The Truth Project

Focus on the Family has launched "The Truth Project," a curriculum designed to reintroduce Christians to a biblical worldview of science, law, and other fields of knowledge.  Seton Hall law prof David Opderbeck offers a thoughtful, sympathetic critique of the effort, but he concludes:

At the end of the day, my biggest source of angst with something like the “Truth Project” is its insistence that “the Truth” has once-for-all been captured in some neatly packaged curriculum, which often is presented as beyond question in all its aspects. I guess this helps some people who have never really thought about the fact that there is something like “the Truth” outside themselves. It doesn’t really help people like me, who believe in transcendent Truth, but who are experienced, traveled and read enough to know that all human expressions of the Truth are contingent and slippery, and carry elements of danger. Humans who claim to possess the Truth tend to shut out all other voices, thereby immunizing themselves from inconvenient truths outside their own limited sphere of knowing. Humans who claim to possess the Truth also tend want to transmute their truth into power, in the end disregarding a basic truth — that all people are created in the image of God with inherent dignity and freedom.

Ultimately, as followers of Jesus, we never really “possess” the Truth — it possesses us, in the person of Jesus. And ultimately, as followers of Jesus, the power of the Truth that possesses us is the power of the cross — the power of the way of sacrifice and love. Let us bear witness to the Truth that possesses us, but let us do so in humility, in the aspect of pilgrims and disciples (”learners”), not in the aspect of war.