Abstract
This article offers a close reading of two sections of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, i.e., §70.1 “The True Witness” and §70.2 “The Falsehood of Man” against the background of the post-truth environment. A brief discussion of the post-truth phenomenon highlights how some strands of the resistance to it trade on a binary of objective and subjective approaches to truth and epistemology, insisting on the triumph of the former over the latter as the way of overcoming the problems of knowledge and truth in a post-truth culture. The reading of the two selected texts from the Dogmatics indicate that Barth’s discussion of truth and falsehood cuts across that binary. Whilst much of what Barth says in these texts is said in earlier parts of the Dogmatics, it is sharpened in this context by Barth’s discussion of the “pious lie,” the distortion of the truth within the Christian community, as the fundamental form of falsehood. Alertness to this sin challenges the church to adopt a posture of self-criticism to its own knowledge of the truth. This can be its own form of witness in the post-truth age.
Highlights
The concept of truth has never been self-evident
Barth’s discussion of the “pious lie,” the distortion of the truth within the Christian community, as the fundamental form of falsehood. Alertness to this sin challenges the church to adopt a posture of self-criticism to its own knowledge of the truth. This can be its own form of witness in the post-truth age
That it has provoked the vigorous, probing and enduring debates and discussions that it has within Western culture is in large measure because there has been a broad cultural consensus that the concept points to something real and which, notwithstanding various limits, is knowable. This consensus has, never been without its dissenters, and it has been significantly disrupted within the West’s intellectual world for some time, whether by the post-modern impulses towards epistemological relativism or the post-metaphysical suspicion towards any unifying objective reality. This disruption, common to the intellectual world, has transferred to wider cultural realms with the emergence of the various factors which have led to the current era being designated “post-truth.”
Summary
The concept of truth has never been self-evident That it has provoked the vigorous, probing and enduring debates and discussions that it has within Western culture is in large measure because there has been a broad cultural consensus that the concept points to something real and which, notwithstanding various limits, is knowable. This consensus has, never been without its dissenters, and it has been significantly disrupted within the West’s intellectual world for some time, whether by the post-modern impulses towards epistemological relativism or the post-metaphysical suspicion towards any unifying objective reality. Prompted by Barth’s ideas, I will make some proposals for Christian engagement with public discussion of truth in a post-truth context
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