Chapter 4: Interpreting the Bible in Times of Controversy
In the fourth chapter, Rogers draws primarily from the document put together by the UPCUSA (United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America) in 1982. I think the guidelines are extremely important and so I will simply list the guidelines that Rogers provides, and will share some of Rogers’s thoughts (and possibly some of my own commentary as well) on how the guidelines pertain to the issue of homosexuality and the church.
Guideline 1: Recognize that Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, is the center of Scripture. The redemptive activity of God is central to the entire Scripture. The Old Testament themes of the covenant and the messiah testify to this activity. In the center of the New Testament is Jesus Christ: word made flesh, the fulfillment of Israel’s messianic hope, and the promise of the Kingdom. It is to Christ that the church witnesses. When interpreting Scripture, keeping Christ in the center aids in evaluating the significance of the problems and controversies that always persist in the vigorous, historical life of the church.
- Focusing on Jesus helps us to remain closer to the gospel found in scriptures. As we look to Christ and examine the way in which he interacted with the despised, the rejected, it’s not hard to imagine how he would interact with today’s outcasts, specifically the ones which the church many in the church are rejecting.
- Jesus Christ is the center of scripture – not prooftext verses pulled from the Holiness Code of Leviticus. Keeping Christ in the center helps us maintain a greater sense of the whole trajectory of scripture.
Guideline 2: Let the focus be on the plain text of Scripture, to the grammatical and historical context, rather than to allegory or subjective fantasy.
- This guards against eisegesis (reading what we want into scripture) – we want to avoid surface literalism, but we also want to avoid this “subjective fantasy” where we can try to create as many layers as possible in the text.
- Being faithful to the “plain text” of scripture means that we must work hard to understand the text in its context. It doesn’t mean that there will always be a 100% exact parallel between something mentioned in scripture and modern day circumstances and situations. In the Presbyterian Church in the United States’s Guidelines, they wrote “While a particular text may name a subject with which we are also concerned in the present, the assumption should not be immediately made that the contemporary subject is the same as that addresses in the biblical text or that the circumstances and conditions of the biblical writer and modern interpreter are the same.” It’s pretty clear that this has some important ramifications for using scripture in talking about homosexuality.
Guideline 3: Depend on the guidance of the Holy Spirit in interpreting and applying God’s message.
- This guideline allows for the possibility that the Holy Spirit might be leading us into a new interpretation of scripture. It’s clear that the church has listened to the guiding of the Holy Spirit in the past as we have changed our minds concerning race and women’s issues.
Concerning the issue of the Holy Spirit, Rogers writes:
“It seems that the Holy Spirit is once again working to change our church – making us restless, challenging us to give up our culturally conditioned prejudices against people of homosexual orientation. As we come to know faithful, obedient Christian disciples whose sexual orientation is different from that of the heterosexual majority, we discover that they have been blessed by the Holy Spirit even as heterosexual people have been. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a change in our attitudes and actions can be a faithful response to God’s leading” (60).
Guideline 4: Be guided by the doctrinal consensus of the church, which is the rule of faith.
- Rogers does note that “At first glance, it might appear that the consensus of the church has been against the full acceptance of people who are homosexual” (61). However, he again notes that in the past, the consensus of the church has not always proven to be right. Rogers writes, “Past practice is not necessarily a recommendation for future faithfulness” (61). I think this is something important to note – especially for when people like to focus on this point – that the history of the church, the great thinkers of the past, have all been against acceptance of homosexuality.
- When we talk about doctrinal consensus of the church – we generally turn to the Creeds and Confessions of the church; for Presbyterians, this means opening up our Book of Confessions. However, as Rogers proceeds to detail in this chapter, “The Reformed confessions, properly translated, say nothing about homosexuality” (61). In addition, the rule of faith makes it clear that opinions about homosexuality are not essential matters of the faith. If our central documents of our faith and theology, our Creeds and Confessions, are silent on the issue of homosexuality, then why do so many claim that this IS a central and essential matter of our faith; one that has the possibility to derail the ordination of those who disagree with the church’s current stance on the issue?
Guideline 5: Let all interpretations be in accord with the rule of love, the two-fold commandment to love God and to love our neighbor.
According to Rogers:
“When we interpret Scripture in a way that is hurtful to people, we can be sure that we are not glorifying God…Whether our interpretations of Scripture result in love for God and neighbor is a practical test of whether our interpretation is correct” (62).
Sound a little simplistic? Perhaps; but if our interpretation of Scripture is causing us to hurt people, to specifically target a group of Christians and children of God (LGBT folks) and to use our “correct interpretation” to keep them out of the church and to keep them from living lives of integrity that honor both who they were created to be and their Creator, there seems to be something wrong there. The PCUS report in 1983 states, “Any interpretation of Scripture is wrong that separates or sets in opposition love for God and love for fellow human being” (62).
Guideline 6: Remember that interpretation of the Bible requires earnest study in order to establish the best text and to interpret the influence of the historical and cultural context in which the divine message has come.
The Westminster Confession writes, “All synods and councils since the apostles’ times, whether general or practical, may err, and many have erred…” (63). May err, and many have erred. That’s important. Whenever I have conversations with people about this issue, I’m very clear in saying, “You know – maybe I’m wrong about this….” But, I’m very clear that I’d much rather be wrong and have extended too much grace, too much acceptance, too much love, too much care – than to see that I was wrong and should have been loving people more, should have been welcoming more people.
Rogers really emphasizes the importance of learning about the context of certain biblical passages before jumping to conclusions on their meaning for Christians today. He uses as an example the emphasis on male gender superiority that was prevalent throughout both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Sexual contact was expressly forbidden between two men – not because of an issue related to sexuality, but because it was a confusion of gender roles. Both men couldn’t play the “masculine, male” gender in sexual contact, and one would have to be the “soft” or effeminate male – which was degrading in that society. The same focus on gender roles continued into the New Testament. Focusing on the context caused Old Testament scholar Phyllis Bird to conclude, “In the final analysis, it [prohibition of homosexual behavior] is a matter of gender identity and roles, not sexuality.”
Guideline 7: Seek to interpret a particular passage of the Bible in light of all the Bible.
Scripture interprets scripture, right? Rogers writes, “We need to interpret the parts by the whole, the complex by the simple, the peripheral by the central” (65). Again, we need to look to the central theme of the Gospel message from scripture.
I’m going to include, at the end of each of these posts, a link to an article written by Real Live Preacher, on the issue of homosexuality. I’ve always loved his writing, and I hope you will too. In his post, “Olives, Wineskins, White Bread and Jesus,” he shares about churches beginning to think differently on the issue of homosexuality.
This post is part of an ongoing review of Jack Rogers’s book “Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality.” For more information about the series, you can read the first post here. Individual Chapter Reviews: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6 and Chapter 7. I also share some Final Thoughts about the book here.
Adam,
Thanks for your boldness in talking about this issue. There are many of us Christians who agree with you, but it takes a level of boldness to speak out against what has been held as the “right” (as in correct) view of homosexuality within the church. My favorite line from this entry is: “I’d much rather be wrong and have extended too much grace, too much acceptance, too much love, too much care – than to see that I was wrong and should have been loving people more, should have been welcoming more people.” If only all Christians chose to err on the side of love, this world would look very different. I like to remember that while Christ extended grace and forgiveness to sinners, he was intolerant of intolerance (ie. pharisees).
Blessings!
Sara
I think that this chapter really gets at the heart of the actual issue behind all of the controversy over homosexuality, women, [insert controversial topic here]. If you look at the most heated debates around this blog, they all boil down to the fact that people are operating from different modes of Biblical interpretation. It is of utmost importance in these conversations to be self-aware about the mode of interpretation that we use, hopefully offering grace to those who function from a different mode of interpretation. The truth is, homosexuality is not the controversial issue, but rather Biblical interpretation is the crux (no pun intended) of the debate. I’ll be curious to see what the discussion on this post looks like.
Thanks Adam for the post and the continuing series. I really like his guidelines. They’re clear, concise and Jesus-focused. I used them once in a sermon and included a printed copy in the bulletin, several folks found it a helpful resource to keep and use. A few visitors that day (who I knew) found me heretical for quoting Rodgers. I found their lack of openness to a wise way for reading scripture challenging, even more so in that when I asked them what guidelines they used for reading, interpreting and understanding scripture, they were unable to respond besides simply reading and doing.
Good stuff, Adam. I always find it difficult when people want to move conversations about which reading of scripture to discerning the Spirit. I don’t know that doing so represents a step forward in terms of clarity. So, while it sounds good and in the end is correct, “depend on the guidance of the Holy Spirit in interpreting and applying God’s message” doesn’t exactly lead out of the quagmire. Just put up a post about Warren/Robinson which tangentially relates. Thanks for the book overview.
Guideline 1: check
Guideline 2: check
Guideline 3: check
Regarding the work of the Holy Spirit in interpreting Scripture – knowing that we are all sinful people led astray by temptations and that Satan is at work to mislead the world away from the gospel – what is your criteria for discerning the work of the Holy Spirit from the work of Satan?
Also, does the Holy Spirit change His mind? Did He at one point lead Christians to a different interpretation of the same Bible?
Guideline 4: check, sort of
It is utterly absurd for someone like you to be arguing for confessions to be an authority in any way. You deny nearly everything written in the Westminster Confession. The 1646 Confession did not address homosexuality because they didn’t have apostates like you perverting Scripture in an attempt to defend blatant sin. Why is this a central issue today? Because the only way to avoid the clear teaching of Scripture regarding homosexuality is to disregard Scripture and destroy the foundation of the gospel.
Guideline 5: check
Yes, Jesus said we are to love God and love our neighbor, yet He taught this as a summation of the 10 Commandments. He said, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. We are not free to interpret “love” however we want. Love is defined in Scripture and it does not mean that we are not allowed to say anything that is hurtful to anyone. Did not Christ say things that were hurtful to the Pharisees? Are some people therefore exempt from being recipients of the law of love? Or perhaps you just don’t understand the law of love.
Christ, speaking through Paul, described all mankind as “worthless,” as having the venom of asps on their lips (Rom 3). In doing so, Paul was quoting and interpreting the Psalms. Is this not hurtful? Is Paul’s interpretation therefore not valid?
If it is wrong to interpret any passage of Scripture in a way that would exclude anyone from the church, what are we to do with passages of Scripture that explicitly tell us to exclude people from the church? In what way are we supposed to twist these texts in order to get them not to say what they say? Do we use the black highlighter method, or the scissor approach?
1 Cor. 5:9-13 “I wrote to you in my letter telling you not to associate with sexually immoral people – not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy or swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater. reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. 12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? 13 God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”
You do not understand Jesus’ attitude towards sinners. Yes, he associated with outcasts, with people that the religious leaders would not associate with. But he required repentance of them. Paul continues in 1 Corinthians, clearly showing that many terrible sinners were accepted into the church – yet they were expected to change, by the grace of God. They do not remain in their sin.
1 Cor. 6:9-11 9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous [2] will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, [3] 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
And finally, is it truly loving not to confront someone about unrepentant sin that will send them to hell? No, it’s not. And your little consolation about having “too much grace” will be of no comfort to those who are burning.
Guideline 6: check
Yes, it’s important to understand context. But context should never contexualize away the entire point of any given passage of Scripture. Yes, there was an emphasis on male leadership throughout the Old and New Testaments. But why? Rogers is simply begging the question. God did not command it because it was cultural, it was cultural because God commanded it.
Guideline 7: check.
Brandon,
Your position regarding culture and God is quite laughable.
Did God also command it in the cases of cultures completely isolated from people of the OT/NT? Obviously most (but not all) such cultures were patriarchal. You argue that the culture adopted patriarchal power structures due to God commanding it (via words of prophets, scripture, kings, etc). Will you then say that all other patriarchal cultures developed by the same means?
“God did not command it because it was cultural, it was cultural because God commanded it.”
My difficulty with this statement is that it presupposes that 1) everything recorded in the Bible is to be treated as command/law, and 2) the Biblical text was recorded independent of (or immune to) cultural influence.
On point 1, I struggle with reading the Bible as one great big piece of law, as if every narrative and poem and historical document and letter were written as explicit pieces of instruction. When I read the Bible and take it seriously, this means that I have to take seriously the variety of literary genres present in it. This means that I don’t read Chronicles the same way that I read Leviticus or the way I read the Psalms or the Gospels or Paul’s letters or pieces of apocalyptic literature. Therefore, I find it inappropriate to lump ever part of the Bible together as explicit divine command. As a good Lutheran, I am a firm believer of the Bible – the Word of God – as revealing both Law and Gospel. I get twitchy when we blur the lines and begin treating the whole of the Scriptures as law.
On point 2, I have to think that there existed cultural norms that developed independent of God and theology. I also have to remember that the Bible was not written on the eighth day of creation! That is to say, the Bible was not written before human civilization, looking forward; rather, the Biblical texts were all written many years after-the-fact, looking back on events that had already occurred. To me, this means that I can’t make the assumption that the Bible was written as an expressly prescriptive document, and I therefore can’t rule out the possibility that the Biblical writers were all influenced by cultural norms – some of them godly and perhaps others of them not!
I guess…all of this is a very long-winded way of saying that not everyone will agree with the above statement. It’s also a prime example of what I described in my first comment on this post: that we all come to this discussion and to the Bible with our own set of assumptions, and it’s not inherently bad that we bring along our assumptions, but we need to be self-aware about these assumptions and realize that they may not hold true for everyone.
I look forward to further discussion!
Heated indeed. :)
Brandon has written much that would be interesting to follow up on, but I’ll keep it to the last point, Guideline 6:
I wonder what it means to “contextualize away” the point of a passage. Context is context — we can be closer or further from the true context (and thus meaning) but, given the definition of context, it doesn’t make sense to “contextualize away” the point of a passage. I wonder if this is simply a dismissive phrase used by those who are uncertain of the context of a given passage, but certain of what they personally want the passage to say.
And the last sentence is particularly troubling: “God did not command it because it was cultural, it was cultural because God commanded it.” I’ll just let that one stand on its own.
Thanks for an interesting post and conversation.
Oh, and pertinent to Guideline 2, for anyone in the Chicago area, I just received word of a pertinent upcoming lecture in March:
“Luther and the Plain Sense of the Word:”
@Melissa: Thanks for your thoughts. We certainly need to interpret passages with their original intent (or literary genre) in mind. But “wives submit to your husbands” is not a poem, it’s a command. Wouldn’t you agree?
Regarding point 2, you need to reconsider your view of Biblical inspiration. Peter says:
I agree with your comments regarding our presuppositions. I disagree when you say:
we need to be self-aware about these assumptions and realize that they may not hold true for everyone.
If it’s true, it holds true for everyone. Truth is not subjective.
Context being everything, Peter was helping the Church combat those who looked at the scriptures (ie, the Septuagint) and failed to find Jesus in it because of the way they (non-Christians) choose to read the text, as well as those who were teaching that the Church had made all this up. Peter was justifying the Church’s reading of Scripture by saying “We have the Spirit of God and, speaking through us, we understand the text differently than you, and, btw, we are right.” When we read it ourselves, away from that context, we are seeking for a different meaning in the text – which is ok, of course, but that’s what we are doing and we need to be honest about it. What we read into it is not what the writer put there.
St Peter’s was referring not to the “Christian Scriptures” (NT) but to the Septuagint, including several texts that later Christians choose to ignore (to the end of either heresy or sheer boredom, I think) such as Baruch and the book of Wisdom, as well as several other texts the Church used or not, according to her purposes (such as the Protevangelion of St James, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Odes of Solomon). I’m not speaking of “Davinci Code” sorts of Nonsense, but rather the historical development of Scriptural use in the Church.
The local church has always made choices in the canon (ie, what the early church used, vrs what the Orthodox use today, vrs the Roman Catholics, vrs any sort of Protestant – and the Ethiopian canon of scripture is HUGE) and further, each local church makes choices about what the text means in the context of that community: only a certain type of modern Protestant pretends there is a specific, self-obvious meaning. This is a recent innovation that has next to nothing to do with the historic uses of scripture in the Church, but it is the local option for some; the house-wine if you will, in older wineskins. I realise this tosses Guideline 2 out the window, but the saints and doctors of the church would not have recognised “the plain text of Scripture” at all without “allegory” or “typological” reading. That’s what St Paul does when he turns the Watering-Rock into a Type of Jesus or the Red Sea into a Type of Baptism. Allegory is the way the Early Church and the Fathers made sense of the OT – as well as other pre-Christian writings (as when, for example, St Justin Martyr calls Socrates and Plato Christians or when modern, orthodox theologians find intimations of Jesus in the Tao te Ching ).
Truth is a person: Jesus Christ. And it is not subjective, but he (Truth) is relational – Truth is not a legalistic text (or a legalistic reading of a text). We can know the Truth that Liberates only in the context of relating to him and to each other. As St Peter says, it’s not from someone’s individual interpretation at all. It is the Spirit of God speaking in prophecy to the church that helps the Church to make sense out of scripture for the times in which we live.
LOL. Thanks Huw.
@forrest, God explains in Romans 1-2 that He has revealed truths about Himself and His law to all men, but they distort or hinder it through sin. Thus we are likely to see similarities throughout various cultures, yet differences as well.
@kyle
Many people will attempt to misuse context to claim that a particular passage or text is no longer relevant to us today simply because it was written in a context that was different in some way from ours. That is what I am referring to.
A proper use of context would include the understanding that God chose to speak through men in specific situations to communicate eternal principles to His church.
“Wives submit to your husbands” is not a poem, it’s a command. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Yes, but a command to whom? And even broader, what does it mean?
Brandon, though I think we might agree on quite a lot, I no longer believe as you do. As I’m sure you know, it’s hard and messy work studying the various cultural-historical contexts of the scriptural writings. But it matters. And your apparent claim that culturally embedded statements (regarding slavery, dietary restrictions, marital instructions, communal laws, or any number of culturally conditioned topics) simply mean today what they meant then — that providing context to a passage is “contextualizing it away” — is, in my opinion, simplistic and naive.
The writers of scripture are so clear about so many important things, but no matter how much you might believe, for instance, in the “eternal principle” in Eph. 5 of wives submitting to their husbands, it remains rightfully a peripheral topic given the ambiguity of the intent of the passage and the occasion of the letter. We can guess, but we just don’t know. And as much as we want the Bible to be a handy reference manual full of objective, eternal truths concerning all the controversial topics today (homosexuality, creation/evolution, gender roles, predestination, etc.), it’s not.
To quote one of my favorite seminary profs: “If we go to scripture with the wrong questions, we get very strange answers.”
Adam,
I disagree strongly with Jack Rogers’ conclusions. I think his approach to interpretation must have some flaws…but I am listening to you and wanted you to know I am…I am trying to be respectful.
Great job, Brandon. I think your first comment said it all so I won’t go on another long rant. I would like to add one thing, though. It seems to me that Jack Rogers and his ilk are holding a core worldview that conforms to the popular views of the day. Any little piece of classic Christianity that happens to be acceptable in that worldview is welcomed while anything that contradicts it is shunned. This is not Christianity. It’s humanism with some Christian icing sprinkled on top. When your worldview looks absolutely nothing like any other Christian worldview in history, but looks strikingly similar to the world around you, take pause. You may want to rethink the label you’ve chosen.
Adam – thanks for helping birth and facilitate this online dialogue. I’m grateful for the ways in which you use your net gen communication skills to empower discussions among and between us. Isn’t that what being pastoral in large part is all about? As I listen I’m struck by the need for all of us in the church – those on and off line – to (re)learn how to dialogue, discuss and discern together what the Spirit of God is saying to us and calling us to be in the world that is ours today. Thanks for contributing to the larger ecclesiastical picture!
Interested readers can visit http://www.GaysAndSlaves.com to see why the Biblical condemnation of homosexual practice does not apply today. The cultures of Biblical times were taken into account in coming to this conclusion.
Interested readers can visit http://www.JesusIsIrrelevant.com to see why sin and the wrath of God is a first century Jewish concept that does not apply today. The cultures of Biblical times were taken into account in coming to the conclusion that the atonement meant something. Christ’s crucifixion is irrelevant today, but we hang on to His name because we think it sounds cool.
@kyle
I’m sorry, did you intend for me to understand anything you just wrote? I simply can’t understand what you meant to say, given the ambiguous intent of your comment and the occasion of your writing it.
@ Brandon
I don’t know that I’ll make much headway here, but you and I really do agree on much more than you think, particularly regarding Rogers’ slippery interpretive method. While I don’t agree that contextualizing Paul’s few passing comments on homosexuality can be equated with “disregarding Scripture and destroying the foundation of the gospel,” (yikes – was homosexuality a theme of Paul’s gospel?), I do think scripture makes a case, however frail and secondary, against homosexuality. I wish it didn’t. But just as some attempt to “contextualize it away,” I wonder if you are unnecessarily trying to cram it into the gospel message itself where it doesn’t belong. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “destroying the foundation of the gospel” — see how easy it is to misunderstand peoples’ writings, even in the same language and culture!
I’m simply promoting a hermeneutic that recognizes that not every passage carries equal prescriptive force:
1. God’s prohibition against eating pork or sowing two seeds in the same field is certainly contextualized
2. Paul’s prohibition on women covering their heads is pretty certainly contextualized
3. Paul’s prohibition on women teaching men appears to be contextualized
4. Paul’s condemnation of homosexual activity appears to be more universally intended
5. Paul’s (and the church’s) central assertion that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead is a statement of fact that they believed was true for all people in all times
Maybe you would draw the line elsewhere (e.g. between #3 and #4), but I hope you will agree that there’s still a gradation. Maybe then we can be friends.
@kyle,
Thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. I said that Scripture is disregarded and that Scripture is the foundation of the gospel, not homosexuality.
1. Yes, and it would have remained binding had God not removed the sanction through further revelation.
2. I would disagree that he is referring to literal headcoverings in this passage, but I would agree with Peter that there are some passages that are difficult to understand.
3. Yes, but the context is Creation (1 Tim 2). We still live in the world God created, right?
4. Yes, as is the condemnation of greed, adultery, idolatry, drunkenness, etc
5. Absolutely.
I don’t see quite the gradation you do.
It might just be semantics at this point…but I would say Christ is the foundation of the gospel, not Scripture. This is not to say that Scripture is unimportant. (Indeed, how would those of us living significantly after the Christ event know anything about the gospel otherwise?) It remains an important distinction for me, though, that God’s primary act of revelation came through the incarnation and that the Bible is a witness to that revelation – that Christ is the good news and that the Bible points us to that good news.
@Brandon
“God explains in Romans 1-2″
No. Not God, Paul. Paul wrote a letter to a Christian community. The Word of God is not the literal Words of God. And that’s the problem. You approach Scripture as a Muslim approaches the Qu’ran. Yet how Muslims approach the Qu’ran is how Christians ought to approach the living Word of Christ. To do otherwise is to perform idolatry with an ideation of Scripture that is false. As Melissa says just above this, and I do not think it is simple semantics, but a deeper theological problem, Christ is the foundation of the Gospel, not Scripture.
Brandon, it appears that you have your theology completely backwards and that is why the issue of context will continually be a stumbling block for you. By the way, if you read only translations of the text, you are reading interpretations. Moreover, if you are reading the original languages in any of the codices, those too are comprised of judgments that scholars have made throughout the years to determine what the texts “most likely” were when composed, and even then there is till disagreements that abound as to the sources of those texts. So the best you can do is read the oldest fragments that we have available or else you are relying on interpretations all the way down. There is no evidence to support your appropriation of Scripture, and it is a theologically backwards and unstable position to have. Finally, it is an extra-biblical and un-Scriptural position to take (God-breathed is not “spoken” or should be confused with any notion of “infallibility” in Scripture) hence, the foundation of such a position is bound to an absurd and self-referential loop.
@Brandon
BTW truth is a social construction based upon a consent of someone to what they determine to be legitimate facts of reality. This is never determined in social isolation. It is a correspondence between belief and fact. Facts are themselves determined legitimate through social agreements based on legitimate sources of evidence. Truth lies in the middle assimilating reality and accommodating to it. It is simply cognitively impossible to fully accommodate to an external reality without a subjective assimilation of it. This is as true as physical laws of the universe (like thermodynamics or mathematical constants) as it is with the notion that God is in control of that reality (as in predestination or even absolute dependence).
@Drew
I love how you just tell us what truth is as if your modern day Sophism is a foregone conclusion. It’s not that we haven’t gotten the memo about the postmodern view of truth. We just see it as a short stop before nihilism and the unraveling of culture. After all, if you’re right, then all appeals to truth are nothing but power plays. And that includes your appeal to the truth that truth is merely social consensus. If it weren’t for the divine intervention of the Holy Spirit (a fixed reference point) to reveal truth, I might be inclined to agree with you. But the interjection of a holy, personal, eternal God into the human soul is at the heart of Christianity and, therefore, I’m under no such obligation. In fact, the opposite: I’m obligated to strive for truth because it is attainable.
@ Matthew Griffin
Who said I was postmodern or presenting a postmodern view? Or a “sophist”? Nice ad hominem and it’s paltry because you totally read into my argument. And a flawed mind has to interpret the holy spirit anyway. Unless you are perfect and think that your cultural lifeworld is perfect, I can’t see why anything I have said is a problem. Even if God speaks to you directly, you still have a frail mind that has to figure out what to do with it. And that is all socially constructed. If you can do a better job of actually arguing why my argument is wrong then you have something constructive to say. Until then it’s just hearsay.
One more thing, to say that truth is a social construction is not postmodern relativism as if that is so horrible. It is really just a fact of how our minds work. If you don’t like it, tough really. Hard pill to swallow for many, but it’s exactly what keeps me clear in the absolute line of distinction between humankind and God. Tell me how “postmodern” that sounds if you even get what “postmodern” really means (since it is really postmodernismS).
@DREW
“BTW truth is a social construction based upon a consent of someone to what they determine to be legitimate facts of reality.”
This is probably the best summary of the postmodern view of truth I’ve ever heard. And to think, it came from someone who is a self-described pragmatist. The absurdity of proposing that the only incontrovertible truth is that truth is a relative social construction is self-evident. It is a violation of the law of non-contradiction: A cannot be non-A. Incontrovertible fact cannot be non-incontrovertible fact. This is not just a “hard pill to swallow”. It’s an absurd pill to swallow.
My original objection stands. You really think that your view of truth is so self-evident that it is a foregone conclusion? Would Plato agree with you? How about Decarte? Kant? No, but I imagine the sophists would. In fact, in the history of philosophy your position is pretty meagerly represented.