A Theory of Truth

Hauerwas has often insisted that if we need a theory of truth to know Jesus, we should worship that theory. Jonathan Tran, a follower of Hauerwas' approach to theology, here provides us with a theory of truth that is at once both a "theory" and yet not - it is but an observation arising out of our ordinary forms of life:

 "The contexts which grant meaning to what we say go before us, necessitating “I mean what we all mean when I say something we all understand,” making speech at once an act of agency and participation. Yet agreement also incurs estrangement because while I must mean what we all mean when I say something, I sometimes don'tmean what we all mean by it. The same facts of language that gather us, that norm us, can also estrange us from one another, make us abnormal to one another. In the second sense, conventions are not unnatural intrusions on human life but rather indicative of and appropriate to what it is to be human, to be able to carry on the way that humans do, to participate in the human form of life.45 Language is conventional to the life form humans inhabit and so its conventions are natural for those whose interests in the world match the ways they speak of it and indeed how they live it. Conventions signal relations of agreement, even intimacy—what I have called internality—between words and world. We could say that we are here furnished with a theory of truth, if we can also admit that we are here furnished with its unnecessity—a theory of truth only becomes necessary when words and world are envisioned as separately occurring entities."

 (From: Jonathan Tran, "Linguistic Theology: Completing Postliberalism's Linguistic Task," Modern Theology vol. 33, 2017.)

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