Author: David Opderbeck

My wife loves Home and Garden “fix-it” TV. Tonight I was discussing with my 7 year old son the sorts of things he wanted to pray for. He mentioned toys, money, and that “we won’t have any sewage problems.” A recent HGTV show apparently featured a family with a broken sewage line, and the footage of raw sewage in their backyard made a big impression on my boy. Sheesh.

Here is my image of NYC today. And a Haiku:

Through the Looking Glass today:

Brad Hightower at 21st Century Reformation discusses how 1 Cor. 1:22 suggests true knowledge exists only in the context of relationship with God through Christ.

Stones Cry Out reports on the global decline of atheism.

Tod Bolsinger writes about how regular meals can become sacramental. He asks: “How would our lives be different if we didn’t ‘limit’ the Lord’s Supper to the Holy High Tea that we celebrate once a quarter, once a month, even once a week, but instead was the mystery in every meal, every time?”

I am God, and there is none like me.
I make known the end from the beginning,
from ancient times, what is still to come.
I say: My purpose will stand,
and I will do all that I please.
From the east I summon a bird of prey;
from a far-off land, a man to fulfill my purpose.
What I have said, that will I bring about;
what I have planned, that will I do.

Isaiah 46:9-11.

We don’t always, or often, understand how or when God will fulfill His purposes. Yet every small detail of His plans is orchestrated as He wills — even down to a single bird or man summoned from far off to accomplish one task. How foolish to think God has forgotten to judge, and how comforting to know God has not forgotten to bless.

Through the looking glass today:

Smart Christian announces that the Christian Blogcon is set for October 13-15 at Biola University in California. Looks like a great lineup!

Jollyblogger compares the notion of “cyberchurch” with Gnosticism. Very interesting, and on point, I think.

Aaron at The Voiz discusses how giving technology — specifically video technology — to the powerless can help fight injustice, and references the film Born in Brothels. What a great movement this could become! The Christian Blogcon should include discussion of this sort of thing.

Here’s the view from my walk to work in NYC yesterday. Anyone who claims to enjoy winter doesn’t work in the city.

Through the Looking Glass today:

Alan Creech writes that while Christian books, seminars and weblogs can be useful, “What I don’t think is healthy, though, is not realizing that God has provided for us, by His Holy Spirit, in the Community of the Faith, in our local and regional contexts, all that we really need in order to be fully developed as Human Beings like Jesus.”

Emergent US considers an “Emerging Theologians” series to highlight work by “currently unpublished” authors. Interesting. Are bloggers who read alot but never went to seminary and have published in other fields eligble, I wonder?

Jason Clark writes about how his personal struggles with depression and anxiety led him to the Emergent movement and says “theology saved my faith.” I wonder how many other evangelicals or former evangelicals have been drawn to deep study of theology, and perhaps to the Emergent movement, through wrestling with the black dog of depression. Jason’s story resonated with me in so many ways. Someday, maybe soon, I’ll post about my own fights with panic and the black dog.

Here is the view from New Jersey today. I used to love this stuff. Now I have to shovel it. Oh well, at least I get some fresh air and exercise!

In response to some of the interesting comments and dialogue recently over the nature of and basis for truth claims, I’m going to make an effort to explain my current thinking about these issues. I should say at the outset that I’m still working through many of these thoughts, so my posts about them are in the nature of conversations about my thought process rather than dogmatic claims.

When we speak of things like “foundationalism” and “truth webs,” we’re employing metaphors to describe the nature of human knowledge. No metaphor, of course, is perfect. Given the limited utility of metaphors, we need to be particularly careful about how closely we identify our thinking with any given metaphor. As Christians, the metaphors we use to understand the nature of knowledge and truth should never divide us. These metaphors are simply tools that help us understand a reality we can’t fully grasp, and they should always be held loosely.

That said, here’s how I understand the metaphors of the foundation and the web, and some reasons why I think the foundation metaphor is problematic and the web metahpor preferable.

I wanted to follow up a bit more on one illustration Phil Steiger used in his post on foundationalism. Phil seems to advocate common sense realism, which he refers to as “soft” foundationalism. He criticizes a coherence view of truth with the following illustration:

There are things attractive about Coherentism, but it has at least one infamous flaw. In court, for instance, it is entirely possible to construct a case against a defendant in which all the evidence points to their guilt and no piece of the evidence contradicts any other piece. The catch, however, is that the defendant is actually innocent. What we have is a coherent but false belief that the defendant is guilty.

The problem with this illustration is that it betrays more problems with foundationalism than with a coherence view of truth. Let’s say, for example, that there were a revelation from God concerning the accused’s innocence. This revelation seems to contradict logic: all the evidence the court has been able to percieve logically points to the accused’s guilt. Common sense realism would tell us we must convict, because the sole foundation for real knowledge is logic and common everyday perceptions. A web-based view of truth, however, would allow for faith in a revelation from God as one anchor point for our web of truth. We’d then be forced to reexamine the assumptions underlying the “common sense” evidence, and perhaps come to a different conclusion about the accused’s actual guilt.

The essential problem with any kind of foundationalism for a Christian, I think, is that many basic aspects of our faith can’t be explained by simply logic and common sense. The Trinity and the relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will come immediately to mind. If logic and common sense are the only foundation for truth — and this is what foundationalism of any stripe claims — we’d then have to reject the Christian faith’s truth claims.

I do, of course, share Phil’s concerns that many postmodern thinkers would accept all beliefs as equally “true” so long as they’re internally coherent. As Christians, we believe in real truth, which means some things, as coherent or attractive as they seem, are not true. But, as Nancey Murphey demonstrated in Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, truth web claims can be tested against each other within a coherency model, in particular by examining the relative consistency of a given web against another and the relationship of the web to how we experience reality.

In many ways, I think is how the “worldview” concept originally functioned. Our aim in promoting the Christian “worldview” shouldn’t be so much to justify Christianity against the yardstick of reason as to show how the Christian worldview is the most internally coherent web with the best correspondence to human experience.