The Demise of Foundationalism and the Retention of Truth: What Evangelicals Can Learn from C. S. Peirce By Amos Yong Introduction In a recent essay entitled, "The Postpositivist Choice: Tracy or Lindbeck?", Richard Lints suggests that there are basically two methodological options available to con temporary theology: either the postmodern approach that highlights the public or universal character of theological rationality or the postliberal emphasis on intertextuality, narrative, and the cultural-linguistic framework of all knowledge.1 Although Lints writes from within the evangelical tradition, a movement well known for taking a stand for the truth, he refrains from offering an answer to the question posed in the title, preferring instead to provide a descriptive survey of the two options.2 As part of his account, he discusses the two central issues that char acterize the present situation and which postmodems and postliberals deal with in their own way. The first is the demise of what he calls "epistemic foundationalism"; the second and related issue is the nature of and criteria for truth. The problem is that the death of foundationalism appears to have relativized all truth claims, re sulting in a debilitation if not paralysis of theological thinking. Because of their insistence on the importance of truth, some evangelicals have continued to reject the validity of the anti-foundationalist critique. Those who have acknowledged its legitimacy have generally elected in turn what Lints has de scribed as the postliberal option. I do not think that evangelicals can remain intel lectually viable if the former strategy of resistance continues, nor do I think that the latter postliberalism by itself is an adequate methodological response, since it in The demise of epistemological foundationalism over the course of the present century has reopened theological questions about truth Two prevalent non-foundationalist alternatives, postliberalism and postmodernism, have been unable to provide adequate accounts for the full sense of the notion of truth classically conceived as correspondence, coherence, and prag matic Amos Yong suggests that the fallibilistic epistemology, multi-faceted semiotic theory of truth, and philosophical pragmatism of Charles S Peirce provide a viable means by which evangelicals can reconstruct a non-foundationalist theory of knowledge that is able to pre serve the kind of robust doctrine of truth—including that of truth as propositional—they are well known for Mr Yong is Assistant Professor of Theology at Bethel College (MN) 563