That Funny Little Thing Called "Truth" Gets People All Riled Up

"Modern culture has not really rendered creeds and confessions untrue; far less has it rendered them unbiblical. But it has rendered them implausible and distasteful. They are implausible because they are built on old-fashioned notions of truth and language. They make the claim that a linguistic formulation of a state of affairs can have a binding authority beyond the mere text on the page, that creeds actually refer to something, and that that something has a significance for all humanity. They thus demand that individuals submit, intellectually and morally, to something outside themselves, that they listen to the voices from the church from other times and places. They go directly against the grain of an antihistorical, antiauthoritarian age. Creeds strike hard at the cherished notion of human autonomy and the notion that I am exceptional, that the normal rules do not apply to me in the way they do to others. They are distasteful for the same reason: because they make old-fashioned truth claims; and to claim that one position is true is automatically to claim that its opposite is false. . . . Truth claims thus imply a hierarchy whereby one position is better than another and where some beliefs, and thus those who hold those beliefs, are excluded" (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 48).