The message about community this week brought up some interesting questions around truth and how it interacts with community. Ultimately I think that the modern idea of an objective, absolute truth that can be defined or can exist disconnected from relationship is at best incomplete.
Here are a couple great excerpts I used this weekend, from an article by the late Stanley J. Grenz.
[The only way to] answer our question is to invite us to participate in the truth. We will never come to know Jesus is the Christ unless we take the step of participating in what Jesus embodies. To know the truth, we must respond personally to the Master’s invitation, “Come and see.”
[We] are less impressed with well-reasoned arguments that supposedly prove the rightness of our claims to truth than with the life of a truth embodying community. Consequently, when viewed from a postmodern perspective, the final answer to Pilate’s question [what is truth?] lies in the fellowship of the disciples who live in the light of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus.
Great quotes. Thanks!
Len Sweet covers this topic in a manner that blew my socks off and opened my eyes to ‘Truth’ in a whole new context in his book “Out of the Mystery and Into the Question”. In it, he says many things on Truth – but the biggest thing that has stuck with me (and I think I”ve only read to about page 100) is that Truth is not absolutes (right vs. wrong) as much as it is found in authentic and genuine relationship. To me, this makes Truth to be the ‘realness’ of who I am brought into the presence of the ‘realness’ of who you are. Like ‘someone’ I still respect said – “All of me with All of God in All of life” … That is Absolute Truth. And when I bring ‘all of me’ into relationship with ‘all of you’ … therein lies Truth as well.
I was not at the Sunday PM celebration … sounds like I missed a good one. Mind you, they’re all good ones!