Objective truth

I had lunch today with my World Religions professor from last summer. She has an amazing mind, and I imagine we will be hearing a lot from her in years to come. We were talking a bit about truth, and it made me think of how I was trained to do evangelism.

The very best kind of truth that anyone can have is "objective" truth, no? That's the stuff we whip out when we want to shout down an atheist. However, if we chase the origin of that phrase, it seems that the observer of the objective truth must be the subject. In that apologetics paradigm, I'm uncomfortable allowing those subjects to be free, active subjects, because I've become disenchanted with how their worldview impacts the world. Even if God is the prototypical subject and we assert that objective truth is his, we still have to take a subjective position in order to define that truth.

The problem with that truth model is that it pushes every un-self-reflective subject into the position of object. So if I'm an old guard apologist, I see the object that needs to be converted, I grab the truth object off the shelf, and I try to get the two objects to play well with one another. It dehumanizes the human object, and it perverts what truth is.

This is where Dr. Ireland's thinking is valuable. She—confessedly borrowing and assimilating from many others—says that truth is a relational endeavor between subjects in which both subjects are transformed from their previous stases. I leave out some other key details in anticipation of her book being published. The point is, if we humbly see ourselves as subjects interacting with other subjects, the felt threat of evangelism is diminished. I'm not advocating some new "subjective truth" fad (which is actually very well in vogue). There is a time for everything. A time to be a subject, and a time to be an object. It's simply that our brothers (and usually not sisters, interestingly) who crow about objective truth need to stop objectifying truth and allow it to be the living, relational being we observe in the Bible—Jesus of Nazareth. When we allow him as subjective truth into our interactions, we can't help being transformed.