Plurality, Immediate Love and Propositional Truth

Hey Dad,
I hope your weekend away was awesome.
Well, here's the last installment for now of my essay-ish letters. I realized when we were talking yesterday how difficult I think it will be to ever fully make you understand where I am at with this but I also realized how great it is to talk to you about it - not only for the benefit of clearer thinking for me - but because I feel like it has been a great way to get to know each other better. So, anyway, thanks.


I've been thinking a lot about the place of propositional truth within these ideas of subjectivity and the intrinsic nature of relationships.

To recap/restate what I was saying in my first letter: Philosophically speaking, there cannot be objectivity in a literal sense since to experience is to take a vantage point - to be subjective. This leads to the conclusion that nothing exists except in relation to something else - presumably derived from the nature of God himself - and, I would add, everything that exists does so only in relation to God. Theologically, we can infer that since God himself is plural and since it is impossible for anything to exist above or over God (i.e. some objective reality), persons, rather than fixed truths are the fabric of our existence.
These, to me, inherent ideas can lead to my conclusions about the importance of relationships over fixed propositions.

However, it would (obviously) be absurd for me to say anything like, "there is no propositional truth" or even, "doctrine and dogma are meaningless" since these are self-negating statements and since all my arguments so far have been propositions themselves.

So how can I reconcile this contradiction?
Firstly, I don't think contradictions are the aberrations we try and make of them. Our God seems quite comfortable proclaiming apparently contradictory things about himself or the world on a regular basis. I suppose it could all be seen as part of this idea of subjectivity: because reality is a matter of personalities moreso than propositional truths, we can almost suggest that propositional truths are merely products of the personalities (certainly in the case of God) and we would expect them, in this case, not to conform all the time to a set of rules (which would, in turn imply something larger than persons - something larger than God). Or, I think it could also be said that - if reality is centered around relationships, which are fluctuating, unstatic, eternally progressing things - propositions have an irreconcilable, processive nature. Nothing we say at any one point will be able to encompass "reality". No system or theory or set of facts can contain it because it is not a quantity, it is an endless interaction.

[This is, to a great extent, part of what I believe to be the genius of scripture. It is not, as I've said to you already, a list of propositions or facts but a very organic book of narratives, personal letters, poems and metaphors that clings tenaciously to the specific and, because of that, can never be comprehensively broken down - every time we make a statement that would seem to fully explain one aspect of it, another slips through our fingers at the same moment. Scripture is not describing a system but introducing us to persons. More about that in a minute.]

Which brings me to the "secondly": I think we should see propositional truth, not as non-existent or unimportant, but as subservient to relationships (in a broad sense - i.e. everything is related to everything else - and in a personal sense). Without it in some form, we can't comprehend the relationship we bear to anything else. We certainly can't enter into interactions with those things. Propositions become, then, the tools of relationship. They are the way in which we communicate our vantage point and in which we receive another's.

This is where it becomes very tricky for me to put my head around, but I'll try anyway: propositional truth is something like the glass through which we can see one another. It is not, in itself, anything. But if I were to abandon it altogether I would cease, in many ways, to hold a position from which another is able to encounter me. This is one of the huge problems with trying to assert that everything is true or right. We tend to take issue with that idea simply by saying "everything can't be true - there has to be an ultimately correct truth". But I think we are missing the real point. More importantly, that assertion is a refusal to interact meaningfully. Someone who is thus "tolerant" is really ducking beneath the glass and putting themselves "out of touch" so that I can no longer strive towards knowing them through the dialogue we have been talking about.

This is the crucial point that I have been working to make and that, so far, I think you have misunderstood: Inherent subjectivity as I have described it does not lead to the conclusion that everyone is right - that everyone can create their own reality based on their viewpoint - it leads, rather, to the idea of inherent plurality. As I have already said, nothing can exist except in relation to something else. This means that reality does not rest with me but, in a sense, with all of us as those who collectively experience the relationships.

Even theologically we can assert that everything ultimately exists in relation to God - who is plural (in a sense, exists in relation to himself) - but that we must continuously seek an interactional unity with him in order to partake in what is real.

What I'm driving at is that "reality" is a sort of ongoing accumulation of our interactions. You and I can no more decide what reality is than suddenly leap a hundred feet into the air. Reality and more specifically "truth" is an organic, living thing, which is not fixed so that it can be arrived at, but must be related to continuously. Further, it is not the sum of our "individual realities" but the interactions between them.

This is partly why I can say what I did about the church. We cannot see ourselves as individual Christians who know this or that about God and have a relationship with him. We have to see ourselves plurally, as part of the community, the family, the body of God which relates to him as a group. I can't decide for myself what truth will be. [In fact, I really ought to get the idea out of my head that I can arrive at truth at all, as though it were a goal to be scored in a cosmic game of basketball. Living is not a matter of goals. We often act as though we, as Christians, have merely been handed the rule book in secret which tells us exactly how to come out on top in the end and that our job is to try and pass the rule book around so that everyone can be a winner. Rather, the adage is true: The Journey is the destination.] There is a constant tension between the irrevocable nature of our individuality - i.e. we can never become another or lose our subjectivity - and the inescapable plurality that subjectivity demands, which makes everything we experience continuous and fluid rather than fixed at a point.

I should clarify: the community of the church - any community for that matter - doesn't decide truth any more than an individual does. Even if we, as a church, make this or that doctrinal statement we haven't then arrived by vote at truth. That statement becomes, on a communal level, what any statement I might make to you is on an individual level - a claiming of vantage point which allows us to interact with others (community to community, community to individual etc.). Groups should really be seen as kinds of individuals that are part of still larger groups (and so on and on) so that the tension I am describing is never resolved.
The idea of propositional truth, then, takes on a sort of paradoxical nature: Propositional truth is always greater than me - it is even much greater than us - but it is always less than the interaction we are having right now.

This is why Paul insisted that love was the chief of all Christian virtues. When we insist that propositional truth is more important than anything else - that it comprises reality - then we inescapably relate to each other on the level of power. We wrangle each other into the truth - our goal becomes, not stark, painful, sacrificial, transforming love, but merely power. When there is an end in mind (conversion, persuasion, behavior change) we will always seek power to achieve that end. Love, like faith as I described it earlier, must be a relinquishing of power. Christ demonstrated this consummately in his death. Love is an extreme and willful deference to the needs of another rather than an attempt to change the other.

When we see reality as fluid, unending, interactional and completely dependent on others, we can begin to better embrace the idea of loving relationships not as a series of goals to be reached, but as continuous and sacrificial interaction. It is unloving and selfish to decide that I determine truth and that everyone must adjust themselves accordingly. On the other hand, it is just as unloving to insist that everyone decides their own truth and thus avoid any kind of real engagement. If, as a third option, I want to choose someone and allow that person alone to determine what I hold to be truth, I will fool myself into thinking that I have attained their vantage point, maintain my subjectivity unawares and end up at the beginning – determining truth for myself.

What this all means is that we ought to become more and more specific in our dealings with each other. Everything we do should be based in the present and on the person before us rather than on generalizations and categories (our propositional truth often leads us to categorize everything) which are based in the past and the future and are ultimately a bid for power. When we can become thus engaged we will be able to partake in the plurality that our subjectivity - that our theology - demands and thus partake in reality. Love must be immediate rather than general (theoretical, broad, planned, remembered) for it to be love at all and this “immediate love”, by focusing on the specific, the individual, the here-and-now, can bring us into community and thus overcome that tension between individual subjectivity and plurality.

This is where I was going with my earlier statements about scripture. To my mind, scripture defies neat systemization or categorization because it is always concerned with the specific – the stuff of stories and poems and letters. I think it can only introduce us to the person of God in this way. If it listed his attributes we would have a very finite God on our hands. Since it tells us his specific words/actions at specific moments through specific people and events he comes alive for us in a most organic and unquantifiable way on the page and we are left thinking, “I hardly know this ocean of a person” rather than, “Ah! So that’s God is it?” And all the time, as the specifics of our moments and relationships are brought to bear on those in scripture it continues – not to yield more and more information – but to take us deeper and deeper into the bottomless depths of God’s person.

Your comment about people wanting answers really struck a chord with me. I think you're right, people do want answers. But I think you're wrong to say that we can give them any. An "answer" is really just a thing of power. When we have a final solution to any problem that confronts us we can take control and "overcome" that problem – as if, once for all, we had “fixed” ourselves – as if the past and the future were just as real as the present. However, when we realize that nothing is fixed and that only God may possess power (though even God lays it down for redemptive love) it becomes clear that we cannot offer any "answers" to anything but only a relationship, through the community of God's people, with the Truth himself.


Well, dad, take your time reading this and we'll talk about it sometime. Some of what I've said here isn't as clear as I'd like it, I find it really difficult to express some of these ideas, but hopefully it helps you get a vague sense of where I am.

I love you

Chad