Part I: What is truth?
As I strive to better understand God and my place in his plan, I have been reading current ideas in theology pertaining to the struggle between modernism and postmodernism. I find that I can’t totally turn my back on modernism despite its faults, being, myself, a product of its teaching; my profession finding its success through the application of the scientific method, which is the basic tool of modernism. Yet, I find much appeal and value in the postmodern argument that modernism has failed to produce its anticipated utopian results: the world is still at war, poverty abounds, people still suffer and die needlessly.
In considering theology through the modernist and postmodernist approaches, I find neither adequate to explain what I see, experience and read in scripture. Therefore I am shaping a new paradigm so that I can at least have a point of reference from which I can direct my life. Any paradigm must start with presuppositions.
Presuppositions
1) There is universal truth. We receive glimpses of this truth through creation, scripture and via illumination from the Holy Spirit.
2) (Modern) man has overestimated himself and his ability to grasp and understand this truth. This is a result of the enlightenment (most recently) and man’s pride. It is in effect, the sin of Adam and Eve (and Satan); the desire to be the master of one’s own fate, or in essence, to be like God.
3) (Modern) man has underestimated God; his attributes, his limitlessness, his eternality. Man has tried to limit God, placing him in an anthropomorphic box of systematic theology, making him conform to a human image.
4) Segments of truth are within our ability to comprehend, but we fail to see truth in its totality and in its proper context. (Modern) man has attempted to systematize his glimpses of truth. His pride has led to using his systems as tools for exercising dominion over others, and has led to divisions, judgementalism and power struggles.
5) Time is a dimension in which we can capture a portion of absolute truth, as it is framed in a specific context. (More about this in a minute!)
6) Faith reaches beyond our human limits as we seek to relate to God who is beyond the limits within which he created us.
7) All worldviews of human origin and the spiritual realm likely are a mixture of truth and falsehood (our versions of Christianity included!). Some essence of God’s truth can likely be found in all religions. Our problem comes in trying to sort out the truth from the error.
Let’s try to put truth into a visual paradigm. Let‘s use a parabola to represent absolute truth, which progresses to infinity on either end, but has specific defined points on a graph.
Let us first look at scientific truth on this paradigm. We know from physics, for example, that Newtonian mechanics, which for years seemed to be the correct way of explaining our universe, is really inadequate, and in essence in error outside of specific circumstances. We now have quantum mechanics, string theory, etc., which apply to conditions where Newtonian mechanics break down. Newtonian mechanics however, served man quite well, and appeared to be true. Newton’s laws actually work in a segment of the continuum of truth in which we live, and are in essence true under certain conditions. Let’s illustrate this region of applicability as the segment of truth framed in a context of time and circumstances bordered, or framed, by the two lines on the parabola.
Physicists tell us that outside of this segment, this framed context, Newtonian mechanics no longer work, and that we need a better description of the truth; thus we have quantum mechanics. But even quantum mechanics fail to explain what happened during the milliseconds of time that occurred at the moment of the Big Bang, or, if you will, the initial creation event. Quantum mechanics encompasses a bigger segment of the parabola, but yet has its limits, and fails to contain the entire parabola of truth. Man’s understanding of truth is incomplete, and will likely remain so.
Let us look at this in the realm of theological truth. There appear to be conflicting ways in which God has dealt with people throughout history. We see this clearly in the Bible. For example, God told King Saul to exterminate the Amalekites; man, woman, child and even their animals. This seems to be in clear contradiction with the teaching of Jesus to love our enemies. Yet, we believe that God never changes. How can this be? Are they both “true” expressions of the will of God?
Let us use our paradigm. We can see that we have two sets of lines dividing the parabola into segments. There is the segment between the lines with arrows, and another segment between the lines without arrows. These two segments overlap, and also have portions that are unique. Both segments contain truth, but neither contains all the truth (the entire parabola). They do share some truth in common (the overlapped segment).
When God told the Israelites to exterminate their enemies, was this truth framed in a particular context of time, culture, etc.? Was it truth that applied to that situation? (This is not situation ethics! This is God’s absolute truth for a particular setting, a part of God’s continuum of truth that is beyond our ability to see and comprehend!) This is one unique portion of one segment of truth along the continuum. Maybe Jesus’ command to love our enemies applies to a different frame along the continuum, another unique portion of the other segment? Yet there is much in common between the times of Old Testament Israel and the new Testament Church (the common, overlapped segment).
If this is an accurate paradigm, this does not afford us the liberty to say to one another, “What is true for you is not true for me!” We have the hard job of discovering what God’s truth is for our particular setting. But we need to be careful because (presupposition #7) each of us has mixed into our worldview truth and error. Discovering and weeding out that falsehood is our task, with the help the Holy Spirit, and in the context of the faith community, the church. There is an individual component to that process, but we must be careful to avoid the enlightenment error of assuming that each of us can independently, for ourselves, decide on truth. Truth needs to be discovered and defined in the context of the faith community as directed by the Holy Spirit.
Does this framework of truth find itself defined only in time, or are there cultural elements as well? Can different frameworks coincide during the same point in time? Can truth appear to be different in different cultural settings? If we look at the book of Acts, we see quite a mix of truth frameworks within a short time period. We see the apostles, fully aware of the resurrection of Jesus. We see the disciples of John, not yet aware of Jesus, nor the resurrection. And we see Cornelius, the gentile, recognizing and serving the God of creation apart from his knowledge of Judaism or Christianity. All of these frameworks were active at the same time and contained truth that was apparently acceptable to God in their specific contexts.
Does the same apply today? Are there cultural frameworks (Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, various forms of Christianity, etc.) where people have portions of truth, to which they are faithful, and are therefore acceptable to God? To be sure, each of those systems is mixed with some error (as is ours), and none of them contains all the truth.
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