We do not come to conclusions about Truth by listening to two sides of a debate, ‘diagonalizing’ between them, and naming a third path built out of the positives we like, or empathize with, from both sides.
Truth is not built out of human perspectives. Nor is the road to truth some open minded assemblage of partial truths, or negotiated settlements. We certainly can affirm, with Augustine, that all truth is God’s truth, wherever it may be found, but we absolutely do not come to conclusions about truth by picking up all the scraps and shoving them into a social theory.
Truth is not scattered tragically lost through the world, like puzzle pieces only waiting to be found by us, (or by ME), or the specially educated or empowered, and re-assembled.
Truth is something revealed in one solitary person: Jesus Christ. Now, because the world was made through Him, we do indeed see His fingerprints and the echoes of His voice wherever we go; we can affirm the beautiful, good, and true, as far as that goes.
But when we want to know Truth, we must go directly to Him personally. God’s plan is not for us to run about effecting some kind of epistemological (or political) plebiscite with whomever or whatever we might encounter, and then summing it all up in a theory or structures or systems to approximate something that will pass for truth. What chaotic nonsense! What we need is to know the mind of Christ and His perception insofar as He shares it in His Word, or directs us even in our observations by His Spirit. There is no bypassing that solitary means to knowing Truth: knowing Him personally first is the basis even for the legitimate use of reason in this world.
We know who individual human beings are because of who God says they are.
We know beauty and goodness because God, His Word, and His original design and intent in creation, is the measure of such things.
We know what true love is by who God is, and how He acts and models love for us.
We know what family, marriage, cooperative work, and even trade are like by what God created and instituted in the Garden.
We know what is morally right by His self-revelation as Father, Son, and Spirit, and how they relate, and then by God’s own direct commands: most spectacularly by the glorious command to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbour as ourselves.
This means we absolutely do not come to conclusions about society or justice by way of a social theory, critical or otherwise. We do not come to better accounts of history merely by arbitrarily preferring the perspectives of those we considers losers, over or against those we assess as victors. A critical posture does not automatically create the antithesis needed for some utopian synthesis. And we never know anything about our neighbour by contrived progressive schemes of category, classification, or conjecture about shallow or prejudicial tribalistic associations, class, race, or nation.
The fact that our knowledge of truth is always partial, because we are not God, does not invite posturing ourselves as more entitled or powerful because we esteem ourselves better at gathering up the scraps, but demands rather that all all human interpersonal relationships be defined rigorously by humility and the rejection of coercion. We have only what God has disclosed – and God does not reveal in order to make us personally powerful, but simply to help advance His Kingdom rule.
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