Truth and Philosophy of Religion

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Truth, or the futures of philosophy of

religion
a
N.N. Trakakis
a
School of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne,
Australia
Published online: 24 Mar 2014.
To cite this article: N.N. Trakakis (2013) Truth, or the futures of philosophy of
religion, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 74:5, 366-390, DOI:
10.1080/21692327.2014.899156
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International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2013
Vol. 74, No. 5, 366–390, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2014.899156
Truth, or the futures of philosophy of religion

N.N. Trakakis*
School of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

(Received 24 February 2014; final version received 24 February 2014)
Philosophy of religion, in both its analytic and Continental streams, has been under-
going a renewal for some time now, and I seek to explore this transformation in the
fortunes of the discipline by looking at how truth – and religious truth in particular – is
conceptualised in both strands of philosophy. I begin with an overview of the way in
Downloaded by [109.100.141.168] at 11:43 28 March 2015
which truth has been commonly understood across nearly all groups within the analytic
tradition, and I will underscore the difficulties and shortcomings of the analytic
approach by comparing it with a Continental, and specifically Heideggerian, approach.
I then proceed to a conception of truth that is even further removed from the analytic
tradition, one that is prominent in the theology of Christianity and which identifies
truth with Christ. The point of this detour through divergent understandings of truth is
to show how philosophy of religion, whether analytic or Continental, remains
entrenched in forms of thinking that will need to be overcome if it is to have a credible
future.
Keywords: truth; Heidegger; metaphilosophy; analytic philosophy; Continental
philosophy
Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’

Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the
world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’
Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’
(John 18:37–38)
Jesus said to him [Thomas], ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’
(John 14:6)
Philosophy of religion, in both its analytic and Continental streams, has been undergoing a
renewal for some time now. In the analytic tradition, the work of Alston, Plantinga, van
Inwagen and Swinburne has reinvigorated a field that was languishing in the positivist
gutters in the middle of the last century. Interestingly, something similar has been going
on in the Continental area, as evidenced by the development of post-metaphysical
theologies by the likes of John Caputo, Mark C. Taylor, Jean-Luc Marion, and Gianni
Vattimo; the theological turn in French phenomenology decried by Dominique Janicaud;
and the increasing interaction between secular-minded Continental philosophers (such as
Slavoj Zizek) and theologians (such as the Radical Orthodox). While some have wel-
comed and even celebrated this transformation in the fortunes of philosophy of religion, I
am not so sanguine. And to indicate why I will take a somewhat unorthodox route of not
focusing directly on the typical metaphilosophical themes of the nature, methodology and
aims of philosophy of religion, but by looking instead at how truth – and truth in religion
in particular – is conceptualised in both strands of philosophy.
*Email: nick.trakakis@acu.edu.au
© 2014 International Journal of Philosophy and Theology

International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 367
This, however, is not as eccentric a strategy as it may initially appear. For the question
of truth and one’s response to it are what give shape to the way in which one practices
philosophy (including the philosophy of religion), and so far from being a peripheral
question, it lies at the very heart of metaphilosophy. As John Sallis has noted: ‘It is not as
though philosophy is first delimited as such and then brought to bear on the question of
truth; rather, the way in which the question of truth is addressed, the way in which truth is
determined as such, determines the very project of philosophy.’1
I will therefore begin with an overview of the way in which truth has been commonly
understood across nearly all groups within the analytic tradition, and I will underscore the
difficulties and shortcomings of the analytic approach by comparing it with a Continental,
and specifically Heideggerian, approach. I will then move on to a conception of truth that
is even further removed from the analytic tradition, one that is prominent in the patristic
understanding of God in Christianity and which identifies truth with Christ. The point of
this detour through divergent understandings of truth is to show how philosophy of
religion, whether analytic or Continental, remains entrenched in forms of thinking that
will need to be overcome if it is to have a credible future. If, as is sometimes thought,

human beings define themselves by the way they conceive truth, then philosophers of
religion will need a very different account of truth if they are to arrive at a more
enlightening image of who they are and what they are doing as philosophers.
1. Truth in the analytic tradition of philosophy

Various accounts of truth have been developed and defended over the course of the history
of the analytic tradition. One favourite has been the correspondence theory: what we
believe or say is true if and only if it corresponds to the way things really are, i.e. to the
facts or to the world. This was the view of Russell and Wittgenstein during their logical
atomist days, and it is an intuitive and commonsensical view that is thought to be rooted in
Aristotle’s dictum that ‘to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true’.2
If the analytic tradition was initially aligned with the correspondence theory, this was
in part because it wished to distance itself from coherence theories of truth and their
idealist undertones. According to the coherence theory, a belief is true if and only if it is
part of a coherent system of beliefs, where the condition of coherence is more than mere
logical consistency. In the hands of British idealists such as H.H. Joachim and F.H.
Bradley, coherence amounts to a fully comprehensive, consistent belief set, and only
such a belief set could be ‘fully true’; individual propositions can only be partially true.
A further prominent account of truth in the early days of the analytic movement was
the pragmatist theory. On more populist versions, the theory amounts to the view that
truth is what is useful: if a belief ‘works’, in the sense that it helps us to cope or to achieve
happiness and well-being, then it counts as true. But more refined versions do not spell
out the difference that a true belief makes in exactly this way. C.S. Peirce’s ‘pragmaticist’
theory, for example, defines truth by way of consensus, so that a belief is true if and only
if it would be unanimously accepted by all who undertake the relevant investigations and
have the requisite experiences. In this case, the practical difference that truth makes
consists in convergence of opinion: truth is present when those who employ a certain
method of inquiry will (or perhaps would if they persisted long enough) agree. William
James, on the other hand, linked truth not with consensus but with beneficial results of
various sorts. On this view, associated also with John Dewey and F.C.S. Schiller, a belief
is true if and only if it brings about a good outcome (in the long-run, and not simply at the
present moment) for the person holding the belief. For James, the beneficial outcomes
368 N.N. Trakakis
include successful predictions and good explanations, improved human intercourse and
communication, and the encouragement of higher emotions and better behaviours.
More recently, a much more minimalist and deflationary view of truth has taken hold
in the analytic tradition. For Tarski, for example, any definition of ‘true sentence of L’,
where L is a formalised language, must satisfy two requirements: formal correctness and
material adequacy. The material adequacy condition is explicated in terms of ‘Convention
T’, which requires that a definition of truth should imply all the ‘T-biconditionals’, so that
(to borrow a famous example) ‘Snow is white’ is a true sentence (of English) if and only if
snow is white. More explicitly deflationary theories see even less substance in the notion
of truth. According to F.P. Ramsey’s redundancy theory, there is no property of truth at all,
and so appearances of the expression ‘true’ in our sentences are redundant. On this view,
to assert that φ is true is just to assert that φ, or simply to repeat what it says. Somewhat
similarly, on P.F. Strawson’s performative theory, when we call something ‘true’ we
perform an act of agreeing to, repeating, or conceding it – we say ‘ditto’ to it.
Insofar as these deflationary views are eliminativist – in the sense of seeking to
eliminate the concept of truth from our vocabulary – they eschew any commitment to
the concept of truth and so they obviously avoid the entire problem of ‘truth-bearers’, that
is, the problem of what is the proper or primary bearer of truth. But deflationary theories
need not be eliminativist: a deflationist may regard truth as useful, albeit dispensable, and
when truth is being used or predicated of something the problem resurfaces as to what is
the vehicle that bears or carries truth.
The general trajectory of the analytic tradition, whether deflationist or not, has been to
view truth as something that is borne by various modes of representation, such as sentences
and propositions. Surprisingly, however, this has more or less been taken for granted and
received little scrutiny. The problem of truth-bearers has not received much attention in
analytic philosophy, at least over the last few decades, despite its significance for a wide array
of problems considered important within the analytic tradition.3 It is generally assumed
across nearly all the foregoing accounts of truth that the primary truth-bearers or truth-
vehicles are representations of certain sorts – they are ways of representing or picturing the
world, and so they are true or false depending on whether they correctly represent the world.
These modes of representation may be divided into two groups, depending on whether
or not they are mind or language-dependent. There are, firstly, truth-bearers that are (or
essentially involve) linguistic or mental representations of some sort. One sub-group of
this category consists in indicative sentences, where a sentence is defined as ‘any
grammatically correct and complete string of expressions of a natural language’.4
Another sub-group consists in mental acts or processes, such as the acts of believing,
judging, and making a ‘statement’ in the sense of a kind of speech-act involving ‘the
assertoric use of a sentence by a speaker on a particular occasion’.5
But there are also truth-bearers that exist independently of mind and language. These
are abstract entities, and one prominent example is the ‘statement’, not in the sense of a
speech-act, but in the sense of ‘what is said when a declarative sentence is uttered or
inscribed’,6 or the mental or conceptual content of a sentence. Another prominent non-
linguistic truth-bearer is the notorious ‘proposition’, defined variously as: (1) the content
of what is said; (2) the meaning of a sentence, or ‘what is common to a set of synonymous
declarative sentences’;7 or (3) the object of a mental state, such as belief or hope. Abstract
entities such as statements and propositions do, of course, receive expression in thought
and speech, but they need not and so they can exist independently of mind and language.
So, despite the variety of views in the analytic tradition as to the nature of truth, there
is almost universal agreement that truth (if and when it exists) is something that is borne
or carried by linguistic, cognitive or abstract entities such as sentences and propositions.

And in holding sentences or propositions to be true one is in effect claiming to be
correctly representing the world. Truth, therefore, in the analytic tradition is fundamen-
tally an epistemic notion: it affords us with representational knowledge of reality, or an
account which correctly conforms with how things really stand. This much is common
lore in the analytic tradition. But there is an alternative way of seeing truth that is in
keeping with a tradition much older than the analytic movement, where truth is not merely
the property of language (sentences), mind (judgements) or abstracta (propositions), and
instead attaches primarily to radically other kinds of beings and modes of being. On this
view, truth is much more than the conformity of thought to reality (although it is this as
well). At bottom, truth is a kind of disclosive event or happening, one which reveals the
nature of things or of the world itself. Such a view has therefore been called an
ontological conception of truth.
It is such a view that is suggested by Bruce Wilshire, in his vehement critique of
analytic philosophy, which he dubs ‘fashionable nihilism’. Wilshire writes:
Truth…in this channel [i.e. in analytic philosophy] is typically construed as a correspondence

between propositions ‘in the mind’ and the world ‘out there’. But these are all reified
abstractions, not the flowing life of involvement in whole surrounds that we bodily beings
actually live.
And think of it! Why should truth be restricted to words? All the unencompassable ways the
world is revealed to us constitute truth. Silences, music, gestures, presences and presencings
here and there. Animals, birds, trees, indigenous peoples, all these beings can be true when
they are true to themselves, true to their nature, and their nature is shown to us.8
Although this is not exactly the view of truth I will be defending, I am very much drawn
to the idea that truth can encompass concrete and living beings, as well as moments of
silence and musical compositions. Such a notion would be dismissed by analytic philo-
sophers as absurd, even by those who are relatively ‘liberal’ or ‘broad-minded’ enough to
see in truth something more substantial than anemic disquotationalism and something that
finds expression in a variety of forms.9 Marian David, a proponent of such a view of truth,
writes: ‘Truth is promiscuous: it attaches to sentences, utterances, statements, assertions,
claims, judgments, beliefs, thoughts, assumptions, axioms, theorems, premises, and con-
clusions.’10 But from another angle, this does not go far enough: it is still to subjugate and
repress truth, not allowing it roam free and fulfil its desire. I am reminded in this context
of some beautiful lines of Kevin Hart’s:
It’s spring: the maple tree speaks of her lips,

The curve around her bottom that I love.
But no one sane will ever quote a tree…11
It is precisely trees and skies and seas and divinities that we should be quoting more often,
or so I will argue.
2. Truth in Continental philosophy: Heidegger

Whatever happens with historical human beings always derives from a decision about the
essence of truth that was taken long ago and is never up to humans alone.
(Heidegger, ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’12)
370 N.N. Trakakis
To see what has gone wrong in the analytic approach to truth, it may be helpful to look
beyond the analytic paradigm and to turn to the very different approach to truth found in
the so-called Continental tradition. In comparison with the analytic tradition, Continental
philosophy is far less homogeneous in terms of goals, methods, conceptualities and
overall framework principles, leading some to even deny the very existence of
Continental philosophy. But it is not necessary to survey the entire disparate field of
Continental thought. One leading and instructive exemplar will do, and one can’t do much
better than Heidegger.
Heidegger, of course, has a bad reputation in analytic philosophy. Recall, for example,
Carnap’s criticism that Heidegger’s das Nichts counts as a prime piece of meaningless
metaphysics.13 More recently, Paul Edwards in Heidegger’s Confusions has stated that
‘sober and rational persons will continue to regard the whole Heidegger phenomenon as a
grotesque aberration of the human mind’.14 Others have spoken of a farrago of Black-
Forest kitsch,15 and even comparatively sympathetic commentators from the analytic
tradition often complain that they struggle to identify any arguments, but find only the
explication of metaphors in terms of other metaphors – Bernard Harrison, for example,

complains about ‘the sonorous opacities of Heideggerian metaphor’.16
I’m not proposing to defend Heidegger from these charges. I only set out to show how
Heidegger’s approach to truth can be illuminating in itself as well as helping to illumine
some distinctive shortcomings and failures of the analytic tradition. However, the above
stereotypical portraits and criticisms of Heidegger may well get in the way of a proper, or
at least fair, appreciation and appraisal of his work on truth, and so it would be advisable
to at least set them aside for the time being.
On at least one and perhaps common interpretation of Heidegger’s work on truth,
Heidegger is not altogether impressed with what he calls ‘the traditional conception of
truth’ which locates truth primarily, if not exclusively, in linguistic entities such as
statements and sentences, or else non-linguistic (or mental) entities such as judgements
and propositions. On this view, shared also by the analytic tradition, as indicated earlier,
truth is a matter of a certain relationship (of agreement, correspondence, or adequatio)
holding between a statement and its ‘object’, with what the statement is about, e.g. the
world or a state of affairs. Heidegger does not reject this view outright, but he does think
that it is a somewhat superficial view, not going to the heart of the matter.17 As he states:
‘Our analysis takes its departure from the traditional conception of truth, and attempts to
lay bare the ontological foundations of that conception. In terms of these foundations the
primordial phenomenon of truth becomes visible.’18 Similarly, a bit later on he writes: ‘In
proposing our “definition” of “truth” we have not shaken off the tradition, but we have
appropriated it primordially.’19 Heidegger therefore concedes to the likes of Aristotle and
Aquinas (his two principal exponents of ‘the tradition’) that statements are true when they
agree or correspond with some extra-mental reality. But this agreement or correspondence
– he would add – is in turn dependent upon a certain unconcealedness (Unverborgenheit),
or clearing (Lichtung), to use an expression from his later writings. In other words, the
truth accomplished or secured by a statement is parasitic upon a more primordial kind of
truth, one achieved by the disclosedness of being.
But what exactly is the ‘disclosedness of being’? Here, as elsewhere, Heidegger looks
to the Greek, in this case to the Greek word alēthēia (ἀλήθεια), which ordinarily means
‘truth’ and etymologically suggests a privative understanding of truth, composed as it is of
the privative prefix a- (un- or dis-) and the root lēthē (meaning ‘hiddenness’, ‘closure’, or
even ‘forgetting’). The origins of the word therefore imply to Heidegger a conception of
truth as an absence or lack of something, and in particular as something that lacks
hiddenness or has been ‘torn away’ or ‘wrested’ from hiddenness. Truth therefore comes
to be seen by Heidegger as disclosure or disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), unconcealment
or unhiddenness (Unverborgenheit), as rescuing and retrieving something from some prior
darkness and thus holding it, even if only momentarily, in presence and light. (Indeed, this
bringing things out of darkness into the light is what the practice of phenomenology
amounts to for Heidegger.) But how does Heidegger get from truth as correspondence to
truth as unconcealment?20
Heidegger distinguishes three levels of disclosure, ranging from the originary to the
derivative. The first or most superficial level consists in predicative disclosure, or
disclosure via propositional statements. Ordinarily, the word ‘truth’ applies exclusively
at this level, where it is a property of statements that correctly represent facts or states of
affairs. At this level of disclosure we are able to represent correctly to ourselves, in
synthetic judgments and declarative sentences of the type ‘S is P’, the way things are in
the world. This is truth as the correctness of thoughts and assertions – the kind of truth
that analytic philosophers ordinarily traffic in. But for Heidegger correctness or corre-
spondence cannot be fully captured by a representational model of language, where

beliefs and assertions correspond by representing some state of affairs just as it is.
Correspondence, rather, presupposes the notion of unconcealment, since a belief or
assertion corresponds by giving us an orientation to things in the world that allows
them to show themselves in a particular way and thus helps us to bring them out of
unconcealment. And so, even at this elementary level of propositional truth, there is an
element of disclosure: when a proposition corresponds to the way things are it is
disclosive of things just as they present themselves. As Heidegger puts it:
To say that an assertion ‘is true’ signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. Such an
assertion asserts, points out, ‘lets’ the entity ‘be seen’ (ἀπόφανσις) in its uncoveredness. The
Being-true (truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering.21
A true statement therefore involves the predicative uncovering of entities. But this is
not all there is to truth, and according to Heidegger it has been the predicament of Western
philosophy and science to fail to see this. Propositional truth is not the most basic kind of
truth, but is founded in pre-predicative modes of uncovering entities. In other words, a
predicative, apophantic sentence (of the type ‘S is P’) can be true only because of a more
primordial occurrence of disclosure, one in which entities make themselves manifest as
the standard against which the assertion can be measured – and this leads us to a second
level of disclosure.
On this second level, there is the ‘truth’ of entities, where an entity is ‘true’ when it is
uncovered or dis-covered in the sense that it is made available for comportment. The
reference to ‘comportment’ indicates that this is a kind of disclosedness that is accom-
plished through our everyday forms of concern and engagement within the world, where
we interact with or interpret something as something, e.g. when we use a certain object as
a hammer, or when we see a friend as a true friend, ‘the one whose friendly actions show
him as he really is’, as Wrathall puts it.22 This may therefore be called a ‘hermeneutical
disclosure’ of entitles. But this hermeneutical activity on our part requires a certain
unhiddenness, the presenting or ‘uncovering’ of things as they are. Truth, indeed, would
not be possible unless things open themselves up to us. The Greeks, according to
Heidegger, experienced truth as precisely openness and unhiddenness (recall that the
root, or one of the roots, of the Greek word for ‘truth’ is ‘hiddenness’), and their
conception of truth as correctness was grounded in this experience (even if they were
372 N.N. Trakakis
not fully aware that they were doing so). So, for Heidegger, within any given world to be
an entity is to be always already disclosed as something or other, and this kind of
disclosure gives us what he calls ‘ontic truth’, the truth of entities in their being.
But we have yet to reach bedrock. At bottom we have not the disclosure of entities,
but disclosure-as-such, or world-disclosure, the disclosedness or opening up of the world
which in Heidegger’s terminology affords us with ‘ontological’ or ‘primordial’ truth – the
truth of Being, not of beings. It is unconcealment in this sense that is the essence of truth,
for it makes predicative truth possible, and so it may be better to describe it as the
condition of possibility for there being any truth at all, rather than as a further kind of
truth.23 What makes pre-predicative as well as predicative uncovering possible is the
original occurrence of disclosure, the disclosedness of world. This is not ‘world’ in the
ordinary sense of the physical universe or the totality of things, but the all-embracing web
of significance relations or a kind of ‘field of meaning’ that structures Dasein’s under-
standing of itself and of everything it comports itself to. It is the ‘world’ in this sense that
makes it possible for entities to manifest themselves as entities with a specific mode of
being or essence. Put linguistically, unconcealment at this level is where meaningful

language becomes possible, and this in turn makes it possible for there to be true (and
false) assertions and judgments. This is why Heidegger calls the foundational sense of
disclosure ‘language’, meaning by this not some spoken or written discourse, but logos in
the terminology of Heraclitus (or Heidegger’s Heraclitus): the original ‘gathering’ of
entities into meaningful presence so as to disclose them as what and how they are
(‘λόγος as ἀπόφανσις’, as Heidegger put it24).
For Heidegger, Dasein (literally, ‘to be there’) does not refer to an individual human
being or even to humanity as such, but to the way of being which is manifested by human
beings. As we have seen, being-true is a matter of being-uncovered, and for Heidegger
this is precisely the way of being that we manifest. It follows, therefore, that truth or
disclosedness belongs to the very constitution of Dasein, to our way of being. In other
words, what Heidegger describes as ‘the world’ is, more properly, a way of being of
Dasein, not in the sense that the world and we are the same thing, but in the sense that
being-in-the-world is what it means to be the kind of being we are. Thus, the disclosed-
ness of Dasein is the most primordial phenomenon of truth – that is to say, Dasein is the
primary truth-bearer. For Heidegger, therefore, Dasein is the (primordial) truth: ‘In so far
as Dasein is its disclosedness essentially, and discloses and uncovers as something
disclosed to this extent it is essentially “true”. Dasein is “in the truth” [in der
Wahrheit] … the disclosedness of its ownmost Being belongs to its existential constitu-
tion.’25 Truth thus belongs primordially to Dasein, but not in a crude subjectivist or
relativist way where Dasein determines what is true or has the power of arbitrarily
assigning truth-values.26 The point, rather, is that Dasein is in such a way as to be the
disclosedness of being (both its own being and that of others), and it is the disclosedness
that Dasein essentially is that makes possible any uncovering whatever and so in this
respect it bears the ‘essence’ of truth.
In his later writings, beginning with ‘On the Essence of Truth’ (based on a lecture first
presented in 1930), Heidegger’s thinking famously ‘turns’ in a new direction, away from
the subjectivism brought on by the centrality of Dasein in Being and Time to something
that lies beyond Dasein, although encompassing it. This something is signaled by
Heidegger’s use of the metaphor of the clearing (die Lichtung, literally ‘lighting’),
which of course draws upon the image of an opening or open-space in a dark forest
(e.g. a glade), and was likely inspired by Heidegger’s frequent forest hikes. Walking
through dense dark woods with limited visibility, one can suddenly come into an open
region, where the trees have been cleared so as to allow the light to stream in and give
things room to display themselves. The density and darkness of the surrounding forest
calls to mind human handiwork, as when we speak of ‘cleared land in the woods’. The
metaphor of a clearing, therefore, is not meant to suggest something already in place and
static, unmoved either by the encroaching forest or by our arrival. Instead, a clearing has
an event-like structure: it is a space of possibilities where things happen, where things
come into the open and manifest themselves, and so where ‘truth happens’.27
Although this cleared space is in some sense more fundamental than the entities which
appear in it and the humans who respond to them, Dasein retains for Heidegger an
important connection with clearing, openness and hence truth. Dasein, in fact, comes
now to be described as a ‘clearing’ in the midst of reality: we are the-there or the ‘Da’
where beings can show themselves, letting them be seen and thought about. Da-sein,
being the-there or place where things come to appearance, is the ‘concealed essential
ground of man’ as well as ‘the originally essential domain of truth’.28 Thus, when
Heidegger defines truth in terms of the clearing he means to indicate a certain openness,
where this encompasses the openness (or unhidenness) of things to us, our openness (or
freedom) towards them, and the openness of the region itself which must be traversed
between things and us. Our openness as freedom, however, is not an arbitrary whim
(where we decide by fiat what is true) but a way of comporting ourselves to things so as to
allow them to open themselves to us, without forcing them into preconceived moulds.
Heidegger therefore states that ‘the essence of truth is freedom’, where freedom is ‘first
determined as freedom for what is opened up in an open region’, and so is a matter of
‘letting beings be’.29 But just as freedom is not caprice, so freedom as letting beings be is
not neglect or indifference (as in ‘live and let live’). Freedom, rather, involves attentive
involvement and engagement: ‘To let be – that is, to let beings be as the beings which they
are – means to engage oneself with the open region and its openness into which every
being comes to stand.’30 In its essence, then, freedom is a kind of engagement that takes
us out of ourselves (thus giving us a special sort of ‘ek-sistence’) and into the space where
we are exposed and ‘attuned to’ unconcealed beings, if not to the very unconcealment
itself. It is in a space such as this that our language allows beings to ‘present themselves’,
making possible comparison and accordance between dissimilar entities.31 In short, the
openness of comportment, and more fundamentally the freedom this comportment is
grounded in, is conceived as the necessary presupposition or enabling ground (i.e. the
‘essence’) of the traditional account of truth as correspondence. Heidegger therefore
concludes:
If the correctness (truth) of statements becomes possible only through this openness of
comportment, then what first makes correctness possible must with more original right be
taken as the essence of truth. Thus the traditional assignment of truth exclusively to state-
ments as the sole essential locus of truth falls away. Truth does not originally reside in the
proposition.32
Now, I do not offer Heidegger’s account of truth as the final truth, or as a decisive
refutation of the general approach found in the analytic tradition. However, what
Heidegger’s account at least shows is that it is far from obvious that truth is something
that can only be borne by the kinds of linguistic and abstract entities that are standardly
presupposed in analytic accounts (entities such as sentences and propositions). Of course,
we do not need to defer to Heidegger to appreciate this. There is a long-standing tradition
in Western philosophy of ascribing truth to things other than sentences or propositions.
374 N.N. Trakakis
Plato, for example, applied alēthēs (‘true’, ‘undeceptive’) and alētheia (‘truth’, ‘undecep-
tiveness’, ‘reality’) to things, and primarily to the Forms. Picking up from Plato, idealist
philosophers have identified truth (or full and complete truth) with such entities or
categories as the Whole, God, the Absolute, Spirit, etc. Also, more homely examples
are available from ordinary discourse. We commonly speak of various things and people
as being ‘true’, e.g. ‘a true artist’, ‘a true friend’, ‘true love’, ‘being true to oneself’,
‘swords that swing true’.33
But examples such as these still remain within the ambit of the traditional conception,
for even in such cases the notion of truth as correctness of thoughts (or assertions) is
implicit, e.g. we say that someone is a true friend because he corresponds to our idea of
what a friend should be. In other words, truth – even when applied to things and objects,
rather than statements and propositions – may still get cashed out (or analysed) in terms of
correspondence or correctness. (As Heidegger notes: ‘material truth [by which he means a
genuine or authentic instance of a natural kind, such as gold] always signifies the
consonance of something at hand with the “rational” concept of its essence’.34) This is
of course fine as far as it goes, but the problem is that it does not go far enough, for we
still need to know what makes the correspondence in question possible. As Heidegger
puts it, ‘Whence does the presentative statement receive the directive to conform to the
object and to accord by way of correctness? Why is this accord involved in determining
the essence of truth?’35 The problem, then, is not so much the relation of correspondence
itself, but in accounting for this relation, that is, in explaining or showing how our words
successfully latch on to the world (and hence what we say corresponds to what is the
case). Heidegger’s point is that invoking propositions, or like entities, only multiplies
rather than resolves the difficulties at this level.
Heidegger’s approach brings to the fore a dimension of truth that is rarely counte-
nanced in either analytic accounts or everyday uses of ‘true’. As mentioned earlier, at the
most primordial level of disclosure, Heidegger claims to be describing the ‘essence’ of
truth. In doing so, however, he rejected the traditional understanding of essence as the set
of properties shared by all objects of a certain kind, and instead defined essence as ‘the
ground of the inner possibility of what is initially and generally admitted as known’.36
Thus, the essence of truth he is seeking refers to the enabling conditions or grounds for
making assertions about beings and checking their accuracy, in a similar manner to Kant’s
transcendental inquiries into the conditions of the possibility of something assumed to be
valid. In other words, Heidegger is not looking for a criterion of truth, which would help
one to determine whether a proposition is true or false, or would help one recognise when
truth is present. Rather, he is attempting to delineate the essence, meaning or nature of
truth.37 And he does so in a phenomenologically informed way that aims to describe and
account for the experience of truth as disclosure, rather than in a purely conceptual or
historical fashion (which is why criticisms of his playful etymological analyses and his
readings of the Presocratics are not always to the point).
To be sure, analytic philosophers have also attempted to provide accounts of the
meaning and nature of truth, and not simply criteria for truth (as the theories of truth
outlined in §1 indicate). But what these theories lack is an analysis of the conditions of
possibility of truth: What makes truth, as ordinarily conceived (as correspondence)
possible in the first place? There is also lacking the kind of appreciation evident in
Heidegger of the close link between truth with something that goes beyond the correctness
of assertions – that truth is not always, or even primarily, something borne by sentences,
propositions, or judgements. To see this, consider how Heidegger, but not Russell or
Quine, can comfortably accommodate the idea, common to musicians, painters and
mystics, that there are truths that are ineffable and so cannot be expressed in language at
all (or at least can only be expressed very imperfectly and inadequately in language).
Consider, likewise, the idea often voiced by poets that there are truths that can only (or
can only adequately) be expressed through the allusive or symbolic idiom of poetry and
song. Heidegger, too, adopted a view of this sort. So, rather than regimenting ordinary
discourse by means of the propositional calculus, as a Russell or Frege is wont to do,
Heidegger thinks that the inauthenticity (cliché, idle talk) of everyday language is only
circumvented by means of the unconcealment of truth and reality achieved in poetic
language, particularly as represented by the likes of Hölderlin and Stefan George.
Analytic philosophers are likely to respond that poetic truths, if truths they be, must be
translatable or reducible to something like a propositional form, otherwise we are merely
presented with sentimental feeling at best, or ‘bullshit’ at worst (as Harry Frankfurt would
say). Heidegger, on the other hand, can understand well that John Keats, when writing that
Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know38
was not simply venting his personal feelings, but was indicating that truth is much more
than merely a correspondence or likeness to an ideal, for at bottom it is the ideal itself.
The recognition that truth can be ineffable and non-propositional partly accounts for
the tendency in much religious literature to hold up verse and hymn, as well as song and
dance and art, as the primary means of contact and access to the divine. Gregory of
Nazianzus, for instance, put his outstanding rhetorical talents to effective use in the fourth
century not by composing elaborate and systematic treatises, in the manner of Origen’s De
principiis (which he nevertheless knew well). Instead, he delivered orations, wrote letters,
and most significantly penned a remarkable series of poems, his poetic work including
Homeric hymns, narratives of his own life (including the first extant autobiography in
poetic form), didactic expositions, prayers, epitaphs, and intimate reflections on the
sorrows and follies of life. If such a body of work is consistent with being called ‘the
Theologian’ (as Gregory has since the mid-fifth century), and indeed being widely
regarded as the greatest theologian of the fourth century, it is far from clear that analytic
philosophers of religion would see in this something worthy of emulating.39
3. Ascending further: a Christological conception of truth

In his second Theological Oration (usually given the title ‘On the incomprehensibility of
God’), Gregory of Nazianzus deploys a trope common in the literature of the Christian
East, that of the mystical ascent:
I was running toward God, toward the comprehension of God, and so I climbed the mountain
and penetrated the cloud and became enclosed in it, detached from matter and material things,
achieving the fullest possible degree of self-concentration. But when I looked, I barely caught
a glimpse of God’s back.… And this is God’s back, that knowledge of him which is behind
him, just like the shadows and images in the water that reveal the sun to those with weak
eyes, since they cannot see the sun itself and their vision is overwhelmed by the purity of its
light.40
This image of the ascent from light to darkness lends itself well to the Heideggerian
conception of levels of disclosure. On Heidegger’s view, as we have seen, the common-
sensical and intuitive understanding of predicative truth needs to be surpassed, as it were,
376 N.N. Trakakis
so as to reach the ground or essence of truth, truth in the most primordial sense, which
makes predicative truth possible. But unlike Gregory, where the ascent takes one from
clarity to incomprehensibility, Heidegger’s conception of truth as grounded in an uncon-
cealment, an unhiddenness or a ‘making manifest of…’ remains within the Platonist
framework of the journey from the realm of shadows in the cave into the light – though
even for Heidegger, the light in the clearing is at best fleeting and momentary. But also
unlike Gregory, Heidegger would be loathe to identify his original or ontological truth,
disclosure-as-such or world-disclosure, with God himself. For Heidegger, philosophy sets
out the limits and conditions of possibility for the ontic sciences, theology included. But
while Dasein has no access to anything beyond time, and thus has no experience or
consciousness of God, for Gregory it is our very access to that which is beyond time and
the source and cause of all, viz. God, which makes everything possible and everything
meaningful – including truth.
Here of course we meet Heidegger’s methodological atheism, his insistence that
philosophy (by which he meant phenomenology) must be in-principle atheistic. As he
memorably put it: ‘A “Christian philosophy” is a round square and a misunderstanding.’41

Behind this privileging of philosophy lies the assumption that philosophy is more radical
in nature than theology. Just as Russell was to complain against Aquinas, Heidegger holds
that if we were to start from a position of theism, then our questioning or seeking would
begin by already having found what it searches: God. Philosophy, by contrast, must
consist in an authentic questioning, following the trail of inquiry wherever it leads.
Philosophy, as the ontological science (the science of being), must therefore stand beyond
or beneath theology (as one of the ontic, positive sciences), providing theology with much
needed conceptual clarification and correction. In short, to think God, theology must first
go to philosophy, to learn how to think being.42
Although many philosophers and even some theologians may welcome this, e.g. it has
been held that it is useful for theological reasons that theology turns to philosophy for
correction, so that it may weed out the impact of Greek philosophy or scientific ration-
alism – this displays in the opinion of others a loss of integrity and nerve. Alvin Plantinga,
for example, in his influential ‘Advice to Christian Philosophers’, which he delivered in
1983,43 called for a kind of Christian philosophy that is more autonomous, bold and self-
confident, and which is primarily answerable to the Christian community (and not to the
wider philosophical community). More specifically, Plantinga argued that the Christian
philosopher need not accept common (i.e. common in the current philosophical climate)
assumptions and views about how to start and how to proceed in philosophy, and what
constitutes a good or satisfactory answer or argument. Given that there are no metaphy-
sically neutral starting-points in philosophy, a Christian philosopher is entirely within his
rights in starting from belief in God when working on some philosophical project (e.g. on
the theory of knowledge, or the nature of personhood), even if he cannot convince all or
most philosophers of the existence of God. The Heidegerrian ideal of a theologically
neutral ontology – which resurfaced in the ‘New Phenomenology’ of Levinas, Henry,
Marion, and others – is thereby rejected. If Plantinga’s call is heeded, then any strict
separation of philosophy from theology is unwarranted. And if this is supplemented with
the call of the Radical Orthodox, then philosophy is not brought into a closer relation with
theology, but is made dependent on and grounded in theology. It is such a reversal of
Heidegger that I wish to pursue here.
A further ascent is therefore required, an ascent from philosophy (in both its analytic
and Continental guises) to theology. In making this move, we need to pursue the
Heideggerian program of the Destruktion of truth even further than Heidegger himself
allowed, so as to ask for the conditions of possibility or grounds for the disclosedness of
the world, or ontological truth: What makes it possible for this kind of truth to appear and
thus for the world to open itself up to us? Is ontological truth nothing more than a brute
fact, admitting of no further analysis or explanation? Or can we go further? As Gregory
intimates, matters become increasingly risky and dangerous the further one progresses in
such questionings, for one easily loses one’s bearings and the capacity to comprehend as
one approaches the divine darkness.
The principal idea in this scheme, common to the Christian East and West, is that God
is Truth, or alternatively and perhaps more in keeping with traditional christology: Christ
is Truth, for as Jesus stated: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14: 6). This has
been spelt out in various ways. According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, for
example, it is held that God has no parts, and so there is no real distinction between
God and his properties – in which case ‘truth’ as one of God’s properties cannot be
distinguished from God himself. Another way of understanding the ‘God is Truth’ idea is
that God is the condition of possibility of there being any truth at all. Relevant here are
those arguments for the existence of God such as that famously developed by Augustine,
which infer the existence of God from the existence of truth.44 C.S. Lewis expressed this
insight wonderfully well when he stated: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun
has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.’45 Christianity,
according to Lewis, is not only true but is what makes whatever truth there is (in science,
art, morality, and other religions) possible.
But however the ‘God is Truth’ idea is precisely worked out, an important implication
of this idea is that truth – at least in its fundamental and original sense – is not
propositional or abstract in nature, but is something concrete, living, life-like and life-
giving, personal and hypostatic – for this is exactly what God as Trinity is.
Also, if God is Truth, then the bearer of truth will be radically different from a mere
linguistic mode of representation (such as a sentence) or an abstract entity (such as a
proposition). One proposal, advocated by contemporary eucharistic theologians such as
John Zizioulas, is that the truth-bearer is the eucharist (try to find an analytic philosopher
who accepts that!). It is in (or as) the eucharistic community that Christ as truth is
revealed and realised. As Zizioulas states:
In the eucharistic assembly God’s Word reaches man and creation not from outside, as in the
Old Testament, but as ‘flesh’ – from inside our own existence, as part of creation. For this
reason, the Word of God does not dwell in the human mind as rational knowledge or in the
human soul as a mystical inner experience, but as communion within a community.46
This naturally leads to the trinitarian understanding of God, particularly in its classical
formulation given by the fourth-century Cappadocians. On the one hand, God is, as Israel
knew, a single reality, a single ‘substance’ or ‘essence’ (ousia) or ‘nature’ (physis), a
single ‘what’. But God is also three ‘persons’ (πρόσωπα) or ‘hypostases’ (ὑποστάσεις),
three unique things or characteristics (ἰδιότητες). However, all these terms – ‘substance’,
‘person’, ‘hypostasis’, etc. – cannot be understood without an awareness of how different
their referents are from what is signified by them when we ordinarily speak of the created
world. This is especially the case with the Cappadocian understanding of ‘person’, a
category which (as Zizioulas explains) cannot be subsumed under the modern notion of a
‘person’ as a separate, individual centre of consciousness, or a bundle of natural and moral
properties (e.g. gender, skin colour, benevolence).47 Indeed, to conceive of the divine
persons in this way, Zizioulas writes, ‘would be an anthropomorphic monstrosity,
378 N.N. Trakakis
unworthy of the name of God’.48 Divine persons, rather, are distinguished only by their
relations of ontological origination. Gregory of Nazianzus, for example, characterises the
three persons chiefly by their point of origin and their resulting relationships to one
another: the one God is the unbegotten Father of Jesus Christ; the Lord Jesus Christ is the
Son of God who is begotten from the Father; and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the
Father. And so rather than referring to each divine person as ἄτομον (which does not carry
with it the dimension of relation), Gregory describes each person in terms of ‘mode of
being’ (τρόπος ὑπάρξεως) and ‘relationship’ (σχέσις): ‘The Father is a name neither of
ousia [substance] nor of energeia [activity], but of schesis [relation].’49
This reveals something of paramount importance about God and likewise about truth.
It is the very nature of God as Trinity to be ‘personal’, in the sense of a way of being and
relating, and so something with which we can enter into relationship and share, partake of,
and indeed become (as the Eastern doctrine of ‘theosis’ or divinization states). When the
nature of God is conceived in such relational terms, the result is a conception of God as
dynamic movement: God as Trinity consists in interpersonal and perichoretic communion.
Gregory gave expression to this dynamism through his doctrine of the ‘monarchy of
God the Father’. This doctrine, seen by some as the most fundamental element of
Gregory’s theology and as the foundational principle of trinitarian logic, holds that it is
the special property of the Father to be both without source himself (in the sense that he is
unbegotten and uncaused, or a se) and the source of the Son and Holy Spirit, and thus the
source and cause of the Trinity as a whole. If God the Father is taken to be the sole source
and cause of the Trinity, then the Trinity itself is ‘revealed as a kind of dynamic, ordered
life that eternally arises from and returns to God the Father’.50
Gregory is by no means alone in thinking of God as dynamic and relational in nature.
As Fergus Kerr has pointed out, ‘Historically, Thomas Aquinas was passionately con-
cerned to stop Christians from thinking of God as one more item in the world, as a
substance with properties, like a creature.’51 Kerr goes on to show how Thomas sought to
avert this slide into anthropomorphism and to preserve the Creator/creature distinction by
developing a dynamic conception of divinity, a conception which explodes the myth of
Thomas’ God as a static and ‘religiously unavailable’ deity. For Thomas, ‘there never was
being which was not always already becoming: acting on others, interacting, has always
been the ultimate perfection of any thing.’52 Thomas, in other words, thinks of being and
substance in dynamic and relational terms, rather than in inert or static terms, as is often
supposed. This becomes particularly clear in Thomas’ account of God as ipsum esse
subsistens, subsistent existence, and actus purus, pure actuality and activity. On this view,
God is not an individual entity, but the unrestricted act of existence, or pure act or activity,
for in God being and doing completely coincide. As Kerr puts it:
God is not a substance with accidents, a subject with properties, and an agent capable of
activities that occasionally express but never totally realise himself. That is what creatures are
like; agents never completely and transparently doing our being, so to speak. In God, being,
knowing, loving and creating are identical (the doctrine of divine simplicity); and this is,
simply, being which is always already doing.53 (Emphases in original)
Thomas’ God, according to Kerr, far from being a static entity, is more like a radically
dynamic and revelatory event, more like a verb than a noun.
But if God is Truth, then similar things can be said about truth. In his groundbreaking
work, Being as Communion, John Zizioulas traces the Greek patristic understanding of truth
as one based on an ever deepening realisation of the relational nature of the being of God.54
The Greek Fathers, on Zizioulas’ reading, sought to synthesize (or, better, to overcome)
the Greek philosophical understanding of truth and being as trans-historical (so that
ontology is removed from history as far as possible) and the opposing Hebraic view of
truth as essentially historical (as revealed in the covenants of God with his chosen people).
In the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, for example, a eucharistic approach to truth is
developed, so that truth and being are identified with life, above all with incorruptible and
eternal life (life without death), which is ‘the life of communion with God, such as exists
within the Trinity and is actualized within the members of the eucharistic community’.55
The fourth-century Cappadocians take this further with their Trinitarian approach, which
effects a veritable ‘ontological revolution’. Here, in a radical break with Greek thought,
substance and being are conceived in relational terms: ‘To be and to be in relation
becomes identical’.56 This is supplemented, or reinforced, by Maximus the Confessor,
for whom Christ is beyond all human conceptualisation and predication. Christ is there-
fore ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ truth, and Christ and truth itself lie ‘beyond the choice between
affirmation and negation’.57 Taking this a step further, in the christological approach to
truth represented by Maximus, being (and hence ontology) finds its ultimate fulfilment
and meaning in love, and especially in the ecstatic love of God as exemplified in the
incarnation. As Zizioulas puts Maximus’ view:
The incarnate Christ is so identical to the ultimate will of God’s love, that the meaning of
created being and the purpose of history are simply the incarnate Christ. All things were
made with Christ in mind, or rather at heart, and for this reason irrespective of the fall of man,
the incarnation would have occurred. Christ, the incarnate Christ, is the truth, for He
represents the ultimate, unceasing will of the ecstatic love of God.58 (Emphases in original)
We thus have a striking series of identifications of truth with being, and of being with life,
communion and love. On the patristic view, then, the essence or ground of truth is love.
But as Zizioulas goes on to point out, the intimate and indeed constitutive connection
between truth and love has been overturned by the Fall. Zizioulas interprets the Fall in
ontological terms as introducing a rupture between being and communion: ‘the world
ultimately consists of a fragmented existence in which beings are particular before they
can relate to each other: you first are and then relate.’59 This rupture between being and
communion is concomitant with the separation of truth and knowledge from love, so that
‘the “other”, whether in the form of a “person” or a “thing”, is present as an object of
knowledge before any relationship of communion can take place’.60 This in turn intro-
duces in human existence the alienation of the person from nature and also thought from
action, thus making possible hypocrisy – the disassociation of action and thought and thus
the falsification of truth.
What this implies, however, is that the primordial connection between truth and love is
something that needs to be restored. For this to happen, our life and created being more
generally must be transformed into communion and ‘true life’, which can only occur when
the ultimate point of reference for fallen existence becomes communion with God. So, if
truth is not to be falsified and distorted, but is to be restored to its true nature as loving
communion and incorruptible life, a radical re-orientation in created being is required. Put
otherwise, truth (or the true nature of truth) is something that can be and must be brought
about, something that happens and is accomplished. Truth, in short, is an event, the Christ-
event to be precise.
As this suggests, the ‘grammar’ of truth needs to be spelt out quite differently from the
ways in which it is ordinarily done. Specifically, truth on this analysis is not a predicate or
380 N.N. Trakakis
attribute, as it is on standard predicative and propositional accounts of truth. Truth is not

even a noun (or an abstract noun: ‘truth in itself’ or ‘truthfulness’). Instead, truth is to be
parsed as a verb: God as Truth is a way of relating, modelled on the being of God as inter-
personal communion. Put more fully perhaps, God as Truth expresses a mode of being
that consists in relation, a ‘way of life’ in the truest sense (not in the common and banal
sense this expression is often used today) – and so something we can emulate and imitate,
if only faintly.
Truth, on this view, is not simply something that we learn, but relates to how we live
and so is something that we do. Truth is therefore an action, an activity, a performance.
This ‘performative’ conception of truth has biblical roots, as when Isaiah 26:10 talks
about learning righteousness and doing the truth. To do the truth, in the Old Testament,
amounts to loyalty to God, which is expressed by carrying out God’s will and fulfilling his
Law (1 Kings 2:4, 2 Kings 20:3, Is 38:3, Ps 86:11). Similarly, in Ephesians 4:15 the
apostle Paul writes about ‘speaking the truth in love’ – as Peter Bouteneff points out, it
often passes unnoticed in translations that the Greek here uses ‘truth’ as a verb (aletheuo),
so that Paul is actually talking about ‘truthing’ in love.61

A similar conception of truth is defended by John Caputo in his little but popular
book, On Religion, where he seeks to determine what possibilities remain for religion in
our high-tech, post-secular world.62 One possibility that he thinks certainly does not
remain is the idea of ‘true religion’, in the sense of ‘the one true religion’ or an exclusive
access to the absolute truth. But Caputo does not thereby wish to do away with the notion
of ‘religious truth’, as long as this is correctly understood. A proper understanding, says
Caputo, cannot be had as long as religion continues to be conflated with, or subsumed
under, the sciences. A religion, according to Caputo, is not a scientific hypothesis, as the
creationists suppose. But if this is so, then ‘there is not a reason on earth (or in heaven)
why many different religious narratives cannot all be true’.63 For Caputo, then, the very
idea of there being a ‘one true religion’ commits a category-mistake, treating a ‘poetics of
experience’ as though it were a cognitivist or propositional discourse. As he puts it, ‘“The
one true religion” in that sense makes no more sense than “the one true language” or the
“one true poetry”, “the one true story” or “the one true culture”.’64 Religious truth is
therefore vastly different from scientific truth, in that truth in religion is not about
expressing facts or offering explanations. But then what does religious truth amount to,
for Caputo?
Caputo’s view is that religious truth is something that expresses the virtue of being
genuinely religious, ‘truly loving God, loving God in spirit and in truth (John 4:24).…
Loving God in spirit and in truth is not like having the right scientific theory that covers
all the facts and makes all the alternative explanations look bad’.65 An example of such
genuine religiousness and love of God would be the great personal risk and sacrifice many
religious individuals make in ‘serving the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the worst
streets of the most dangerous neighborhoods’ (but, Caputo adds, ‘without getting trapped
by the claim to a privileged divine revelation made by the particular religions’).66
Caputo is thus led to a pragmatist, as opposed to a cognitivist, conception of religious
truth which he spells out as follows:
Religious truth is not the truth of propositions, the sort of truth that comes from getting our
cognitive ducks in order, from getting our cognitive contents squared up with what is out
there in the world, so that if we say ‘S is p’ that means that we have picked out an Sp out there
that looks just like our proposition. Religious truth belongs to a different order, to the order or
sphere of what Augustine called ‘facere veritatem’, ‘making’ or ‘doing’ the truth.67
Rather than thinking of religious truth-claims by analogy with scientific claims to knowl-
edge, Caputo urges us to think of religious truth as something that we do, something that
we enact and make happen.
Earlier I identified a serious shortcoming in the standard analytic account of truth, viz.
that it cannot accommodate the primordial or fundamental kind of truth that is sometimes
found in poetry and art, including hymnography and iconography. But now we seem to
run into an equally severe problem, from reverse: If truth is indeed personal and poetic, as
is being claimed, then does anything go? How could we rule out anything and everything
as counting as ‘true’, in some sense? And if we cannot rule this out, then truth is
trivialised and loses all value. This is a common complaint raised by analytic philosophers
(in private, if not in print) against Continental views of truth such as those offered by
Caputo and like-minded Derrideans and postmodernists, who are charged with ‘going soft
on truth’.68
I think there is some point to this criticism, for it shows up the false dilemma that
Caputo seems to be propagating: either truth is something scientific, objective, cognitive,
etc., or truth is personal, performative, non-propositional, etc. To see how there could be a
third way, consider again the idea of God as Truth. On this view, there is indeed an
objective standard of truth – it is God himself. (Admittedly, because the standard is a
person-like or concrete being, it is a somewhat unusual form of objectivity. The objective
standard in this case is a subject, and hence is in some sense subjective. But what this
underscores is the problematic nature of the very subject-object framework itself, which
Caputo continues to take for granted.) But once the notion of God as Truth is spelt out
along the lines suggested earlier – where God as Truth is a dynamic and communal mode
of being that we are called to partake of – then truth takes on a performative character:
truth is something to be done, appropriated, realised and lived out. Only then can truth
transform, transfigure and liberate. And when this happens, truth happens, and one
participates in Truth (theosis).
The key idea here is that truth is not a purely abstract affair that makes no difference to
life, but is rather the very key to life, and so possessing it (or sharing in it) makes it
possible to live life as it was intended to be lived. The proclamation of Christ as Truth,
then, is not aimed at satisfying man’s curiosity, as though Christ were being offered up as
one more object of scientific study, but is intended as a revelation of the true sense and
purpose of human life. The truth, who is Christ himself, is thus intimately linked with life,
and to follow Christ is to know the truth and to conquer death. As Christ promised his
followers, ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’ (John 8:32). Truth,
in such religious or theological contexts, invariably has soteriological implications, as
Zizioulas points out:
If truth as communion is not to be separated from the ontology of life, then dogmas are
principally soteriological declarations; their object is to free the original εἰκών of Christ, the
truth, from the distortions of certain heresies, so as to help the Church community to maintain
the correct vision of the Christ-truth and to live in and by this presence of truth in history.69
The connection between truth and soteriology is made not only in Christianity, but is
prevalent in all the world religions. In Buddhism, for instance, the Four Noble Truths are
offered as the path to enlightenment. The person who understands and appropriates these
truths will break the bonds that tie them to life and will achieve release from the cycle, or
nirvana. It is in fact the centrality of soteriology that led the Buddha to deny the relevance
of the gods. In Buddha’s view, questions regarding the gods and offering sacrifices to
382 N.N. Trakakis
them seemed unimportant compared to the great task of finding enlightenment. He

famously compared a disciple who sought answers to speculative questions, such as
whether the world is eternal, to a man shot with an arrow who refuses medical treatment
until he is told the social caste of his attacker, his name, his size, his skin colour, his home
town, and the details of his weapon – before he learned all this, he would die. Buddha
therefore rejected metaphysical speculation as a useless distraction from the important task
of achieving enlightenment.
The concern with truth, in Christianity as in Buddhism, is essentially a concern with
how to live, or how to live fully. The idea that truth has momentous personal significance
goes back to the ancient philosophers, Socrates, Plato and the Hellenistic schools espe-
cially, and it was these thinkers that inspired Kiekergaard to develop his account of truth
as ‘subjectivity’. Truth, Kierkegaard thought, was not worth worrying about and certainly
not worth pursuing over an entire lifetime as a scholar, if it held no practical or existential
implications. As he stated in an early journal entry, while he was still a student: ‘What
would it profit me if the truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I
acknowledged it or not?’70 This is the kind of objective (or objectified) truth that results
from dispassionate and disinterested inquiry. What counts here is the content of what is
said (the ‘what’), while the moral and spiritual condition of the subject and their personal
relationship to this content (the ‘how’) becomes irrelevant, or at least does not occupy
centre stage (for ‘even the demons believe’, James 2:19).71 Kierkegaard therefore defined
truth as the very antithesis of objectivity:
When subjectivity is truth, the definition of truth must also contain in itself an expression of
the antithesis to objectivity.… Here is such a definition of truth: An objective uncertainty, held
fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth
there is for an existing person.72 (Emphases in original)
How exactly this infamous account of truth is to be understood may be open to debate, but
it is clear that the emphasis falls on ‘how’ something is said, as opposed to ‘what’ is said.
This ‘how’ suggests a certain way of life, one of ‘passionate inwardness’ towards some-
thing that is held fast through a process of personal appropriation and assimilation. Truth,
on this view, is never a matter of indifference to an individual, but is essentially related to
their life, to their inner passions and struggles to become selves of a certain sort. For
Kierkegaard, then, having the truth (or ‘being in the truth’) is not so much a matter of
entertaining the right propositions, but of being inwardly transformed, and in particular
transformed by the love of God.
But unlike Caputo, Kierkegaard is not open to the charge of endorsing some wild form
of subjectivism or relativism, or undermining objectivity or objective truth.73 According
to some interpreters at least, Kierkegaard does not set out to repudiate the traditional
account of truth as the conformity of thought and being.74 For Kierkegaard recognises that
passionately embracing and living by a particular idea, even if this has a transformative
effect on one’s life, is not enough to make that idea true (i.e. true in an objective sense).
Subjectivity may be necessary (for unless we relate ourselves to truth, we cannot
genuinely know it – in areas, at least, of momentous existential import), but it is not
sufficient. An objective standard or criterion of truth is also required, in order to be able to
discriminate between authentic and spurious claims to truth. But by the same token the
objective standard – even if it is provided by, or grounded in, God himself – will also not
suffice on its own to bring one to the truth, in the sense that really matters: not simply
learning some facts or acquiring new bits of information, but personally participating in
the ground of what is real. For Kierkegaard, therefore, it is both the subjective and
objective dimensions that hold the key to truth and its significance.75
Concluding remarks
No doubt the foregoing provides only the barest of outlines of a specific conception of
truth. But it is important at this time to have done even that, for the idea of Christ as Truth
is rarely discussed or taken seriously in either analytic or Continental philosophy of
religion. One of the morals I wish to draw from this discussion is something akin to the
Shakesperean ‘plague on both your houses!’ (from Romeo and Juliet Act 3, scene 1): both
the analytic and Continental traditions, in their treatment of truth, remain captive to
impersonal and theologically minimalist forms of thinking – ways of thinking that do
not take the kind of hypostatic existence instantiated in the trinitarian divine life as the
ultimate reality and value, and as the ultimate Truth. As this goes to show, no philoso-
phical tradition has a monopoly on truth, or on the disfigurement of it. Karen Green, in a
paper entitled ‘A Plague On Both Your Houses,’ put it well when she stated:
Shoddy scholarship, obscure jargon, bad arguments and narrow definitions of what counts as
philosophy are things we should be against, and they occur in all styles of philosophising,
both on and off the Continent. Careful scholarship, plausible arguments and a tolerant attitude
to the many different forms that philosophising can take are the things we should be for. No
person, region, or tradition has a monopoly on these things.76
But it is another Australian philosopher, Richard Campbell, who has demonstrated in

practice what philosophy would look and sound like when it brings together the best
achievements of the analytic and Continental schools. In his 1992 magnum opus, Truth
and Historicity, Campbell argues that the Platonic ideal of truth as unchanging, timeless,
universal, purely objective, perspectively neutral, etc., needs to be replaced with a
conception of truth that takes seriously the historicity of human existence. He therefore
refigures truth as historically-conditioned, transitory, contingent, culture-bound, etc., but
in a way that avoids sceptical relativism. To avoid the slide into relativism (about truth),
one of the strategies Campbell employs is to reject the assumption common to relativists
that statements are the sole or primary truth-bearers. In its place, Campbell offers a
performative conception of truth: truth as faithful action: ‘There is need for a major
conceptual shift in how philosophers think of truth, to recognize its primary locus as
occurring not at the discursive level but in the category of action.’77 As with the account
developed above in §3, Campbell develops a conception of truth where truth primarily
occurs in the dimension of action. Specifically, the truth of statements is grounded in our
being true to how things are, where ‘being true’ is understood in terms of faithfulness: ‘In
so far as we apply the concept of truth to ourselves – to our thought, our speech, our
action – it consists in our being dependable and trustworthy, in our acting faithfully in our
situations.’78 Truth, on this view, is a matter of acting (and so thinking and speaking)
towards things and other persons in a way which is faithful to them, to how they are, to
their way of being and acting.
One of the inspirations behind Campbell’s account is the biblical tradition, where the
Hebrew word for truth is emeth, meaning reliability, the unshakeable dependability of a
thing or word, the faithfulness of persons. And so, in thinking of truth as that which is
vindicated historically, the biblical tradition preserves the element of historicity in the idea
of truth that the Platonic tradition lacks. But Campbell also takes his cues from Anselm’s
384 N.N. Trakakis
teleological account of truth, according to which the truth of a proposition consists in its
doing what it ought (facit quod debet): ‘The proper function of a proposition, its rightful
end, is to signify to be what is. That is what it ought to do. When it does that, it is right
and true.’79 This constitutes a further significant departure from the Platonic tradition,
where truth ‘is fundamentally an object of contemplation (theoria) and enjoyment, rather
than something to be done, a matter of praxis’.80
Among other things, Campbell’s book provides an excellent example of what it would
be like to practice philosophy in a way that is conversant with both analytic and
Continental traditions, and is not strictly beholden to either. As one reviewer said of
Campbell’s book: ‘It is refreshing to have Heidegger and Hume discussed side by side,
without the denigration of one or the other.’81
Even more importantly, Campbell works to enrich the notion of truth in a way rarely
attempted by philosophers, especially those who view truth as exclusively a feature of
statements. As Campbell himself put it: ‘One consequence of this confining of truth solely
to the logico-linguistic domain is that the often sophisticated work of contemporary
philosophers has become overwhelmed by its own technicalities. As a result, it has lost
any vital connection with the deep problem of truth posed by the widespread disillusion
with its value and validity.’82 In a culture that has become thoroughly sceptical or
indifferent to the possibility of truth, of discovering it and communicating it, it seems
more vital than ever to reclaim the significance and reality of truth. To do so, however, it
is necessary to re-establish the connection between truth and life – and more broadly, the
connection between philosophy as the pursuit of truth and philosophy as a way of life and
action, which Campbell does laudably well.
But Campbell’s account is not without its own problems. To place truth in the
category of action is surely an improvement on the logico-linguistic accounts of some
philosophers. But when truth is detached from the trinitarian life of God, from the
dynamic coinherence in love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as it is in Campbell’s
work, the essential connection between truth and self-giving love is lost. Campbell, to be
fair, does allow for what he calls a ‘trans-historical notion of truth’, which he describes as
‘eternal’ though not to be confused with the Platonic notion of timeless and changeless
truth. As he states:
The sense of truth invoked in this notion is of the utterly faithful and ultimately reliable.…
Truth as an eschatological ultimate stands to the future as a limit stands to a mathematical
series, as the law governing the progression which can never be identified with any item in
the series, however elevated.83
This is not entirely removed from the patristic understanding of God as an eschatological
reality, though Campbell does not explicitly make the connection. For Campbell, how-
ever, trans-historical truth is in the end an ideal rather than an actuality.84 But the ideal, as
conceived in the Christian scheme (as the absolutely perfect), is the real, constituting the
ground and source of all contingent reality and even breaking into it through the incarna-
tion of the Word. To identify the historical person of Christ with Truth, and to see Christ
as the source for whatever truth there is, not only historicizes truth in a far more radical
way than Campbell can accommodate, but also renders atheistic attempts to comprehend
the world as finally incoherent: they are not so much false as unintelligible, since what
they deny (God) is precisely what they affirm (truth, specifically the truth of atheism).
Like all else, truth is not theologically neutral.85
Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited from discussions with graduate students and staff from the Divinity Faculty
at Cambridge, and Sarah Coakley in particular. Helpful comments were also received from audi-
ences at various conferences, including the Biennial Conference in Philosophy, Religion and
Culture, hosted by the Catholic Institute of Sydney (October 2010); the Conference of the
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, hosted by the University of Queensland
(December 2010); and ‘The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion’ Conference, at
Syracuse University (April 2011).
Notes
1. Sallis, Double Truth, 71.
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1011 b27.
3. See Haack, Philosophy of Logics, 79, and Wright and Pederson, “Truth: The New Wave,” 7.
See also Mark Platts’ dismissal of this problem as uninteresting in Ways of Meaning, 37–40.
4. Haack, Philosophy of Logics, 75.
5. Lowe, “Truth,” 926.

6. Haack, Philosophy of Logics, 76.
7. Ibid., 77.
8. Wilshire, Fashionable Nihilism, 16 (emphasis in original).
9. For an excellent recent collection of essays that seek to articulate and explore the robust and
substantial character of truth, see Pritzl, Truth.
10. David, Correspondence and Disquotation, 10.
11. Hart, “Amo Te Solo,” 22.
12. Heidegger, Pathmarks, 182.
13. See Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” 60–81, especially 69–73.
14. Edwards, Heidegger’s Confusions, 47.
15. See Harrison, “Heidegger and the Analytic Tradition on Truth,” 121, where reference is made
to Bernhard’s Maîtres Anciens, 64–69.
16. Harrison, “Heidegger and the Analytic Tradition on Truth,” 124. Echoing views of this sort,
one take on Heidegger as summarised (though not necessarily endorsed) by Michael Inwood
is: ‘He was (with the possible exception of Hegel) the greatest charlatan ever to claim the title
of ‘philosopher’, a master of hollow verbiage masquerading as profundity.’ See Heidegger, 1.
17. See Wrathall, “Heidegger and Truth as Correspondence,” 69–88, who emphasises that
Heidegger does not intend to reject the traditional notion of (propositional) truth as corre-
spondence, nor does he seek to redefine propositional truth in terms of unconcealment.
18. Heidegger, Being and Time, 257.
19. Ibid., 262.
20. Mark Wrathall has pointed out that Heidegger, in his later work, even begins to drop talk of
‘truth’ in favour of ‘unconcealment’, partly to distance himself from the narrow conception of
truth dominant in the Western philosophical tradition. See “Unconcealment,” 337–338.
21. Heidegger, Being and Time, 261. Mark Wrathall highlights Heidegger’s nonrepresentationalist
account of correspondence. See “Truth and the Essence of Truth in Heidegger’s Thought,”
244–246.
22. Wrathall, How To Read Heidegger, 73.
23. This seems to be the point behind Heidegger’s famous repudiation, in his 1964 essay “The
End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, of his earlier practice of equating aletheia or
unconcealment with a kind of truth that is more original or primal than truth as correspondence
or correctness.
24. Heidegger, Being and Time, 196.
25. Ibid., 263. But note Heidegger’s modification: ‘Dasein is already both in the truth and in
untruth.’ Ibid., 265. Similarly, in “On the Essence of Truth”, he writes: ‘Man errs. Man does
not merely stray into errancy. He is always astray in errancy.… Errancy belongs to the inner
constitution of the Da-sein into which historical man is admitted’ (133). The idea here is that
the inauthentic, das Man mode of existence, where understanding involves a concealing and
distorting rather than a careful uncovering of things, is a typical if not ineliminable aspect of
Dasein’s being.
386 N.N. Trakakis
26. Heidegger responds to this objection in Being and Time, 270.

27. I borrow the notion of the clearing as a ‘space of possibilities’ from Mark Wrathall, who writes
that the clearing refers to ‘a domain or structure which allows there to be things with properties
and characteristics, or modes of being. This is not a spatial domain or physical entity, or any
sort of entity at all. It is something like a space of possibilities.’ See “Unconcealment,” 340.
This, however, indicates a connection between space, or place, and truth, a connection
explored by Jeff Malpas, who writes that ‘it is in the thinking of truth that Heidegger’s
thinking most properly becomes a topology’. See Heidegger’s Topology, 194. I would also
add an intimate connection between place, truth and God, and I discuss the relationship
between place and divinity in “Deus Loci: The God of Place and the Place of God in
Philosophy and Theology.”
28. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 124.
29. Ibid., 123, 125.
30. Ibid., 125.
31. Ibid., 121–122.
32. Ibid., 122.
33. Heidegger himself offers the examples of ‘true joy’ and ‘true gold’. Ibid., 117. See also
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 256, §235. On ‘true’ as a predicate of persons and
things, see Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), vol. XI, 417.
34. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 119.
35. Ibid., 123.
36. Ibid.
37. See Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, 127–30. On the distinction
between definitions of truth and criteria of truth, and on the connections between the two, see
Haack, Philosophy of Logics, 88–91. As Haack explains: ‘The idea is, roughly, that whereas a
definition gives the meaning of the word “true”, a criterion gives a test by means of which to
tell whether a sentence (or whatever) is true or false – as, for example, one might distinguish,
on the one hand, fixing the meaning of “feverish” as having a temperature higher than some
given point and, on the other, specifying procedures for deciding whether someone is feverish’
(88).
38. Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 346.
39. Consider, for example, the revealing fact that analytic philosophers very rarely write poetry, or
even write about poetry.
40. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration, 28.3.
41. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 8. The point is repeated in Heidegger’s lecture,
“Phenomenology and Theology”, first presented in 1927 at Tübingen; see the English transla-
tion by James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, in Heidegger, Pathmarks, 53.
42. These views are developed in Heidegger’s lecture, “Phenomenology and Theology”, where he
states his principal thesis as: ‘theology is a positive science, and as such, therefore, is
absolutely different from philosophy’. See Heidegger, Pathmarks, 41.
43. The paper was first published in Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3 (1984): 253–71.
44. Augustine’s argument from truth can be found in his dialogue De Libero Arbitrio, bk. 2, ch. 3–
16. See also his earlier work, Soliloquies, which he begins with a prayer where he states: ‘God,
the Truth, in whom and from whom and through whom all those things which are true have
truth.’ For discussion of Augustine’s argument from truth, see Gerson, “Saint Augustine’s
Neoplatonic Argument for the Existence of God,” 571–84. Anselm, similarly, offers an
argument from truth in his Monologion, ch.18, and in De Veritate he develops the idea of
God as supreme Truth. For Anselm’s account of truth, see Campbell, Truth and Historicity, ch.
6, and Visser and Williams, Anselm, ch. 3. Aquinas also developed an account of truth that
rested on the idea of God as Truth, by which he meant that God is the cause of all truth and
that God exemplifies truth to the highest possible degree. See Wood, “Thomas Aquinas on the
Claim that God is Truth”, and Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, the latter showing
that ‘for Aquinas, truth is theological without remainder’ (6). For contemporary defences of
the argument from truth for the existence of God, see Hebblethwaite, The Ocean of Truth, and
Markham, Truth and the Reality of God.
45. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 140.
46. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 115. The eucharist has, for Zizioulas, an inescapable escha-
tological dimension: ‘What we experience in the divine Eucharist is the end times making
itself present to us now.’ See Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, 155. For further
discussion of the relationship between eucharist and eschatology, see Manoussakis, “Anarchic
Principle of Christian Eschatology”, 29–43. Truth, as residing essentially in the eucharist, also
takes on an eschatological dimension, as Robert Turner discusses in “Eschatology and Truth,”
15–34.
47. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 171–77.
48. Ibid., 171.
49. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration, 29.16. This is not to say that for Gregory (or for Zizioulas, for
that matter) the divine persons are nothing but relations. Communal relation is the means by
which we distinguish the persons, but it does not constitute their identity as persons. In other
words, relations do not define the persons, but only manifest them.
50. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, 214. On the doctrine of the monarchy in the Cappadocians, see
also Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, ch. 3. There is some dispute (even amongst
Orthodox theologians) as to whether the doctrine of the monarchy of the Father is at all
theologically defensible or even patristically sound. See Cross, “Divine Monarchy in Gregory
Nazianzus.” Cross argues that ‘Gregory never uses the term “monarchy” to pinpoint the
Father’s activity. For him it is a word associated with the activity of the divinity, or of the
whole Trinity of persons’ (ibid., 114). According to Cross, the monarchy is linked by Gregory
to the unity of the divine essence: ‘Gregory uses the term “monarchy” to talk about the divine
essence or the Trinity of persons, not the Father’ (ibid., 116).
51. Kerr, “God in the Summa Theologiae: Entity or Event?” 65–66.
52. Ibid., 65.
53. Ibid., 69 (emphasis in original).
54. I do not mean to underplay the disputed nature of some of Zizioulas’ claims about the patristic
understanding of the Trinity. He has been criticised, even by Orthodox theologians (such as
John Behr and Andrew Louth) for example, for importing the categories of existentialist and
personalist philosophy into patristic theology, and advocating a ‘social trinitarianism’ and a
prioritization of personhood over nature unknown to the Greek Fathers. There may well be
some substance to these criticisms, but that is irrelevant for my purposes here. For even if
Zizioulas entirely misconstrues the theology of the Greek Fathers, he nevertheless offers an
interesting and challenging account of how the notion of God as Truth can be understood.
55. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 81.
56. Ibid., 88.
57. Ibid., 90.
58. Ibid., 97–98 (emphasis in original).
59. Ibid., 103 (emphasis in original).
60. Ibid., 104 (emphasis in the original).
61. Bouteneff, Sweeter than Honey, 22. On ‘doing the truth’ in the New Testament, see also John
3:21 and 1 John 1:6.
62. Caputo, On Religion. I will be drawing here on 109–117 in particular.
64. Ibid., 110.
65. Ibid., 111.
67. Ibid., 115.
68. A similar criticism has been made of Heidegger, see for example, Tugendhat, “Heidegger’s
Idea of Truth,” 258–259, where it is argued that Heidegger’s account of truth ends up
trivialising truth: ‘The broadening of the concept of truth, from truth as assertion to all
disclosedness, becomes trivial if all that one sees in truth as assertion is the fact that it
discloses in general.’ In other words, Heidegger’s understanding of truth as uncoveredness
places him in the invidious position of being unable to make sense of the contrast between
truth and falsity. Richard Wolin (following Werner Marx) sees in this grave political implica-
tions: truth becomes entangled with error, sham and even evil. As a result, it was not difficult
for Heidegger to see National Socialism as ‘an occurrence of truth’, while being at the same
time fully cognizant of its violent and evil dimensions. See The Heidegger Controversy, 247. I
borrow the phrase ‘going soft on truth’ from Forrest, “Missing the Point Many Times Over?”,
where he describes the legacy of John Anderson in Australian philosophy, including
Australian philosophical atheism, as a refusal to go soft on the truth.
388 N.N. Trakakis
69. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 116–17 (emphasis in original).

70. Kierkegaard, journal entry from August 1, 1835, quoted in Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 58.
71. However, there is an ‘ethics of belief’ in all areas of knowledge, no matter how abstract they
may be. Scientific inquiry and progress would not be possible if there were no moral integrity
and truthfulness amongst those who conduct research and experiments.
72. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments”, 203 (empha-
sis in original).
73. It may be possible, however, to charge Kierkegaard with an excessive individualism which
overlooks the communal (or eucharistic) character of truth, where truth (or at least religious
truth) is always borne in community.
74. Richard Campbell, for example, states: ‘While.… Kierkegaard maintains that objective reflec-
tion is unable to grasp the truth of empirical reality, that does not mean that he therefore
abandons the traditional definition of truth. Quite the contrary! His eventual definition of truth
in terms of subjectivity is not an alternative to that, not a replacement for that; it is rather a
statement of how truth as traditionally defined has to be thought of, if it is to be attainable by
an existing individual.’ See Truth and Historicity, 301 (emphasis in original). See also Law,
Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, ch. 4; Vardy, Kierkegaard, 27–28; Westphal,
“Kierkegaard and Hegel,” 114; and Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction, 62–66.
75. On the dangers of both rationalism and romanticism in theology, see Simon Tugwell’s
excellent essay, “Scholarship, Sanctity and Spirituality”.
76. Green, “A Plague On Both Your Houses,” 281.
77. Campbell, Truth and Historicity, 411.
78. Ibid., 437.
79. Ibid., 104.
80. Ibid., 107.
81. Misak, “Review of Campbell, Truth and Historicity,” 122.
82. Campbell, Truth and Historicity, 395.
84. He makes this clear in Truth and Historicity, 438.
85. From a Christian perspective, another deficiency with Campbell’s account is its incompat-
ibility with Christian anthropology. For Campbell, being human is a matter of self-determining
action, so that it is through my actions that I constitute or fashion myself as a distinctive
human being. Campbell borrows this idea from Emil Fackenheim, who held that ‘in acting,
man makes or constitutes himself’ (Fackenheim, Metaphysics and History, quoted in Truth
and Historicity, 399). But on the Christian view, human being is not constituted by human
action, but by divine action and in particular by the divine act of creating the world ex nihilo
and ex amore. And so, in linking truth in an essential way to the process of human self-
formation, Campbell is putting forward a distinctly non-Christian account of truth.
Notes on contributor
N.N. Trakakis is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University. His
publications include The God Beyond Belief: In Defence of William Rowe’s Evidential Argument
from Evil (Springer, 2007) and The End of Philosophy of Religion (Continuum, 2008). He has also
edited, with Graham Oppy, a five-volume History of Western Philosophy of Religion (Acumen,
2009), and a two-volume work on philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, entitled The
Antipodean Philosopher (Lexington Books, 2011).
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Truth and Philosophy of Religion

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International Journal of Philosophy and

Truth, or the futures of philosophy of

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Truth, or the futures of philosophy of religion

School of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’

© 2014 International Journal of Philosophy and Theology

will need to be overcome if it is to have a credible future. If, as is sometimes thought,

1. Truth in the analytic tradition of philosophy

or carried by linguistic, cognitive or abstract entities such as sentences and propositions.

Truth…in this channel [i.e. in analytic philosophy] is typically construed as a correspondence

It’s spring: the maple tree speaks of her lips,

2. Truth in Continental philosophy: Heidegger

explication of metaphors in terms of other metaphors – Bernard Harrison, for example,

spondence cannot be fully captured by a representational model of language, where

being or essence. Put linguistically, unconcealment at this level is where meaningful

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know38

3. Ascending further: a Christological conception of truth

memorably put it: ‘A “Christian philosophy” is a round square and a misunderstanding.’41

attribute, as it is on standard predicative and propositional accounts of truth. Truth is not

so that Paul is actually talking about ‘truthing’ in love.61

them seemed unimportant compared to the great task of finding enlightenment. He

But it is another Australian philosopher, Richard Campbell, who has demonstrated in

5. Lowe, “Truth,” 926.

26. Heidegger responds to this objection in Being and Time, 270.

69. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 116–17 (emphasis in original).

Caputo, John D. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001.

Illinois University Press, 1989.

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