“What is truth” is a question asked by skeptics through the ages. It was asked by Pilate, the procurator of Judea, with weary cynicism, when faced with the Lord Jesus. Post Modern thinking seems to have gone further and denied that there is such thing as “truth” since we can only, in their view, make our own truth.

In the Middle Ages truth was what the Roman church said it was, or if you were in Greece or Russia it was what the Orthodox Church said it was. Wycliffe, in England challenged all this with his translation of Jerome’s Latin Bible and the Lollards, and later, the Independents and the Baptists, argued that truth was what God said it was. They understood the Word of God and the Bible to be identical so everyman could find out The Truth for himself by reading the Bible. Of course there was the problem that people interpreted the Bible differently and often people failed to recognize that it was their own interpretation they quarreled over and not the actual meanings of the actual words of the Bible.

With the Renaissance came the tendency to look away from the Bible and instead to study nature both human and material. Renaissance paintings, instead of a virgin and child, a sort of ethereal goddess sort of person with an ethereal baby, depicted an ordinary young woman with an ordinary baby. Most people except the reactionaries in the churches thought this seemed sensible since this was probably how Mary and the baby probably were. In fact neither position could explain the truth of this simple “truth” of the incarnation. We still find it difficult, or impossible, at Christmas to get our heads round it and turn instead to eating, drinking, giving presents, and having a good time.

After that things really went from bad to worse. Kierkegaard, fed up with the formalism of the state church and the difficulty that religious “truth” presented to the Enlightenment mind decided that “faith” was “a leap in the dark”. In other words you did not know that God was there or anywhere, or that He existed at all but you believed. You leaped out into the void and hoped that someone was there to catch you. If there was then you at least had an experiential reason for believing. If not then, hard luck!

Meanwhile Britain was going through a period of Christian renewal. Churches and Chapels were springing up everywhere and there was a lot of enthusiasm. People claimed both a rational and an experiential reason for believing God. Nor was their leap one that was into the dark, but, lit by the light of a rational reading and application of the Bible, they set about a series of reform movements such as had never been seen before in the history of the world.

If you had asked them, a lot of those who believed and who spread the Gospel all over the world, would not have been able to give a fully coherent explanation for this enthusiasm of theirs. Some would certainly have done so. The leaders and the intellectuals among them certainly did. The Bible answered the big questions as nothing else did. On top of that it clearly demonstrated in the lives of converted criminals, drunks and losers, that it really did work in practice. When challenged as to the miracles in the Bible, one working class preacher answered, with the humor and the confidence of the British working class. “You don’t believe in water being turned to wine? Then come to my house and I will show you beer turned into furniture.”

But the confidence of the nineteenth and early twentieth century evangelist was not only a pragmatic one. He also believed that there were no contradictions in the Bible. This was no leap in the dark though to some of the patronizing intellectual classes it seemed so. Our working class evangelist had read and re-read the Bible. He read it every day, morning and evening. He read it completely through, from cover to cover, often once every year, perhaps a bit more. He studied it and argued it and he took on the world in debates about it wherever people gathered to speak and to hear and to heckle.

This was a movement of power, of crude lower class language which expressed magnificently eternal truths and witnessed boldly to The Truth. Then came Darwin. At first there was uproar, but not much. Gradually the idea that the universe had come about, out of nothing, over vast aeons of time, by chance, took hold. Gradually it ate away at the convictions of the evangelicals.

The sons and daughters of the working classes were educated, some went to university and the new thinking, the modern thinking, affected them and the old ideas were leavened with the new. And the new, at first giving a certainty as of scholarship and scientific progress, finally threw all into doubt and confusion. The old ideas of truth as something which corresponded to a reality “out there” began to break down. Preachers in the churches were becoming educated men. No longer were they Bunyans, or Booths but they had the letters of University degrees after their names and people respected them as educated, better taught and of a superior intellect.

Kierkegaard had started it. Faith was not believing what God said but believing first before seeing and understanding. Nietzsche continued it and his idea that modern man had killed God, or at least the idea of God, the relevance of God, began to fit in with Darwin’s theories. The rug had been well and truly pulled out from under the feet of the Christian world. If everything had happened by chance then there could be no purpose, no meaning and no rationality. If God was irrelevant at the best or actually non-existent, then there could be no morality. The Ubermensch seemed to be the answer. The idea of “man come of age”, who made his own morality and needed no God to do it for him gave a sense of pride to the humanist and the atheist. In Germany a new ethic was born, that of the race, the leader and the struggle for national identity and dominance.

Religion, if we may use the term to contrast with the evangelical fervor which had fired the hearts and driven the movements for reform in Britain, retreated into itself. The medieval Mysticism of the “saints” of religion became popular with new enthusiast for new visions and for old ones. Mystics like Theresa of Avila, Joseph of Cupertino and St.John of the Cross became popular. In the USA and in Britain the new charismatic movements gave back the enthusiasm expressed in music, clapping and dancing and a certain amount of confidence that religion “worked” because if gave good feelings.

In secular terms the slogan, “if it feels good, do it!” became a yardstick for secular activity including the protest movements of the sixties. Existentialism had merged with politics and religion to give a feeling of reality in experience without asking if the experience was one of reality. Increasing numbers of modern translation of the Bible also gave a sense of constant improving which was not actually improving permanently because it had to be repeated ad infinitum. More change was simply more of the same thing. It was a confusing world we lived in and everyone had a sneaking suspicion that Pilate may have had a point to his cynicism.

Existentialism itself encouraged this since Sartre argued for commitment, but without being sure of what you were committed to. It probably did not matter as long as you were committed but his brief romance with the Communist Party was something of a disillusionment. It is not particularly strange that if there is nothing true, or worthwhile, or good then “commitment” is an empty word.

Of course the strong strand of Romanticism in modern culture could do all sorts of things with words so that language became a game of semantics where words were small on content but large on connotation. So “commitment” sounded good, it was even good for a slogan, but it had lost all meaning. Inevitably the commitment did not last. Some people looked for more commitment or other commitment that might give satisfaction but they seldom found that ideal creed, party, or love affair for they all looked inviting at first but all turned to dust or took up too much time or energy. People instead, now watch sport or game shows on television and “nobody thinks too much on Desolation Row”.

As confusion turns to disillusion so philosophy tries to understand and academics work out a theory and write a paper on what it is all about. Post Modernism, Post Christianity, and Post History and all the other Post Whatever, are simply existentialism where the despair and the angst has been replaced by a belief that we can do it ourselves. Reality is socially constructed. Well that is partly true. The reality out there is reflected in our thoughts, so what? It is still reality out there, and we do our best to perceive it.

History is socially constructed. Of course it is, we can only interpret and apply the sources for our historical investigation. What we have may not be way it really was but there are some obvious factors that guarantee the skilled historian can get some way to understand the past and its people. We have a common humanity for a start. The passions and the fears are the same for everyman and for every woman. The hopes and the ambitions may have different cultural clothing but they are, in the end, the same. They are hopes of love, for security, and for recognition. So what is the problem?

Morality is socially constructed. That is partly true in that we make the laws, but on what basis do we make them and is it a just one. Our thinking, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, is that we have pulled the moral rug from under our feet. Neither of these, nor Kant, nor Hegel, have been able to solve the problem. They have not been able to show us how we make a morality that is not based on absolutes. That is, one which is based on a reality that is really out there. Truth is not expediency, nor is it preference, my perception may be far from the truth but truth persists and, by a dialogue with my fellows, I may learn enough to get a bit closer to it. Maybe in this life I shall never attain to it but it is there nevertheless.

We cannot of course live with the Superman of Nietzsche, nor with Kierkegaard leaping off the high board into the void, without knowing whether there is water in the pool or not. In a court of law the witness is required to tell the truth, “beyond all reasonable doubt”. The judge and jury accept it as truth if it can be backed up by other independent witness, or by other, irrefutable facts. The Judge, of course interprets and applies the law to the case, but that is another matter. The witnesses and the jury are concerned with truth and they do not understand that as something which is socially constructed. We cannot live with Post Modernism. As soon as we enter the realities of every day life whether it is an office, a factory or a court of law we find we are stuck with the truth and we feel cheated if we cannot find it.