The Lost Beauty of Truth-By Ken Myers
One of the effects of Christianity on what was called
"Christendom" was to create a setting in which the fundamental assumptions
of a Christian world view were taken for granted. Virtually everyone,
even the apostate or unregenerate, lived under the canopy of Christian
truth. Both general beliefs and the specific application of principles
were informed by Christian ideas. Christian truth thus lived intuitively
in the culture, directing the reasoning of individuals and, perhaps
more significantly, informing their imaginations and affections.
Christendom, however, no longer exists. More
than a hundred years ago, Friedrich Nietzsche insisted that God was
dead. Christianity no longer had the cultural power it once had. God
no longer lived in the consciousness of a critical mass of people. It
is much easier to ignore Christian truth claims if Christianity is no
longer the shared context of social life.
When Nietzsche said it, it was old news. Yet
Christian apologetics still has not gotten the point because much of
it is still concerned only with defending Christian truth, principally
by the making of logical arguments. But for years, the issue of truth
itself has been irrelevant.
There have always been those who prefer to
ignore the conclusions of rigorous argument. But for the most part,
the culture was sympathetic to logical discourse as a means to discovering
truth and to the idea that truth was an ordering principle for life.
Why? Because truth was a vital part of the canopy of Christian assumptions.
But too many social forces have conspired
to transform the Christian sense of the inherent nature of reality into
a marginal and obscure curiosity, even within the church, and even among
those who are technically orthodox.
Apologetics must learn to take seriously the
obstacles to the hearing of its arguments. Our culture regards with
less and less plausibility the notion that one should order one's life
around the conclusions of arguments.
I once spoke with a non-Christian colleague
about a controversial scholar whose work I admired. After rehearsing
a number of this scholar's lucid arguments on various matters, my friend
rather wearily conceded: "Look, I can't disagree with his arguments.
I just don't like his conclusions, so I can't accept them." This person
clearly lacked a "feeling for truth," the weight on one's conscience
that one must adjust one's views and behavior if persuaded of new truths.
Such a loss could be described as a change
in cultural sensibility. One cause of this change has been the rising
dominance of image-based communication and the receding influence of
print-based communication. In print, with words, one makes propositions.
With propositions, one makes arguments and draws conclusions. These
conclusions then become the starting propositions for further arguments.
Thought, in a cultural atmosphere dominated by words, takes linear,
logical forms, and naturally recognizes the difference between contradiction
and noncontradiction.
One of television's effects is the subtle
inculcation of the assumption that it's not very important to be able
to work with words. Working with words requires working with logic.
It requires habits of reason. It nurtures an appreciation for the profound
and existentially compelling difference between truth and error. Thus,
in a print-based culture, part of becoming educated is to develop a
"feeling" for truth.
Image-based communication is not so much irrational
as a-rational. It is more concerned with internal subjective resonance,
"good vibes," than with seeking synchronization with some objective
reality. Image-dominated forms of communication are nonlinear, nonpropositional,
and hence inconclusive; they do not move from propositions to conclusion.
Christians need to pay more attention to understanding
how the sensibilities of our culture shape its assumptions and convictions.
The discipline of pursuing that goal might be called cultural apologetics:
the aspect of apologetics concerned with understanding the cultural
context in which the arguments are being made. Christian apologetics
cannot simply be concerned with refining the arguments for the Resurrection
or for the existence of God. Those things must continue to be done.
But unless there is simultaneously urgent, intense attention to the
obstacles modern sensibilities put in the way of accepting the truth
of the Gospel, one of two things will happen.
The church may become a completely marginal
fringe group within society whose message is literally meaningless to
the culture at large. The second option is that the church will ignorantly
and carelessly accommodate itself to modern sensibilities. It will accept
the assumption that truth is irrelevant, and thereby evacuate its message
of any power, translating it into what Paul called "another gospel."
Ken Myers Ken Myers is editor of the Mars
Hills Tapes, a bimonthly audio magazine on cultural issues.
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