The Truth (capital T)

Craig Bob over at Out of Fellowship posted a podcast, Step Away from the Truth, that is spot on. Go and have a listen!

One major peeve of mine concerning the church is the truth thing. I can accept that there is one absolute truth out there, and it’s worthwhile pursuing it. What I postmodernisticly can’t accept is that we will ever fully grasp that truth. I interpret the truth in one way, and you interpret the truth in another way. There will always be a gap between different people’s views of the truth, and a gap between people’s views of the truth and the actual truth.

Take the bible for instance. Reading is an act of interpretation. The bible speaks differently to different people. But that’s not held true in a lot of churches. “You should not interpret the bible, read it as is”. There’s one officially sanctioned truth that everyone is expected to subscribe to.

The result of this is a monotonous state where people leave there brains together with their coats. If you question anything, you’re not questioning a viewpoint, you’re questioning the truth. You’re questioning God. And that’s not a good thing to do.

It’s not just the core that’s a guarded truth. It’s not just the deity of Jesus, or the cross thingy, or central themes like that. It’s also a slew of other issues, accumulated over the years, which you need to buy into. The tradition today’s churchianity rests upon plays a major part, probably more so than what the church cares to admit. It seems that the periphery is more important than the core most of the time.

The great benefit of that whole way of thinking is that it’s quite convenient. To have everything all figured out, is a great security blanket. You no longer need considering the hard questions. You just need to figure out how to best convince/convert others to share your beliefs.

However, at least for me, it’s quite a fragile state of living. You have to worry a lot about people taking away your security blanket. Since so many pieces are part of your absolute truth mosaic, threats to any of the pieces are threats to the whole mosaic, your whole belief system. That makes things like “The Da Vinci Code”, evolution, science, and questioning people scary.

When I stopped going to church my faith became gradually less black and white. I lost many of my holy cows along the way. I stopped being afraid of other people succeeding in tearing down my faith that I deep down knew I hadn’t fully questioned. A faith that was handed to me as a packaged deal. Buy one salvation, get a whole load of truths for free!

Doubt is highly underrated!