The Logic of The Incarnation – I.e. that Something Can Be Present While Remaining Utterly Unknown...

Way, Truth and Life

So what do we mean by the ‘truth of the world’? Simply speaking I am here referring to everything that makes itself known to us. To attempt to speak the truth in this worldly sense is to talk of something that has appeared in some way…

So what is the truth of Christ, i.e. what is it that Christ seems to be talking about when he talks about truth? Is it possible that Christ is speaking precisely of something that does not make itself manifest (the truth of the world), of something that cannot be spoken about via the contemporary scientific and empirical discourse?

…we can begin to perceive the logic of the incarnation – i.e. that something can be present while remaining utterly unknown…

So what is the truth of Christianity if it is not something measurable by the truth of the world? The gospels often make the claim that the truth of Christianity is life. In order to understand why this truth claim operates at a different level than the truth of the world let us reflect upon the notion of life. Upon close reflection it becomes clear that I cannot experience your life (all I see are movements in your flesh etc.). Your life is not accessible to me directly but is inferred by me. But more fundamentally my own life is not accessible to me either. I do not experience my life but rather my life is what opens me up to experience. While I enjoy my life I do not ‘experience’ it. It is present but not intelligible and therefore not able to be understood via the truth of the world (while ‘biology’ is a term that refers to the study of life, in reality it is the study of dead matter for life cannot be found on a dissecting table in a lab).

…Christianity, whether true or false on its own terms, is not fundamentally a metanarrative which makes claims on the level of the ‘truth of the world’. Rather it claims a different type of truth, something which can never be rendered intelligible to empirical method but that none the less can make itself known via its presence – i.e. life in all its fullness. Is this not what we learn from the testimony of the man healed from a lifetime of blindness – he does not make any epistemic claims but simply shouts out, ‘I once was blind but now I see’.

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