May (Web-only) 2004

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Art Lindsley is a senior fellow at the C.S. Lewis Institute who believes we need to defend absolute truth in a relativistic world. Lindsley is most recently the author of True Truth: Defending Absolute Truth in a Relativistic World. He has served at the C.S. Lewis Institute since 1987 and was Director of Educational Ministries at the Ligonier Valley Study Center, and Staff Specialist with the Coalition for Christian Outreach. He co-authored Classical Apologetics with R.C. Sproul and John Gerstner. Lindsley has an M.Div. from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.

In what sense is truth the decisive issue of our time?

If you give up the idea that there is any truth, as some people are doing, then you don't have any basis for anything in terms of ideas for culture, for morality, for religious belief. In all these arenas if you shift the view of truth, then you have no basis to maintain anything.

If you had to summarize to somebody what you're trying to establish in True Truth as it relates to both modernism and post-modernism, what would it be?

The first half of the book tries to deal with the basic psychological objection of post-modernism, which is that any kind of grand story or meta-narrative will automatically produce oppression. So that whenever you speak about truth or absolutes, many people automatically hear it as intolerance and closed-mindedness and self-righteousness. In other words, they hear a different message than what you may be saying.

Where was modernism flawed?

It placed too much accent on reason, that reason was the definitive and only way you could know things. I don't see how any believer could be a modernist because we need revelation in order to ...