Is there such a thing as a universal, all encompassing truth; one "right way" to God?
Forewarning: what ensues is some spiritual wrestling (which is a process, and I by no means am a heavyweight champion) that gets kind of convoluted at times. This is also an incredibly long post, so stick with me and I'll reward you with some pictures. :-)
I read this blog on Patheos the other day that was arguing that Gods love is a perfecting love- that He isn't content to leave us alone in our sin, but He rebukes and corrects us when we fall back into sin. The author then goes on to say that Christians aren't called to be tolerant, they're called to be loving AND loving people means "standing up for the truth even if people aren't going to like us for standing firm in the truth." Basically, I thought it boiled down to this- if you love someone, you call them out and hold them accountable for their actions. I've dubbed this the "perfecting love model".
The perfecting love model is an argument I've come up against many times now.
It came up the other day, when I was reading a book I found at Pastor Kirsten's place (Your God is Too Small)-- it said, "We hear, or read, of someone who was 'a real saint: he never saw any harm in anyone and never spoke a word against anyone all his life.' If this really is Christian saintliness, then Jesus Christ was no saint. It is true that He taught men never to sit in judgement upon one another, but He never suggested that they should turn a blind eye to evil or pretend that other people were faultless."
The "coincidence" of running into the same question while just trying to relax and unwind convinced me that it was about time I should work out an answer to it, or at least my feelings on it.
I have a few issues this whole model... For one, what actually is truth? Right? Isn't the 'truth' (or at least, our perceptions and understanding of it) constantly changing? Even in the hard sciences, where truth is less subjective, we're always discovering new things that change what we previously thought to be fact. (The world isn't flat, there are such things as quarks and leptons, the sun isn't infinite, dark matter exists, etcetera)
So is there such a thing as truth? And if there is, do you think we'll ever truly reach it?
I tend to think not...I don't know, I'm reminded of St. Augustine: "our hearts are restless until they rest in you". And I know it is possible to take that to mean we are never satisfied until we are followers of Christ, or any other slew of possibilities, but I tend to think of it like this-- we're always going to be looking for the truth (God, when we get Him right), but we're never gonna find it. We're always gonna be restlessly searching, from now till the day we die and finally rest in Gods hands. Then we'll know truth.
At least, that's how it sounds to me.
But for yet another issue, the whole argument is based on the assumption that the speaker (here, the Christian) is the one with divine, absolute truth who has an obligation to share his 'right' truth with everyone else.
So I looked up some verses about love- Proverbs 3:12, 12:1, and 24:13, John 17:23, Ephesians 5:11, and Hebrews 6:12and 10:24 all kind of support the perfecting love model. Micah 6:8, Matthew 22:37-39, John 10:17 and 15:13, Romans 5:8, 1 Corinthians 4:21, Galatians 5:13, Ephesians 4:15, and 1 John 3:16-19 were ones that all could be used to oppose the perfecting love idea.
So there's biblical support for it, but there's also verses that could contradict it as well. As it goes, if you cherry pick verses, you can support or oppose anything.
Regardless of biblical support or dissent, I'm still not convinced that there is such a thing as 'absolute truth'. Doesn't almost every group with a belief system (generally speaking, of course) think that they and they alone have the absolute truth, and that everyone else either has only a half truth or is just plain wrong?
I don't know if I can believe that there is only one right religion, one right path to God, one absolute truth we must follow. Have you read 'The Life of Pi'? There's a quote in there that sums this whole thing up for me well:
"Mamaji has two passports. He's Indian and French. Why can't I be a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim?"
"That's different. France and India are nations on earth."
"How many nations are there in the sky?"
"One. That's the point. One nation, one passport."
"One nation in the sky?"
"Yes. Or none. There's that option too, you know."
"If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?"
And I'm not sure at all how that fits into my faith.
I just really don't think that it's realistic to think that God has revealed to us (Christians, Catholics, Lutherans, ELCA, LCMS, take your pick) alone what His truth and His will on earth is. No one has ever told me straight out that they believe their way to be THE right way, but it's often implied. Every time someone tells me that homosexuals go to hell unless they repent, or that it's so good I'm a missionary now because I can share the "reality of Gods love" with the people I meet here (which has its own disturbing implications, but more on that later)... Every time people use the Bible or the teachings of their church to justify political statements that would bring the entire country into alignment with their personal beliefs... To me, that's just like saying, "well, I think that God says its this way; so this is the right way to do it and I'm going to ignore what you think God says because obviously I'm more right than you." Maybe that's oversimplified, or overly sensitive, I don't know. But I do know that's how I hear it, the way that I read in between those lines.
And that comes off as arrogant and short sighted; and frankly, unrealistic.
Because the reality is that we are flawed, imperfect creatures that are always gonna screw it up. I mean, come on, that's almost guaranteed, isn't it? We are a MESS. Why would God leave such a big and important thing like perfecting others or living up to his standards up to us, who are bound to get it wrong? In addition to that, the idea that humanity could ever come close to imitating God (or His will, or His love, etc.) is laughable. We just aren't capable-- and that's the entire point of our faith!!
I can't help but think that this idea of us as being called to love our neighbors by perfecting them is kind of pretentious. In a way, it's like we're elevating ourselves to Gods level.
All that relates back to another article I read a while back: "You say you believe God is in control, right? Do you really believe that? Or are you worried that you somehow have to make that mean anything at all through your own actions? If His power over the world is in any way dependent on your own, maybe you need to find a bigger god." It's a sassy statement, but also kind of true, right? Why should God, the all powerful, the almighty, omnipotent Creator of the entire universe need US to help 'fix' or 'perfect' humanity?
This has all been on my mind in context of religious pluralism here in Madagascar. The FLM (Fiangonana Loterana Malagasy, Malagasy Lutheran Church) seems to be in constant contention with the people to whom they're trying to minister to over their traditional religion of ancestral worship. It's very complicated, and I don't pretend to even have the beginnings of a basic grasp on the topic. The tiny bit of knowledge I do have only begins to scratch the surface... But this is what I (think I) do know:
There are aspects ancestral worship that a lot of Christians would say is heresy or going against God and the teachings of Christianity. Some Malagasy would view the ancestors as a kind of a "bridge" to God... Which kind of interferes with the idea of Jesus as our way to understand God better. After all, doesn't the Bible say, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"?
And there are aspects of ancestral worship that many of us in the West would call superstitious- the belief that ancestors can curse or bless, holding certain places as sacred because spirits dwell there, etc.
I also know, from my sociological training if nothing else, that ancestral worship is a large part of the culture here. It relates so strongly back to the culture of emphasizing family, that when Malagasy Christians refuse to participate (especially in famdihana- the turning of the bones), they are often ostracized from their family- the most heartbreaking thing ever, because to Malagasy, your wealth is your family. There is nothing more important than family.
Many people here genuinely want to worship Christ, fully and completely. But the church here (from what I've seen thus far, the FLM especially) seems to be telling them that they have to decide...abandon ancestral worship, possibly lose your family, but gain the acceptance of the church...or stay true to tradition and lose the church.
Ancestral worship is tradition, something that sets the Malagasy culture apart and differentiates it. Tradition isn't something to be ignored or glossed over- it's a beautiful, unique piece of the tapestry of human belief and history that should be celebrated and appreciated.
Why can't we integrate the two, Christianity and traditional Malagasy culture?
Is there truly only one nation in the sky, and only one passport to get there?
Who's to say that their religion doesn't have some pieces of truth in it? And who's to say that Christianity maybe doesn't have the entire truth? What if the only way to know the whole 'truth' (which I'm defining as God) is by combining all of our various pieces of truth?
What if that's religious pluralism, in its purest form?
So.... That's the whole mess. Kudos to those of you who made it through the entire, jumbled ball of my thoughts.
But this is what has been running through my mind for a while now. Well in reality, almost forever. Since I actually started thinking at all about Christianity and faith with any sort of intellectual questioning.
Madagascar just kind of pushed it back up, front and center in my brain, demanding to be seen and wrestled with.
I hope I didn't offend anyone, or blaspheme too much. I'm only trying to engage with my faith, and work out the questions that've been eating at me. I'd love to hear others thoughts and responses to help form a better theory/opinion, so leave a comment!
And, FINALLY, some pictures as promised. I hope to get a few more soon, hopefully of my students and my workplaces! Woo!
First, I am super excited to read about your travels and your thoughts on faith because I miss wrestling with those things in ways that happened more often at Valpo for me. I hear what you’re saying about absolute truth. To my mind, though, just because everybody claims to know truth, that does not mean that there isn’t an absolute truth. Knowing how I am as a human being, I think it is much more likely that my flawed self is just bad at seeing/recognizing/understanding absolute truth than that it doesn’t exist. If you imagine a bunch of people with bad eyesight all looking at the same object, they are going to say what they’re seeing is the truth, even if it’s not correct. They’re all probably going to see some true things about the object too, even if they can’t see everything. But that doesn’t change the actual characteristics of the object they’re seeing. Some may be nearsighted or farsighted or colorblind and see the object differently, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an object there, or that it doesn’t possess certain characteristics. I think our “vision” won’t be perfected here on Earth (by us or by God), but by studying the scriptures we can get “glasses” with better and better prescriptions as we find out more and more about the truth—God and His nature. Maybe that is where the idea of “perfecting love” comes in—that love helps others to see the truth. On the flip side, I believe shoving religious glasses on people who don’t want them is maybe not the best tactic.
ReplyDeleteI also don’t think God has revealed Himself only to Christians. In my Taste & See class, something Prof. Weber brought up was that the sheer variety of edible food is ridiculously extravagant. We don’t need the amount of different kinds of delicious and healthy food that we enjoy. We don’t need it to take on a whole other sensation when mixed with certain other foods or roasted or baked. Materialistically speaking, we need nutrients and fiber, not amazing flavor. But we have a lavish variety of tasty foods. I think that is one small way truth is revealed to us—it tells us that God is good, and that He gracious; He gives us wonderful things that we don’t deserve. (It’s a large part of the argument of a book we read by a culturally Jewish scientist.)
Your idea about needing to combine all our various pieces of truth is something I had not thought of before, and I will continue to ponder. I don’t think Christians are the only ones to have hit on certain truths about God—you can see all kinds of religions and beliefs that hit on some part of reality that Christians believe in, too. I think that the revealed Word is a good standard for determining this, despite how incredibly messed up that can get, as you said. For my part, though, I’m sure it’s a user error :)
May your transformations continue to reveal more beauty.
~Caitlin