Relative Truth

Doodle of the cabin at Lake Summerset

I’ve been on a truth journey lately, examining my ideas of Truth and seeing how they match up with what Jesus taught about the subject and how to apply it me. Truth is a slippery thing at times. It reminds me of Einstein’s theory of relativity wherein time and space bend relative to our perspective, or where we are situated historically and geographically.

It is not that time is changing, it isn’t, or that sound waves are changing, or gravity is changing, but how we experience it changes according to where we are situated. 

I have come to believe that the closest we will ever find to absolute truth in our daily lives will never be discovered in a set of do’s and don’t, or spiritual formulas, but rather through an example of Jesus’s life. 

Anytime Jesus wanted to explain a big umbrella truth, he used stories. Stories are way harder to pin down, and I think that is exactly the point. We want so badly to pin things down. Rules, lists of spiritual practices, lists of consequences, etc etc. 

But truth can’t be pinned down. Principles—love your neighbor as yourself, give to those who ask, turn the other cheek—are principles of a way to live, but there’s precious little in the way of pinning these principles down exactly—do we give 10% as a tithe? Is that mandatory? What if we write a check but never get to know the real people who do need the check but also need human interaction? Can we give to everyone all of the time, when would we work, how would we feed ourselves or our families? Is sex outside of marriage always wrong? Is divorce wrong? All the time? Is homosexuality wrong?  

Hunting down specific do’s and don'ts in the Bible is silly. The Old Testament is chock-a-block full of stuff in opposition to what Jesus taught and that no one in their right mind would try to follow to the letter. 

 I know the arguments: stoning and ceremonial rituals of food and cleanliness (for example) were part of the Old Covenant. Sort of a preliminary set of rules for helping humans not give in to their basest impulse (the Ten Commandments for example). With the New Covenant, the old is finished and the Gospel of Jesus is ushered in. 

But we still try to slip them in if we find it convenient and we also try to find rules and lists in the New Testament.  But, we cherry pick them according to the current culture. Try excommunicating all the divorced people in today’s congregations! 

Paul says that women shouldn’t speak in church or teach men, but for a few hundred years the church has had women teachers in the missionary fields preaching and teaching to grown men—this certainly says as much about the inherent racism in the Church as adult people of color were relegated to children as it does a loophole for extenuating circumstances.

Paul says women shouldn’t braid their hair. But hair braiding is the epitome of wholesome hair styles in the last few centuries; think Little House on the Prairie. I was always taught that Paul is saying women shouldn’t dress like prostitutes as supposedly prostitutes in his time braided their hair. This is all silly. Hair styles, clothing styles, are in constant flux. 

Case in point: I admire many things about the Anabaptist lifestyle, but the idea that clothing or technology from the 1500s is particularly godly is silly at best. They’re not dressing like Jesus and Mary did after all. So, how is the 1500s special. Not.  (I know there are differences between Amish and Mennonite for example, in clothing and technology, but the principle is the same.) It seems to me that the point of all the rules in Anabaptist communities is NOT godliness but rather a way to stay separate from the prevailing culture. Many of the Old Testament laws were, I believe, also written for this purpose and this purpose alone. 

But as much as we fight against them sometimes, we like rules. We like anything that designates our place in the group, in society and rules help us control the society. These can be life-giving (stop at stop lights,) or horrifically life-denying (ex. The war on drugs singling out of black people to incarcerate at obscene levels and handing out equally obscene sentences.) 

But Jesus really didn’t care about Sabbath rules or associating-with-sinner rules. But, on the other hand, there were no woman in the inner circle of his disciples. Was this a rule, or a concession to the times? He didn’t speak out specifically against slavery, against rape, against child molesting, about domestic abuse?

Or did he? There are only 2 rules he said, Love God and love your neighbor (who he went on to explain were the outcasts of good society.) Two “rules.” In fact, two principles from which we can judge ourselves and others. Only those two matter, but extrapolating them into how we should live, leads us to the scary world of knowing our own hearts and the darkness and light within us. 

It leads us into truth, as much as we can see anyhow, of who we are, what we are afraid of, what we truly love, and what we believe about ourselves and others and our and their place in this world.