Bracketing the Truth

At America Magazine, Matt Malone has a blog post entitled Who is Truth? Here are a couple excerpts that caught my eye:

A friend recently told me that he was participating in a new inter-religious initiative at a Catholic university in Europe…It was with a sense of relief then that my friend told me that in the interests of “keeping the peace,” the dialogue participants had decided “to bracket questions of truth.” I wished him well, of course, but what he was about to do struck me as a nearly impossible task. Surely one could put aside certain discrete questions of epistemology, questions involving the mechanics of knowing in a cognitive or psychological sense. But how could any conversation proceed by “bracketing” the question of whether there is such a thing as truth?

His peroration is particularly strong:

To be a Christian is to dare to live in hope that the Truth possesses us. When we forget that, says Benedict, when we fail to recognize the Truth, then “the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world.” In other words, when we “bracket” the truth, we make violence more likely, not less. That is a good thing for all of us to keep in mind, never more so perhaps than when we are in conversation with our non-Christian brothers and sisters.

I both agree and disagree with his understanding of the truth and the dangers of bracketing the truth.  Adapting what I wrote in the commbox there, I see two ways in which we can bracket the truth successfully.  These are not permanent solutions, but are rather beginnings.  The first is what I have heard to as a Rawlsian approach (though I do not know the work of John Rawls well enough to pin this approach on him.)  One can tproceed as the drafters of the UN Declaration of Human Rights did:  accept that they each party has wildly divergent (if not contradictory) metaphysical bases for their thinking, and work to see if from these bases they could reach common conclusions.  One might think of this as “parallel evolution” in the realm of philosophy.  The resulting dialog can be very fruitful, since it shows the participants that their understanding of truth need not be mutually exclusive.  The points of disagreement can then be explored carefully, leading to a better understanding of how their truths differ.

On a practical level I am very partial to an idea articulated by Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity.  He advocated the “theology of the hammer” as a way to circumvent the deep divisions within the Christian community.  He argued  that various Christian denominations did  not have to resolve their doctrinal disagreements in order to agree that building houses for poor people is a good thing.  Two things come from this pragmatic approach.  First, something concrete and important is accomplished:  the corporal works of mercy.  Second, working together can build relationships, and (as the Fr. Malone points out) the Christian understanding of truth is relational:  Jesus said “I am the truth” and if we are to know the truth we must know one another.   So, paradoxically, by “bracketing” truth questions and dealing with the mundane and the concrete, we can build relationships that may in fact make violence less likely.