Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Wednesday, January 4, 2023
Let’s accept the reality that there IS a singular truth about the nature of God, so we can truly begin to search for it. Then, let’s earnestly begin the search. If we are unwilling to even accept the premise that there IS an objective truth, we will never begin the search that will eventually lead us to God.

For some of us, it might seem ridiculous to say that truth does not exist, because we have simply assumed the reality and existence of “truth” since we were very small. But others out there have struggled with the idea that there can be singular, exclusive truth in all areas of life, and if you ask your friends to talk about issues of faith, you will quickly discover that few of them are able to agree on a singular, objective truth. In fact, many of us have come to the conclusion that there is no one truth about anything. And when we say that nothing is objectively “right” or “true,” we are actually saying that EVERYTHING is “right” and “true”! If no one particular idea or reality is true to the exclusion of others that are NOT true, then we have to admit that every idea, notion or reality is equally valid and “true.” Something in our intuition tells us that this simply cannot be the case.
Now we may disagree on the nature of truth at the spiritual level, but it’s hard to deny objective truths at the physical level. As I step out into the street, it’s either true or untrue that there are cars racing back and forth in front of me. I make a decision to step out based on the truth that I observe and recognize. If the street is busy with cars speeding back and forth, it is not both true and untrue that I can safely step into traffic. If I do step out, I will not be both dead and “un-dead” as a result of the truth of the situation. The street is either filled with cars or it is not. It is either safe to cross or it is not. BOTH realities cannot exist at the same time. One truth must exist at the exclusion of the other.
Let’s put it another way. As I leave the restaurant tonight and enter the restaurant parking lot, I will need to find my way back to my car.  While there may be other similar vehicles in the parking lot, only one of them is mine; only one of them belongs to me. My key will only fit in one door. If I am caught trying to break into a similar car, I will not be able to tell the police that this other vehicle is both mine and not mine. There is a singular exclusive truth about the car involved here. It is either mine or it is not!
But while exclusive truth seems rational and acceptable in the material world, some people have a much harder time accepting the possibility of objective, exclusive truth when it comes to spiritual matters. For these folks, there exist any number of diverse and divergent truths about God and even more possible paths to this God, all of which are said to be true at the same time! But it’s important for us to take a deep look at this claim of diversity and religious pluralism. We need to remember that the world’s greatest (and even not so great) religions don’t make the same claims about God and the nature spiritual reality. And it’s not just a matter of each religion adding something to the larger picture. Each of the world’s religious systems makes claims about the nature of God (and life after death) that are diametrically OPPOSED! The world’s religions simply don’t agree with each other! Buddhism claims that there is no personal God, while Christianity argues that there is a personal God. Judaism claims that Jesus was simply a man, while Christianity claims that he was God Himself! Islam encourages its followers to eliminate and destroy all infidels, while biblical Christianity encourages its followers to love their enemies. These notions are very different and very opposed and they are only a few examples of the literally thousands of points at which world religions disagree. It is fair to say that ALL of these world religions may be wrong about what they believe (each system must make its own case), but it is simply crazy to say that all of the world’s religions are correct at the same time; their truth claims are opposed to one another! In spite of this obvious conflict in spiritual truths (or perhaps because of this conflict), the world around us is making a couple of claims about the nature of truth.
Truth Does Not ExistFirst, the world tries to tell us that objective, objective truth simply does not exist. This is an “ontological” issue. “Ontology” relates to the nature or essence of “being.” The claim here is that ALL truth is “perspectival” in nature. In other words, all truth depends on your perspective! What may be true for one person may not be true for another; it really simply depends on your point of view.
Truth Cannot Be KnownSecondly, the world around us is also making the claim that even if objective, objective truth does exist, we could never know with certainty what that truth is. This is an “epistemological” issue. Epistemology relates to the nature of “knowing” or being able to know something. The claim here is that we simply cannot trust our human mental faculties to tell us what we need to know to come to a conclusion about any truth we are examining.
For many great philosophical thinkers in history, understanding truth is elusive enterprise based on both its nature and our ability to comprehend it in the first place. But let’s take a close look at both of these concerns about truth. To say that truth does not exist is to simply make yet another truth claim and this nullifies any claim against the existence of truth, does it not? And to claim that all truth is “perspectival” in nature is to once again make a claim that you want others to believe is NOT simply coming from your own perspective. When someone says that all truth depends on your point of view, they want us to believe that this statement is true and not simply their point of view! See the problem? And to say that we simply cannot know the truth, even if it exists objectively, is to once again make a self-refuting claim. How can we know that we cannot know? If certainty is impossible, then how can we be certain that certainty is impossible? Are you starting to understand the silliness of all of this?
Truth is rather brutish in the way that it imposes itself on our lives. It’s like a safe dropping from a ten-story building; we either step aside or get crushed. While we may not know all that can be known about something, and while we may all have a distinct perspective about an issue, to deny the existence of truth or the sufficiency of our own knowledge of truth is to begin a series of silly mental experiments. At the end of the day, if we look up and see the safe falling, we are probably going to find ourselves stepping out of the way.
Now not everyone takes this rather common sense approach to truth. Great philosophers through the ages have at times also been great skeptics:
Andre GideBelieve those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
Molly IvinsI believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.
Albert EinsteinTruth is what stands the test of experience.
BuddhaBelieve nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books, believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.
So how did we get to this place in our world where so many great thinkers distrust anything that is claimed as truth? How did we get to the point where we trust nothing and, at the same time, embrace everything? Let me tell you about my grandmother. She never had any doubt that there was a singular truth. She grew up in Naples, Italy and spent her early life in a world of common dreams, common values, common faith, common enemies, common holidays, and common lives. In a place like this, everyone agrees on what is true and what is a lie, at least when it comes to the major worldview issues. But my grandmother eventually migrated to the world’s greatest experiment in multi-culturalism: the United States. There is no other country in the history of mankind that has tried to blend so many different people with so many different backgrounds. Here, my grandmother had to confront the realization that there is more than one way to consider the world. She found herself in a place where few people agreed about ANYTHING. But she learned quickly that disagreeing about truth is not the same as believing that there simply is no truth to argue about; disagreeing about the truth does not mean that truth cannot be known.
How can we, as individuals, trust that the knowledge we hold is actually true? What is “knowledge” in the first place and how is “knowledge” related to “belief”? Well, philosophers have been thinking about this for some time and the traditional analysis of knowledge is usually described in the following way:
Knowledge=Properly Justified True Belief
Now, what exactly does this mean? It’s important for you and I to understand this simple little equation because our knowledge of ALL things (including our knowledge of spiritual matters) comes down to whether or not we hold properly justified true beliefs. So, let’s examine the definition more precisely, starting backwards from the definition of “Belief” to the definition of “Knowledge”:
“Belief”Let’s face it; you can’t “know” something unless you “believe” it. I can’t “know” that there is a God unless I believe that God exists. But my belief is simply not enough; it is insufficient. You and I can both believe things that are simply untrue. It is possible for us to have false beliefs. And people who believe something that is false often think that they KNOW it. But there is a difference between “believing” and “knowing” in this context. You may “believe” something that is false, but you can’t genuinely “know” something that is false. Now think about this for a minute. We may “know” OF something that is false, but what we “know” is that it IS false! To actually “know” something is to “know” that it is TRUE. And you and I can’t actually “know” something to be true unless it actually IS true. In other words, we can’t “know” something unless it is NOT false.
“True”Most of us like to think that we hold the truth, yet when someone presses us to define what truth is, we might have a hard time trying to define it. How do we determine when something is true? Over the centuries a number of theories have emerged related to assessing, apprehending and understanding truth:
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
The recommendations in the report essentially represent a progressive takeover of the SBC, utilizing the same pattern of of Title IX style administrative control used by progressives in higher education (and elsewhere). As in secular society, accusations of wrongdoing are being leveraged for the purposes of seizing control of an institution.

In newsletter #49 I discussed the importance of defending institutional integrity. The first plank of this was “trusthworthiness,” that is, operating with baseline morals and ethics. As I put it, “You would think this would be a simple baseline element of institutional leadership, but alas apparently not. The number of churches and other Christian institutions with a variety of moral, ethical, operational, and even criminal problems is absurdly high.”
Unfortunately, one of the areas with severe failings has been in responding to abuse. The Catholic abuse scandals get the most press, but there’s a ton of Protestant ones too. At the same time, I pointed out that in the Protestant world, outrage over abuse is curiously selective and often associated with political attempts by activists to insert themselves as the leaders of the institution being accused. I said with regards to this:
This is why, although even accusations by enemies that are true need to be strongly addressed, you should never give any sort of position of authority or oversight of your organization to people making accusations against it. You’ll note that they frequently agitate for this such as by demanding that some allied organization be retained for an investigation, calling for the board members to be replaced (naturally by people of which they approve), etc. But just because I point out that an organization has some conflict of interest, for example, that doesn’t mean I or my buddies should be assigned any role in running or overseeing its finances.
I want to examine the recent Southern Baptist Convention abuse report through this lens. I didn’t go into any detail on the investigation itself and the findings. Sadly, I have no doubt that there are many cases of abuse, and many cases in which incidents of abuse were poorly handled.
The SBC is a huge denomination with nearly 14 million members. Clearly, any group this large will have lot of bad things happen within it. Demographer Lyman Stone suggested that the report shows the SBC has lower levels of abuse than we would expect. Even if that’s true, it certainly doesn’t excuse the evildoers or those who failed to correctly act in positions of authority. Judgment begins with the household of God. The Protestant house has not been in order on abuse.
Rather than the allegations themselves, I want to look at the report’s recommendations for action. There are about 30 pages worth of them, including 17 executive committee recommendations (along with two alternatives) and 16 credentials commmittee recommendations. So even in the recommendations, I cannot do a detailed analysis here. But I will give a big picture look.
Creating a Title IX Style Adjudication System in the SBC
Before getting into the recommendations, it’s important to note that in baptist church polity, each congregation is completely autonomous. Unlike other denominations like the Episcopal Church or the Presbyterian Church, where the denomination provides a lot of oversight and control over congregations, baptist denominations do not have authority over their churches. Basically, the only membership requirements are very low baselines, such as giving assent to the broadly evangelical Baptist Faith and Message statement. The SBC is more of a cooperative association than a denomination per se.
The abuse report recommendations start to change that in two key ways:

It proposes creating an “administrative entity” that will be similar to a Title IX style tribunal in investigating allegations of abuse.
It proposes turning the credentialing committee (which basically determines whether or not a church is affiliated with the SBC) into a more expansive accrediting committee that can kick out any churches that don’t comply with the Title IX style entity, or who are otherwise not perceived as following the party line from the report recommendations on abuse.

Given that this report is about some of the some heinous felonies on the books —sexual assault and sexual abuse —it’s remarkable how few references to the criminal or civil legal system there are in the recommendations. Apart from references to mandated reporting —cases where churches are legally obligated to report suspected abuse to the police —I only saw one reference to criminal justice in the recommendations, a note that the Title IX style entity might hire people from law enforcement backgrounds.
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In the Scriptures, through many human authors in many circumstances, the one God speaks (Heb 1:1), and the unity in this diversity leads us to God’s final Word: Jesus Christ. Biblical theology is the attempt to relate the diversity and the unity alongside the likewise important disciplines of exegesis and systematic theology, all with the ultimate goal of beholding God. Though the Bible has so many authors, it was written by God. God picked the authors of the Bible, so they were prepared to speak for Him. God’s Spirit inspired them to say exactly what He wanted to say to His people!

What is biblical theology? It’s not just theology that is ‘biblical.’ All good theology sits under the authority of Scripture and seeks God’s revelation of Himself in it, but there are several important types of theological study. Biblical theology seeks to understand the unity and diversity of Scripture’s expressions by comparing the Bible’s parts to its other parts in light of the whole canon. Those parts might include a phrase, metaphor, theme, pattern, book, author, genre, section, or even testament (Old or New). When one of these parts is compared to another of these parts or to the whole canon, biblical theology is happening.[1]
There is obvious diversity of expression and emphasis in Scripture, because God spoke through many human authors in many genres on many occasions (Heb 1:1). There is nevertheless unity in Scripture, because it is the one triune God who breathes out all Scripture (2 Tim 3:16), from whom and through whom and to whom are all things (Rom 11:36). Sound biblical theology is biblical not only because it takes God’s Word as its authority and source but because it is occupied with the literary particulars of Scripture, its diverse expressions, its canonical structure (for example, there is both an Old Testament and a New Testament), and the way later books refer to earlier books. It is also theological because it takes all these books as God’s one Book revealing God’s own essential nature through His economy, that is, His interactions with His creation, chiefly through the work of the incarnate Son. Indeed, “All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation”[2] (Luke 24:27).
Biblical theology benefits our exegesis and our systematic theology. It can help us to understand the richness of any given part or passage of Scripture as we study, teach, or preach it. It can also help us see how Scripture’s structure and story support or correct our systematic theology. Biblical theology also benefits from these sister disciplines. For example, the particular grammatical construction of an NT quote of the OT can help us discern whether the NT author is trying to draw out a particular implication of the OT text or perhaps re-apply it to a new context in a new way.
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