80 Chapter 1 inclined to live together and hands to work to make this possible, the problem of widely different truth conceptions can still cause a fundamental short circuit in heads. For the modernist, truth should be known through positivistic science, a process that, ultimately, leaves no room for directional diversity and only allows for temporal uncertainty. For the post-modernist, there simply remains no space for meta-narratives, as Lyotard (1984) observed. This leads to the question of how truth should be handled in a modern, fragmented society, if not every single individual has to have his or her own. This question is an epistemological one. Both MacIntyre (2007) and Taylor (1989) referred to it: MacIntyre (2007) in his plea for the classical Aristotelian account of the virtues and Taylor (1989) in his retrieval of moral sources for actual debates. In a modern, fragmented society, people differ fundamentally in their reactions to basic questions such as the following: What is the meaning of life? When does life start? Where does morality come from? What is death, manhood, femininity, marriage, et cetera? For Christians, this raises the question of how to handle revealed truth in a context of secularisation, which prompted Greene (1998) to note that ‘there are few things that the church needs as badly as a new epistemology’ (p. 116). Responding to Greene’s (1998) plea, the Australian missiologist and educationalist Geoff Beech (2021) put forward a Christian theory of knowledge that he described as a relational epistemology. It is an epistemology that does justice to both revealed truth and partial knowing among believers. As in the cases of Zizioulas and Zerbe, Beech’s intercultural biography also matters. As a missionary in Bolivia, he discovered how deeply he was influenced by Western thinking about knowledge and truth, whereas the people he lived and worked with adhered to other cultural values and visions. Describing Bolivia as ‘a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and (…) a pluri-lingual country’ (p. 10), Beech (2019) noted that ‘the religious context of the people of Bolivia, including their beliefs, worldview suppositions, and understanding of truth and knowledge, relate to a particular epistemology’ (p. 20), an epistemology that he characterised as more holistic and relational. This discovery motivated Beech (2019) to criticise the dominance of Western epistemology in science and education. Beech (2021) also fully subscribed to Greene’s (1998) view that Christian thinking in the West has become too closely related to the principles of modernism due to its sheer faith in the Western scientific method. ‘The downside of this relationship is that the doctrine of knowledge present among many Western Christians is much more influenced by rationalism and empiricism than by a Biblical view of truth’ (Beech & Beech, 2019, p. 134). Secularist systems of education promote ‘an unhealthy scepticism and deny the existence of the socalled, supernatural or at the very least of the interaction of the supernatural
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