An Apologetic Blunder

There is a popular Christian apologetic that I have heard far too many times in my life. Most recently, I have encountered it in this form:

"The objection goes something like this: 'All moral and spiritual claims are the product of our particular historical and cultural moment.' [...] If you infer from the social conditionedness of all belief that 'no belief can be held as universally true for everyone,' that itself is a comprehensive claim about everyone that is the product of social conditions--so it cannot be true." [...]

"A more postmodern version of this claim is the assertion that reality is 'language-ridden' and every truth claim is nothing but the insights of a particular linguistic community. But, as Siegel points out, to say that all reality accounts are language-ridden and relative to their own linguistic communities is itself a universal account of the working of language across all communities and therefore is a claim about the human condition as such. [...] They do the very thing they forbid other communities to do." [...]

"Many say that all truths are power plays. When you claim to have the truth, you are trying to get power and control over other people. [...] If you say that all truth-claims are power plays, then so is your statement. [...] Foucault was pressing the truth of his analysis on others even as he denied the very category of truth. Some kind of truth-claim, then, seems unavoidable."

The basic insight being discussed is that, while truths are important parts of our individual and collective lives, we are sometimes prone to thinking that we have access to univocal and transcendent Truth. In reality, truths are necessarily context-dependent in a number of ways (the three examples above -- that truth claims are contingent, linguistic, and productive of power relations -- are suitably illustrative). If we fool ourselves into imagining that we are dealing with "Unconditioned Truth," we are mistaken about the way truth works.

The apologetic response: "Aha! But then your claim about how truth works cannot work in an Unconditioned Truth sort of way!"

But this is not a response to anything; it is merely a refusal to grasp the critique to begin with. The claim is that "truth" works like A, not like B. To say, "but that's not B," is to simply miss the entire point of the argument.

The apologist has at least two legitimate responses to the argument that truth claims are context-dependent. First, she could contest this, arguing that Unconditioned Truth Devoid of All Context is something to which we really do have access after all. Second, she could accept the argument and defend the truths of Christianity in view of a more suitable theory of truth. To simply go the way of the ostrich, however, is unconvincing.