L'Abri 101: The Christian Faith as Truth - Greg Jesson & Jock McGregor - Friday Night Lecture - June 5, 2026

L'Abri 101: The Christian Faith as Truth

We have a short five-week course on the essentials of L'Abri teaching, what we sometimes refer to as the 'Five Themes of L'Abri'. Each Friday, Greg Jesson and Jock McGregor will co-teach one of these themes. For those of you who have wondered about what makes L'Abri's teaching distinctive or who want to learn more, this will be a good opportunity. Each lecture is stand alone, but if you can listen to all five lectures that make up this short course, that would be best. This week we start with what Dr. Schaeffer called 'True Truth'.

{Text of Greg Jesson's Handout follows}

Pondering the Five Themes of L’Abri:   #1:  On Truth & KnowledgeDr. Greg Jessongregrjesson@gmail.com

Plan for the Lecture:1.  Opening comments on L’Abri themes2.  What is at stake?3.  Carefully define truth and then knowledge, which requires truth (15 points)4.  Common Misconceptions concerning truth and knowledge (the following 15 points)5.  How did truth and knowledge get undermined?6.  Primary reasons that truth is rejected: naturalism and skepticism 7.  Francis Schaeffer’s pivotal insight concerning apologetics, life at L’Abri, and living in what is true

Truth, Reality, and Knowledge: Following Clues, Signposts, Hints, and Insights 1.  Only certain kinds of things can be true, such as beliefs, thoughts, and indirectly sentences.  (Propositions) 2.  Truth is the correspondence between a belief and reality.  (Correspondence Theory of Truth.)   Schaeffer called this “true-truth” and Dallas Willard called it “real-truth”.  3.  Reality is everything that exists.  Therefore, there are not different realities.  (There are differing conceptions of  reality, but only one reality.  Reality is objective; it has nothing to do with how you feel or what you wish.) 4.  Truth requires a truth-bearer (a belief, thought, or sentence) and a truth-maker (reality). 5.  When a thought matches reality, it is true. 6.  When a thought does not match reality, it is false. 7.  Every thought must be true or false. 8.  Because reality is objective, truth is objective.  (Truth has nothing to do with how you feel or what you wish.) 9.  Therefore, saying that something is “true for me” is literally non-sense.  (Willard’s compass example.)10.  Saying something “is true for me,” is just a confused way of saying, “I believe it.”11.  Believing something (even really hard), does not make it true.12.  Knowledge is more than truth. 13.  Knowledge requires three things:  You must have a belief, the belief must be true, & the belief must be justified.  14.  Justification comes in degrees; therefore, knowledge comes in degrees. 15.  The value of knowledge is that it “gets hold of” reality.  The rest is the adventure of your life!

Some Misconceptions and Confusions: (Examples of misconceptions and confusions are taken from Jamie Smith’s book, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism)  1.  That nobody knows anything.  Rather, everyone starts by knowing a lot.  (Romans 1: 18 ff.)  2.  If you can’t prove something then you can’t know it.  (Rather, every argument must come to an end.  The         real issue between presuppositionalism and evidentialism is what is required for adequate justification.)  3.  That we need philosophy in order to know if we know anything.  4.  That knowledge is impersonal, mechanical, and always simple.  (Rather, knowledge is always an achievement of a person wherein the individual grasps the objective on the basis of adequate evidence.   Therefore, knowledge is always a grasping of the objective from a perspective, and perceiving and understanding  the objective within the context of one’s history, education, culture, motives, language, preconceptions, presuppositions, agendas, values, other knowledge, other beliefs, and physical and mental condition, etc.)  5.  That knowledge is complete or perfect.  (We can have perfect knowledge of very small matters, e.g., a phone  number, but complete knowledge only belongs to God.