What We Know: Taking Risks but the Right Ones

So I left behind a time when all I knew seemed clear, exact and certain.  I came to learn that even within Scripture, especially within Scripture, there is mystery and there are multiple perspectives.  I came to see that God is love and grace reigns everywhere.

Accordingly, I came to understand certain things about what we know.  I came to doubt universal and abstract truth claims lifted out of all living context that prove to be heartless down on street level where real life is lived.  I came to understand that power corrupts truthfulness as it corrupts everything else – that often what passes for knowledge is what those with power wish to pass for knowledge.  I came to realize, however, that there is a limit to what we can learn from skepticism and doubt.  Western civilization is built upon a hermeneutics (an interpretation) of suspicion.  But doubt is in the end corrosive, and there are deep, deep truths that can only be learned by a hermeneutics of empathy.  In the end, we fully understand only what we love. 

I came to see that every kind of systematic thought – scientific or otherwise – begins with taking some things for granted, with a faith commitment that calls for personal decision, and involves the risk of being wrong.  I came to see, on the basis of both common sense and my faith in God, that there is a trustworthy correspondence between us, those who know or seek to know, and what can be practically known.  Truth can be known.  We are wired to seek and find truth.  Over time and in a free marketplace of ideas truth can be known, though wise people may still speak of it in many ways.  But I also came to see that truths – scientific and otherwise – advance by intuitive and imaginative leaps that answer: How do we best account for life as it is?  What works?  What offers hope?  Down on street level and out in real life what are the real human needs, and how are they best satisfied?  What is wise and compassionate, decent and humane? 

It also dawned on me that if we learn to think for ourselves (which is the Western project), then we cannot be expected to think identically.  For this reason, our central values must be inclusive and pluralistic.  They must be founded upon those traditions in our various heritages, religious and otherwise, that encourage trust, forgiveness and love for one’s neighbor, even for one’s “enemy”; that promote sweet reasonableness in the face of life’s undeniable complexity, ambiguity and paradox; that allow for and learn from multiple perspectives; that ease our fears and teach us kindness and understanding in the response to our differences; and that nurture us to draw strength from historical change and cultural diversity.  Where there is respect, openness and freedom, truth wins through, but now truth that can draw people together including the many, many people who to this point have weighed religion in the scales and found it wanting. 

What We Know: Starting the Journey

One of the great challenges for the church in our times is to make sense of life, yes, for ourselves, but also for the many, many people who have weighed religion in the scales and have found it wanting, who seek compassion, decency, common sense and inclusiveness but who have not found these things in churches, mosques and synagogues, who seek to make sense of a God they still believe in but whom they struggle to find in religion as they have experienced it.  Many, many people are tired of churches but they throng to interpretive spaces, to interpretive centers, to interpretive channels, to interpretive blogs and websites, to places that make sense of life and origins and history and religion and doctrine. 

How then might we, as followers of Jesus and as church communities, make sense of life and make sense of the world in which we live?  It begins naturally with making sense of what we know.  What do we know and how do we know that we know it?  And on what basis can we feel confident that what we think we know is truthful and squares with the way things really are?  In a world filled with new ideas, many of which challenge the ways we’ve thought before, in a world filled with competing truth claims, in a world filled with works of spiritual genesis that are not a part of our own faith tradition, how do we make sense of what we know?  

I will begin by tracing my own story.  I, like many others, grew up in a universe where everything was clear, exact and certain.  At least at first sight, and few looked deeper.  You knew who you were, where you came from, and where you were going.  You knew what was right and what was wrong.  You knew what was false and what was true.  You even knew who was saved and who was lost.  In fact, everyone and everything fit exactly into his, her or its own precise category.  Perhaps it is no surprise then that  I  had a professor back in my graduate studies in religion many years ago who would tell us that we could ask him any question, any question at all about anything, and given a little time, he could give us a book, chapter and verse answer from Scripture.  For anything.  He might have to go off and think about it for an hour or so, maybe a day or so – please smile, though he seldom did – but given time, he could give a book-chapter-and-verse answer to any question imaginable.  And it could be a question about anything: physics, biology, astronomy, any ethical dilemma, certainly any doctrinal matter, or who to date, how to raise your children, or who to vote for.  For any question, he could find the answer because after all had not Jesus promised us that when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide his apostles into all the truth?  So, he reasoned, the Spirit came and inspired Scripture – gave us the Bible, and now we have this Scripture and it makes everything perfectly clear.

Even as he was saying these things, however, I came to realize that things were not at all that obvious to me or to most people.  I came to see on the basis of Scripture itself that there were many things that were not clear, exact and certain.  I began to read Scripture not through the lens or filter of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment but as it was written – true to its original intent and historical context.  I began to read it with empathy for others as Jesus did.  I  began to see that it was not primarily a law code, that, yes, there were parts of it that were ancient law codes, but much of it was narrative and poetry and prophetic oracle and literary correspondence.  Within it there is mystery, and within it there are multiple perspectives.  Within it, ideas develop over time.  Within in, there is dialectic, that is, point and counter-point leading us to seek transcendent principles.  We are invited by Scripture to wrestle with a God who is simply I AM, I AM WHO I AM, beyond words and beyond category.  And I learned all this as a follower of Jesus who asks me to open my heart and my mind to others, to others who are very different from me, who gives me this Golden Rule, that I should do to others what I would have them do to me.  So I learned to respect others and to seek to understand them.  And I learned all this as one who has come to see that God is, in fact, love.

Making Sense

I write as a Christian.  I value honesty.  That’s what I am, a Christian.  Others may question this, but I don’t.  And I find great joy and meaning in my Christian faith.  But I also write as one just trying to make sense of life and of the world in which we all live.  As things stand, our souls explode with questions.

What does the future hold, and what say do we have in this?  How do we know what we know, and how do we know that we know it?  What do we make of Jesus?  And what did Jesus really mean when he said he was the way and the truth and the life?  What do we make of Scripture?  Much of the evil that has happened in history and that still happens now comes from sacred texts being read in literalistic, legalistic ways; but then how are we to understand them?  [One clue: the title of this blog!]

And on and on. 

Why sickness, and disease, and suffering, and natural disasters, and personal tragedies?  What do we make of the faith of others – of profound spiritual works like the Tao Te Ching or the Bhagavad Gita?  How do we make sense of history, of the flow of history?  And what are we to make of a story that ends, according to tradition, with an allegedly loving God consigning hundreds of millions of people to excruciating agony for ever and ever and ever – not just for a minute or two, or an hour, or a day, or a week, but year after year, forever and ever?  How do we make sense of it all? 

And I go back to the question of why are more and more people, especially more and more young adults, unaffiliated with any community of faith?  What might we offer them?  How might we best serve them – the many people who have weighed religion in the scales and have found it wanting, who seek compassion, decency, common sense and inclusiveness but who cannot find it in churches, mosques and synagogues, who seek to make sense of a God they still believe in but whom they struggle to find in religion?

Several summers ago, my wife and I visited Atlantic Canada where I spent my pre-teen years.  I’d never been back.  We visited my hometown, Fredericton, and many other places I remembered from my childhood: the charming port city of Halifax, Port Royal, one of the great explorer Samuel Champlain’s early seventeenth-century settlements in the New World, and Grand Pré, Ground Zero for the eighteenth-century Acadian deportation immortalized by Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline.”  And we visited some of the most fascinating and breathtakingly beautiful spots on earth: the Hopewell Rocks, gigantic rocks now sculpted like towering flower pots by the fifty-foot tidal surges of the Bay of Fundy, and the spectacular Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island.  And everywhere we went  there were these buildings, simple, classic, elegant structures called Interpretive Centers where visitors went and read up on what they were seeing, visited artful displays, and listened to audio-visual presentations that made sense of what they were experiencing.  And it dawned on me that maybe this is one thing that churches in our time need to be - INTERPRETIVE CENTERS, places people can come and make sense of their lives and our world. 

Today many people who have substantially given up on churches throng to interpretive centers, to interpretive channels, to interpretive blogs and websites, to places that make sense of life and origins and history and religion and doctrine, where word and art and music come together to make sense of the realm of the Spirit, places that allow for multiple perspectives, places that make sense of differences, that respect differences and see dignity in the differences. 

Ever since then I’ve been inspired by the dream of the contemporary church being a such a place, a place that doesn’t have all the answers (no place does) but that does honor all the questions, a place light on dogma and bright with insight.  I believe that if we keep our wits about us, if we stop and look and see, we’ll find truths together that are not that far from what we already intuitively knew to be true, truths that our hearts have long known though words have often eluded us.