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viduals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities."
79 Advaita's Text-truth-world relation conforms to this third model in which propositions and experiences, though not excluded, are subordinate to the exigencies of a formative Text. |
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Lindbeck develops his third model at length, with important and helpful observations on how theological language works, how one acquires skill in it, and how communities articulate a world "out of" their sacred texts.80 Here I introduce only his observations on truth. In an "excursus on religion and truth" Lindbeck addresses the problem of the categorial truth of religious claims, such as go beyond the demonstration of the coherence of those claims for the sake of believers, to claims about the world as such.81 Thus, Christian believers ''assert that it is propositionally true that Christ is Lord: i.e., the particular individual of which the stories are told is, was, and will be definitively and unsurpassably the Lord."82 |
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Lindbeck makes several points that are pertinent to our understanding of the Advaita model of truth and of the way in which outsiders actually encounter this truth. First, he distinguishes "intrasystemic truth" from the "ontological truth" of statements: "The first is the truth of coherence; the second, that truth of correspondence to reality which, according to epistemological realists, is attributable to first-order propositions."83 Regarding the former, he observes that the expected coherence of the system includes not just "axioms, definitions, and corollaries," but also "a set of stories used in specifiable ways to interpret and live in the world . . . a religious system is more like a natural language than a formally organized set of explicit statements . . . the right use of this language, unlike a mathematical one, cannot be detached from a particular way of behaving."84 |
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The latter kind of truth includes ontological correspondence and reference to the "real." Here, though coherence is necessary, it is not a sufficient basis for religious truth. The ontological truth of religious utterances is linked to a way of life, since that truth "is not an attribute that they have when considered in and of themselves, but is only a function of their role in constituting |
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