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Whatever Happened to Truth?

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Comprised of four essays from the plenary sessions at the 2004 ETS convention, Whatever Happened to Truth? addresses truth from biblical, cultural, philosophical, and hermeneutical perspectives. Editor Andreas Köstenberger notes in the introduction that each contributor writes from "an evangelical, inerrantist perspective and in the conviction that there is truth, and that truth can be known, in God's written word, the Bible, and in God's incarnate Word, the Lord Jesus Christ." (10)

Köstenberger begins the anthology with his essay "'What is Truth?' Pilate's Question in Its Johannine and Larger Biblical Context." He gives a defense of the historicity of the Johannine account, and then examines the role of the characters involved in the trial (the Jewish leaders, Pilate, and Jesus). While being a well-written and intriguing essay, it felt out of place. The study and conclusions reached have more to do with the historical issues related to John 18:38 than they do with `truth' as such.

The second essay, "What is Truth? Truth and Contemporary Culture," was written by Albert Mohler. Mohler suggests that postmodernism supplies six challenges for Christians. I found the most interesting to be `the dominion of therapy.' According to Mohler, "The critical epistemological questioned is shifted from `What is true?' to `What makes me feel good?'" (61) As usual, Mohler provides insightful points regarding culture and challenges Christians to stand firm in light of them.

J.P. Moreland contributes the third essay, "Truth, Contemporary Philosophy, and the Postmodern Turn." His paper caused the most reaction due to his claim that "postmodernism is an immoral and cowardly viewpoint." (76) After defending the correspondence view of truth, he maintains that postmodernism (especially in its Christian manifestations) is confused on at least five points, primarily epistemological. Though a bit sensational, Moreland does a superb job of showing where postmodernism has gone wrong in regards to truth.

The final essay is "Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture, and Hermeneutics," authored by Kevin Vanhoozer. Vanhoozer makes many points, including: textual meaning cannot be reduced to propositions, inerrancy is not really a hermeneutic, and hermeneutics should be theodramatic. While he makes several good points, Vanhoozer's contribution is mostly a rambling mesh of independent points having no direct relation to one another. He covers so many different areas that each of the summaries of his essay at the beginning and back of the book are at least twice as long as the other summaries.

Each author offers a unique contribution to the question, Whatever Happened to Truth? While some are stronger than others, it is a valuable book in that it engages truth on several fronts from diverse perspectives.

Whatever Happened to Truth is a compilation of four plenary addresses given at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theology Society. Each essay approaches the issue of truth from a different vantage point. Andreas Kostenberger offers a biblical exposition of Pilate's question to Jesus, "What is truth?"; Albert Mohler provides a cultural commentary, warning evangelicals to avoid the postmodern mood and its effects; J. P. Moreland provides a philosophical defense of a modest foundationalism and a correspondence theory of truth; and Kevin Vanhoozer concludes with a hermeneutical-theological essay on truth. These four essays are framed by Kostenberger's clear and helpful introductory and concluding essays.

Overall, I found the book extremely satisfying, bringing together as it does four distinguished and staunch defenders of conservative evangelicalism. Kostenberger's essay "What is Truth? Pilate's Question in Its Johannine and Larger Biblical Context" is a scholarly and thoughtful exegesis of Jesus and Pilate's exchange, though his excessive footnotes were a distraction. J. P. Moreland's essay "Truth, Contemporary Philosophy, and the Postmodern Turn" is thoughtful and clear as usual, though there's certainly nothing new here. The essays by both Mohler and Vanhoozer, however, deserve further comment...

These are not good days for truth. Truth has taken a hammering for several centuries now, and the attacks seem to intensify with each passing age. Modernism of course offered a reductionistic view of truth, arguing that only the empirically verifiable could pass the truth test.

And postmodernism has come along, declaring that there is no such thing as truth. All of which sits nicely with a largely hedonistic and relativistic West, in which individuals are quite happy to justify their selfishness by a shrug of the shoulders and the reply, "Whatever".

In such a poisoned environment, this volume offers a much-needed antidote. Truth exists. Truth matters. And truth must be affirmed. Thus assert the authors found in this helpful volume

This book actually comprises four separate essays, not necessarily of equal value or uniform consistency, but all of worth in the current debate.

The opening essay by Kostenberger focuses on truth as found in John's gospel, especially in relation to the appearance of Jesus before Pilate. As Kostenberger has recently written a helpful commentary on John (in the Baker series, 2004), this is the most biblical-based of the essays, and reads much like an excursion from his commentary.

The second essay, by R. Albert Mohler, is an overview of the cultural trends that have arisen out the modern and postmodern assaults on the biblical view of truth. After providing a readable, non-technical survey of the last several centuries, Mohler reminds us that a recovery of the biblical doctrine of revelation is needed to restore truth to its proper place.

Philosopher and apologist J.P. Moreland examines the philosophical assault on truth, especially the attack on the correspondence theory of truth. He critiques the confusions of postmodernism, and offers helpful distinctions and conceptual clarity in our understanding of truth. He demonstrates how a modest version of foundationalism is still defensible and worth promoting.

Finally Kevin Vanhoozer offers what may be the most important and detailed discussion of this book. He explores the related concerns of doctrine, hermeneutics, truth and understanding. He offers nuanced discussions on how we should understand concepts such as inerrancy, the role and meaning of propositional truth, and the phenomenon of Scripture. Those familiar with his earlier works, especially Is There a Meaning in the Text (1998), First Theology (2002), and The Drama of Doctrine (2005) will finds similar themes here, and will enjoy the complexity and sensitivity of his argumentation.

Being a collection of diverse essays, which tend to go off in different trajectories, this volume can appear to be slightly disjointed. But the four authors all share common concern over the war on truth, and the need for biblical Christians to once again stand up for truth when it is no longer popular to do so, even within sections of the church. As such, this is a valuable set of articles that deserve a wide reading.

'Truth has always been a matter of contention. Throughout all the centuries, even as far back as the pre-Socratic philosophers, truth was the major issue of philosophical concern and inquiry.' p 58

Truth is a very difficult axiom to pen, because the truth is that social groups construct their own truth to serve their own interests, so to serve those who are in power. Albert Mohler Jr interacts with the great philosophical shift in reasoning that has occurred over the past two centuries, and contends that since the Enlightenment every culture establishes its own truth. The inquiry into the radical relativism we have inherited from men known as the 'high priest and prophets of the hermeneutic of suspicion', such as Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Kant, Hume, Hengel, Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard, rests solely upon deistic claims for human autonomous reason.

'Third, the demise of the text. If the meta-narrative is dead, then the great texts behind the meta-narratives must also be dead.' p 60

A very different understanding of truth evolves when it is 'invented'. 'Little imagination is needed to see that this radical relativism is a direct challenge to the Christian gospel', laments Alberth Mohler, p 59. Postmodernism has turned the truth on its head, as where most arguments throughout history were rival claims to truth, today we are told that truth is universally subjective to the human capacity of experience and reason. Thus truth, by definition, is relative to the time, to the place, to the need, and to the person. Truth has become a contested category, and no longer determinable by fact. Modern man has come of age.

'Theology should be catholic, not in the Roman sense of according magisterial authority to the official tradition of the institutional church, but rather in recognizing what we might call the ministerial authority of the consensus tradition of the church as it is extended through time and space. Catholicity is the antidote.'

p 110, Kevin J Vanhoozer

The brief analysis by Albert Mohler is enough to buy this book. His assessment of "post-conservative evangelicals" who buy into post-modern notions is very pointed. He defends the late-Dr. Carl Henry, who is the subject of the religious academic barbs by those who would throw the old ways out (primarily because of his committment to inneracy and a form of foundationalism, which many misstate as mere Enlightenment foundationalism). Mohler criticizes Stanley Grenz, Clark Pinnock and others who have embraced newer methods of epistemology and have been found wanting.

Mohler quotes Henry's definition of theology, "Divine revelation is the source of all truth, the truth of Christianity included. Reason is the instrument for recognizing. Scripture is its verifying principle. Logical consistency is a negative test for truth, and coherence a subordinate test. The task of Christian theology is to exhibit the content of divine revelation as an orderly whole" (p. 71).

J.P Moreland critiques the post-moderns for their misunderstanding of "objectivity" and their philosophical confusion.

Unfortunately, Kevin Vanhoozer starts out by making a brief narrative on Truth through interpretations, but ends up joining the critiquing camp against Henry and jumps about. His bottom line is that of an Evangelical gone neo-Barthian. This camp tends to always use orthodox language, but the meaning behind the words are obfuscated and the listener is left to chasing notions.

Vanhoozer does make one good point that Evangelicals should return to the great Protestant tradition where Scripture is the supreme rule for life and thought.