Confident Belief: What Does it Mean to Know Truth?
The matter of the “knowability” of the faith is a problem for nonbelievers, but it can be a worse problem for believers. Those whom Daniel Taylor calls “reflective Christians” often find themselves betrayed by their own doubts; they feel the weight of providing for themselves the kind of evidences a nonbeliever might demand and feel guilty when they cannot produce in their own minds a logical certainty for their beliefs.1 What such a believer typically does is continue to mount up evidence and arguments and think and talk and think some more and hope that one day either the missing link will come clear or he will be able to “call off thoughts awhile,” in the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.2
Postmodern Skepticism
Times are changing, though, and the problem Christians face more and more is the challenge coming from the other end of the spectrum. If modernists demand indubitable knowledge, postmodernists deny the very possibility of true knowledge at all. While on the one hand modernists say there is not enough evidence to trust our beliefs, on the other hand postmodernists tell us our evidences mean nothing regarding the truth value of our faith.
Postmodernists believe that truth is a construct of our own imagination and desires. They believe there is no single, unifying account of reality that covers everything, one metnarrative as they call it. They believe one must leave everything an open question, that one shouldn’t settle anywhere since there is no way to know ultimate truths at all. Our own realities are created for us partly by our society and partly by our own exercise of power, often by the very words we use.
Is the Christian, then, now to think of her faith as just that? Her faith? Something that has validity for her and her group but not necessarily for everyone? This kind of thinking fosters religious pluralism, the belief that truth is found in many different religions. This is disastrous for Christianity for it leaves us wondering why we should hold to these beliefs when others might be more attractive.
Thus, there is on the one hand the modernist who thinks we can know everything we need to know using our reason, and on the other the postmodernist who thinks the search for knowledge is a waste of time. In the face of these mindsets, what should we do? Should we resign ourselves to feeling guilty and maybe a little intellectually perverse because we can’t assign mathematical certainty to our beliefs? Or do we swallow the skepticism of postmodernists and just hold our beliefs as the creations of our own minds and wills? It is my contention that we needn’t be bound by either position on truth and knowledge, but that we can have knowledgeable confidence in the truth of the faith.
Category: Fall 2007, Living the Faith
Followers
Fans
