I continue to be amazed by N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God. In the early chapters, he spends a good deal of time defending the rather postmodern idea that truth isn’t about propositions, but rather that propositions are a way of summarizing truth that was played out in the unfolding story of God, Israel, and the church.

I’m also reading Len Sweet’s Out of the Question…Into the Mystery, which is a surprising hybrid of traditional Christian bookstore fare and incisive postmodern worldview hacking. Sweet reiterates the traditional “Truth is a Person” perspective, but I resonate a lot more deeply with Wright’s view. Wright says:

If it is true that all worldviews are at the deepest level shorthand formulae to express stories, this is particularly clear in the case of Judaism. Belief in one god, who called Israel to be his people, is the very foundation of Judaism. The only proper way of talking about a god like this, who makes a world and then acts within it, is through narration. To boil off an abstract set of propositions as though one were thereby getting to a more foundational statement would actually be to falsify this worldview at a basic point. This is not to say that we cannot use shorthand phrases and words to refer, in a few syllables, to a complex story-form worldview which it would be tedious to spell out each time. Thus the phrase ‘monotheism and election’ (see chapter 9 below) does not refer to two abstracted entities existing outside space and time. It is a way of summoning into the mind’s eye an entire worldview. In this, as we shall describe presently, Israel told and retold the story of how there was one god, the creator, and of how he had chosen Israel to be his special possession, and of how therefore he would eventually restore her fortunes and thereby bring his whole creation to its intended fulfillment. To provide the whole explanation each time would be impossibly wordy. It would also, in any case, be unnecessary-provided one remembers that, like so many theological terms, words like ‘monotheism’ are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology, not mere childish expressions of a ‘purer’ abstract truth.

What sort of stories are most characteristic of Jews in this period? As we have already suggested, stories of all sorts can express the set of beliefs held by most Jews, including the belief that their god was the creator of the world; but this belief (unlike various forms of dualism, for instance) most naturally and characteristically comes to birth in stories about events in the real world. That is, when creational and covenantal monotheists tell their story, the most basic level of story for their worldview is history. NTPG, 77-78

It’s jarring to hear that propositions are not the real deal when it comes to truth, but after-the-fact descriptions of God-events in human history. We have spent hundreds of years trying to come to the right propositions about faith, and wondering why that faith often left us dry, while biblical faith seems at once so vibrant and so elusive. Perhaps it is because the biblical followers of God were not believing primarily in propositions, but walking on in the faith that had been established through God’s unfolding story.

What do you think? Is Wright’s take on truth defensible? Useful? Correct? Advisable? Dangerous?