacDowell in Evidence That Demands a Verdict), but rather looks internally at the other person's worldview and presuppositions and seeks to address such things. I think starting and ending with evidence tends to overlook (or misplace?) the matter of the unregenerate heart. . .the heart that is bound by sin and not free.
Got ya. That makes sense. I think apologetics has deeper goal than a lot of people are giving it credit for. I would love to see some mysticism come with philosophy into apologetics. Likewise I think mysticism needs some more philosophy in it.
I also think that we need to focus more on how we are all image bearers - regenerate and unregenerate - in order to make that link from us to God. Most people do not understand original sin because they still see goodness in their lives (as image bearers in Christianity's point of view). The more we help them realize that Christ offers us to be fully alive the more they will realize the idea of original sin.
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