Trinity and Truth by Bruce Marshall (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 635 Trinity and Truth. By BRUCE MARSHALL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 287. ISBN 0521453526. This remarkable book sets forth a bold thesis and develops it with great subtlety. In its negative aspect-looking chiefly, one supposes, towards theologians-the thesis is that typically modern accounts of the Christian faith fail to meet the best standards of analytical philosophy, even while accommodating modern thought in ways that diminish the substance of the faith. In its positive aspect-addressed not only to theologians but clearly also to philosophers-the author's thesis is that a Tarski-Davidson account of truth, meaning, and justified belief is the strongest available in contemporary philosophy, and that its theological inadequacy can and should be made good by full-blooded doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. For a description of what Christians most importantly hold true, Marshall begins by attending to the crucial ritual act of the assembled Christian community, which is the Lord's Day liturgy of word and sacrament whereby the narrative of God's history with the world is rehearsed and prolonged. By readings from the canonical Scriptures, preaching, prayers, and gestures, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are identified as the triune God who, in a differentiated unity of action, creates, redeems, and consummates the world. Marshall focuses particularly on the Resurrection of Jesus; and "Jesus is risen" will, at a later stage in his argument, become the prize example of a statement whose meaning and truth are to be determined. The next step, however, is to show what has been wrong with the grounding of the truth claims for Christianity offered in their several ways by Schleiermacher, Bultmann, K. Rahner, S. M. Ogden, D. Tracy, and W. Pannenberg (though the last mentioned is let down gently in virtue of his "eschatological reserve"). Their fault lies-alone or in combination-in their supposition of an internally accessible "experience" or an externallyevident set of irrefragable data that are not themselves belief-dependent at least for their meaning. These variously "foundationalist" justificationsof Christian beliefwill not stand up to the analytic work of such philosophers as Quine, Putnam, Dummett, and Davidson. From analytic philosophy, and particularly from the work of Davidson in the wake ofTarski, emerge proposals for the assessment of truth claims and the justification of beliefs that, so far as they go, provide what Marshall believes are a more suitable beginning for the clarification of the nature and content of the Christian faith. In the line of Tarski and Davidson, the truth conditions of a sentence take the following shape: "'Grass is green' is true if and only if grass is green"-and this within a cohesive framework of meaning, other beliefs, and the way the world is arranged. This is considered by Marshall to be the most adequate philosophical account of truth on the current scene. The added "framework" (my word, not Marshall's) is perhaps what saves this account from being a "truism" (a possibility which seems to concern Marshall very 636 BOOK REVIEWS but its very basic character is precisely what testifies to the elementary, intuitive nature of our grasp of (th e notion of) truth. However, Marshall will hold that a Tarski-Davidson account needs theological modification, not only when talking about God, but also when talking about creatures, since the actions of the divine persons and their mutual relations are constitutive of the very concept of truth. His next step is to examine more analytically what the canonical Scriptures and Christian doctrine and practice claim about God and truth. If Jesus is "the truth" 14:6), he enjoys comprehensive epistemic primacy; and if his life, death, and resurrection are "for the life of the world" (John 6:51), then "what happens on the way from Bethlehem to Golgotha and the Emmaus road has universal scope." The Pauline way of putting this is to say that aH things were made through Christ and for Christ and hold together in him, who "made peace by the blood of his cross" (1Cor8:6; Col 1: 15-20). The ontological basis resides in Christ's being "the icon of the unseen God" (Col 1:15; cf. 2...