“True Truth” isn’t the Answer to “Post-Truth”

We’re living in a post-truth society now, they say.

This is what all those conservative evangelicals once feared, right? The onslaught of postmodern relativism would usher in a thoroughly post-truth world, where ideologies (devoid of solid reasoning) reign supreme, where feelings rule over reason, where morality is simply up to the individual, where everyone is trapped in their own perspective, where Absolute Truth is demolished and truth becomes simply the truth that is true for me, regardless of whether it’s true for you.

But the irony is that, if the “Age of Trump” represents the pinnacle of our post-truth society, evangelicals are no longer railing against relativism, pragmatism, and power-driven ideology. Instead, many of have embraced it, whether in the form of the anti-science, anti-accountability, anti-logic, or just plain old thoroughly tribal-centric self-interest.

Morgan Guyton reflected yesterday about this cognitive dissonance of growing up in a conservative evangelicalism which  touted “Absolute Truth” and which railed against relativism but is now turning out to be as, or more, relativistic, perspectivalist, pragmatic, and power-driven than the “postmodern” enemies they once feared.

I’ve had the same experience. And I must say, nothing has surprised me.

I realized, for example, that “Christian apologetics,” was not a legitimate, honest quest for true understanding of world religions (as you might find in the discipline of comparative theology). Rather, very often it was (and is) a polemical enterprise; it was about “winning” a rhetorical argument abut the superiority of Christianity over other religions or over atheism (or in common parlance, “world views”) even when it meant ignoring contradictions and serious problems within one’s own faith tradition and theology.

Similarly, I learned that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy was used as a shield against real discrepancies or problems within the Bible and as a way of imposing theological authority over others — not to mention as a political weapon within institutions that strive to impose order and uniformity.

I also came to understand that evangelicalism was just as relativistic, or perspectivalist, if not more so, than any other religious or ideological perspective. The doctrine of inerrancy actually encourages a strong perspectivalism, because one cannot hold firmly to the doctrine and also have genuine freedom or room to ask serious questions of the text — if those questions run against the grain of the received, authoritative perspective. And cultures (seminaries, colleges, churches, etc.) driven by inerrancy squelch genuine curiosity, often with serious consequences — loss of job, etc.

D.G. Hart concludes a recent post by briefly suggesting (if I understand him correctly) that “true truth” is the opposite of relativism.

But that’s just not true.

“True truth” is an odd phrase made famous by Francis Schaffer, the late apologist so highly revered in conservative evangelical circles. For Schaeffer, “true truth” is basically the conviction that there is such a thing as Absolute Truth and that, as Schaeffer puts it: “it is possible to know that truth, not exhaustively but truly.”

Schaeffer disliked and even derided fideism, which he saw as a retreat from the rigorous arguments of reason and evidence into the warm blanket of faith. As he put it, “Patting people on the head, they [fideists] say, ‘Don’t ask questions, dear, just believe.”

But underlying Schaeffer’s supposed commitment to evidentialism was presuppositionalism, of the sort that Cornelius Van Till advocated. The premise of presuppositionalism is that only God provides the proper beginnings (presuppositions) for [sinful] people to think rationally and “truly” about the world. So, the authority of divine revelation and the inerrancy of Scripture is a presupposition that must be believed in order for people to discover the content of true truth, or at least the content of that truth which is contained in divine revelation.

It’s a famously circular argument. And it circles everything back to the presupposition that the Bible completely and utterly without errors because its author, God, is incapable of erring.

Inerrancy is an epistemological security blanket that can also be used as a political weapon. And it’s not a good candidate for responding to a “post-truth” era; in truth, it only further intensifies the problem, which is that too many people are less interested in discovering truth — even if and when it means rethinking cherished beliefs — and more interested in confirming their own presuppositions.