Whatever Happened to Truth? | Andreas Köstenberger, ed.

Andreas Köstenberger, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., J.P. Moreland, Kevin J. Vanhoozer. Whatever Happened to Truth? Crossway, 2005. 176 pp.

I am the way, the truth and the life. —Jesus Christ

A generation ago Francis Schaeffer coined the phrase “true truth,” not in distinction from “false truth,” but in recognition of the fact that the very notion of “truth” was under siege already in his day.¹

According to Schaeffer, Christians were to emphatically affirm the possibility and reality of truth by claiming to know “true truth,” not merely subjective, relative “truth.” As Schaeffer lamented, for modern man, “truth as truth is gone, and … relativism reigns.”² And Schaeffer understood that once truth is torn down in our institutions of higher learning, it is only a matter of time before this will trickle down into our everyday lives.³

In his final work, The Great Evangelical Disaster, writing in 1984, Schaeffer urged, “Where is the clear voice speaking to the critical issues of the day with distinctively biblical, Christian answers? With tears we must say … a large segment of the evangelical world has become seduced by the world … we can expect the future to be a further disaster if the evangelical world does not take a stand for biblical truth and morality in the full spectrum of life.”⁴

Schaeffer’s clarion call must be heeded.⁵ And yet, it is not sufficient merely to repeat Schaeffer’s arguments; a new generation must rise to the challenge of making a case for truth.⁶

There is no greater power than standing up for the truth, simply speaking the truth, describing what one has seen, doing only what one believes he should do, living in keeping with one’s faith, hope and love. Living in the truth has tremendous personal and political consequences, which, once unleashed, have the potential of causing the collapse of an entire system of lies.

The same power of truth is evident in the lives of Jesus and his followers. Pilate’s house of cards collapsed only three short years subsequent to Jesus’ crucifixion, and despite the Jewish leaders’ efforts to keep the peace with Rome, their “place” was nonetheless destroyed in A.D. 70 and their “nation” laid waste. The rule of truth established by Jesus, on the other hand, took root, and, as the Book of Acts attests, the message of the resurrection spread like wildfire. The story of the early church gives powerful testimony to the fact that the truth cannot be permanently kept down.

Truth has a power of its own, a power that in the long run proves stronger than the usurped authority of institutional power. Jesus embodies this hope, the hope of the ultimate triumph of truth in the reign of his kingdom.

We are living in an age of great confusion about the issue of truth. In a world of media invention and virtual reality, truth has become a distant category to many persons, especially in the academic elite.

Today, in sociological analysis, philosophical discussion, and of course political debate, the issue is truth itself. Recent debates over issues like embryonic stem cell research, same-sex marriage, sexuality, and human cloning are really disguised arguments about the nature of truth itself.

In every corner of culture, confusion and chaos run rampant in this post-truth age.

How have evangelicals responded to this crisis of truth in contemporary culture? Many have openly celebrated the rise of the postmodern age, redefining themselves as revisionists, reformists, post-conservatives, or even post-evangelicals.

There is no doubt that the postmodern age, just as much as the modern age, demands of the church, and of evangelical theology in particular, some serious thinking, critical engagement, and honest confrontation. In speaking the truth in contemporary culture, however, and in relating it to the future of evangelical theology at large, there is need not only for honesty, but for decision.

The way out of this hermeneutical nihilism and metaphysical anti-realism is the doctrine of revelation. It is indeed the evangelical, biblical doctrine of revelation that breaks this epistemological impasse and becomes the foundation for a revelatory epistemology. This is not foundationalism in a modernist sense. It is not rationalism. It is the understanding that God has spoken to us in a reasonable way, in a language we can understand, and has given us the gift of revelation, which is his willful disclosure of himself, the forfeiture of his personal privacy.

Evangelicals are committed to a theological method that understands truth to be something more than the postmodernist can ever understand or embrace. Truth is revealed in Scripture. Truth is revealed in the One who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Truth is revealed in Jesus Christ, who prayed that his Father would sanctify his own in truth, and who confessed, “Thy word is truth.”

Contemporary culture presents us with a challenge, but in essence it is the same challenge that has confronted the church all along. If we as evangelicals are not committed to a theological method with a robust understanding of truth, there is a great and imminent danger that Christ will not in fact be glorified, the Bible will not be obeyed, the gospel will not be preached, and the Kingdom will not be extended. Let us therefore be determined to be a people who will say more, but who will never say less.

Excerpted from Whatever Happened to Truth?, edited by Andreas Köstenberger, copyright © 2005, pages 10, 51, 54, 65, 67, 69, 72-73, 133, 135. Used by permission of Crossway Books, a ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois 60187. Download for personal use only.

1. E.g., Francis Schaeffer, Escape from Reason, in Complete Works, Vol. 1, 218-219, where Schaeffer writes, “It is an important principle to remember . . . that . . . though we do not have exhaustive truth, we have from the Bible what I term ‘true truth.’ In this way we know true truth about God, true truth about man and something truly about nature. Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge.” [↩]
2. Ibid., 233. For an assessment of Schaeffer’s work, see the theme issue, “The Legacy of Francis Schaeffer,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 6 (Summer 2002). [↩]
3. Francis Schaeffer, Death in the City, in Complete Works, Vol. 4, 230. [↩]
4. Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster, in Complete Works, Vol. 4,401. [↩]
5. See also the comparable challenges issued by Carl F. H. Henry in many of his works, including Twilight of a Great Civilization: The Drift Toward Paganism (Wheaton: Crossway, 1988) and Toward a Recovery of Christian Belief (Wheaton: Crossway, 1990); and by Charles Colson, with Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1999, alluding to Schaeffer’s How Shall We Then Live?) and with Ellen Santilli Vaughn, Against the Night: Living in the New Dark Ages (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1989). But note the critique of Schaeffer, Henry, and Colson as engaging in “cultural pessimism” by James A. Patterson, “Cultural Pessimism in Modern Evangelical Thought: Francis Schaeffer, Carl Henry, and Charles Colson,” JETS (forthcoming). [↩]
6. For good examples, see David F. Wells, No Place for Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993) and God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994); and Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay:Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000). [↩]

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