Insufficient Truth
March 5th, 2007
The relative attitude toward the whole question of truth is not always merely the desire to doubt, but very often, and particularly today, it is the admission of the insufficiency of human knowledge, and - in so far as this is the case - it is the sign of a secret longing for a truth which lies beyond the human plane.
- Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (The Westminster Press, 1946) 7.
I can admit the insufficiency of human kowledge, and while I love the way he differentiates between desire to doubt and this admission, it is at the same time kind of depressing. The idea of always longing and never “knowing” is sad. “Beyond the human plane” faces you with complete unattainablity. How do you feel about this?
I guess when the quote is placed in the contextless vacuum of my blog it is hard to pin down what Brunner is getting at. I think he is attempting to articulate that empirical knowledge cannot entirely deliver the goods with regards to God, religion and even general spirituality. In the following sentence he says,
“With the breakdown of all our hitherto familiar norms and standards there is also a judgment on that false self-sufficiency of human reason which was characteristic of an earlier day. Thus the task of theology to make plain what faith means by revelation has become urgent.”
Brunner is attempting to communicate to the reader that reason alone is not and cannot be the sole means of knowledge about God. The Enlightenment project attempted this and time has revealed that it is not the answer to all of mans knowledge problems. Revelation, according to Brunner, is a viable method of arriving at certain types of knowledge.