Straplines

Just a quick thought based on the last blog. It is striking how often companies and brands use straplines which sound profound but are nonsense. I don't just mean they are nonsense from a Christian worldview, but are nonsense within our culture's worldview.

I think that there is a reason for this and it is to do with our culture's shift in thinking around the notion of truth. In Vaughan Roberts recent series of Bible readings at Keswick (really excellent) - he talks about how in the Enlightenment (18th to 19th Century) thinkers moved from thinking that truth was found through revelation to the idea that truth was found through reason.

However, philosophy then found it impossible to find a basis for agreeing about anything. This led to our present situation of surrender. We will never find an agreed 'truth' so we will simply have to settle for deciding what is true for me. The problem is that this is subjective - we end up deciding that something is true because it seems true or feels true to me.

I think that modern nonsense slogans are the product of this. It no longer matters whether something is true - what impacts me is if it feels true or profound to me. And so advertisers are enticing us with what feels true. The problem (as we saw in the last post) is that it is often nonsense. So the truth we are constructing for ourselves is often nonsense. Isn't that a bit worrying - how can I trust my life to it? How will this truth bear the weight of my destiny? 

And that is another reason why the Bible is so wonderful. The Bible doesn't so much contain a powerful truth that I hold, but a Truth that is powerful enough to hold me.