L'Abri 101: The Christian Faith as Truth We have a short five-week course on the essentials of L'Abri teaching, what we sometimes refer to as the 'Five Themes of L'Abri'. Each Friday, Greg Jesson and Jock McGregor will co-teach one of these themes. For those of you who have wondered about what makes L'Abri's teaching distinctive or who want to learn more, this will be a good opportunity. Each lecture is stand alone, but if you can listen to all five lectures that make up this short course, that would be best. This week we start with what Dr. Schaeffer called 'True Truth'. {Text of Greg Jesson's Handout follows} Pondering the Five Themes of L’Abri: #1: On Truth & Knowledge Dr. Greg Jesson gregrjesson@gmail.com Plan for the Lecture: 1. Opening comments on L’Abri themes 2. What is at stake? 3. Carefully define truth and then knowledge, which requires truth (15 points) 4. Common Misconceptions concerning truth and knowledge (the following 15 points) 5. How did truth and knowledge get undermined? 6. Primary reasons that truth is rejected: naturalism and skepticism 7. Francis Schaeffer’s pivotal insight concerning apologetics, life at L’Abri, and living in what is true Truth, Reality, and Knowledge: Following Clues, Signposts, Hints, and Insights 1. Only certain kinds of things can be true, such as beliefs, thoughts, and indirectly sentences. (Propositions) 2. Truth is the correspondence between a belief and reality. (Correspondence Theory of Truth.) Schaeffer called this “true-truth” and Dallas Willard called it “real-truth”. 3. Reality is everything that exists. Therefore, there are not different realities. (There are differing conceptions of reality, but only one reality. Reality is objective; it has nothing to do with how you feel or what you wish.) 4. Truth requires a truth-bearer (a belief, thought, or sentence) and a truth-maker (reality). 5. When a thought matches reality, it is true. 6. When a thought does not match reality, it is false. 7. Every thought must be true or false. 8. Because reality is objective, truth is objective. (Truth has nothing to do with how you feel or what you wish.) 9. Therefore, saying that something is “true for me” is literally non-sense. (Willard’s compass example.) 10. Saying something “is true for me,” is just a confused way of saying, “I believe it.” 11. Believing something (even really hard), does not make it true. 12. Knowledge is more than truth. 13. Knowledge requires three things: You must have a belief, the belief must be true, & the belief must be justified. 14. Justification comes in degrees; therefore, knowledge comes in degrees. 15. The value of knowledge is that it “gets hold of” reality. The rest is the adventure of your life! Some Misconceptions and Confusions: (Examples of misconceptions and confusions are taken from Jamie Smith’s book, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism) 1. That nobody knows anything. Rather, everyone starts by knowing a lot. (Romans 1: 18 ff.) 2. If you can’t prove something then you can’t know it. (Rather, every argument must come to an end. The real issue between presuppositionalism and evidentialism is what is required for adequate justification.) 3. That we need philosophy in order to know if we know anything. 4. That knowledge is impersonal, mechanical, and always simple. (Rather, knowledge is always an achievement of a person wherein the individual grasps the objective on the basis of adequate evidence. Therefore, knowledge is always a grasping of the objective from a perspective, and perceiving and understanding the objective within the context of one’s history, education, culture, motives, language, preconceptions, presuppositions, agendas, values, other knowledge, other beliefs, and physical and mental condition, etc.) 5. That knowledge is complete or perfect. (We can have perfect knowledge of very small matters, e.g., a phone number, but complete knowledge only belongs to God.) 6. That knowledge does not require humility, patience, and work. (Rather, what one can see is always dependent on the condition of that person. As one famous epistemologist said, “Take heed how you hear” Luke 8.18) “What I, a sinner saved by grace, need is not so much answers as reformation of my will and heart.” Smith, p. 30 [In fact, we need all of these things! Reformation of the will and heart often comes through answers.] 7. If something is an interpretation, then we can’t know it is true. This is simply false. In fact, we test our interpretations countless of times everyday against reality to see if our interpretations match reality. “I would agree that the gospel is an interpretation and that we can’t know the gospel is true, if by knowledge we mean unmediated objectivity or pure access to the ‘way things are.’” P. 44. 8. If something is true, then everyone could/would know it. 9. That one’s presuppositions, preconceptions, and beliefs cannot be challenged by the facts. “…I am, in some sense, carrying on the Schaefferian legacy…I want to demonstrate that, perhaps to Schaeffer’s surprise (and chagrin), the claims of postmodernists such as Derrida and Foucault have something in common with his own account of knowledge and truth (insofar as Schaeffer recognized the role of presuppositions.” p. 27, cf. p. 50 “Unless our apologetic proclamation begins from revelation, we have conceded the game to modernity.” Smith, p. 28 10. That all knowledge comes from sense experience (empiricism)—things we see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. After all, this claim itself is not derived from sense experience. 11. That knowledge requires certainty. Certainty is psychological not epistemic; it has nothing to do with knowledge. 12. Knowledge need not be objective. Subjective truth and subjective knowledge are incoherent. Notice how people who talk of these don’t define them. Is subjective knowledge different from mere belief? If so, how? “However, we need to consider these deep differences in interpretation rather than glibly supposing that the Christian account is objectively true and then castigating the Buddhist account for being merely an interpretation. In fact, both are interpretations; neither is objectively true.” P. 50, emphasis in the original. “Language is a lens through which we see the world, albeit with some distortion, simply because this lens stands between us and the world. As soon as there is a lens, there is distortion.” p. 36 13. Claiming objective knowledge necessarily leads to oppression and abuses. “To assert that our interpretation is not an interpretation but objectively true often translates into the worst kinds of imperial and colonial agendas, even within a pluralistic culture.” p. 51 14. If one has objective knowledge then one has not made an interpretive judgment. Knowledge is always an interpretation, but it offers itself as the correct (i.e. true) interpretation. “If everything is interpretation, then even the gospel is only an interpretation and not objectively true.” p. 42 15. If it is logically possible that one is wrong, then one cannot know it. Rather, simply because it is logically possible that one is wrong, it does not follow that one is wrong. The Train Wreck of Truth and Knowledge: 1. Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Biblical writers: Knowledge Blind faith 1. God 1. nothing 2. the soul 3. values 4. what other people think, feel, perceive 5. the real world of science 2. Empiricism: Knowledge Blind faith 1. the real world of science 1. God 2. other people 2. the soul 3. values 3. Relativism: Knowledge Blind faith 1. the “world” as my group sees it 1. God 2. group values 2. the soul 3. universal values 4. the real word of science 4. Subjectivism: Knowledge Blind faith 1. my feelings 1. God 2. the soul 3. values 4. the real of science 5. what other people, think, feel, & perceive 5. Postmodernism: Secular and Religious Fideism: The categories of truth, knowledge, justified belief, evidence, and logic simply drop out. Every set of beliefs is just as “rational” as any other. Knowledge Blind faith All that is available for everyone, Faith systems, Worldviews, Language games, Paradigms, As rational as anything else, Presuppositions, Mere Traditions, etc., etc. There are two basic lines of argument against truth: 1. The correspondence relation doe
