This is a continuation of my posts about Donald Bloesch’s Holy Scripture.
Bloesch’s chapter “Truth in Biblical & Philosophical Perspective” is excellent. Bloesch notes that both the correspondence and coherence views of truth are Biblically flawed. “To understand truth bascially in terms of correspondence between the mind and the exterior world,” Bloesch notes, “reflects a dualistic view of reality, presupposing a bifurcation between mind and matter, spirit and nature.” This is a helpful corrective to the strong emphasis in some corners of evangelicalism on the correspondence view (to the point, in the writings of folks like Doug Groothuis, of holding that the correspondence view is the only proper view for a Christian to hold).
The coherence view, Bloesch holds, is equally flawed, because it is rooted in an idealistic monism, in which everything is capable of hanging together perfectly in human speech and thought, and in which nothing is unique or outside a systematizable perspective. Yet Bloesch is similarly critical of mysticism, in which truth is a sort of “overarching unity that dissolves particularity and individuality” and pragmatism, in which “the criterion for truth is workability and utility.”
Against all these views, Bloesch suggests that “truth” in scripture usually means “genuineness, veracity, faithfulness and steadfastness.” “In the deepest sense,” he says, “truth is identified with God himself, and the stamp of truth therefore characterizes both his words and his works. Truth is not so much an ideas as a person, not so much a formulation as an act.”
This does not to suggest to Bloesch that correspondence and coherence are irrelevant. However, while
[t]he Christian certainly shares with the unbeliever the idea of truth as a correct description of the world, . . . the correspondence theory becomes questionable when the discussion turns to ultimate or final truth. Truth in the ultimate sense is not a conforming of the mind to objective reality but the refocusing of the mind by the Spirit of God, who breaks into our reality from the beyond. Truth is being brought into accord with the transcendent meaning of the gospel, the very Word of God. It is not simply an agreement between our ideas and the gospel but a conforming of our totla life orientation to the demands of the gospel. Truth in biblical perspective is not so much the factual of the eventful. It is not the mere perception of facts but transformation by the transcendent reality that the biblical facts point to and attest.
Similarly, the coherence theory eventually breaks down because “[r]evelation cannot be assimilated into a comprehensive, rational system of truth….” However, revelation “can throw light on all human systems that purport to give meaning and purpose to life.” Pragmatism also is misplaced because “the fundamental need of human beings is not satisfaction or integration but deliverance from sin and communion with God.” And mysticism loses contact with Biblical truth because “[f]aith is not a mystical unknowing but a steadfast and certain knowledge concerning things beyond the compass of human reason and imagination (Calvin).”
Bloesch ties all this together in an assessment of evangelical controversies about scripture. He notes, correctly I think, that
The crux of the problem in contemporary evangelicalism concerning the inerrancy of the Bible revolves around different understandings of truth. The conflict is not so much theological as philosophical. Because a large segment of conservative Protestantism has unwittingly accepted the Enlightenment reduction of truth to the rationally empirical or evidential, the possibility of forging some concensus on this question is made all the more difficult. What is clear is that the cultural or dictionary understanding of truth has eclipsed the biblical understanding among many earnest Christians.
Bloesch argues for an understanding of inerrancy that is not freighted with this cultural baggage. “Biblical Christians,” he says, “can affirm the inerrancy of Scripture so long as it is not confused with total factual and scientific accuracy. . . . Inerrancy in biblical understanding means that the Bible in its unity with the Spirit guides us into all truth.”
This does not mean that the essentially historical character of Biblical revelation can be discarded.
The paramount question is not whether the Bible is true in the sense of being fully accurate in everything it reports, but whether the Bible leads us into truth, whether the Bible brings us truth. But the Bible could not lead us into truth unless its central claims were true, unless its overall witness were reliable and dependable. . . . To affirm that the Bible teaches ‘religious truth’ but not ‘historical truth’ is to overlook the Bible’s central claim that paradoxically God became historical, myth became fact.
Ultimately, Bloesch states, “[t]he texts of Scripture are steppingstones to the spiritual reality to which these texts refer, a reality inaccessible to historical research and investigation. God’s Word is truly known only when God himself speaks, an occurrence that is always unpredictable and mind-altering.”
There is so much that I think is helpful and right in this balanced, reformed understanding of truth, which nods to Barth without accepting Barth uncritically.