Trinity and Truth: (Series Number 3 Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine)

Two closely related questions receive distinctively theological answers in this study: What is truth? and How can we tell whether what we have said is true? Bruce Marshall proposes that the Christian community's identification of God as the Trinity serves as the key to a theologically adequate treatment of these questions. Professor Marshall argues on trinitarian grounds that the Christian way of identifying God ought to have unrestricted primacy when it comes to the justification of belief, and he proposes a trinitarian way of reshaping the concept of truth. Direct engagement with the current philosophical debate about truth, meaning and belief (in Quine and others) suggests that a trinitarian account of epistemic justification and truth is also more philosophically compelling than the approaches generally favoured in modern theology, as exemplified by Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Rahner and others. Marshall offers a contemporary way of conceiving of the Christian God as 'the truth'.

Table of Contents:
Preface; A note on translations; 1. Introduction: theology and truth; 2. The triune God as the center of Christian belief; 3. Epistemic justification in modern theology; 4. Problems about justification; 5. The epistemic primacy of belief in the Trinity; 6. Epistemic priorities and alien claims; 7. The epistemic role of the spirit; 8. The concept of truth; 9. Trinity, truth, and belief.

Review :
"In an age when skepticism about truth and objectivity is so prevalent, this is a remarkable book." Theological Studies "...this is a very important, challenging, and poerful book that provides both insight into and a measure of guidance out of the crisis of Christian theology in the West. Marshall's book exemplifies the classical vocation of faith seeking understanding." First Things "This remarkable book sets forth a bold thesis and develops it with great subtlety. To theologians and allthinking believers Marshall displays the intellectual superiority of a robust version of the historic faith over reductionist restatements of it. In highly technical style, he furnishes a surround for the kind of advocacy that has been conducted in evangelistic, apologetic, and pastoral mode by Lesslie Newbigin and other significant theological writers of the late twentieth century." The Thomist "Bruce Marshall's book is best understood by way of this last trope. His purpose is to take the philosophical water of a particular approach to the question of truth - specifically, that found in the analytic philosopher Donald Davidson's work, a corpus in which there is scarcely a spark of explicit interest in theological questions - and to turn it into the Christian wine of a Trinitarian account of truth. This is an important book, both for its particular constructive proposal and for its method. It is in this procedural sense that Marshall's work is most different from that of those modern theologians with whom he takes such effective issue in the first half of the book." The Journal of Religion "Trinity and Truth is finally an important contribution in philosophy and theology. Virginia Quarterly Review "Trinity and Truth is finally an important contribution in philosophy and theology." The Virginia Quarterly "Marshall employs an account of truth that is so intimately linked to belief that it can be stretched for Christian purposes, in which truth is a person. Advanced graduate students an scholars only." Religious Studies Review Jan 2002