Bracketing the Truth
At America Magazine, Matt Malone has a blog post entitled Who is Truth? Here are a couple excerpts that caught my eye:
A friend recently told me that he was participating in a new inter-religious initiative at a Catholic university in Europe…It was with a sense of relief then that my friend told me that in the interests of “keeping the peace,” the dialogue participants had decided “to bracket questions of truth.” I wished him well, of course, but what he was about to do struck me as a nearly impossible task. Surely one could put aside certain discrete questions of epistemology, questions involving the mechanics of knowing in a cognitive or psychological sense. But how could any conversation proceed by “bracketing” the question of whether there is such a thing as truth?
His peroration is particularly strong:
To be a Christian is to dare to live in hope that the Truth possesses us. When we forget that, says Benedict, when we fail to recognize the Truth, then “the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world.” In other words, when we “bracket” the truth, we make violence more likely, not less. That is a good thing for all of us to keep in mind, never more so perhaps than when we are in conversation with our non-Christian brothers and sisters.
I both agree and disagree with his understanding of the truth and the dangers of bracketing the truth. Adapting what I wrote in the commbox there, I see two ways in which we can bracket the truth successfully. These are not permanent solutions, but are rather beginnings. The first is what I have heard to as a Rawlsian approach (though I do not know the work of John Rawls well enough to pin this approach on him.) One can tproceed as the drafters of the UN Declaration of Human Rights did: accept that they each party has wildly divergent (if not contradictory) metaphysical bases for their thinking, and work to see if from these bases they could reach common conclusions. One might think of this as “parallel evolution” in the realm of philosophy. The resulting dialog can be very fruitful, since it shows the participants that their understanding of truth need not be mutually exclusive. The points of disagreement can then be explored carefully, leading to a better understanding of how their truths differ.
On a practical level I am very partial to an idea articulated by Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity. He advocated the “theology of the hammer” as a way to circumvent the deep divisions within the Christian community. He argued that various Christian denominations did not have to resolve their doctrinal disagreements in order to agree that building houses for poor people is a good thing. Two things come from this pragmatic approach. First, something concrete and important is accomplished: the corporal works of mercy. Second, working together can build relationships, and (as the Fr. Malone points out) the Christian understanding of truth is relational: Jesus said “I am the truth” and if we are to know the truth we must know one another. So, paradoxically, by “bracketing” truth questions and dealing with the mundane and the concrete, we can build relationships that may in fact make violence less likely.
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Rather than bracket the truth, I would bracket my certainty that I actually stand within its light, and I would a approach dialogue not by putting truth aside, but in the hope that I and other endeavor to pursue it, even though and especially as we pursue it from different angles, going in different directions, and by holding different presuppositions about the meaning of truth. In other words, I wouldn’t bracket truth, per se, but the idea that truth is something containable and able to be possessed.
Such epistemological humility is ideal, but unfortunately rare: without throwing stones at others, we only need to look at the history of Catholic triumphalism. Hence, the understandable desire to maneuver around the (often implicit) aussumption that “I am right and you are wrong.”
Anything that brings us together, no matter how small the niche, is a good thing as it provides an opportunity to get to know each other. In doing so we may find out how much more we have in common than that which we do not.
That will make it much harder to divide and conquer us.
What separates us is lack of love with “truth” being held captive by beliefs that do not bring us any closer to the truth of love–God’s Love. These beliefs seem to support one’s identity more than they support a belief in God.
David,
Thanks for this. I don’t often comment, but I have enjoyed your contributions here.
A few thoughts:
It is difficult in today’s (Western) world,influenced as it is by concepts of cultural pluralism and relativism, to make any sorts of religious truth claims without being perceived as being presumptuous and as wishing to enforce oneself or one’s faith on another through sheer force.
Benedict is correct to note the correlation between a disparagement of truth and a rise in violence, but on the practical level, it is difficult to see how conversations which place a heavy emphasis on Truth can proceed in an inter-religious atmosphere.
The second method you listed for bracketing truth is at the surface attractive to me as well. Prominent theologians involved in ecumenical dialog have noted that the most painful and important part of the dialog is often building relationships with the dialog partners, growing to love them as brothers, but being unable to share Eucharist with them. This pain brings home the depth of sin that is schism and prompts them to work for real unity. However, the method described by Fuller reminds me a bit of a sort of “regnocentricism,” which drops questions of theo-centrism, Christ-centrism, or Ecclesio-centricm to speak of building the reign or kingdom. Truth is forfeited for praxis; Christ ends up being relativized. I don’t see this as a problem for Fuller per se, but his view seems to be at the top of slope heading in that direction.
Thanks Joshua. I see your point about “regnocentrism” though I think it can be avoided (by Christians at least) by keeping our eyes on Christ even as we deal with practical things like bread.
Also, it is interesting to note that as post-post-modern a thinker as Slavoj Zizek takes modern liberals to task for their inability to make objective truth claims—or more precisely, their refusal to admit that they make such truth claims.