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Truth as Mission: The Christian Claim to Universal Truth in a Pluralist Public World1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Alistair McFadyen
Alistair McFadyen
Affiliation:
Dept of Theology and Religious StudiesUniversity of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT
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Extract

Alasdair Maclntyre has argued that, despite its ‘rhetoric of consensus’, modern society is irreducibly pluralist since it lacks the basic condition necessary for securing agreement on the truth of competing convictions — namely, some background consensus as to the nature and procedures of rationality. Even if the possibilities of affirming truth in the public sphere may not be quite as grim as Maclntyre makes out (and it seems to me to universalize an apt description of American public society), we are nonetheless still left with disconcerting questions as to the nature of public truth. Has public discourse been relativised into competing truth-claims? Is it possible to speak now of a common public world, of society, at all? Or of rationality? Indeed, if truth cannot be made the subject of public agreement, can we really speak any more of truth at all? How, in this situation, can Christianity claim to have an absolute and universal Truth? And how might it gain a public hearing for its truth?

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , November 1993 , pp. 437 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1993

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References

2 See Maclntyre, A., After Virtue, 2nd edn., (London: Duckworth, 1985)Google Scholar; Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988)Google Scholar.

3 I owe this image, of course, to Neuhaus, R. J., The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1984)Google Scholar.

4 It is not always easy to distinguish which epithet to attach to which theology, however, since foundationalism and fideism are not simple opposites. For a very helpful discussion of this, with reference to the ‘New Yale School’, see Tilley, T. W., ‘Incommensurability, Intratextuality, and Fideism’, Modem Theology, 5 (2), 1989, 87–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Whether it was believed thatthis imposition and the politics of Christendom more generally were justified because it was the imposition of the universal truth, and not just an approximation to it, is unimportant here. It is at least as likely that Christendom was considered by the Church merely as a useful set of political circumstances in which mission could flourish — an understanding which is only possible on the basis of a recognition of public pluralism (or else why conduct mission?). In other words, Christendom might have been recognised as a form of mission existence in a pluralist situation.

6 Hardy, D. W. and Ford, D. F., in Jubilate: Theology in Praise (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, speak of the resurrection as God referring jesus back to the world (p. 126).

7 Thus the conditions of dialogue in the kingdom operate as a peculiar kind of formal universal for every here and now. Yet, because the content cannot be specified apart from the particular situation, it is not a tyrannical universal. See further my The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships (Cambridge: CUP, 1990)Google Scholar. This position approximates to those taken by Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, who both try to identify transcendental, universal conditions of thought and action which are present within empirical conditions.

8 J. Stout refers to the kind of process I have in mind as moral bricolage (see his Ethics After Babel: the Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1988)Google Scholar. Edward Farley has similar considerations in mind in his construction of theological portraiture (see his Ecclesial Reflection: an Anatomy of Theological Method (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

9 For a fuller presentation of all this, see The Call to Personhood, Part IV.