No Room
for Personal Truth
By Dr. Bruce Prescott
Al Mohler has been writing a lot about
post-modernism lately. I'm not enamored with post-modernism, but my issues with
it are vastly different than his. Recently, Mohler posted a weblog that deals
with what is the heart of the issue for him. For him, "Evangelicals are faced
with a stark choice: either to join the postmodern descent into a truthless,
foundationless confusion, or to stand with conviction on the truth of God's
Word."
For Fundamentalists, theology is always a debate about the Bible. The
foundation for their faith is not Jesus, it is the Bible. A simple affirmation
of the authority of the Bible is not enough for them. For them, only an
affirmation of inerrancy can save you from joining "the postmodern descent into
a truthless, foundationless confusion."
In their eyes, if you affirm biblical inerrancy, you have an objective
foundation for the truth claims of your worldview. If not, you "are embracing
the radical subjectivity, perspectivalism, dehistoricism, and relativism of the
postmodernist academy."
The demand for an "objective" foundation reveals Mohler's standard for truth.
For him, truth is propositional. It is a property of words and/or sentences and
is governed by the rules of logic and reason. At bottom, for Mohler, truth is
embodied in the cold, dead logic of timeless precepts and rational propositions.
Mohler's theology is more rationalist than Christian. That is why he fails to
discuss Incarnational Truth. In his theology, there is no room at the inn for
Truth that is personal. Truth embodied in the "Living Word," with arms open to
personal relationships with real people, is too "subjective" and
"individualistic" for him.
Mohler assents to the idea that, "Christians understand truth to be
more
than propositional," but he neither understands this Truth, nor discusses it.
Instead, he emphasizes that truth is "never
less
than propositional."
Mohler may be satisfied living in relation to "propositional truth," but I think
I'll keep trying to live in relation to the living, personal Word of God to
which the Bible points.