Shades of White

During a town hall meeting, Tom Coburn said the following,

"We didn't get to where we are as a nation ... outside of a connection to the originator of it all.  Intellectual minds can argue that, but it's foolishness in the sight of the creator.  My answer to most things is go to the author and find out what He says..."

This brings up a point I wanted to talk about anyway... (and I'm sure there was more to talk about during that meeting, but listening to Coburn makes me ill.  And I voted for this guy, once, long ago...).

My initial idea of what was right and wrong was strongly rigid - I believed that there is Truth, and everything else is Falsehood.  Imagine, if you will, a bullseye, dartboard, or circle with a dot in the very center.  In that center is Truth.  Everything outside of it is Falsehood.

Only the Red in the middle is Truth

Now, I don't know where on that dartboard I appear, but I believe I'm close to the middle, that my Truth largely overlaps God's Truth, with maybe a few minor exceptions.  I believe this because I read the Bible and if the Bible says something's evil, I try to avoid it.  I fail miserably on a number of things, but my belief doesn't change for failing miserably.  There are a few places where I disagree with the Bible - things like slavery and letting women speak in the Church (my own mother is ordained, which helped make me a little more progressive in that respect), and I rationalize the difference by saying that God had been saying only what was needed by the people of that time and place needed to hear to survive in their world, and that those messages weren't meant for us now.

I believed that my ideas about God and Truth were so spot on that I could harbor no dissent.  Something was either True or False.  It was a black-and-white situation, and there could be no shades of gray.  Discussions of shades of gray were sin straight from the mouth of Satan.  When I began dating a Jewish girl, I did so under protest, because obviously Christ is Truth and therefore Judaism is evil. 

Largely, those beliefs were what I had been informed about by pastors, youth group leaders, Sunday School teachers, and the few Biblical scholars I had read.  I also read my Bible exhaustively and my copy had commentary in it as well that I used to help focus my theology.  By reinforcing them from these authority sources, I could justify believing that one thing was only true for a specific time and place, while another thing wasn't, because these authority sources became my gospel, unwittingly.  I was not a "Bible-only" believer, because I was taking input from outside sources.

I have way, way more to say on that topic... but now is neither the time nor place.

So I believed rigidly that what I believed was true; and even if it wasn't, I believed I had to act as if it was, because to do otherwise would be to court evil.  This is, certainly, one way to read Romans 14:23:

But whoever has doubts is condemned if they eat, because their eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.

This reading says that anyone who believes must hold his beliefs strongly or admit sin into his life... that is, if you have any doubts about your beliefs, then everything that relates to them is sin as well.

What I didn't realize is how Truth as we know it is informed by non-Bible sources.

During my education and conversion to the Left, I was impressed upon by the Sophists and Plato.  The following will be an extremely-simplified version of history, which is to say that it will be wrong, but it is close enough that you can work with it to understand my point (if it's blatantly wrong, please tell me and I'll correct it).  Plato spoke about absolute truth (or, as I say it, "Truth" with a capital T) as a real thing that exists behind all other things.  It is from this truth that we can understand morality.  As a classical Greek philosopher, the Romans adopted him when they usurped Greek culture, and the Christian church, because it was Roman already when it was born and became even moreso when Constantine converted, inherited the philosophical background of Rome.  That background was re-strengthened during the Renaissance, as people fell in love with Greek culture all over again.  So, basically, Christianity as we know it today cannot be functionally separated from Greek philosophy, and this idea of Absolute Truth came with it.

When the Absolute Truth idea gets applied to Christianity, we would say that God is the absolute truth from whence all other truth derives.  Interesting, though, that Plato and the rest of the Greeks did not believe in a single God... but I digress. 

Gorgias, one of the Sophists that Plato wrote about as debating Socrates, famously had an opposite idea of Truth:

1. Nothing exists
2. Even if existence exists, it cannot be known
3. Even if it could be known, it cannot be communicated.

The last point is the point I latched onto.  You see, I also learned that language is horribly inadequate to express knowledge.  Even a simple bit of reasoning can cause a person to see how "true" this is - take how many times we have to ask a judge for clarification on legal matters.  When, for instance, the founders said, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" - did they mean that we shall all be free to own guns?  Or did they mean that if we were part of a "well-regulated militia" we should own guns?  This very debate rages today, more than 200 years later.  No matter whether you believe that it lands only on one side or the other of that debate, you must at least admit that it remains something that people are confused by.

Thus, if a document 222 years old and studied by millions of people can have a confused meaning by virtue of the obscurity of language, how much more would a document close to 2,000 years old and translated multiple times - from Greek into Hebrew and then into English for most of our translations of the New Testament - be confusing in its language?  We have evidence that it is, by virtue of having a nearly-limitless number of Christian denominations, all of whom disagree over relatively simple matters.  The Church, in fact, has been having such disagreements and schisms throughout its entire history.

And yet, we are convinced that the Holy Spirit translates the text for us.  It is how people attempt to bridge the gap between confusing language and Absolute Truth - namely, that the God inside us translates it for us.  This brings up a difficult conundrum:

1. Those who disagree with us must not be Christian
2. or Truth must be adaptable to the individual person

And this is, I think, the cause of a lot of our distress in the Christian Church.  We constantly vary between the two points, and we try to accept that variation without acknowledging its idiosyncrasy. 

Take, for example, Fundamentalism.

The Christian Fundamentalist movement was not a movement with an evil intention.  They recognized the problem of Absolute Truth and attempted to create a list of what was known and accepted as Absolute Truth so that believers could come together and share in that Absolute Truth without having to bicker and argue about it.  The rest of the arguments would seem relatively minor if we could agree on the "big things."  What it did instead, however, was create a sense of other - that is, by defining what Christianity IS, it also defined what Christianity IS NOT, and pushed all beliefs that did not share in those key points into the realm of the ostracized other.  And, as I've talked about elsewhere, what is other easily transitions into enemy.

I came up with a different rationalization: that Absolute Truth cannot be known.  We can know things that approximate Truth, but never quite reach it.

Why?

Well, no matter what happens, no matter how we are informed by the Spirit, we still think in terms of language.  When we try to rationalize things from God, we try to do so through words in our minds.  The moment we do that, we place a filter upon God, and limit the power of God.  We tell God that He can only speak to us through a filter of our existing knowledge. 

That's not to say God cannot speak to us beyond that, just that the moment He does, we will filter it.

As an aside - maybe this is the meaning of speaking in tongues - an understanding that defies language and comes out in utterances that are unintelligible.  Again, though, even with a Gifted translator, the moment it's turned into language it's stripped of its power.  If we try to rationalize the tongues we just spoke in, we rationalize them into language.  In Romans 8:26, Paul says that the Spirit prays on our behalf using grunts we cannot understand, so there's some merit to that idea.

Interestingly, no where in the Bible does it say that the Holy Spirit is here to help us translate the Bible.  2 Peter 1:20-21 says,

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

But that concerns prophecy, not all of Scripture.  Just as the passage that people reference to say the entire Bible is perfect and without error doesn't actually say that, but rather "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16), which means that it's inspired by God but not necessarily "True."  That is, God could be speaking to us in ways we can understand, but that miss the mark of what is "True."  Would it have been useful for God to tell ancient Jews living 5,000 years ago that the world was created in a big bang?  Would they have understood the background science necessary to navigate that?  

Thus I now understand that Truth isn't relative, but is unknowable, at least as a discernible fact.  If it exists, it is so far behind reality that we can't understand it directly, and can only see its effects.  

Back to the question of Romans 14 - how does this inform that passage?  Well, in our own country, we have what's called "Reasonable doubt" - that is, is there a good reason for thinking that something might not be as we expect?  We can certainly have doubts - most Christians would be remiss if they didn't admit to having doubts about the existence of God - but "reasonable doubts" are another thing altogether.  I may doubt whether it's appropriate to get a tattoo, for instance, but is there something in the Bible that would cause me to have a "reasonable doubt."  In this case, there is a proclamation that altering your skin is evil.  But can I rationalize that in a way that makes sense to how I understand God?  If that proclamation is, for example, only applicable to Levites, then it's obvious that it was to keep them separate from the rest of the population and show clearly how they were God's representatives.  It doesn't necessarily apply to me, then, and I'm free to do so.

In the rest of Romans 14, Paul showed us how this works.  He talks about Christians who eat meat, and Christians who don't.  He says for his own part, he thinks that it's OK to eat meat.  But, for those who don't think it is, it's not.  They have doubt about it.  He has justified his doubts, and so it's OK for him.  He doesn't rub it in their face, but instead he says to accept those who disagree, and to keep from eating meat in front of them for fear of making them fall into sin.  There may be Absolute Truth about meat, but even Paul doesn't know it.  Ergo, what matters far more is what you do with the Truth you believe - and part of that is not being a jerk with it.

Now, this realization allowed me to soften my heart, and to come up with an additional benefit of seeing Truth this way...

When I believed I knew what was Right and what was Wrong, I created a space where even God was not welcome to speak to me.  If I heard a voice telling me that I was wrong about something, it must not be from God, because God agrees fully with me.  But if I was wrong, then that meant that God could not tell me - I was unable to hear from Him.  This means that if the Spirit was trying to speak with me about the Truth, I had shut Him out, and said "No, I will find my own Truth."  

Only in being able to accept that the things we think we know aren't True can we learn, even from the source of all Truth.