The World's Ruined: What is truth?

Friday, March 15, 2013

What is truth?

Senator Rob Portman (R) has announced that after years of opposing the state's legalization of gay marriage he is now in favor of it. The reason? He explained to reporters "that he changed his position after his son Will told him and his wife, Jane, that he is gay."

Mollie Hemingway's salient observation:

One of the fascinating things about society today is that personal experience trumps everything else in argumentation. Very few people seem to care about fundamental truths and principles while everyone seems to care about personal experience and emotion. It's the Oprahfication of political philosophy.

This, unfortunately, very much describes the broad and not so-broad evangelical church today. Books abound that advocate methods for living the Christian life, not by faith in the objective truth of Jesus Christ's finished work of redemption, but in the subjective - hearing Jesus speak, finding his immediate will, living in the spirit through inward impressions. This approach essentially lays out one's personal experience as the royal road to true Christian living. Jesus speaks to me... the Spirit revealed to me... I sensed his presence... These have become some of the subjective sign posts, the experiences by which Christians determine truth in order to live their Christian life. The objective truth of Scripture gets filtered by and colored through personal experience to such an extent that the result which emerges is a subjective Rosetta Stone interpreting God's Word into my way, my truth, and my life.

Certainly we can't divorce ourselves from our own experiences or personal biases when coming to Scripture. But for that very reason we should be wary of - rather avoid - verifying what God's Word teaches and what it means to live the Christian life by any final reliance on personal experience, which sad to say, has become the status quo in today's American non-confessional Christianity. It also has become default path for many believers in Reformed confessional churches.

4 comments:

Charlie J. RayMarch 15, 2013 at 2:40 PM
You have the Pentecostals, the neo-orthodox, and the Van Tilians to thank for that. If Scripture is not univocally the revealed propositional truth claims of God and merely "analogical", then it logically follows that truth is two-fold. God's truth is unknowable because Scripture is not literally what God says on the homosexuality issue. Following the logic of Van Til, human experience of Scripture rather than propositional truth is really the bottom line. If such is the case, why complain when Evangelicals reject doctrinal propositions recorded in Scripture?
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Charlie J. RayMarch 15, 2013 at 2:43 PM
WCF Ch. 1, Of the Holy Scriptures:

6. The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men. (2 Tim. 3:15–17, Gal. 1:8–9, 2 Thess. 2:2) Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word: (John 6:45, 1 Cor 2:9–12) and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be observed. (1 Cor. 11:13–14, 1 Cor. 14:26, 40)

The Westminster Confession of Faith (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996).
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Jack MillerMarch 15, 2013 at 3:21 PM
Charlie, you have to go farther back than the 20th century. The roots of the subjective as the key to truth are found in the early gnostics, the mystics throughout church history, the anabaptists of the 16th century, and the type American Christianity that evolved out of the revivalism of the first and second Great Awakenings.
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HudsonMarch 18, 2013 at 10:43 AM
I actually think we have the Roman Catholics to thank for the fine political mess of traditional marriage. Specifically, they made marriage into a "Sacrament" such that it appeared the government was contributing to the administration of it. If only it had been left as God's blessing for all men and women, even non-Christians, then it would now be treated routinely.
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The Mere Mercy of God

This calling of Abram is a signal instance of the gratuitous mercy of God. Had Abram been beforehand with God by any merit of works? Had Abram come to him, or conciliated his favour? Nay, we must ever recall to mind that he was plunged in the filth of idolatry; and God freely stretches forth his hand to bring back the wanderer. He deigns to open his sacred mouth, that he may show to one, deceived by Satan's wiles, the way of salvation.

But this is done designedly, in order that the manifestation of the grace of God might become the more conspicuous in his person. For he is an example of the vocation of us all; for in him we perceive, that, by the mere mercy of God, those things that are not are raised from nothing, in order that they may begin to be something.

-John Calvin, Genesis, (Banner of Truth), p. 343

"Nor the faith also does not shut out the justice of our good works, necessarily to be done afterwards of duty towards GOD (for we are most bounden to serve GOD, in doing good deeds, commanded by him in his holy Scripture, all the days of our life): But it excludes them, so that we may not do them to this intent, to be made good by doing of them. For all the good works that we can do, be imperfect, and therefore not able to deserve our justification: but our justification doth come freely by the mere mercy of God..." (Thomas Cranmer - Homily of Justification)

Justification-Sanctification/Law-Gospel

In short, I affirm, that not by our own merit but by faith alone, are both our persons and works justified; and that the justification of works depends on the justification of the person, as the effect on the cause. (John Calvin, Acts of the Council of Trent with the Antidote)

The law guides, directs, commands, all things that are against the interest and rule of sin. It judgeth and condemneth both the things that promote it and the persons that do them; it frightens and terrifies the consciences of those who are under its dominion. But if you shall say unto it, “What then shall we do? this tyrant, this enemy, is too hard for us. What aid and assistance against it will you afford unto us? what power will you communicate unto its destruction?” Here the law is utterly silent, or says that nothing of this nature is committed unto it of God: nay, the strength it hath it gives unto sin for the condemnation of the sinner: “The strength of sin is the law.” But the gospel, or the grace of it, is the means and instrument of God for the communication of internal spiritual strength unto believers. By it do they receive supplies of the Spirit or aids of grace for the subduing of sin and the destruction of its dominion… (John Owen, A Treatise of the Dominion of Sin and Grace)