Christian Faith As Truth
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 does not look like a physical (causal) relation:
The truth bearer (a true belief, thought, or sentence) -----Corresponds to----- The truth maker (some fact)
“It [naturalism] refutes itself. Whatever else we may come to believe about the universe, at least we can’t believe in naturalism. The validity of rational thought, accepted in an utterly non-naturalistic, transcendental (if you will), supernatural sense, is the necessary presupposition of all other theorizing.”
C.S. Lewis, “Religion Without Dogma?” in God in the Dock, p. 107
“Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim is false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult—at least as difficult as modern physics, and for the same reason.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 121
2. Skepticism:
Global philosophical skepticism always makes a knowledge claim (“It is impossible to know reality as it is” or “All we can know is our experiences, never reality itself,” etc.), but it requires some knowledge of the world
to establish this conclusion.
Descartes: How do you know that you are not now dreaming?
Contemporary philosophy, where it is often claimed that everything is subjective “How do you know that you are not a brain in vat?” Hilary Putnam, Harvard University
It is almost universally accepted among philosophers today that the only objects which we can be acquainted with are beliefs or something best described as mental.
According to Keith Lehrer:
“In whatever way a man might attempt to justify his beliefs, whether to himself or to another, he must always appeal to some belief. There is nothing other than one's belief to which one can appeal in the justification
of belief. There is no exit from the circle of one’s beliefs.”
Knowledge pp. 187-188
According to Lawrence BonJour:
“Now it is a familiar but still forceful idealist objection to the correspondence theory of truth that if the theory were correct we could never know whether any of our beliefs were true, since we have no perspective outside our system of beliefs from which to see that they do or do not correspond.”
“Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?” in American Philosophical Quarterly, 1978 pp.1-8
According to Michael Williams:
“Justification is a matter of accommodating beliefs that are being questioned to a body of accepted beliefs.
Justification always terminates with other beliefs and not with our confronting raw chunks of reality, for that idea is incoherent.”
Groundless Belief p.112
And, according to John Pollock:
“What is it that justifies a belief? Suppose someone justifiably believes some fact about the world on the basis of some other fact. Philosophers have often wanted to say that it is the second fact that justifies one’s belief in the first fact . . . But this is misleading. What is important in deciding whether the person is justified in his belief is not the fact itself but rather the person’s belief that it is a fact.”
Knowledge and Justification p.25
*“Skepticism presupposes an ontology of the mind (a view of the mind) that makes knowledge impossible.” GJ
*“Once one is driven to hold that logic itself is merely subjective the entire enterprise of philosophical inquiry collapses into incoherence and impossibility.” GJ
G.E. Moore:
A) 1. The skeptic's principles are correct.
2. If the skeptic's principle are correct then I cannot know of the existence of this pencil.
3. Therefore I cannot know of the existence of this pencil.
A) 1. P
2. P > not Q
3. therefore, not Q ( valid by modus ponens)
B) 1. I can know that this pencil exists.
2 2. If the skeptic's principles are correct then I cannot know of the existence of this pencil.
3. Therefore the skeptic's principles (at least one) must be incorrect.
B) 1. Q
2. P > not Q
3. therefore, not P (valid by modus tollens)
Moore’s point: Both A and B are logically valid, but we can still ask, “Which do we know better, A1 or B1?
A1 is a long line of questionable philosophical reasoning (such as David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), whereas B1 is not. (Compare Hume’s account to Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters, the first letter), (See also G.E. Moore: “Refutation of Idealism” and “Proof of an External World”)
What was Francis Schaeffer’s great insight about apologetics?
Schaeffer was inspired by Romans 1. 18ff. People dishonestly suppress truths, which they know to be true (e.g. that people, including oneself, are not merely biological robots, that ethics is nothing but personal preference, that the external world is unjustified opinion, that logic and math are nothing but feelings, etc., etc.). In many areas of life, non-believers live as if those beliefs are true but they deny their truth (or that truth even exists). So, Schaeffer would encourage them to live consistently with their non-
Christian views. What people often surprisingly discovered was that they couldn’t live consistently with their non-Christian worldview. For many, this was the first moment when they were open to the evidence that
they were wrong. (See The God Who Is There pp. 126-130)
In other words, Schaeffer thought the greatest danger was that the non-believer didn’t take his or her views seriously enough. If non-Christians really took their beliefs and the logical implications seriously, they couldn’t continue to live in the world, thus they have to cheat by living inconsistently with their beliefs.
Schaeffer’s challenge to Christians: What about us? Are we intentionally living by taking our Christian beliefs seriously?
The founding of L’Abri
For Further Study:
Dick Keyes: “Five Themes of L’Abri” at https://www.labriideaslibrary.org/IdeasLibraryDatabase/five-themes-of-l'abri
Benjamin Keyes: “Five Themes at L’Abri Revisited” at
https://www.labriideaslibrary.org/IdeasLibraryDatabase/five-themes-of-l'abri-revisited
Gresham Machen: “Christianity and Culture, delivered at Princeton Seminary 1912” at
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Christianity-and-Culture-Machen/0f7b3f26fdf92a941d7c11226b0de25ee939fa1c
Jim Paul: “True Truth in a Post Truth Culture” at
https://englishlabri.substack.com/p/true-truth-in-a-post-truth-culture-c85
Greg Jesson: “It All Comes down to ‘True-truth’” in He Still Speaks: Francis Schaeffer’s Enduring Relevance, 2021
Greg Jesson: “The Impossibility of Philosophical Skepticism” in Defending Realism: Ontological and Epistemological Essay, 2014
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