Confident Belief: What Does it Mean to Know Truth?
In addition, I suggest that it isn’t merely practically impossible to remove these faith/value commitments: it would be wrong to attempt to do so. One must always situate one’s work in a framework of values to give it any significant meaning at all. Otherwise we are just acting, just doing things with no purpose to give coherence and direction.
Someone might object here that ones value commitments can be verified so as to render them no longer just faith commitments. To this Newbigin responds that faith is fundamental, even to doubt! For even doubt must rest on beliefs which are not themselves doubted. This is because one doubts something because it conflicts with something else one already believes. If that prior belief is also subjected to the test of doubt, it, too, can only be doubted because of something else one believes, and so on. Further, if one’s doubt itself is based upon certain criteria of truth, then those criteria themselves must be believed. If they, too, are subjected to doubt, then the criteria for evaluating them must be believed to be true criteria, and so on again. Of course, one could simply doubt everything—in other words, become a skeptic. But no one can live consistently as a skeptic. To get in a car and drive on the highway indicates that one believes the brakes will work. And we expect people to have a basic understanding of some normative moral values. Newbigin sums up: “One does not learn anything except by believing something, and—conversely—if one doubts everything one learns nothing …Rational doubt always rests on faith and not vice versa.”20
It’s important to realize, too, that the mathematical model simply doesn’t apply across the board. Few areas of our lives are governed by such a high standard. Christianity isn’t just a set of ideas to be logically constructed and evaluated. It is a Person relating to persons in particular historical contexts. We can place no stricter demands on this relationship regarding the certainty of knowledge than we do on the relationships we experience with people on earth in particular historical contexts.
On the plus side, we do have a significant body of evidence supporting our belief including historical evidences, rational arguments, and matters of the human experience such as the question of meaning—things which can’t be quantified and thus find no place in modernistic thought. We also have no reason to adopt the reductionistic naturalism of modernism just on modernists’ say so, but rather recognize the reality of and intrusion of the supernatural into our world.
In addition, it must also be kept in mind that the truth of Christianity doesn’t rest on the fragility of human reason, although it is through our minds that we recognize its truth. It rests on the faithfulness of God who has made Himself known to us.21 Our assurance comes from the combination of knowing, believing, and following the One who is true, not just from working out logical arguments.
Category: Fall 2007, Living the Faith
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