Franke begins the next chapter with, “The one truth is, and can only be, expressed in plurality” (p. 115). So that means the sentence bearing that claim, being one, isn’t really true. Of course if we added a sentence saying that truth is sometimes expressed without plurality, then it could have been true. But why did it need that second sentence? Why couldn’t we have started with the one truth sentence?
My friend David Cassidy, at the Auburn Avenue conference just concluded, told a story there from his early days of pilgrimage, when he was still in the charismatic movement. He was at a meeting where one person stood up on one side of the hall, said, “Thus saith the Lord,” and proceeded to prophesy. After that, someone else stood up and said, “Thus saith the Lord. ‘That was not me.'” After a moment, the reply came back, “Thus saith the Lord. ‘Oh, yes, it was.'” Now there’s plurality for you. Let us all strive to reconcile the different voices within
the chuch.
“Maintaining the belief, as many do, that the true gospel must be absolute and unenculturated is dangerous because it leaves those who hold such beliefs blind to the ways in which their own culture shapes their understanding of the gospel” (p. 119).
But in order to function at all, everyone (who knows he does not possess the ultimate and absolute truth the way God possesses it) must also know that he possesses what Schaeffer called “true truth.” Not exhaustive truth, but nonetheless, still the real thing. For example, Franke, in the passage quoted above, is serenely confident that to take the “dangerous” route by holding that some of your truths are “absolute and unenculturated” is a bad thing to do. Why is it bad to do this dangerous thing? Is it always? Everywhere?
In this chapter, Franke does raises the challenge to his own position that I have been pressing, but he then utterly fails to address it. “How does the Christian community engage in a robust practice of deconstruction that does not itself become accommodated and domesticated to the assumptions and aspirations of a particular social and historical situation?” (p. 121).
I give him credit for asking the question that needs to be asked, but his answer (stay open to Scripture) doesn’t answer the question, given the hermeneutical framework he has created. You can only be prevented from this kind of error if you stay open to a Bible that can always and everywhere keep you out of that kind of error if you understand what it teaches.
With that question unaddressed, it is not long before we are back, up to our necks in the Starbucks milieu, because Franke is not really open to the words of Scripture that call us out to a radical third way. “The task is not easy, because powerful forces in the world and in the church stand in opposition to this discovery,” the discovery being that theologians from all over, red, and yellow, black and white, have a lot to teach each other. Powerful forces are against that? You could have fooled me. Powerful forces appear to be promoted this kind of thought-porridge with might and main.