How do evangelicals know the truth?

A while ago, an LDS friend of mine asked me a very good question: how do evangelicals determine spiritual truth? With apologies to my friend for neglecting his question for so long, I thought I would take the opportunity to answer here.
The Mormon Way
For the purposes of contrast, I thought I would begin by touching briefly on how Mormons determine spiritual truth. The most common method preached in Latter-day Saint circles might be best summarized as, “confirmation by the Spirit through personal revelation.” [1] Moroni 10:3-5 states:
Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts. And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.
And by what method is “the Holy Ghost” expected to reveal the truth? What does a confirmation from the Holy Ghost look like? For most believing Latter-day Saints, the answer to that question is, “feelings and thoughts.” Preach My Gospel is the current LDS missionary handbook on teaching and converting new members, and it has this to say on the matter:
This message of the Restoration is either true or it is not. We can know that it is true by the Holy Ghost, as promised in Moroni 10:3–5. After reading and pondering the message of the Book of Mormon, any who desire to know the truth must ask in prayer to our Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ if it is true. In order to do this, we address our Heavenly Father. We thank Him for our blessings and ask to know that the message of the Book of Mormon is true. No one can know of spiritual truths without prayer.
In answer to our prayers, the Holy Ghost will teach us truth through our feelings and thoughts. Feelings that come from the Holy Ghost are powerful, but they are also usually gentle and quiet. As we begin to feel that what we are learning is true, we will desire to know all that we can about the Restoration.
Knowing that the Book of Mormon is true leads to a knowledge that Joseph Smith was called as a prophet and that the gospel of Jesus Christ was restored through him. [2]
The assumption I have usually encountered among LDS friends is that one can discern any spiritual truth via the same method, and logically that seems consistent enough.
The Evangelical Way (?)
I want to talk next about how evangelicals discern truth, but there’s a question mark in my subheading because I feel like calling this section “The Evangelical Way” would be a bit of a misnomer. That’s because I do not think there is anywhere near consensus among evangelicals on how one can discern what truth is. If you don’t believe me, try Googling “evangelical epistemology” and see how much material you get. It’s a topic that’s easy to get lost in. For some of the evangelicals that I know, their epistemology looks much like LDS epistemology. They know the truth concerning God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible because of their intensely passionate feelings, which they interpret as the witness of the Holy Spirit, and that is what they will primarily point to as their source of truth.
The one phenomenon that I have witnessed again and again as part of the evangelical family is, “because the Bible told me so.” We know that God is real because the Bible tells us so. We believe Jesus of Nazareth is his Son and accept his divine mission because the Bible tells us so. If we want to make an argument pertaining to any moral, social, or ecclesiastical issues—whether slaveholders can be Christians, how to respond to homosexuality, the ordination of women, etc.—the Bible is our battleground. The hand that rocks the Bible rules the evangelical world.
This answer is problematic though. Arguing that we can know the truth of all things via the Bible is a little like arguing that aliens seeded the Earth when asked about the origins of life. In the latter example, even if that is the case, we still have to explain where the aliens came from. Likewise, when we say that we know something is true because the Bible says so, we still have to explain how we know the Bible is true. So, how can we know that the Bible is true? A self-witness of truth is fairly meaningless, and arguably the Bible contains no such witness for every one of its books [3], therefore we must discern the truthfulness of the Bible from non-biblical sources.
Yes, that’s right. Evangelicals discern spiritual truth from sources other than the Bible.
My Way
Ask evangelicals how they know that there is a God and Jesus is the Christ and you will probably get some kind of appeal to the Bible. Ask how they know that the Bible is true and your answers will be all over the map. Rather than going through a lengthy survey of different evangelical epistemologies, I thought I would conclude this post by talking about how I discern truth. For my own part, I am heavily influenced by what is known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
The Wesleyan Quadrilateral holds that we discern spiritual truth from four sources:
  • The Bible
  • Tradition
  • Experience
  • Reason
I’m too lazy and incompetent to draw you a diagram, and feeling too ethical today to swipe someone else’s, so I recommend that you browse Google images for some of the diagrams other people have come up with. The diagram found in this blog post is my favorite. Note that in my view, “Experience” includes (but is not limited to) the witness of the Holy Spirit.
Many evangelicals will say that the Bible takes precedence over the other three sources. For my own part, that reasoning is problematic since we would not even have the Bible without tradition and cannot know its truthfulness without experience and reason. Rather, I hold that all four points of the Quadrilateral are approximately equal and each has the potential to theoretically cancel out the other. In practice I treat the Bible as the only infallible point on the Quadrilateral, but I also accept that our method of creating the Bible (tradition) was fallible, and that my tools for deciding on the Bible’s truthfulness and infallibility (experience and reason) are equally fallible.
My Way v. The Mormon Way
My own feelings are that if there is a “Mormon Quadrilateral,” it is one in which believers are asked to prioritize Experience over Tradition, Reason and even Scripture. The missionary discussions start early on pushing for new believers to have a spiritual experience with LDS things, then use that experience as the basis for the truthfulness of LDS tradition and scripture. Reason is meant to confirm that experience, and if reason ever seems to be pointing to the untruthfulness of the LDS church, reason must be in error. Scripture is meant to confirm the truthfulness of the current LDS method, and if Scripture seems to contradict it, it must be in error. Same with the historical Mormon tradition. This is certainly not how all Mormons approach truth, but just as I think that evangelicals generally ignore the question of how we can know the Bible is true and merely assert its truthfulness, I think Mormons tend to depend on feelings and what they interpret as a “spiritual witness” more than they depend on anything else.
———–
NOTES
[1] My LDS friend’s words, not mine.
[2] Preach My Gospel, p. 39.
[3] The Bible does contain statements which allude to the reliability and inspiration of Scripture, such as 2 Timothy 3:16 and Luke 21:33. However, even if we accept these statements as pointing to scriptural inerrancy, we do not have a page in any biblical book that says, “The following 66 books are the Bible.” The canon of the Bible itself was formed via extra-biblical sources.

Comments

How do evangelicals know the truth? — 15 Comments

  1. Thanks for the post Jack. I thought I’d add some additional thoughts and sources into the mix. Perhaps one of the more broadly conceived talk on Mormon epistemology was given by Truman G. Madsen on
    September 20, 1994 and titled simply: On How We Know.
    Madsen argues that “[T]here are really only five main modes that have been appealed to in all the traditions, philosophical or religious: an appeal to reason, an appeal to sense experience, to pragmatic trial and error, to authority–the word of the experts–and, finally, to something a bit ambiguous called “intuition.” I can report, too, that from my judgment those five modes are harmonized and balanced in our living tradition more effectively than in any other tradition I know.”
    Here, it’s possible Madsen might be offering a correction to an unbalanced or unharmonized tendency to prize of one mode of knowing over another within Mormonism.
  2. For some time I have wondered how my evangelical family members have such strong belief in the Bible when they are aware of the history of how the texts were composed and selected. Your post has helped me see that they have other pillars upon which their faith is built.
    I appreciate your honesty in mentioning the problem of fallible methods of creating the Bible and fallible tools of human reason and experience in understanding it. I think no matter what religion a person adopts, she must deal with mysteries that don’t yield to reason, intuition, experience or authority. For those we need faith.
  3. Go John Wesley and Albert Outler! The quadrilateral is one of the real gems of the Wesleyan tradition.
  4. Thanks for this, Jack! My two immediate thoughts are:
    1. The “Mormon Quadrilateral” has a fifth corner — church authority. Maybe that falls under “tradition” in the Wesleyan one, but stands out especially for us because the LDS church has both a strong global hierarchy and claims direct divine guidance through a prophet.
    2. While all the points come into play, church authority ends up being the most influential one. You observed that, in the LDS world, “if reason ever seems to be pointing to the untruthfulness of the LDS church, reason must be in error.” I think the same statement could be made substituting “reason” with any other point in the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
  5. Thanks for the post, BFF. It is clearly written and confirms what I’ve suspected for a long time: there is very little difference between my and your epistemology. I would argue that you place too much weight on Mormonism’s view of Experience, and I see that aquinas has already addressed this somewhat.
    Perhaps I am misunderstanding you though. I think if you could answer one question it would help: You’ve answered how you know what you know, but I want to know how do you begin to know what you know?
  6. For me (an LDS convert with an evangelical background), the answer depends on what kind of spiritual truth.
    The “whole enchilada” truth: If I try to analyze what caused me to join the Church — and that’s something I felt chose me rather than the other way around — it ultimately has to be because it “spoke to me.” That’s kind of a nebulous phrase; a phrase others might use to say the same thing is that it resonated with me. Or I might say that at some deep level, it “just made sense.” It’s not just emotions and not just intellect, but some strange combination of the two, and then something else besides.
    I might say I found the narrative (or my version of it) compelling or satisfying. I never particularly found the narrative of the Christianity I grew up with — the idea that God created inferior beings so they could spend eternity praising him — compelling. (I’m not saying all other non-LDS Christians believe this, or even most, although I think they do, but it is the narrative I grew up with.) On the other hand, the idea that we’re like God, gods in embryo if you will, and that he set up a system where we could grow and learn as part of God’s family — not because he needs someone to praise him, but because he loves us so much he wants us to have what he has — now that speaks to me. I’m not sure what more I can say beyond that, except that the sense I have of that overarching truth is quite powerful — so powerful that I put up with a lot of wackiness (example) in the Church’s culture to get there.
    Propositional truth: As to how I determine what’s spiritually true in terms of theology, I’d have to say it bears strong similarity to Jack’s. Although I think it’s hard to overstate how much Mormons in general rely on institutional authority to tell them what’s true in that regard, I blend a number of factors together somewhat like the Wesleyan quadrilateral. A prima scriptura approach seems to work best for me, and that probably has something to do with my evangelical heritage. I figure that if something is canonized, it’s canonized for a reason, even if it’s not infallible. The teachings of the modern prophets also carry great weight (and I ignore them at my peril), but so do the facilities that I have as being a son of God.
    The truth that informs life decisions: Of course, there are many things about how I live my life that the scriptures and the Church are silent on. So my decisions end up being based on various factors that include my desires (which I hope are shaped by the Holy Spirit) and what I’d term personal revelation (although Jack’s word “intuition” might fit also). The first and second commandments have to do with love, and that’s an overriding factor. I also make my share of bad choices, but that’s another issue for another day.
  9. In regard to the Mormon way, it should be noted that they ask you to pray after reading the book of Mormon. You’ll notice that while there are plenty of people praying in, say, Saudi Arabia or Nepal, you almost never see someone spontaneously adopt Mormonism (or Evangelical Christianity). It is always whatever religion they happen to be studying at the time. Reading the book of Mormon and praying about it gives people a strong emotional attachment to the theology. It is the same with every “born again” experience or other conversion. It has nothing to do with truth value and everything to do with satisfying basic emotional needs.
    In your post, you are correct to note that to know the Bible is true, you have to provide outside support. Since all of the New Testament books were written several decades after the time of Jesus’s death and since the ONLY non-Christian to mention Jesus at the time was Josephus and since we only have a copy of his work copied by Medieval monks, many scholars doubt the accuracy of even this reference. As for verifying it by God, if someone was to say “We know Thor exists because of the Norse religious texts and we know the Norse religious texts are accurate because Thor told us” most Christians would laugh that person out of the room. But many Christians like to use the same faulty logic.
    The Wesleyan Quadrilateral doesn’t help because it treats the Bible as one of the supports without explaining why we should trust it. It also treats tradition as one of the supports without explaining why we should trust that either (remember slavery and male-only leadership was the tradition for thousands of years). You need experience (i.e. observable data) but you need to test this experience using logic to make sure you don’t have any biases, which you can’t do if you rely on just faith to interpret what you experience. Logic is absolutely necessary, but experience (observable data) is needed as well.
  10. TomW ~ Just to be clear, are you actually suggesting that Jesus may not have existed?
    Because I have to say, up front, I don’t have a lot of respect for Christ-mythers. They’re the Obama Birthers and Trig Truthers of ancient historical studies.
  11. I’ve puzzled over Evangelical concepts of truth more than anything else within the tradition(s) so thanks for this.
    Like others above, I still don’t understand how one rationally comes to the Bible as truth in the first place. And about the “outside sources”, I often hear people mention the Resurrection and although I really like N.T. Wright’s book on the topic, I can’t see how that’s a closed case – ever. You can’t really prove without any doubt that Jesus was resurrected can you? I think a great case could be made for belief in such a miracle, but to say its fact? (you didn’t mention the resurrection of course, but that’s one of the leading “outside sources” I hear mentioned. Correct me if that’s not the kind of source your referring to.)
    About the Mormon way: You’ve correct about the emphasis on praying over books and people and receiving a witness. However, I very often have heard people use John 7:17 KJV(If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.)as a call for testing, experience and faith. Often I hear it used with things like tithing and Church service.
  12. I should be clear, I understand how one can believe that the Bible is God’s word through spiritual and experiential evidence. I don’t understand how you could ever use reason though.
  13. Like others above, I still don’t understand how one rationally comes to the Bible as truth in the first place.
    The quadrilateral is about coming to truth through four different avenues, not about singling out reason as the only mechanism. The Mormon way seems to be more about finding a final arbiter of everything (feeling and experience), where the quadrilateral is more content to allow for ambiguity. There is no guarantee that all four sides of the quadrilateral will always be in agreement.
    To take as one example from Wesley’s life, look at early Methodist policies of having female group leaders and teachers. Scripture can be read as being for or against this, tradition was definitely against it, and Wesely’s experience with allowing this was positive. So what do you do. The Wesleyan way is to make a judgment call (reason coming into play) in faith, and women continued to serve as teachers and group leaders. I think this is reflective of both how reality works and the idea that a Christian is supposed to act in faith, though not blind faith.
    You can’t really prove without any doubt that Jesus was resurrected can you?
    No you can’t. But why the insistence that there should not be any doubt? My guess would be because of the Mormon idea that through spiritual experience one has access to absolute knowledge that one cannot doubt. I think this idea is both unrealistic and dangerous. Unrealistic both because it’s pretty much impossible to know anything without doubt, and dangerous because it leaves little room for doubt in Mormon epistemology. Or if there is room for doubt, it goes against the grain of the constant “I know.” But it is also dangerous because if the only way to this knowledge is though a subjective experience, what does one do when that subjective experience includes doubt? The only solution seems to be to retreat further and further into the self, hoping to find a space where the doubt does not exist. In my experience that is a formula for despair because there is ultimately no resolution to that problem.
  14. Thanks for the explanation David. The truth is that the quadrilateral (without me knowing about it previously) is much closer to how I approach “truth” and faith – than the common Mormon approach. So I appreciate it and have a good understanding of its usefulness.
    My questions and confusion come from the common Evangelical responses I often hear/read. As Jack noted, “because the Bible told me so” is very common and alludes to a level of certainty close to what Mormons claim. I’ve often heard the Resurrection spoken of in this same way – that it happened without a doubt.
    While I’m sure that mainliners like yourself use the quad and speak with less certainty, I don’t see it much in my own experiences with American Evangelicals. I always use as an example, a variety of study Bibles – marketed to and supported by American EV’s. In numerous cases, scholarly conclusions are thrown out the window – in favor of tradition.
    [Sorry for the winded comment] In short, I don’t know that Evangelicals are that different than Mormons in their method of seeking truth. Unfortunately, “because the scriptures say so” and “that’s the way its always been done” are points of agreement.
  15. Hi Jack,
    I really appreciate this post and comments. They help me to better understand others faith, and reflect on my own. I’ve read your post about where you’re at, and hope you realise that you are doing good in the world, making others think and ponder. Please keep it up!
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