Current Attacks on Truth
by Stefan Gustavsson

 

Understanding

 

      When You see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, It’s going to rain, and it does. And when the south wind blows, you say, It’s going to be hot, and it is. Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time?

Jesus in Luke 12:54-56

 

Affirmation and Challenge

in every culture and in every person there are things to affirm

 

in every culture and in every person there are things to challenge

Attacks on Truth

 in our culture

 

 inside the church

 

Postmodern Culture

 undermining grand narratives

     

”Abandon every theory and all forms of discourse. The need of a theory is the part of the system we abandon.”

Michael Foucault

Postmodern Culture

 undermining truth

     

“There can be no eternal truth if there is no eternal and perfect consciousness to think it.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

 

Postmodern Culture

 undermining reality

 

      “You can choose your identity by your self: girl or boy, straight or gay, kinky or drag… And you always have the chance to change your mind.”

Editorial in Expressen

Swedish newspaper

 

Aristotle on Truth

"To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false."

 

Aristotle, Metaphysics, book 4, chapter 7

 

Truth

 Four characteristics

 

• objectivity
• universality
• eternity
• intelligibility

 

Truth: a Postmodern View

Four characteristics

• Subjective
• Individual
• In the present only
• Unattainable

The world is like...

• non-representative art
• without any known artist
• without any title
• we as viewers must ourselves ascribe meaning and content

 

Future of Postmodern Culture?

• Continues to be postmodern but ceases to be culture?
• Modern (in science, technology, economy) and postmodern (in ethics and religion) simultaneously?
• A return to the modern or the Christian perspective or...?

 

Appreciation for Truth

...we must remember that over the course of history, appreciation for truth has generally prevailed over advocacy of skepticism. Although truth and skepticism have always been in tension, today's esteem of skepticism over truth is not the normal situation. We may confidently expect appreciation for truth to prevail again.

Os Guinness

 

Postmodern:
Lack of Transcendence

• The postmodern is born out of the modern
• The modern perspective is naturalistic
• Postmodern spirituality is therefore without real transcendence
• immanence, pantheism, monism...

 

The View of God

”silence of God”

Jean- Paul Sartre

 

”absence of God”

Martin Heidegger

 

”non-being of God”

Paul Tillich

 

”death of God”

John Robinson

The view of God:
Archbishop K G Hammar

God sent his Son to the world to save it, John 3:17. Mission therefore is a central theme in Christian faith and vocabulary. When the formulation was first made, mission was imagined as something concrete and literal. God was in heaven; heaven was in an upperstory above the earth. When our thoughts today  search for support… most people imagine that God is approaching human beings from the inside, from the cosmic depths that every human being is a carrier of.

 

The View of God:
Archbishop K G Hammar

• “Does God exist?
• The question is formulated in a wrong way.”

 

• “You do not need to believe anything specific to be a Christian.”

 

• God is beyond language
• We must distinguish between god and GOD

 

Lennart Koskinen

• Pure Energy
• The Absolute
• The One
• Being
• Existence
• The Category of Eternity
• The Sixth Dimension
• Original Energy

 

• The Ground of Being
• The Source
• The Highest Reality
• The Cosmic Sun
• The Holy
• Cosmic Consciousness
• The Transcendent

 

Lennart Koskinen

...but best through negations like:

 

• The Nothing of Nothingness
• Not this and not that
• Beyond all categories
• Nameless
• Indivisible
• Incomprehensible.”

From Gud 2000

 

Response

• Many Christians today are confusing pragmatic responses

finding the bridges

• with a theoretical understanding of the issue

Christianity is about reality and truth

 

Response

• Creation
• Revelation
• The Attitude of Jesus

The Created Order

• God is Creator of this reality and of man
• real transcendence
• truth, reason, language

 

• God has chosen to relate to us in and through his created reality
• to dismiss creation is to dismiss the Creator

 

 

General and Special Revelation

 

• The world and the Word
• they have the same source

 

The created reality fits together with the biblical message

 

Jesus in John 5

• Explaining his claims

 

• Giving arguments for the truth of his claims

 

Os Guinness

…the Christian faith is not true because it works; it works because it is true. It is not true because we experience it; we experience it, deeply and gloriously, because it is true. It is not simply “true for us”; it is true for any who seek in order to find, because truth is true even if nobody believes it and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office or sincerity; it is simply true, and that is the end of it.

Time for Truth, p 84

 

Albert Camus

 

Prefer truth to everything