Pauline Dogmatics (2) Truth Claims

In the second chapter of Pauline Dogmatics, Douglas Campbell explains how we can be confident that God’s revelation to us in Jesus is true. I found his approach incredibly helpful, because it clarified something that I have always realised, but could not articulate clearly.

Now we have just spent quite a bit of time reflecting on the fact that the basic truth criterion for the church is the lordship of Jesus, which is to say, the God whom Jesus embodies with complete fullness. And I have emphasized that we know this about Jesus because it has been revealed by the Lord to those who follow Jesus. So this truth claim is active and essentially reveals itself. God in person present with us is the truth, which is our central truth criterion as well.

Everything else now needs to be measured against this truth criterion, and it is clearly an extraordinary one. The center of all truth is a crucified Jew who was resurrected on the third day; and all God-talk; and really everything else besides, has to be measured against it, which is really to say, brought in subjection to it. And we know this truth because this God has revealed it to us—that God is present most directly in this person and in events and activities associated with his life. Hence our truth criterion is alive and active on its own behalf!

However, people who are not responding overtly to the disclosures of God in these terms understandably reject this criterion as the ultimate measure of truth.

These people want to measure by truth by a different criterion and encourage us to do the same. It is here that the gambit is offered and it must be firmly rejected.

If we do this—if we accept this request and, in effect, start playing this game—then we place another truth criterion over the top of God to judge God, who is our truth. Hence this move turns out to be a denial that God is the ultimate truth. God is merely a truth and no longer the supreme truth, which is to say, the truth. We have thereby abandoned our initial position that God is our truth criterion and by doing so, we are really saying that God is not God. God isn’t synonymous with the truth, because there is another truth there that is bigger and better God, which really doesn’t seem like a good idea, once we think about it. God is not the truth?

We have stepped back from God’s gracious personal involvement as the truth in our own situation and have accepted the idea that an alternative approach to the truth should be superior to it...

God’s mode of dispensing truth has thereby been demoted to second place—which, as we have just seen, denies what it is entirely—and we have turned to some other mode of our own invention.

A more technical name for the procedure whereby we elevate our own truth criteria over the truth that is God, ultimately to judge God’s truth or falsity, is “foundationalism,” which denotes here our provision of a different foundation for truth from one that God has laid for us in Jesus, and hence a structure that we ultimately build for ourselves.

Any such philosophical attempt to construct a perfect foundation for thought and knowledge is indeed a form of foundationialism. In the light of the revelation of the Trinity, however, we can see that this exercise in human hubris exists in many more forms than philosophical foundationalism alone, and each of these needs to be identified and resisted.

To build a foundation for the truth ourselves is to reject the truth and to build our own version of the truth, which we then make the judge of all truth, and so the lord of truth, at which moment in effect we bow down before it and proclaim it as our new lord. So epistemological foundationalism, however sophisticated, is, at bottom, nothing more than another golden calf.

And we don’t need to do any of this. We are Christians, located by the work of God within the central truth that explains all of reality. We are in the truth already.

My experience reflects the reality that Douglas Campbell is describing. When I began studying philosophy at University in the early 1970s, I discovered that my Christianity was just a habit, and decided to become an atheist. However, after a while, I discovered this was a lonely position, as life was without meaning and purpose. I was just another animal that would live and die on earth. Because I could not bear to be an atheist, I decided that God must exist. I kind of created a god in my own image, because I decided what he would be like.

At this time my wife and I were invited to a Bible Study led by a young woman who was a friend of a friend. My wife wanted new friends, because we were living in a new city, and I liked arguing, so we agreed to go. When I got into arguments with this young woman leading the group, she would fall back on the bible, and quote what it said.

One day I was skimming through the Bible look for new arguments to use against her, when my eyes lighted on Isaiah 40:12-14, especially verse 14.

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
or weighed the mountains on the scales
and the hills in a balance?
Who can fathom the Spirit of the LORD,
or instruct the LORD as his counselor?
Whom did the LORD consult to enlighten him,
and who taught him the right way?
Who was it that taught him knowledge,
or showed him the path of understanding?

God struck me hard between the eyes. I had been telling God who he could be, but he showed me how ridiculous it was for a human to tell his creator what he was like and how he could behave. I was blown away, and told God that I would accept who he showed himself to be, and that I would follow him.

I knew that this is a new kind of knowing, different from what I thought I knew. I realised that it was a revelation from God. It began as a revelation of the truth of the scriptures (as per Barth) and developed into a revelation that Jesus is a complete and perfect revelation of God (as per Campbell).

This revelation as a different kind of knowing. I realised that I was absolutely certain about that revelation. I also realised that I had this confidence, because the Holy Spirit was witnessing to the truth and giving me a certainty, that I could not have generated on my own.

Later when I started at theological college, my friends were all reading Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, which was popular back then, looking for evidence for their faith. I found his material interesting, but slightly irrelevant. I knew that my faith in Jesus was a revelation from God that had been confirmed by the witness of the Holy Spirit. Any other justification for my faith seemed weak by comparison.

I realise now that looking for this kind of evidence was bowing to a different criterion for assessing truth. I had chosen to stick with a superior criterion for truth which is God who is himself the truth.