The Christian Right’s Problem: Knowing God’s Truth
September 29, 2006
Former senator John Danforth of Missouri has a new book, Faith and Politics: How the “Moral Values” Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together. As reported in yesterday’s Washington Post, Danforth is telling audiences that the “potency of the Christian right in the Republican Party is limited,” “religion is a divisive force in the United States today,” and “GOP leadership [has proven to be] neither humble Christians nor effective politicians.”
I have no intention of reading Faith and Politics, not because I am suspicious of Danforth’s politics and theology – which I am – but simply because my reading pile is already more than ten books deep. Accordingly, I will not analyze all of Senator Danforth’s claims, scrutinize his evidence, or comment on the eloquence of his prose. In fact, I had decided not to say anything about his book, but then I read the following paragraph from the article in yesterday’s Post:“The problem with many conservative Christians is that they claim that [1] God’s truth is knowable, that [2] they know it, and that [3] they are able to reduce it to legislative form,” Danforth writes. “The popular question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ can be difficult enough to contemplate with respect to everyday interpersonal relations. It is mind boggling when applied to the complex world of politics.”
Let’s take a closer look at each of the three components of what Danforth says is “the problem with many conservative Christians.”
1. Many conservative Christians claim that God’s truth is knowable
Given Jesus’ claim to be the Truth, one would not logically expect a Christian – a follower of Jesus Christ – to conclude that God’s truth is not knowable. Expectations notwithstanding, research shows that many Christians make an even more egregious mistake. According to one survey, 54% of born-again Christians believe that there is no such thing as absolute moral truth. (See Barna February 2002.) The cognitive dissonance with which these self-described Christians live is difficult to understand.Without reading Faith and Politics, I don’t know whether Danforth (who is not only a self-described Christian but an Episcopal priest) believes that God’s truth is unknowable. The quote above suggests as much, but is inconclusive. I will give him the benefit of the doubt and not dwell on the question here. In brief, God has given us at least four ways of knowing His truth.
(1) the revealed Truth of Holy Scripture, which of course is essentially meaningless to the nonbeliever;
(2) revealed Truth in nature: for example, evidence revealing that (i) the universe itself is not eternal but had a beginning, (ii) the universe is finely tuned to sustain life, and (iii) the same finely tuned circumstances that allow life to exist also provide us with the best overall setting for making scientific discoveries; this latter point is the subject of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery;(3) His truth is written on the human heart: in the West, this is known as the natural law; in the East, it is the Tao; and
(4) His truth is what conforms to the way things are, i.e., the correspondence theory of truth.
2. Many conservative Christians claim that they know God’s truth
The second component of Danforth’s complaint sounds very much like the common postmodern position – often posing as intellectual humility – that we cannot know that truth with sufficient confidence to act on it or to persuade others to accept it. I agree that we ought to guard against intellectual arrogance, particularly when it comes to the key questions of life. Never would I claim to have discovered absolutely all truths, let alone to have absolutely mastered them. Nor would I claim that any Christian person, church or denomination perfectly practices or embodies the truths they comprehend. Only an all-knowing, all-seeing God can know absolutely all the truth with absolute certainty.
But surely we can know something of the truth. Do not common sense and evidence tell us that some claims are truer than others, however elusive complete knowledge of all truth may be? History suggests that is the case. As explained by Yale Professor of History Donald Kagan in his 2005 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities:
[T]he current fad of skepticism and relativism is as old as the Sophists of ancient Greece and had a great revival with the Pyrrhonism of the sixteenth century. On both occasions their paradoxical and self-contradictory glamour yielded in time to common sense and the massive evidence that some searches are more objective, some things truer than others, however elusive perfect objectivity and truth may be.
3. Many conservative Christians claim that they are able to reduce God’s truth to legislative form
I have to agree with Senator Danforth, to the extent he is talking about the error of “particularism” – “the idea that there is only one particular Christian way to do a thing and, of course, that our way is ‘the Christian way.’” Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, 98 (2003). No one would claim that God has spoken definitively about everything.
[W]here God has not spoken definitively, we can legitimately say, “This practice (political decision, lifestyle, or whatever) is not Christian” – if it contradicts the teaching of the Bible. But we cannot legitimately go on to say, “This practice alone is Christian.” . . . This point means that there is no one Christian form of politics any more than there is one Christian form of poetry, raising a family, running an economy, or planning a retirement. Many ways are definitely not Christian, but no one way alone is.
Id. (Perhaps to many people’s surprise, this view is shared by at least one former top advisor to President George W. Bush. I suspect he’s not alone.)
* * *
Danforth is right: it can be difficult to discern God’s will for our lives as individuals and as a community. But does that mean, as he seems to suggest, that we ought to abandon altogether the effort to discern and apply it to the social ills we face? What do you think?
