On Truth and Kinda Truth, Part 2: Objective v. Subjective Perception of Truth

From the Gospel Coalition’s Website:

“We affirm that truth is correspondence to reality. We believe the Holy Spirit who inspired the words of the apostles and prophets also indwells us so that we who have been made in the image of God can receive and understand the words of Scripture revealed by God, and grasp that Scripture’s truths correspond to reality. The statements of Scripture are true, precisely because they are God’s statements, and they correspond to reality even though our knowledge of those truths (and even our ability to verify them to others) is always necessarily incomplete. The Enlightenment belief in thoroughly objective knowledge made an idol out of unaided human reason. But to deny the possibility of purely objective knowledge does not mean the loss of truth that corresponds to objective reality, even if we can never know such truth without an element of subjectivity. See CS-(2).”

There are a couple things that are very important to point out in this first answer.

• They acknowledge the “idolotry” of claiming to be able to objectively know truth.
• Yet they affirm objective truth exists, that we are able to know and interact with subjectively.
• This subjective interaction does NOT incapacitate us from truly knowing the reality and truthexpressed in scripture.

I’ve found this very interesting, as I’ve realized recently how I have erred on the side of modernism (objective knowledge of truth), and this is illustrated in some of the ways I’ve tried to defend a contextualized interpretation of Adam, Eve, and the Fall over at De-Conversion. Just last week, my Greek in exegesis professor was explaining that scripture is “organic,” and was never meant to be a scientific legal defense against “untruth.” Instead, as with the synoptic gospels, it is truth as view through the human eyes and human communication of its authors through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. If it were objective writing, we would see events of scripture with a bird’s eye view, through some kind of heavenly trinitarian language. As humans, we cannot help but see truth through our own eyes, culture, minds, perspecitve, and sinfulness. ONLY with the help of the Holy Spirit will these truths be illuminated.

The huge benefit of this realization, is that scripture is “multi-perspectival” (a Driscoll term) . Each of the synoptic gospels were written by different people, addressing different topics and questions, for the benefit of very different audiences. Matthew was written by a Jewish Tax Collector to a Jewish audience, and primarily concerned himself with Christ as the fullfillment of Messianic Prophecy. Luke was a gentile physician writing to other gentiles, and had a lot of focus on parables and healings. John wrote to (most likely) the church at Antioch, who struggled with gnostic heresies making its way through the congregation, thus John writes in a very clear, distinct, and almost rythmic style to directly confront those heresies. They all concern the same events, but are through th perspectives of different people through the Holy Spirit. Does this make them any less true? Not at all, it simply means that different aspects of the same events appealed and attracted different types of people. Something can be true without independently being the whole truth.

In the same way, 4 referees calling a football game may have seen the same penalty very differently, yet their perception does not change the objectivite reality of what happened. When they come into dispute with each other over the specifics, they come together, figure out what each others’ viewpoint is, what they saw, and then put together the whole picture from the different accounts. The problem with the modernist view of scripture, is that it treats each referee (or gospel) as the objective truth, and not a subjective narrative of objective truth. This makes apparent paradoxes or inconsistencies very difficult to explain, that otherwise were only meant to illustrate different aspects of the same event, reality, or truth.

This is an area of textual criticism that I am very new to, and look forward to explore what it means that scripture is “organic.” It is both paradigm-shifting, and encouraging, as the implications for ministry (particularly post-modern relevance) are huge.

EDIT: On a side note, Phillip over at Agkrya just wrote an excellent post about the atheistic comparison of belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster to belief in God.  The post is excellent, very relevant to this topic, and very intelligently concise.  The 2 comments posted so far are also very sontructive and clarifying on this whole issue of being able to objectively perceive truth.