Truth is not taken or grasped. It is received.
It is not seized in strength. It is received in humility. More than that, it is received in vulnerability and intimacy.
And, being received, it is still not possessed so much as it possesses… though even that is an insufficient image… because the Truth does not possess… it inhabits the depths of the one who receives it. More like a pregnancy. And pregnancy changes everything… your posture, your tastes, your chemistry, your social life, familial life, financial and emotional life… It changes everything. It seems to me that Truth… the Truth of God, always enters the world this way.
Then, with great effort and pain, we give birth to Truth. Truth is not passed along without some effort, some sacrifice and some pain. It is not like sharing a recipe or like (as some would equate truth-telling) giving directions. It is not data. It is a living thing.
But that is still not all. Because just as a woman must care for a child she has given birth to, we are responsible for the truth(s) we birth into the world: Who it is received by, how it is received and in what context. Because not everyone can care for a child or know how to handle one, just as not everyone can care for the Truth or know how to handle it.
I fear that much christian teaching is treated more like cursory information than like a pregnancy.. Which is why it seems that we are largely unchanged by the “information” we pass along.
That God exists is True, but it must be more than information…
That God lived among us and as one of us for a time must be more than information…
The teachings of Jesus during that time must also be more than information…
His death.. His resurrection.. must be more than information..
It must change us entirely. And only then, when our entire being and way of life is altered can the things we say about Him be the kind of Truth we mean when we say the word.
REALLY appreciate this metaphor, Justin. Having gone through a couple tough pregnancies, it makes an even bigger impact! Thanks for a better exposition/explanation than just “Show, don’t tell” where truth is concerned.
“Truth is not data”…love that and the imagery. Hope all is well.
But who’s Truth? , and as Jesus is Truth, which Jesus?
The Mormon Jesus, or the Muslim Jesus?
The Secular or Dan Brown Jesus?
or the 30,000 different shades of the Protestant Jesus?
One of the reasons I converted to Catholicism is that it was the only Church that seemed to know the historical and authentic Christ, because it was the only Church that still taught what He had asked. How many Protestant churches condemn divorce as Christ did in all four Gospels? And if logic has any relation to the Truth you wax poetic about, why would the Jesus base his church on a book in a time when few could read, and even fewer could afford a book (and when it would remain so for a century and a half?)
Sadly, a study of Reformation history will find it not based on truth, but on each reformers pride . . . and this goes on today as this or that faction splits and opens a new church at the abandoned 7/11 down the street.
Even sadder still is your use of the pregnancy metaphor, as I see most Protestant churches soon accepting abortion as a right, along with Gay marriage, just as they did with divorce and birth control.
Are you interested in Christ’s Truth? or personal dogma with a pretty Jesus mask?
A united Church as Christ prayed for is the only hope this decaying world has.