On Truth

I always seem to be on the wrong end of this one. Either I'm with a group of tie wearin' King James quotin' church-folk who hear my shades-of-gray and jump straight to hell-to-pay (get it? it rhymes!!!), or I'm hanging out with my guerrilla Marxist comrades in their berets and smoking their cigars and think I'm too quick to apply my definition of truth to others.

OK, so I don't regularly find myself in either of those groups, but I do often find myself alone out on a limb in one of these discussions that includes the fractious phrase "What is truth?"

This happened to me tonight at church. We were discussing a recommendable German movie that we had just finished (After the Truth) and The Question [ominous music here] came up. Whenever you start to answer one of these, everybody goes red-flag hunting and prepare themselves to shout you down when they don't want to hear what you have to say. I know this because this is also often what I'm doing.

So here's maybe a clarification of what I mean to say in these conversations and only rarely am able to articulate.

In regards to truth, I hold a position that is, at least in some sense, epistemologically relative. What I mean by this is that while I do believe that there is a transcendent truth (which I more typically refer to as God), I also believe that this truth is somehow inherently mysterious. So, while we can occasionally catch glimpses of truth, truth is not something that we can know like a fact, possess like a book, or wield as a weapon. To put it another way, our own knowledge of the truth stems only from our quick glances at it.

Since God (which you'll recall, is what I am referring to when I say truth above) is infinitely great and we are finite (and terribly ungreat), we cannot own or even store this truth without damaging or distorting it, due to the fact that we're squeezing something so ginormously huge into something so devastatingly compact.

So the truth is out there. There is, in fact, that one truth which is objective and useful as a standard, but due to our inability to comprehend it, our nontranscendent truth-statements are in fact relative to ourselves and our contexts.

I think that's what I meant to say.

An Update ~or~ A News Report, a Girl, and a Poem

I'm tired. I've been working hard and staying very busy all summer. It's been pretty awesome.

But really, I'm still the same me. I don't really watch TV, cause I don't have the time. And I haven't touched a guitar since May, cause I didn't bring one out here. Other than that, I'm still basically the same me.

Oh, except for I kinda fell in love with this girl. At first, I didn't know what to think of her, but the more time I spend listening to her, the more I like what I hear. The problem is that her hair is shorter than mine, and mine's pretty freaking short. Oh, and she's like twice my age.

I am, of course, talking about none other than Sinead O'Connor, who's newish album "Theology" has been playing over and over in my head for the past couple of days now. I recommend it with the caveat that it's not a systematic theology textbook, so if you are going to take issue with her riffs on the Old Testament, then just let it be. But, until somebody else writes awesome music about Job, Jesus, and Psalm 91, I'll be listening to this.

Lastly is a poem. That I didn't write. But I like it. The only way I came across it was through one of the blogs I read to try to stretch the boundaries of how I define ministry. The blog is jonnybaker but the poem is by kester. Enjoy!

If we could all
just stop throwing stones,
and stoop, knees bent
and write in the dust,

we'd see that the dust
was once stone -
grand, and hard, and proud, and tough -
now ground and dissolved
in grace and tears.

So... how much better
to be a grain of dirt
on that kind prophet’s hands
than a stone
in the cold, accusing Temple
of the pure.