Published: September 7, 2023 | Speaker: Chuck Hartman | Series: Pauline Studies 4 - The Church in the World - Part 7 | Scripture: Romans 1:18-32; 1 Corinthians 13:4-7; Ephesians 4:20-24; 1 Timothy 3:14-16
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well that goes along the stronger you express something the more valid it um that goes along with the with the adage that if that if you know if people aren't agreeing with you just say it louder
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um and and they're they're that that's always been the case but not not not like now in fact there was a time when the the outbursts that we see regularly
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would have been considered rare and disturbing especially in governmental settings um even on our in our Congress
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but especially a place like Parliament where decorum was for a long time de rigor you did not lose your cool even if you were debating something that was
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very important and upon which you you you heartily disagreed with the other side um now we just see the
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range of people who now consider themselves experts or at least qualified to speak on an issue is is just almost Universal now I I
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can't remember what what who it was it was one of the Golden Age actors and he was asked his position on some political
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situation and his response was why are you asking me I'm an actor that was I mean there were actors involved in politics of course but for
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the most part the same thing with athletes what is it about being a multi-million dollar athlete that qualifies you to pontificate on anything
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but really honestly what is it that qualifies any of us to pontificate on many of the things about which we have strong opinions we live in an Information Age Information Age and several authors have coined the
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phrase information consumers that we are information consumers because it is so easy to get data and information the problem with that is
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we've lost the ability to process it
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oh that's nice well good do you find yourself agreeing okay well that's good that's good uh Kristen keep an eye on that uh you know someone in a random jealous
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that was going to or wasn't process of sending me a manuscript that I had already posted and so I took Sean and I was like listening who posted
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this what you're trying to send that's hilarious yeah that well we're not we're not critical thinkers anymore um one philosopher one modern philosopher that Brahms quotes
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um says that the innovation in post-truth phenomenon is not a denial of the existence of Truth and facts but rather is the subjugation of facts
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to personal preconceptions and a subjective perspective subjective perspective and I think that's an important point we're not we're not dealing with okay this is this is not whoops
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it's that facts are being subjected to personal preconceptions presented in a very non-factual way
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facts we're told are unarguable it's values that we differ on and we've had a separation between
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values and facts in modern Western society and this comes from the enlightenment it comes from Emmanuel Kant and his successors but it also comes from the idea of well
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it's kind of a joint phenomenon it comes from the Western phenomenon of individuality with conformity
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with conformity which seemed to be opposed you know individuality rugged individuality as you're on your own but in fact we're not on our own and we
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don't want to be on our own we want to be individuals together okay and we want to be individualistic but also to conform so what that does is it gives us pockets
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of subjectivity within our culture and those pockets of subjectivity become very parochial very parochial they are they are not Evangelistic they
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are combative are combative you go and find them they don't Seek You okay but okay but they're they're somewhat like uh the gangs in the Inner City
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once you're in you're in but no one else is in and there's a great deal of hostility so we have this situation it's not a factless society it's
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we are very proud that we live in a modern scientific world scientific world where we're no longer filtering Nature's evidence through our philosophical grid
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but we actually are really we're not doing it any less than Aristotle did Aristotle did it's just that we now have a better handle on the raw data
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we have technology that allows us to know about nature in this in terms of raw data far more than the Ancients knew but we still filter it through our
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philosophical grid philosophical grid and then what comes out on the other side we call facts and if they come out on the other side by somebody who is a recognized
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scientist and it fits in with the prevailing Paradigm then they are unassailable they are self-evident facts
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and anybody who argues with them they are a fact denier so those who argue with those facts and believe that they are being
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misinterpreted the raw data is being misinterpreted they will form their own subjective bubble subjective bubble and their own subjective Society within
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there'll be a minority but there'll be a very proud minority there'll be a very militant minority a very pure minority but nonetheless they're they're not only
9:49
a minority they are actually not impacting the prevailing zeitgeist okay so when we talk about the church in the world and culture and impacting
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culture what is happening here is is not something that is going to impact culture it is really a a form of
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isolationism okay so what happens is you get
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from one another okay so you'll have the prevailing
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the flat earthers for example or the climate deniers or whatever what they're going to be given a name okay in our particular culture depending on what the issue is this one is called
11:03
okay just so you know what it is you're arguing again you're arguing against science and then they're going to be pejorative names like there was in the Reformation anabaptists or Puritans okay climate
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deniers or there's always going to be a pejorative and that's how you can tell the majority from the minority they don't call themselves that within this little subjective bubble they don't go around saying I'm a
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climate denier I'm a climate denier no they but neither did the Puritans go around calling themselves Puritans nor the anabaptists and a Baptist so the phenomenon is something that
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historically we're familiar with the idea of a majority or a prevailing thought pattern isolating minority thought patterns labeling them
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and then either destroying them or marginalizing them marginalizing them the point being is that these are not impacting the culture
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okay and in fact it's
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that the conventional wisdom within conservativism whether Christian or otherwise has been thoroughly ineffective in stemming the tide of liberalism for the
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past 150 years Cal Thomas threw in the towel back in the 90s I believe maybe early 2000s he came up through the Moral Majority
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and was obviously very influential in the 80s when it seemed like the tide was turning you know and the and the the conservative right was going to ride
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this wave and and we were going to have renewal of of the United States and that didn't happen didn't happen and he finally realized that this isn't how it's going to work and he has been
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castigated and and actually he's probably put himself in another little bubble and that's what happens okay you just end up in another little bubble your bubble may be in Moscow Idaho or it
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might be you know in Tulsa Oklahoma but you got your own little bubble and everybody in that bubble says the same thing but they're not saying anything to the world at all and the I and the thought that we're
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impacting the world by this by being our own little bubble is is not happening so there are other points of view where
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they recognize this um there is a um I think he has since passed away but uh their Stanley howardvas he was a leading
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Christian writer kind of a leader of the movement Within evangelicalism toured
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evangelicalism toured a more compassionate um help the poor benevolence type of orientation for the church
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much of what he had to say sounded very good but what he was actually doing if you read enough of his writings is you realize he recognized this isolationism
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and felt that the solution was for the minority bubble minority bubble to absorb itself back into the majority bubble and that's how we
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will impact the world is is by getting in there and and okay agreeing where we can agree or and released not making a
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big issue of where we disagree more accommodationist and that's one of niebers patterns so this the pendulum swings within any given era there there may be
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a more heavily isolationist view or a more assimilationist view or a combination rather than assimilation but these are the views that niebuhr
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highlighted back in 1950s and they are all very accurate to the history not only of the church but of every human
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society this phenomenon is not simply because of Christianity and non-christianity this has to do with political Theory it has to do with um uh family Theory Family Psychology child raising all these
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different concepts and um there's somewhat of a hegelian Paradigm that Hegel said that that the pattern of history is that you know
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somebody comes up with a thesis an idea and he and puts it forward and and there's a reaction against it called the antithesis and there there's debate between the thesis and the antithesis
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until finally there's a synthesis that becomes the next thesis this was the philosophy that Marx used to develop his philosophy of Communism
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capitalism eventually killing itself and that was Marx's hegelianism he was wrong but there is an element in which
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Society generation to generation hot button issues grow cold because they become
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accepted they become the the standard or conventional wisdom conventional wisdom and so there's no real debate about them anymore because everybody has finally it's almost like they finally coalesced
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on that particular issue until somebody breaks off with something else and then you've got another debate that's the nature of the search for truth in the
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human Fallen World it's never been different the only thing different today is the widespread availability of data
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to people that that is the major difference between our era and any previous era is that we have such incredible access to information that even even the 1970s 19 they didn't have
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right television was the big thing but now of course there's there's internet and instant access to anything I mean it's it's somewhat senseless today to
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make students memorize dates and things because it's like they're just going to look it up on their phone their phone right so they have and and there's there's that's good in a sense it's good
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but it is bad because what is it has displaced is actual research actual critical thinking and the ability to
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process this data it's being processed for us and we're simply regurgitating the product the product and that's what we're doing
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a huge imbalance and perspective in other words there's a hyper fixation on a specific subject for people that don't they don't take do you think that that's exacerbated by whatever has that always been that way you think oh I I think
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it's it's it's it's always been that way but but it's much more widespread or pervasive now so every
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someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject that's a churchillion um yeah that's very good yes I think fanaticism is is far more
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rampant than what I see when I read history and in any age but in any age there were the Fanatics okay so I'm I'm right now the era that I find myself in
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is um uh late revolutionary up to pre-civil um or even during the Civil War but you know obviously the the issues were
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slavery but also federalism versus State sovereignty um but you find that the vast majority of congressmen were relatively apathetic
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Wilberforce found the same thing on the issue of slavery over in Great Britain the vast majority were I don't care um the north made a tremendous amount of
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money off of Southern slavery the North had all the cotton Mills the North had the ships that brought the slaves over or the cotton up to New England or over
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to Great Britain so the North had a vested interest in that institution as well but the the point was there were only a few fanatics right you could not possibly do justice
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to history and turn Abraham Lincoln into a fanatic a fanatic he was not a fanatic at all so yeah I think fanaticism but I think
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that's wrapped up in the fact that we know we all now think we have an expert handle on these things okay which is quite amazing that we should think that
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but you know and I wonder sometimes if the things you see on Instagram or X now it's not Twitter anymore or even just on the internet whether
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they're so ridiculous that you wonder that this can't be real okay I mean I I saw one is supposedly in England by their accent but uh I guess
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they have their Karens over there as we do here and a lady knocked on a guy's car window and he rolled it down and and she started uh chastising him for
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polluting he's sitting there in the parking lot with his car idling well he's he's he's he's obviously videotaping her and in the middle of the videotape he videotapes his steering wheel it's a Tesla and he
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goes back and he he she says you're it's against the law which it is not but he says how is
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it against the law well you're you're throwing out noxious chemicals and he says ma'am do you realize this is an electric car and she says hi don't give me that you know and I wonder this
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can't be real can it be real that people are have really grown so incredibly stupid as what we see Anna's saying yeah it's real okay I see
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him too in real life um but what's happening I think it is real but I think what's what's happening is because we have we have such access to information we've convinced ourselves
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that we now have knowledge but we don't have knowledge we have data okay and and that data may not even be
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factual and it is probably not complete it is not data it's a data sample and that data has already been sampled
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by someone with an agenda and I don't care whether it's a conservative agenda or a liberal agenda it's an agenda it's like what a historian has to do
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before he or she writes the book there's a lot of information that does not go into the book because there there's an agenda hopefully the information that goes into
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it is it is critically and validly arranged but it still must be arranged history is not just what happened every
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single day of the period you're studying you realize that even you know even our scriptures even the gospels tell us that many other things did Jesus do but
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I write these things that you might believe and believing that you might have eternal life that's an agenda now we would say that's a good agenda but it's still an agenda
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okay and it's not hidden you're right John just writes it right out there I have called through Luke did the same thing I I interviewed people I saw it I looked for the information and and here
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it is but it's not everything so critical thinking has has largely disappeared and the rare person who can think
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critically becomes a syndicated that some of the population reads and says right on and the rest ignore
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they just ignore because we all we don't have any need of anyone to teach us because we now have the anointing we have the internet okay we have no seriously we have the
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internet and so I mean we even make jokes about that right okay the the one that says that says um don't believe everything you read on the internet signed Abraham Lincoln
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okay um but to hear you know you you see these people being interviewed and asked questions about some particular thing that is in the public eye right now and
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you listen to their answers and you think that is unadulterated stupidity right there just blathering idiots and you wonder if this was what happening to the word yes it's what's happening to the world
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because we're in a we're in a post-truth so truth itself is not even what pilate thought it was
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that's true it's it's exactly what they're showing is what they want to they want to prove you know so when they're asking questions about um name three countries in Africa and one of the person that says well well it
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is one is one no no Africa is not a country okay or one of them apparently gave um Madagascar um Madagascar and then Madagascar 2.
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okay I can't believe that's real I think I think but even so there may have been a dozen people who rattled off three African countries no problem they're not going to show them
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so that's that's what we we lack is a sense of um critical doubt critical doubt as to the information
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and and we're just as guilty as conservative Christians as Liberals are we here through the filters that we have
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learned to employ and those filters block out contrary so there really isn't
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I guess where I'm taking us is when we revisit neighbor and his five paradigms or patterns for the church interacting with the world
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I think we end up concluding that none of them are right
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but certainly none of them wholly right now all of them I should say I shouldn't say not even partially there are a couple that aren't even partially right but some of them are right in the sense that
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by God's wisdom and Providence the church is in the world which means it must interact with the culture around it so the fact of interaction is is
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unavoidable and even the isolationists The Cloister the monastery still interacted with the world around it so you you can you can say that nibor was
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right in that sense but that's the tautology that's that's an obvious statement we're in the world okay so when you look at then okay how
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do we relate to the world do we isolate from it do we interact with it do we accommodate do we assimilate do we dominate those are all the wrong questions
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you just work here is above your pay grade huh um well that that is the uh proposition that that those are not
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questions or paradigms that we find in scripture itself scripture itself we do not find Paul listing five different paradigms on how the church
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should live in the midst of Rome a lot of what we read now in modern conservative Evangelical Christian
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literature is massively influenced by the last 200 years of philosophy we are we we can't avoid that
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it's the way we've been taught to think unless as in Romans 12 we are renewing our minds our minds okay you see the the conforming to the
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world is not an active venture it's the default mode it's the transforming by the renewing of
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your mind your mind that is the active venture okay so Paul really is what he's saying is stop being conformed to the world
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not that you're making a conscious effort to be conformed to the world he's not accusing the Roman Christians of being assimilationists being assimilationists he's not even accusing them of loving the world the world what he's saying is this is the
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direction you're going to go unless you actively Go a different direction
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and the church has founded painfully difficult to consistently do that throughout the ages to resist the natural path of conformity and to go down the path of transformity
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of metamorphosis of metamorphosis so what happens is over the course of time the truth as it is in Christ Jesus this
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Paul puts it in Ephesians 4. he's not saying that there are any other truths he's saying that truth is in Jesus
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Christ and anything outside of that is the LIE but that doesn't mean that we cannot have the truth but over time that truth becomes
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clouded it becomes encumbered and even encrusted
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recognizable to the point that the truth is no longer represented by the church at all that was the conclusion the reformers made with regard to the Roman Catholic
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Church that it was no longer the pillar and foundation of the truth in the world now of course that means it's a false church at that point so it's not saying oh you're still a
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church you're just not a truthful Church no if you if you do not have truth as it is in Jesus Christ you're not a church anymore even if you have that in your name but this has been if you if you
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trace the development of religions of denominations this is what you you see and oftentimes it begins within the
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religious establishment it begins in the academic part of it the seminaries and from there it filters down into the pulpits and from there it filters down into the
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congregants and after a while that entire denomination can be written off as being post-christian apostatizing okay
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apostatizing okay it doesn't happen because because of a concerted effort to do so does that make sense it's not like at the beginning the
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um Presbyterian Church of the North I guess it was just the Presbyterian Church of the U.S I don't know what it was at the time but it wasn't as if when they first got together we would say okay now what heretical liberal ideas
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can we come up with and then slowly voice them Upon Our unsuspecting now it's there listening to the siren song
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of the world's philosophy which is why Paul says in Colossians he says don't be taken in taken in by these things so but we don't think
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we're being taken in that's the subtlety of it okay let me read um
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he says see to it this is Colossians 2 verse 8. see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men according to the stoichaya the
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elementary principles of the world rather than according to Christ
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captive and so Thomas Aquinas can try to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with Christian Theology and everybody calls him a doctor of the church
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like no you can't you can't do that but we do the same thing today we try to accommodate because we want to in the
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seminaries of course we want to come across as erudite we went across as broad-minded and well-read and what we're doing is we're actually incorporating falsehood into the truth
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but the truth will never make false true but lies will make truth false see it's it's it goes one way not the
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other no amount of Truth can make a lie true so when we look at these paradigms and I've I've come I've evolved in my
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thinking when I first read niebuhr I thought yeah this is right but what I saw right about it wasn't what what he was proposing but what was
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his portrayal of History it's just simply an accurate portrayal of what has happened some people have isolated from the world some people have gone into the world and
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assimilated with the world some have tried to accommodate with the world some have tried to dominate and change it yeah okay yeah okay that's simply historical that doesn't make it true
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and then when you start to look at the fact that and this is what D.A Carson points out as well as Leslie new begin and um James Hunter especially
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every single attempt to do any of those five has consistently and without exception failed of its object
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okay now ultimate success or failure that's in the hands of God but in terms of what they set out to do they didn't get there and in fact oftentimes where they ended
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up was far worse than where they started and we've talked about this I know Aaron and I have talked about this in terms of of the Evangelical organizations you know the Gospel Coalition or the
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organization of confessing evangelicals or um you know and you know why do these groups come together well they come together with the expressed intent of perverting the
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doctrine of the church and bringing its downfall no downfall no they come together to with to with to stand up for biblical inerrancy or for the pure gospel right they're
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coming together but where do they end up usually within a generation now it's happening so quickly they end up being liberalized
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being liberalized a combinationist and eventually false because falsehood corrupts truth and God never set up organizations
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to be the pillar and foundation of the truth in the world they carry the seeds of their own destruction because they are not in agreement fundamentally on Doctrine
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and so they must compromise and when they compromise they compromise totally so that so that um to me the most notorious
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um it's not I think it's the confessing evangelicals but I may be wrong anyhow the organization of which Clark Pinnock was a leading member
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Clark pinnick was the leading advocate of open theism the doctrine that teaches that God himself does not know the future but gold boldly goes where no God has
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been before he trusts man and he and man jointly are creating the future
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that teaching is so patently unbiblical that it would be an honor just to call it heresy it heresy okay it is too stupid to even be I mean there's been some good heresies and this
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one doesn't make the list all right so he was brought up on charges in this particular organization to be
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dismissed and he was acquitted now after that several older members of the organization resigned and left Roger Nicole was one of the most famous who
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was there at the founding of it and then you know you know and speaking of founding of it one of our professors at Greenville Seminary Morton Smith
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Morton Smith was the first Clerk of session of the PCA in 1973 and and the dear man and he was a sweet man he was watching
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the disintegration of Doctrine within the PCA in his own lifetime okay it's because we should never these are all uh and these are all cisterns with
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holes in them is what they are or Pockets with holes in them in Malachi okay they're they're not what God has instituted to be the pillar and
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foundation of the truth and so you don't we don't need them and they're not going to bring about
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reformation so truth is fundamentally then the issue the issue but even when we say truth is the issue we don't always agree at what we're
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talking about and pilate's question again was not just a flippant apathy don't don't bother me with that stuff what is truth no what is truth
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okay we know from John's account of that interview that at the very least Pontius Pilate was intrigued by this Galilean Rabbi and
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afterward he was afraid of him so he was not simply brushing him off with some empty question what is truth no he was I don't know that they had any
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more discussion about it John didn't record it record it but he was asking a very common question of this of the day what is truth well that has been the question for
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philosophers for millennia because you know when we say true or false
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a philosopher will take that and say well it's true under these conditions and false under those
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so truth in the Fallen human mind is already malleable and it's malleable this is what comes out of philosophy it's malleable because of our
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of our perspective toward truth so I'm going to put up on the board four theories of Truth and these are
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um three of them are are very old one of and one of them the third one is is a bit more modern although it is
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popped up in the past and then the last one is very much pertinent to our particular time but was also quite pertinent to Paul's
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day next week we're going to talk about um another post
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and I think we're going to see I hope we're going to see that is in spite of the massive differences between our culture and Paul's and Paul's our world in the west is perhaps as
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close to the first century Mediterranean
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and one of those factors that makes it so similar so similar is the remarkable pluralism that we experience in our culture where so many different cultures
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interact this is the way it was in first century Roman Empire Roman Empire any City Jerusalem Corinth Rome any City
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any City would have huge numbers of people from all different cultures and places on the planet at least in that period of the world after that and after the fall of the
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Roman Empire the world once again became more parochial more parochial where it became more tribal and that tribalism would actually go all
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the way up into the 19th century where the vast majority of people living in any given region were the natives of that region that region does that make sense
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but with the second half of the 20th century especially and the Advent of the United States but that's the 20th century because primarily before that it was British Isles or Ireland
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but then you had the Eastern Europeans you had the Mediterraneans coming in and and now we live in a world in the west where you go to any given City and it is incredibly cosmopolitan
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which means basically the city of the cosmos the Cosmopolitan is Cosmos in a city it's it's a definition of pluralism
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and our country is like Paul's world okay which means that we're challenged with what Paul says
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we can't just say well that worked in his day his day about the only thing different between our day and his day is technology but in his day the technology was
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massively better than it was for his father's generation father's generation technology in the Roman Empire Advanced Leaps and Bounds over the ancient Mesopotamians okay that he he wouldn't
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be like maybe the 20th century but in their own time yes it was it was an incredible modern world but it was pluralistic and so
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and so um we're going to get into that that I think is a major factor of knowing the world in which we live but the the four theories of Truth
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the first one is the one that most conservative Christians will say well that's that's it right there it's called the correspondence theory
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holds that the key to truth is a relationship between a proposition and the real world so there's a there's a correlation between the factual proposition and the
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reality it proposes this is very platonic or Plato believed that that the the accidents represented the forms that were Universal
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were Universal okay so correspondence says that the truth is the relationship
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between fact and reality
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is okay and we're we're making a fact statement and the correspondence theory says that there is a relationship between that's that proposition that fact statement and reality
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I I think we can see how Emmanuel Kant and his Aristotelian notion that reality is what we perceive it to be is very detrimental to this
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theory of Truth because we can say okay that's a fact statement but my reality rejects it it does not correspond to my reality
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and reality is my own mind so we that's that's not where Kant went but that's where he led us that's where he pointed he pointed but the other but but even without Kant
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there is still a problem with this and that is we are not well enough aware of reality
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to make all the necessary correspondence
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we we cannot we cannot make God created the heavens and the Earth into a statement of fact
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in fact the writer of Hebrews doesn't he says by faith we know okay because what correspondence do we have between that proposition of fact
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and reality and yet that's what many in Christianity Today do Today do they make it as a proposition of fact
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but that's not this Theory because you can't make the correspondence between your statement and the reality behind it that relationship is purely revelatory
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and faith-based and faith-based but we recoil when someone says well we're not going to teach that in the schools because that's faith well what we should say is so is your
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theory okay it's just as much Faith as my theory because no one can prove Evolution either Evolution either so it's it's you know correspondence works both ways but we look at this and
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we think well truth this is the simple one truth and reality aren't they kind of the same two different words for the same thing
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yes but we live not only in in a world that is a mere component of reality we live in a fallen world
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in which our ability to perceive even that reality is corrupted and limited by our own finiteness and then there are many things that we
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simply cannot know the reality of that we believe to be true okay again okay again um people believed in gravity long before Isaac Newton
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okay and so when he said what he said it corresponded to the reality that everybody had experienced but then coming into the 20th century with the discovery of the atom
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and the analysis of light as energy we came to realize that many of the fact statements of Newtonian physics don't correspond to the reality we are now
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encountering with our greater telescopes or our greater microscope so our oscilloscopes or our technology is opening up to us a reality for which the
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truth statements that we once believed no longer correspond oftentimes that just simply leads to new scientific theories there's no harm done but what happens is within Christianity
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Here Comes Darwin you know and he shows us pictures and this little vestigial piece of this
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bird looks like the the link in this reptile's tale and all of a sudden our correspondence between fact and reality is upset
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is upset and the church starts to imbibe and assimilate evolutionary theory because they always want what they're saying to correspond to reality
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that's a very very open door for deception because we don't have that greater handle on reality so the second one is coherence
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this has more to do with the logic with which the truth proposition is made conclusion then my thought Paradigm is called
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coherent so truth becomes factual statements factual statements that hold together coherently within a system okay so we're moving away from
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our inability to know exactly to our ability to logically put together a system of thought that holds together
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okay party okay party internally it holds together that's exactly right it holds together in that it's its statements
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are coherent are coherent okay so truth
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the problem with this Theory and and the actual practical historical problem with this theory is that there is no such thing as a thought system that holds together coherently forever
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because the more we learn the more that system is broken down and then eventually falls apart now the the the most popular example is
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the ptolemaic planetary or the Helios or the geocentric model Ptolemy the astronomer put together
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charts and mathematical formulas that accurately plotted the movement of the planets all throughout the year and various different places in Europe
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so that was all great it was it was a coherent system coherent system but then someone invented the telescope Galileo says it was him but someone
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invented the telescope I think the one who did was hit over the head with it by Galileo who then took ownership of the telescope but we'll give it to Galileo okay whatever but
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then the telescope comes in and we start to realize to realize that entire system is incoherent and so you get a copernican revolution
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you get a paradigm shift Paradigm shifts show us that the coherence Theory isn't accurate okay so you know what really matters and
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that we're moving ahead in time now we're getting up into the 18th century the Advent of the Industrial Revolution of colonialism of mercantilism and so you know all these philosophical
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discussions about truth are just so many words what works what works that's what matters so we move into the pragmatic Theory
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we're moving away from what we would consider even a remotely biblical definition of truth but we're moving toward the meaning of Truth in our current time
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current time and that is truth is whatever system of thought works and you can add
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in the most modern sense whatever truth whatever thought system works for you but you don't have to have the for you because this is this is a social thing
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as much as it is a personal thing truth that doesn't work is going to be rejected by Society at large and by work I don't mean truth
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that doesn't get you a 1600 on your sat I mean truth that doesn't help your Society run in a stable and consistent manner truth that doesn't adapt itself to the
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other forces that are moving your culture in in an exec in inexorable Direction like the Industrial Revolution so truth becomes for example and this
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actually goes all the way back to Aristotle but in the 18th century Jeremy Bentham came up with the theory of utilitarianism truth is that people make the decisions
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that they make based on their own now that theory actually lies at the heart of the spirit of capitalism
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of advertising of advertising okay that people make decisions based on their own self-interest what works for them so pragmatic Theory teaches that a truth
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is really nothing more than the prevailing
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this takes us back to the statement I made earlier about the two paradoxical characteristics of postmodern man especially in the west and that is individuality and conformity
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individuality teaches us that there is no higher authority than my own
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Conformity says I don't want to be alone in that and so and so the authority over the individual becomes the mob becomes the thumbs up becomes the
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followers on Twitter or X or Instagram it becomes the the affirmation Squad okay and so truth is now Affirmed it is stated individually and affirmed
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by conformity by conformity so this concept everything all right
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now the important Point here is it's not verses but and it's not or it's and even though that seems paradoxical it seems to be a conundrum it it is
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actually a very accurate description of modern Western man proud of his individuality but not willing to stand alone on anything
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and needing that Conformity needing that subjective bubble to give him that sense of being true or in the right but pragmatism teaches us that it's
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it's really just it's being judged on the basis of how well it works not on the basis of any objective data anymore and if there is any data as as I said earlier facts are not rejected they are
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simply now interpreted and maybe what we're looking at here these are the means of interpretation that we've seen used in history the final one is not even called a theory
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it's called an approach and that is the pluralistic
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this is the point at which we we pragmatically because we live in a pluralistic society pluralistic society and we realize that if we dogmatically
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maintain our own truth structures we will tear ourselves to pieces and this actually happened in many of the Eastern cities with the immigration
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waves and it's still happening in many of our cities because of of incompatible truth structures truth structures and this is being fomented by
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lies and so what we see here is Humanity that cannot bend and mix will destroy itself in any society so the pluralistic approach it's not a
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theory because it does not seek out to Define Truth at all it simply denies that anyone's truth is truer than anyone else's
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it codifies this system here where we have all these different subjective bubbles of Truth and we say why can't we all just get along
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okay so the Rodney King theory of Truth and that is um truth
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than and I'm not going to do it the way the bumper sticker does it
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this and I'll say this that one of the reasons that we living in Greenville South Carolina which is still kind of a white bread City