Book dossier

Jesus after modernity

by James P. Danaher

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modern thinkers came to believe that our notion of truth should be objective, certain, and precise. Mathematics became the model for how truth should be conceptualized, and we sought to eliminate ideas that were vague, ambiguous, or contradictory. This inevitably led to our belief that the truth of the Gospel must be conceptualized in the same way, and much of modern theology saw the defense of the Gospel in thesee terms as its task. The teachings of Jesus, however, are often vague, ambiguous, and even contradictory.Fortunately, a twenty-first-century understanding of the human condition has debunked the modern notion of truth, showing it to be truncated at best. ... Consequently, we are free to rethink our notion of truth in a way that is compatible with the things that Jesus said and did, and equally compatible with what we know to be our access to truth given the limits of our human condition.