Jesus after Modernity: A Twenty-First-Century Critique of Our Modern Concept of Truth and the Truth of the Gospel

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Introduction

As modern thinkers, we have inherited a legacy concerning our concept of truth. Part of that legacy involves the idea that our understanding of truth should be objective or factual: that truth is not something subjective or a matter of opinion, but something that is out there within a reality apart from us and unaffected by our perspective of it. The idea of certainty is also part of that legacy and it too shapes our modern notion of truth. If something is true, it should be certain, and the new science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided a model for that certainty. The new science was a mathematical science that quantified nature as never before. It joined the study of nature with mathematics and offered a degree of certainty unknown to the ancients and medievals. This mathematical science also provided the third part of our inherited concept of truth, that is, that truth should be precise. In the modern period, these ideas became so closely associated with truth that we came to believe that any ideas that were contradictory, vague, or ambiguous should have no place in our thinking about truth. All truth claims should be objective, certain, and precise.

One of the reasons these ideas became so dominant in our thinking about truth was that they held forth the promise of dispelling mystery. The ancient and medieval worlds were full of mystery, but the emerging science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries set its sights on transforming the mysterious into knowledge. The early modern belief was that we could eliminate many of life’s problems if our knowledge of them was objective, certain, and precise. If we had such knowledge of a certain disease, for example, we could cure it. As the new science grew in popularity, we came to imagine that if we were to know the truth, our knowledge would have to be objective, certain, and precise.

In the chapters that follow, we trace the emergence of these ideas that became so closely associated with, and thus shaped our modern concept of truth. We then look at how those ideas came under scrutiny in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and were abandoned or greatly modified in order to fit our contemporary understanding of the human condition. Finally, we suggest alternative ideas that might better shape our concept of truth in ways that are more compatible with both a twenty-first century understanding of the human condition, and the things that Jesus said and did.

We begin with the idea of objectivity: there had always been the idea that we had access to objective reality, but in the modern period, some influential thinkers stressed the importance of pure observation—independent of theory—as the means to truth. This had a great influence on forming the new science, which stressed its independence from theory and reliance on the pure data of experience. The new science would maintain that the best way to get at the true nature of things was to make objective observations free of theory and speculation. There certainly was reason to distrust the theories of the past, as we will see, and as the new emerging science continued to yield fruit, objectivity became an essential element in the quest for truth. With the apparent success of the new science, the idea of objectivity found its way into modern theology as well.

In theology, there was a similar rejection of theory in favor of the objective study of Scripture. The reformers had rejected the traditional authority of the church just as modern science rejected the authority of Aristotle. As science looked to what it took to be the facts of nature as authority, modern theologians looked to the facts of Scripture. This had a disastrous effect upon the Gospel. If God were revealing himself to us through the facts reported in Scripture, then the revelations offered through Moses, Joshua, or David were as true as the revelation offered by Jesus. Indeed, if all of Scripture is an objective revelation of who God is, then the Jesus revelation is no different from the other revelations offered throughout the Scripture. They all represent objective facts about the nature of God. Of course, this kind of fundamentalism is attractive to us because of the freedom it offers. With such an objective reading of Scripture, we can temper Jesus’ command to love our enemies,¹ with Joshua command to kill our enemies.² If both are revelations of the objective nature of God, sometimes God wants us to love our enemies and sometimes God wants us to kill our enemies. Thus, we get to choose whether we think this is a time for loving or killing our enemies. Usually, we decide this is a time for killing, and we have God’s objective revelation to support our choice.

We now know, however, that objectivity, as the early modern thinkers understood it, is an illusion, and what they imagined to be the objective study of nature was not raw data at all but a phenomenal interpretation of data. We now know that human experience is a composite of data and the understanding through which we interpret that data. Our God experience is no different, and is always a composite of God’s revelation, and our interpretation of that revelation. This is the nature of our human condition as we understand it today, and, as we will see, it provides us with a way to understand the Scripture, not as an objective revelation of God’s nature, but as God’s revelation of how human beings interpret their God experiences. Thus, although both Joshua and Jesus experience the same God, they interpret and understand their experience of God in very different ways.

It should be obvious that finite, temporal human beings could never objectively understand an infinite and eternal God. The best we can hope for is an understanding befitting our limited perspective, and that seems to be exactly what the Scripture offers. As such, the Scripture is God’s revelation of how we human beings understand our encounters with God, and how God patiently and graciously works with our misunderstandings to bring us to a better perspective.

Having considered the modern connection between truth and objectivity, we then examine the way early modern thinkers tried to connect their new scientific inquiries to the kind of certainty that we find in mathematics. The modern idea of a mathematical physics, which gave us a quantifiable understanding of nature, produced the illusion that the truths of science were certain and precise, like the truths of mathematics. As the influence of modern science spread and became the model for all right thinking, so did the idea that all truth should be certain and precise. Consequently, if the Gospel were true, its truth would have to appear certain and precise as well. This led to an enormous distortion concerning the truth of the Gospel.

Today we now know that the truths of science are probable rather than certain, and when science is precise with its predictions, it usually concerns its own technology rather than nature itself. Contemporary science has modified the ambition of earlier modern science, but many people still equate truth with the kind of certainty we find in mathematics. Consequently, they imagine that if the Gospel is true, then it must be certain, but the Gospel never offers us certainty. Instead, Jesus says, follow me and calls us to a journey. Truth is the end of that journey. It is not a truth that we possess, but a truth that we follow. It is something that draws us unto itself. It is not a truth that we get a hold of, but a truth that gets hold of us. It does not provide assurance that we can be certain of the future but it is what provides direction for that future.

The next three chapters examine the nature of logic as a means to truth. In the medieval world, under Aristotle’s influence, logic enjoyed a dominant place. With the modern age, however, we came to see the kind of analytic thinking at the base of Western logic since the time of Aristotle as synonymous with reason itself. The logic of such thinking was based upon laws of thought that included the Law of Non-Contradiction (A does not equal not A.), the Law of Identity (A equals A.), and the Law of Excluded Middle (either A or not A, but not both A and not A). As we came to see these laws of thought as the basis for all right thinking, it became even more difficult to get at the truth of the Gospel. When we associate reason exclusively with analytic thinking and its laws of thought, we deem unreasonable anything that does not conform to such thinking and its laws. Consequently, much of modern theology found itself either ignoring parts of the Gospel or interpreting them in ways that conformed to the narrow, analytic reasoning of modernity.

Today we know that the two hemispheres of our bicameral brain allow for different types of thinking, and the analytic, left-brain logic of modernity is not the only logic. The logic of synthetic, right-brain thinking allows for contradictions, and the laws of thought that govern such thinking are very different from those that govern analytic, left-brain thinking. When we refuse to analyze phenomena into ever smaller parts in order to eliminate all contradictions, but instead attempt to understand things synthetically in their wholeness, contradictions are natural. Thus, a divine mystery such as God being both a plurality (three) and a unity (one) at the same time is perfectly reasonable to right-brain thinking, which accepts contradictions as natural. Equally, we best understand many of the teachings of Jesus with a synthetic logic that defies the Law of Non-Contradiction and the Law of Exclude Middle. With such an alternative logic, Divine mysteries are not unknowable but are rather infinitely knowable; that is, infinitely knowable if we allow ourselves to be drawn into those mysteries rather than rejecting them because they defy analysis.

In the final chapters, we consider what the Jesus revelation would look like from an enlightened twenty-first century concept of truth. By freeing our notion of truth from its exclusive association with analytic thinking and ideas of objectivity, certainty, and precision, we gain new insight into the truth of Jesus’ message. Of course, coming to the truth of the Gospel will never be easy. The Jesus revelation will always do violence to our understanding, because there simply is no context from which to understand the God of the universe having become a human being. What possible context could there be for a human being who was also the God who spoke the universe into existence? Thus, even if we can get beyond our truncated, modern notion of truth, we still face the absurdity of an infinite God having become a finite man. That will forever be a mystery to us, but, as an infinitely knowable mystery, we can continue to gain insight into it.

The Gospel is about a truth that is a person, and like the truth of any person, we come to better know that truth when we discover that it is more mysterious than we first imagined. In coming to know the truth of a person, a certain and precise understanding says there is no mystery and there is no more for us to know. By contrast, a less certain and precise understanding is the better understanding because it allows us to delve deeper into the mystery of that persons. This is especially true if we are trying to understand a divine person. The truth we seek in coming to know Jesus is a truth that is neither certain nor precise. It is rather a truth that is compatible with the things he said and did, and a truth that better enables us to follow him.

1. Matt 5:44 and Luke 6:27.

2. Josh 6:20–21.

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Objectivity

The idea of objectivity as many people conceive it today had its origin in the emerging science of the seventeenth century. Of course, the idea that there was a world of objects apart from our awareness of them had been around for a long time. We had also believed that we could know those objects. What was new was the idea that an even better knowledge of those objects could be had if we were free from the speculations and theories we brought to our study of those objects. This desire for greater objectivity was at least in part a reaction to the curriculum that dominated the schools of the day. Late into the seventeenth century, Aristotle was still the central figure around whom all formal education focused. Some saw such a dominant influence as a deterrent to future inquiry into the actual nature of things. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was typical of those who represented such a view. In The New Organon: or True Direction Concerning the Interpretation of Nature he criticizes Aristotle whom he says, made his natural philosophy a mere bond servant of his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well-nigh useless.¹ Throughout his writings, Bacon criticizes Aristotle’s logic and blames it, as well as the credence medieval thinkers had given it, for taking us away from the meticulous study of things themselves and instead focusing our attention on disputes over words.

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In addition to criticizing the fact that Aristotle’s logic concentrated on words rather than things themselves, Bacon also criticized Aristotle’s natural philosophy for having rushed to conclusions and developed theories based on far too few examples and experiments. This criticism against Aristotle was very much a consequence of the historical developments of the time. One of the major reasons why Bacon and others were interested in the further exploration of nature was because there was much more of nature to explore than Aristotle or his medieval followers had imagined. Bacon mentions the exploration of remote parts of the globe and the need to consider the new facts that exploration produced. He says, Nor must it go for nothing that by the distant voyages and travels which have become frequent in our times many things in nature have been laid open and discovered which may let in new light upon philosophy.

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Add to this the recent inventions of the telescope and microscope, and it is no wonder that Bacon and so many other seventeenth century thinkers were excited to explore these new vistas into nature. What he and so many others like him saw as obstacles to such exploration were the closed philosophical systems of the past (namely those of Aristotle). Since many in the schools still clung to the authority of Aristotle and his theories, the new science saw Aristotle as an obstacle to overcome. Bacon, however, took things a step further and saw all theory as an obstacle. In his desire to overcome such an obstacle, he says it is only necessary that all theories should be steadily rejected and dismissed as obsolete.⁴ Or as he says a little later, No one has yet been found so firm of mind and purpose as resolutely to compel himself to sweep away all theories and common notions, and to apply the understanding, thus made fair and even, to a fresh examination of particulars.

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This new thinking and the kind of objectivity it spawned would rise in popularity throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and the idea of unbiased, theory-independent observation would come to be associated with serious, scientific study. As this movement away from theory in the interest of science grew in popularity, there was a similar movement in theology. Just as Bacon and others were abandoning theory in favor of the objective study of nature, in theology there was also a movement away from theory and toward what they considered the objective study of the particular facts set forth in Scripture.

The Ancients had many theories about how to read the Scripture. Most of those theories maintained that there were several ways to understand Scripture because it contained multiple levels of meaning. Origen (185–254?) maintained that there were three levels of meaning corresponding to the body, soul, and spirit.⁶ The belief was that through these levels of meaning, God enables the Christian to progress from the visible to the invisible, from the material to the intelligible.⁷ Medieval thinkers continued the tradition of believing that Scripture contained levels of meaning. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) claimed that Scripture had both a literal and a spiritual meaning. The spiritual, according to Aquinas, had three levels of meaning: the anagogic, the moral, and the allegorical.

With the Protestant Reformation, however, Martin Luther (1483–1546), along with other reformers, rejected Aquinas’ idea of four levels of meaning,⁸ and maintained that, The literal meaning, rightly understood, of itself contains its own proper spiritual significance.⁹ This rejection of multiple levels of meaning in favor of the literal turned out to be very compatible with the rise of the new science and its rejection of theory in favor of objective facts. These two developments would provide fertile ground for the development of religious fundamentalism. A fundamentalist literalism would not have taken root in ancient or medieval soil: uneducated peasants saw the world as far too mysterious to be reducible to facts, and educated people sought meaning beyond the level of facts. Between the new scientific thinking and the theology of the reformers, however, the soil of modernity had been cultivated to spawn a religious fundamentalism that found its truth in what they considered the objective facts set forth in Scripture.

Although it would take some time, exposure to the preaching of reformation theology, and the teaching