Over this last year I have given four different talks on the subject of truth. Today I want to conclude this series of talks by looking at a disjunction in the contemporary concept of truth, together with the Biblical solution to this disjunction.

What Disjunction?

First off, what do I mean when I refer to this disjunction?

I mentioned in my last truth talk that when I talk to people about the gospel, I often find that they automatically assume that the truth I am presenting, in so far as it is religious, is necessarily concerned only with the personal, interior landscape of the individual rather than the exterior landscape of the objective world. Religious truth is seen as an inspirational, subjective kind of truth, quite distinct to the solid, fixity of, say, scientific truth. This, then, is what I mean when I refer to a disjunction in the contemporary concept of truth.

Of course, this disjunction is rarely spelled out so explicitly, but on an unconscious level it has almost become second nature in our culture to separate religious truth from normal truth. This division is so pervasive that leaders in government and law you can get in trouble if their decisions are influenced by a religious conviction, since a religious belief, almost by definition, is a personal affair that must not intrude into the public arena.

There are many ways in which we, as Christians, have been subtlety deceived by this disjunction. This is hardly surprising, considering that this disjunction has been working away at the Western Consciousness for over three hundred years. By briefly considering the history of this disjunction, we will be in a better position to understand it and to appreciate the full nature of the Biblical alternative.

Bacon

As far as I can tell, it was the English Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who was the first to get people to begin thinking in terms of there being two different kinds of truth. The reason why Bacon believed there were two kinds of truth lay in another belief of his, namely his belief in empiricism. Empiricism refers to the theory that the only possible way to acquire knowledge is through the senses. It is impossible to know anything apart from what you can actually observe in the concrete world.

Bacon’s thinking was in reaction to the Western philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle and the medieval Scholastics, with it’s emphasis on deductive proofs and abstract categories of logic.

Not only did Bacon teach that knowledge through observation was the way of progress, the way of the future, but he also preached that this was the only ‘humble’ way. To vainly presume our minds capable of discovering any truth through abstract reasoning was, plainly, symptomatic of the worst type of intellectual pride.

But is it possible to divide knowledge up like this? Mathematics is a case in point of how difficult it is to impose a rigid disjunction between reasoning that is inductive or concrete vs. reasoning that is deductive and abstract. It is revealing that in his paranoia of anything abstract, Bacon de-emphasized the usefulness of mathematics in the experimental method, placing mathematics in the same compartment as metaphysics and religion. Bacon’s successors, on the other hand, would want to claim mathematics for the empirical camp. Be that as it may, Bacon’s important contribution to history was in cutting knowledge up like this, assigning one part of human experience to one compartment, the other part of human experience in another compartment, and then putting a sign between the compartments saying “never the twain shall meet!”

It hardly needs pointing out that the implications of this divided field of knowledge went beyond simply a polarization between deduction and induction or between the experimental method vs. deductive reasoning, but effected the more practical categories of science vs. religion, faith vs. reason, theology vs. nature, etc.. According to Bacon, each of these realms operated according to a different set of rules. As Tarnis puts it, summarizing Bacon’s thought, “Each realm had its own laws and its own appropriate method…. Kept rightly separate, both theology and science could better flourish…”

Because belief in God belongs in the non-empirical category – since God is invisible - it followed that according to Bacon’s criteria of knowledge that it is impossible to infer anything about God from the natural world. Thus, Bacon wrote that

Nothing of God’s nature and essence is to be found through the study of this world. There is no divine efficiency in its movement or divine form in its structure. It possesses no divine causation, divine motivation or any attributes of divinity. It is formed matter acting through varieties of locomotion inherent within itself and nothing more.

The Dualities of the Enlightenment

Throughout the 17^th century and into the Enlightenment period of the 18^th century, thinkers continued to develop the empiricist concept. Thus, you had philosophers such as John Locke who said that man was born with his mind as a blank slate and, elsewhere, that “there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.” No knowledge is therefore possible about anything invisible, like the soul, like angels…like God. All we can know is what we can go out and observe in the empirical world.

With this outlook came a gradual, but eventually pervasive, acceptance of empiricism’s natural corollary, Bacon’s divided field of knowledge. Any belief that cannot be verified through empirical/observational means, is a personal, inspirational, subjective kind of truth, quite distinct from the public, objective, verifiable truth of the real world of fact.

This is actually only one among many artificial divisions imposed at the time of the Enlightenment. N. T. Wright has written that the splitting apart of history and faith, facts and values, religion and politics, nature and supernature, liberal and conservative, can all be traced make to the 18^th century. One might also mention the severing of the spirit from the body that occurred as a consequence of the Enlightenment idea that man is nothing more than a machine. The consequence of all these divisions, to quote again from Wright, is that “each of those categories now carries with it, in the minds of millions of people around the world, an implicit opposition to its twin, so that we are left with the great difficulty of even conceiving of a world in which they belong to one another as part of a single indivisible whole.”

The Ring of Power

Gotthold Lessing (1729-81) was an important figure in the German Enlightenment and I mention him because he wrote a famous play called Nathan the Wise which subtlety preaches this divided field of truth.

In the play, an Islamic Sultan asks the Jewish Nathan an important question. The question is this, which religion is the correct one between Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

To answer Nathan tells the following parable. There was once a rich man who possessed a magic ring. This ring had secret power which caused the owner of the ring to gain favour in the sight of God and humankind. Now the owner of this ring took precautions to leave the ring in his family, ensuring that it was faithfully passed on from generation to generation, from son to son. Finally, the ring reached a man who had three sons, each of which he loved alike. As the father drew near his death, he was in a quandary as to which son to leave the ring to, as he had promised the ring, in turn, to each.

As a solution, the father secretly contacted a craftsman who made two identical replicas of the ring. Not being able to distinguished the original, the father left each son with one of the three rings. Of course, when the father died, disputes immediately arose between the sons since each believed they possessed the magic ring.

At this point, Nathan pauses the story to say that just as it was impossible to distinguish which was the correct ring, in a similar way, we cannot trust ourselves to distinguish the grounds on which the different religions rest.

The story continues with each of the three sons believing their ring to be the true one since each had received it directly from the hand of the father. In the end the brothers take their problem before a judge. The judge enjoins the brothers that what is more important than knowing the truth about their rings, is the motivation and inspiration each will achieve through believing that their ring is the genuine one.

Thus ends the parable that Nathan used to answer the Sultan’s question, namely, which religion is the correct one. We could say that in the parable, of course, one of the rings actually was the correct one, so two of the brothers would have spent their life believing something false, but that would be to miss the whole point Lessing is trying to make. The point – and I speak from the perspective Lessing’s whole belief system – is that there is something far more important than questions of truth and falsehood in the narrow, letter-of-the-law sense. Stop trying to defend what you believe is true and concentrate on letting that belief motivate and inspire you. There is no need for factual coherence to be antecedent to religious belief as it must be with scientific belief; rather, the nature of religious belief is such that it can exist on its own, so to speak, without needing to appeal to historic grounds. In fact, Lessing saw the very attempt of Christians to defend the historical veracity of their faith as intolerant since it failed to recognize that all the major religions, if rightly understood, were equally valuable routes to God.

The Reduction of Religious Truth

The situation before us, then, is one where religious truth is relegated to the realm of the subjective, private and unverifiable, juxtaposed with the kind of truth that can be uncovered by science which is objective, public and verifiable. Thus, in his survey of the Western mind, Tarnis speaks of the “double-truth universe” that began to arrive.

Thus arose the psychological necessity of a double-truth universe. Reason and faith came to be seen as pertaining to different realms, with Christian philosophers and scientists, and the larger educated Christian public, perceiving no genuine integration between the scientific reality and the religious reality.

This distinction was of more than mere philosophical significance, as it invited people to view religion and worship of God as a personal affair - a solitary experience between the individual and God that had little relevance to the objective world. What you believe is up to you, but don’t let that infringe on public reality. Such sentiments have, of course, become the commonplace tripe of the spirit of this age. Hence, people treat their religious beliefs as their own personal property in a way they do not treat beliefs about the external world, as if the act of believing is its own justification.

When the Enlightenment sent out to isolate Christianity from the public, objective world, not only was it necessary to conceive faith in purely subjective terms, but the sharp and craggy message of Jesus was reconstructed in terms of timeless platitudes. This enabled Jesus to be seen as a great moral teacher (even “the supreme moralist” of the Jefferson Bible) whose example might be adduced to champion humanitarianism and condemn religious hypocrisy, but whose relevance in the public, objective world was either limited or non-existent. The exclusivist claims of Christian theology were replaced by a ‘faith’ that was common to all religions, undergirded by a rhetoric of brotherly love as inspirational as it was vague.

Of course, the most crucial reduction of religion was in the area of truth, as we have seen. To seek objective verification about a religious claim is almost to commit a category mistake, since the ‘truth’ of religion is a personal truth that is discontinuous with the fixity of the external world of science and history.

Romanticism Resurrects Religion?

In compartmentalizing religion, the Enlightenment was able to minimize it and promote a secular vision of society. However, beginning with Rousseau towards the end of the 18^th century, and culminating in the romantic movement of the 19^th, the tables changed. People began to react against the Enlightenment’s antagonistic approach to religion, and not only religion, but the unspoken opposition the Enlightenment had championed against such things as mystery, enthusiasm, emotion, flux, spontaneity and, of course, the spiritual dimension. What is interesting about the way the Romantic movement revived the religious and spiritual element was that it occurred entirely within the Enlightenment’s framework of the double-truth world. Consequently, not only did romanticism accomplished little to stem the time of the Enlightenment’s legacy, but it simply broadened and propelled the vision while, at the same time, appearing to provide an alternative.

Imagine things like this. The legacy of Bacon and the Enlightenment had left reality divided into two compartments. One of the compartments was small and inconsequential while the other compartment was Big and Important. The small and inconsequential compartment was, of course, that which contained the religious and spiritual, while the other contained the secular vision. Now what the Romantic period did, beginning as early as Rousseau, was not to enter into the room, empty both compartments out onto the floor and begin the momentous task of sorting things out into a more integrated world view. Rather, the romantics went into the room and simply made the religious and spiritual compartment the Big and Important one, while still preserving the foundational separation between the two.

As the Romantic movement grew throughout the 19^th century, spirituality returned to the fore. However, this was a spirituality emptied of all content. Against a backdrop of nearly two thousand years of Christian tradition, the Romantics had plenty of words, phrases and symbols to draw upon that were rich in spiritual connotation. By using these words and symbols in the new context of Romanticism, one could gradually imbue everything with a network of spiritual associations that gave a semantical illusion of meaning without substantial content. Furthermore, because the heart rather than the head was now in the driving seat, one was absolved from having to offer precise definitions amidst this floating web of intuitions. Thus, in many ways the Romantics lived in the best of both worlds. Like the composer Robert Schumann, they could be religious without having a religion, while comfortably hiding behind the kind of humility that, in refusing to be dogmatic, goes and does what it likes.

Throughout this time, the Enlightenment disjunctions only continued in a wider divergence. The ‘outer’ world was left to the scientists, who continued to describe the nature of the cosmos and the human machine in increasingly mechanistic terms, while the Romantics focused on the West’s ‘inner’ culture, namely it’s art and literature and religious vision.

The Privitisation of Christianity

Up to now we have been occupied with looking at developments in the secular culture, in particular the redefinition of religious truth. But now we need to ask ourselves, what was going on in the Christian community all this time? Did the church accept or challenge the Enlightenment’s disjunction of truth?

Many Christians were caught off guard by the Enlightenment. While rejecting the Enlightenment’s conclusions, few Christian thinkers took the challenge of offering a rational critique of the assumptions on which these conclusions were based. Like the Romantics, serious Christians tended to emphasize the importance of religious truth, while still unconsciously accepting the redefinition of that truth as being something that is subjective, private and non-rational. Thus, rather than thinking through their faith and trying to find answers to the attacks being waged against the Bible, they took refuge in an emotional, devotional kind of Christianity that did not require any intellectual underpinning.

On the surface, Christianity seemed to spread in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries. Movements sprung up all over the place, including the Quakers and Methodists in England, the Great Awakening in America, Jansenism in France, Pietism in Germany, etc.. However, beneath the progress that Christianity was making, was an underlying, usually unconscious, acceptance of the Enlightenment’s dualities. Although the founders of most of these movements were far from being anti-intellectual themselves, these movements tended to emphasize the personal, emotional and subjective aspects of faith at the expense of the objective, public elements. In the end this led to an almost exclusive emphasis on saving souls and leaving the domains of culture, society, politics and philosophy firmly in the hands of the secularists. The Enlightenment’s compartmentalization of the sacred and the secular, together with their definition of which belonged in which, seemed to be winning the day.

As time progressed, this bifurcation only heightened, culminating in the strident anti-intellectualism at the turn of the last century with evangelists like Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday. However, as the 20^th century progressed, and Christians found themselves confronted with difficult ethical, environmental and philosophical questions, many have been gradually trying to pursue a more integrated approach to truth. God has provided this century with many inspired Christian thinkers, such as Francis Schaeffer and C. S. Lewis, to help us in this task. Be that as it may, on a popular level, the Enlightenment’s categories still persist very strongly amongst most of the Christian church.

Towards a Unified Field

Finally, I would like to end with some practical pointers on how, we as Christians, can combat the divided field of truth. In addressing all of life, the Bible commits us to an integrated field of truth. Although the Bible does not specifically mention every topic there is, it provides overarching principles that can be used to assess any area of life. As Edwin Rian writes, “Christianity is a world and life view and not simply a series of unrelated doctrines. Christianity includes all of life. Every realm of knowledge, every aspect of life and every facet of the universe find their place and their answer within Christianity. It is a system of truth enveloping the entire world in its grasp.”

When we share the gospel with unbelievers, we must take extra care to let people know that we are presenting Christianity as something that is true in the fullest and most integrated sense. This is hard to do since many Christians do not even treat their faith as if it is true in this wider sense. It should be part of our witness, as well as a natural response to discipleship, to seek to apply Biblical truth to every area of our personal lives, resisting the inclination to reserve it for spiritual compartments. The teaching of the Bible should permeate the whole of one’s existence. This includes seeking to apply Biblical truth to every area of thinking, not just about spiritual and religious topics. As John Newman wrote, “All the branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator.”

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