Perspectief 2019-45

Perspectief 50 Gewone Catechismus is always a product of its own time. Of course, they can’t mean that what GC asserts – or for that matter, the Three Forms of Unity – in the positive statements of belief is true only for the context in which those statements are made. That would make them confessional relativist, meaning thereby that the authors of GC deny the enduring validity of truth. I return to this point below. All the answers in GC have as their essential three-fold aim deepening our trust in God, following the Lord Jesus, and living expectantly for God’s new world. In my judgment, I think the authors of GC successfully present “mere Christianity.” I would say that GC may be seen as the catechism of the worldwide Alpha movement and so would be effective in that context. Still, there are several aspects missing in the authors’ understanding of the context in which they write this catechism and hence in which they articulate the Christian faith. 3. Culture of Veriphobia First, the authors fail to come to terms with the fact that we live in a culture of veriphobia – “the fear of truth” – in which we are living and, yes, drowning. Many in our culture deny the enduring validity of truth. They are skeptics, relativists or nihilists. The skeptic claims that we can’t be sure about the truth-status of what we believe. The relativist about truth holds that there is no absolute truth because all truth is relative to the person, culture, or community who believes it. And the nihilist holds that there is no such thing as objective truth – in ethics, religion, or anywhere else. There is nothing to know. The impact these views have had on the veriphobes in our culture makes it almost impos- sible to claim, according to them, that the fundamental reason to be a Christian is that Christianity is true. Although confessions of faith, such as GC , do more than just merely make theological truth claims about God, man, and the world he has created, if the positive statements of belief in GC are to be what they claim to be, then they must be statements about an objective reality. Truth is a property of propositions such that a proposition is true if what it asserts is, in fact, the case about objective reality. In short, truth signifies objective correspondence with reality; otherwise, that proposition is false.