Truth: static or dynamic
What's your vote?
Personally I find Truth, much like the natural world to be very dynamic. God is very dynamic. The static God that I grew up worshipping in church is becoming much richer and much more interesting than I ever thought She could be. That's right, She. Reading Scripture from the point of view of 'I am' as a she is quite enlightening.
...
A dynamic Truth yields more questions:
Does anyone have a grasp of what the complete Truth is? (Most people would appeal to their affiliated religious beliefs and respond with a profound 'Yes')
What religion is not in search of truth? (Easy -- none)
What religion has nothing to offer humanity in terms of Truth? (This is one to really research...it is crucial to interreligious dialogue)
Why is interreligious dialogue important? No dialogue tends to lead to violence, tension...
What is Truth? (I'd love to get results from a world wide survey)
Why is Truth indefinable? (Perhaps because of its dynamic nature)
Is Truth the abstraction created by man to attach meaning to individual lives?
Is Truth a more postmodern idea -- relative and pluralistic? (I wouldn't go that far, but it's a pertinent question)
What do my experiences tell me about Truth?
What do my relationships tell me about Truth?
What do my religious beliefs tell me about Truth?
A real problem with Truth is that, as humans, we have to categorize it, reduce it into its seemingly different parts. We miss the whole Truth in favor of our own personal and partial truths. As Christians we become part-time Christians (bi-weekly Christians) when our beliefs center around a ticket to heaven. That is not the whole Truth, not something to be used as weapon to those of another faith.
Last weekend a few of my co-workers (who were Christian) talked about a youth conference organized for the purpose of convincing youth that Islam was evil...I took real offense to their discussion and spent most of the day distracted from doing anything else. Belief at the expense of other human beings does not sound like a Christian event I would attend, nor a Christian even period. And quite frankly it scared me.
It's no wonder the term 'evangelical' gets a bad wrap.
Personally, I have found real Truth in all religions. It's too bad that my coworkers will probably never have the experience of meditating at a Buddhist Monastery, never experience the dance and rhythm of Hare Krishna, nor the real commitment of devout Muslims. Even the mysterious religion of the Tao touches upon something truthful. Who is right?
They all are...and they all are not...
Why do I choose to be Christian? There are many days when I question my choice...there are many days when I question this question...choosing to commit to Christianity, to cut a covenant with God and man is very difficult. Doubt will ever haunt my thoughts. But the firm foundation of my beliefs rests upon my holistic understanding of Truth. And this understanding is very much Christian.
What then is Truth? Is it cultural, situational, absolute? My answer is Yes and No. And believe me this isn't the easiest answer...Truth is paradoxical...
Personally I find Truth, much like the natural world to be very dynamic. God is very dynamic. The static God that I grew up worshipping in church is becoming much richer and much more interesting than I ever thought She could be. That's right, She. Reading Scripture from the point of view of 'I am' as a she is quite enlightening.
...
A dynamic Truth yields more questions:
Does anyone have a grasp of what the complete Truth is? (Most people would appeal to their affiliated religious beliefs and respond with a profound 'Yes')
What religion is not in search of truth? (Easy -- none)
What religion has nothing to offer humanity in terms of Truth? (This is one to really research...it is crucial to interreligious dialogue)
Why is interreligious dialogue important? No dialogue tends to lead to violence, tension...
What is Truth? (I'd love to get results from a world wide survey)
Why is Truth indefinable? (Perhaps because of its dynamic nature)
Is Truth the abstraction created by man to attach meaning to individual lives?
Is Truth a more postmodern idea -- relative and pluralistic? (I wouldn't go that far, but it's a pertinent question)
What do my experiences tell me about Truth?
What do my relationships tell me about Truth?
What do my religious beliefs tell me about Truth?
A real problem with Truth is that, as humans, we have to categorize it, reduce it into its seemingly different parts. We miss the whole Truth in favor of our own personal and partial truths. As Christians we become part-time Christians (bi-weekly Christians) when our beliefs center around a ticket to heaven. That is not the whole Truth, not something to be used as weapon to those of another faith.
Last weekend a few of my co-workers (who were Christian) talked about a youth conference organized for the purpose of convincing youth that Islam was evil...I took real offense to their discussion and spent most of the day distracted from doing anything else. Belief at the expense of other human beings does not sound like a Christian event I would attend, nor a Christian even period. And quite frankly it scared me.
It's no wonder the term 'evangelical' gets a bad wrap.
Personally, I have found real Truth in all religions. It's too bad that my coworkers will probably never have the experience of meditating at a Buddhist Monastery, never experience the dance and rhythm of Hare Krishna, nor the real commitment of devout Muslims. Even the mysterious religion of the Tao touches upon something truthful. Who is right?
They all are...and they all are not...
Why do I choose to be Christian? There are many days when I question my choice...there are many days when I question this question...choosing to commit to Christianity, to cut a covenant with God and man is very difficult. Doubt will ever haunt my thoughts. But the firm foundation of my beliefs rests upon my holistic understanding of Truth. And this understanding is very much Christian.
What then is Truth? Is it cultural, situational, absolute? My answer is Yes and No. And believe me this isn't the easiest answer...Truth is paradoxical...
posted by Timcom at 4:16 PM
6 Comments:
How is your holistic understanding of truth Christian? What do you mean by holistic? Definitions please, if you don't mind.
Holism -- 'The theory that living matter or reality is made up of organic or unified wholes that are greater than the simple sum of their parts' -- according to Dictionary.com
In other words, I would suggest that Christianity is a religion largely based upon relationships. What we know is in large part based upon the knowledge gathered from relationships between human and human, God and human, God and nature, human and nature.
Who would God be to us without his relation to us revealed in Scripture? What would we call Him, or deem his revelation without the Bible to aid us (another form of relating)?
For an example, when I view the covenant made between God and Abraham I see dynamic truth in the relationship between the two. To simply break the relationship away into a single part without reading the rest of Scripture as a whole, the covenant does not make as much sense.
Scripture is thus a dynamic whole (a whole narrative, a dynamic mosaic)
Throughout Scripture, God relates to different people in different situations differently. Sure, there are common theological themes and motifs that the rhetoric of the Biblical authors presents to different audiences in different places and situations, but God does not always present the same answer. In fact, in my reading God seemingly contradicts himself occassionally. (Of course he can do that, He's God.)
It seems unfair of me to reduce these dynamics into parts to try and categorize God.
If God is Truth, then why assume that Truth is not holistic. I prefer to think the whole God is more valuable than the sum of his parts, from what I've read in Scripture and from my limited experience. I suppose it is because Christianity has a firm root in relationships, that I find the idea of holistic Truth to be very Christian. And further, the very definition of Love (God) implies a holistic understanding of the world...
There is more to this that I haven't explained, but my thoughts are becoming discombobulated and I need to get back to work. I've written six to seven papers on these topics. I'll see if I can dig them up on my files and post them later on.
Whether or not this former response is just an advertisement or not, it was inciteful...provoking questions having to do with the purpose and definition of a blog. Like the advertisement, I too may come across as advertising certain expectations, positing various normative statements, and yet claim to be only an informative agent. What then is blogging? Is it a public online journal? A therapeutic cyber space?
There is no definitive answer...
Further, the advertisement refers to a tree that is genetically bred to provide more valuable resources than were otherwise available...Positive or Negative? Why?
A small business can boom by means of induction...genetic alteration...is it beneficial? Why?
Am I selling my ideas?
Am I treating my ideas as opinions?
I must admit that I was weary of reading this response, dismissing it as an advertisement, but I am glad that I didn't. My blog is meant as a space to question, to search, to think, to get stuff down on virtual paper. Am I offending people? Probably some readers...Am I imposing my beliefs, expectations? I hope not.
The pragmatic article is typical of those within a capitalistic culture. Profit...opportunity...rhetoric for the purpose of sale...persuasion in the form of information for the sake of profit.
It says never to trust anything without proof...hmmm...what do you think about that?
1. Responding to the question on truth, is it really relevent whether or not we can know truth? Isn't this much like seeking the meaning of life?
Theologically, Jean Cauvin would argue that our total depravity keeps us from being able to know any truth. Wesley would of course take this idea and adapt it to say that truth is known through ecotheology, or possibly a panentheism type way. In that case the only truth would be God himself. Fides quaerens intellectum "faith seeking understanding" is the closest we can get to truth, from a Christian's point of view.
Professor Migliore at your school would argue that Creation is ex nihilo "out of nothing" which gives God no ties to leave in the world. This leads to a theistic approach to viewing an omnipotent God who happens to be our only truth.
In response to a few other things:
2. Truth is cultural based on a limited definition of what truth is.
3. Truth is not absolute aside from faith. For someone to say that something is the absolute truth is to say that his/her opinion is flawless. There are no absolutes aside from what we can say about God through analogical language, i.e. love. If there is the assumption that there is no God, then the cultural can define its own truth, which turns out to be a false truth that everyone cannot accept.
4. From an atheistic view point, truth is the reason religion was invented in the first place. People wanting to know everything, the truth of this or that, the meaning of life, the secret to life. From this view point truth is life and death.
6. Truth is not only a postmodern notion. Truth has been carried over from every flawed paradigm that ever existed. It has changed from an ontological understanding to an epistemological one, but its essence has remained the same.
Well said...and, actually Migliore and I discussed God creating ex nihilo just last week!
I agree with your comments, and wish I could have phrased my blog that way...
The situation in which this blog was a response to is:
"Last weekend a few of my co-workers (who were Christian) talked about a youth conference organized for the purpose of convincing youth that Islam was evil...I took real offense to their discussion and spent most of the day distracted from doing anything else. Belief at the expense of other human beings does not sound like a Christian event I would attend, nor a Christian even period. And quite frankly it scared me."
Perhaps my frustration sent me into a postmodern frenzy...
I completely agree that "faith seeking understanding" is the closest we can come to knowing the truth.
It is very easy to fall into the trap of universal paradigmatic claims to truths.
"But the firm foundation of my beliefs rests upon my holistic understanding of Truth. And this understanding is very much Christian." -- these phrases were supposed to encompass much more, though they are very vague. "Faith seeking understanding" is the point I lacked...or perhaps rather assumed (I tend to do that at times)
I liked the idea of this evolution of Truth from a more ontological understanding to a more epistemological one. Logical positivism and Baconian induction perhaps have had a significant effect on this understanding...
Must go...I need to finish reading Prey into Hunter for Religion and Society
I just wrote a rather lengthy response, but hit the wrong button and it disappeared...but the gist of it was that I think there needs to be some agreement on what the term 'truth' means. Because we are assuming from a postmodern or Christian view that it is something that cannot be known; that we only speculate. However, the connotation of the term is used in various contexts.
John Calvin would say that we, because of 'the Fall' (I hate using that term) then we distance ourselves from God and from our true identity and as such only speculate about both given various revelations...John Wesley was more positive than Calvin and saw the value of a conversion experience, the possibility to live as we were created to live, as our true selves...saw in some ways I agree about John Wesley, though this is vague and that makes it hard to venture guesses...I'll read up on it...
Ex nihilo is an argument I am not completely convinced by...there is Scriptural evidence both ways (whether out of nothing or rearranging of chaos as an opposition to God), and attractive things about both...though both still leave their own theological problems of interpretation. Of course it is hard to venture a guess at metaphorical language intended to describe origins of everything.
The other thing I think we are lacking in is our discussion of what truth is and what criteria there is for discussing it. To assume that we cannot know truth, seems like a futile way of beginning...it is saying that truth exists, but because we cannot know it, we will not even try...
Can anyone for sure say that something is absolutely true...of course not...
If there was no God, no deity of any kind, then truth would all be false you say...hmmm...that poses some ethical problems for me...I do believe in God, but if God were not sustaining humanity, then what would yield ethical truth...consensus on certain points of view, hedonistic calculus...? It sounds as if humanity would be completely beyond anything truthful without God...I am just being sensitive to some of my atheistic friends who would take offense at this comment...I'm not arguing...
Atheism tends to arise when problems in the church or other religious organization arise...when problems and disagreements fall away, so too does atheism...Atheism is a good sign of internal and external problems of the church I think...occassionally signs of religious paradigmatic revolutions.
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