Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast as we continue our series throughout
this Lenten season on reflections of 2020,
some of the things that Michael and I have
spent a number of hours thinking about and talking about over the last year.
And tonight’s session is a little bit different in the sense that it coincides with some themes
we’ve already looked at.
There will be some of our tribalism or us versus them conversation that resurfaces tonight
as well as some of last week’s social media conversation as they play a role in tonight’s
topic, which is essentially this idea of,
we called it all or nothing,
but really it has something to do with how do we discern truth,
how do we participate in things that are truthful?
And as we have all been aware,
the battle over what is true,
what is factual, what is in air,
what is trustworthy, what isn’t trustworthy has been front and center in much of the last
year.
And it has been an interesting experience.
Our purpose tonight is not to argue for what is or isn’t true,
it is more to examine the
reality of how Christians arrive at truth and what we do with it and how we avoid participating
in things that aren’t true,
that things that aren’t accurate.
And so we may be a little all over the map tonight,
but I suspect at some point everyone
will resonate with something we have to say.
Yeah, it’s maybe hard to finely tune exactly the point that we’re speaking to today because
I think in many ways it is a convergence of a lot of different tributaries.
And what’s interesting is if you think about the thing that we talked about when we talked
about oppositionalism and tribalism,
what happens when you have information that is
highly specific to a particular group of people,
naturally what’s going to come with that is
assumptions about what is and isn’t true.
And the problem is that when you engage with only one of those sources,
now you begin to
make assumptions that others don’t make and then it’s hard to have larger conversations
about what is true in that information and what is not.
And then the same is true in that conversation about social media where when you find yourself in echo chambers,
it is very difficult to know the stuff that you haven’t been shown,
the stuff that you literally don’t even know exists out there.
And what makes Christians uniquely positioned to have this conversation,
Clint, is that we have a long history of wrestling with the nature of truth and how one arrives at truth.
And let’s be honest,
we have a checkered history as well.
We’ve not always done a spectacular job of sort of making that journey together,
but we have a long historically challenged,
fought for set of principles that I think might help
us as people of faith today to navigate in a world in which it seems that people are
increasingly buying all of one package instead of being able to thoughtfully and even spiritually
engage with the sort of different standpoints and perspectives that maybe exist today.
Yeah, make no mistake.
There have always been disputes and disagreements about what is true.
I think what maybe has prompted this conversation is that so many of those things in the last
year have been very large and very much in front of us.
The COVID-19 virus is dangerous.
No, it isn’t.
Wear a mask.
Don’t wear a mask.
Take this medicine.
Don’t take this medicine.
There’s racism.
There’s not racism.
This person won the election.
No, this person won the election.
And we have been through in the last year just a constant series of very big and very public
disputes absolutely contesting the truth of one side or another.
And that has put Christians—that’s not a new circumstance,
but it is, I think, a louder version and a more focused version of what has always been true.
And it has put Christians in—at times,
I think it’s put us in some difficult spots.
So a natural temptation of being human is that we are drawn to things that explain the
world around us, and all the better if those explanations are somewhat unique or special
to us.
We like the idea,
if we’re honest, if we’re going to practice a little bit of intellectual
humility, we kind of like the idea that we’re smarter than other people and that we can
see things that others can’t see.
And Clint has made fun of me for a long time.
It’s a joke around the office.
It has been that I enjoy watching Ancient Aliens.
And if you’ve ever seen the show in the History Channel,
it doesn’t deserve to be on the History
Channel.
There’s nothing historical about it.
It is almost farcical in how far out and fantacyical it is in the representation of history.
If something happened in history,
they find a way to explain it with aliens.
And as I say that, Clint, it’s striking.
You know the show I haven’t watched this entire year?
I don’t need ancient aliens to live in a world in which people believe that they can explain
everything with their secret knowledge and their secret understanding.
My point here is,
just to say, number one,
that as humans,
we are all on some level,
if we’re honest, tempted by the idea that we’re smart enough or unique enough that we
can see a thing that others can’t see that explains the world around us.
And we need to confess that in order to have a more rich conversation.
The second reason to say that is that Christians actually have a unique vantage to bring to that conversation.
We have in our own history engagements with similar kinds of things.
And we’re going to talk a little bit about one of those that we call Gnosticism.
Yeah.
We have all loved the idea of our personal truth.
People tend to believe that whatever I accept as true for me is true for everyone else.
And that my experience and my perception of my experience is kind of normative.
But in the early part of our history as Christians,
about the same time that Christianity is being
born, that Jesus is instituting this new method,
this new evolution of the faith,
there is developing alongside of it this thing called Gnosticism.
Gnostic comes from a Greek word,
gnosis, which means to know.
But the idea is this is secret knowledge.
This is spiritual knowledge.
This is not book knowledge.
This is the kind of revelatory knowledge that one would just know things.
And Christians and Gnostics had an interesting journey together because within Christianity
there develops very early a version of Gnostic Christianity that was less inclined to say
look to the Scriptures for evidence of things,
to look at the prophecy of the Old Testament,
for instance, and more inclined to trust this personal revelation that people would be given
or that this secret knowledge that would be imparted on the community.
And Christians and Gnostics had a very difficult time kind of working out their relationship
as they both came to Jesus with very different ideas of what truth meant and how one arrived at it.
Yes, so we’ll spare a larger biblical conversation though you can find in the Gospels,
particularly conversations around John,
you can find in the Epistles,
the writings of the Gospels,
when we read things like speaking in tongues and prophetic gifts,
Presbyterians probably need to do a little bit of work to engage with that.
But what’s behind some of that is what Clint is talking about,
this idea of the spiritual
connection with God.
Gnostics believe deeply that there was this kind of levels of spirituality and that accessing
those different levels was possible if one secured this secret knowledge.
And there was a sense in which the Gnostics like the idea of the secret community of the
things that happened behind closed doors and Christians who were a persecuted community
kind of got that they were meeting in tombs,
they were meeting in far from places for their own safety.
There was this kind of organic melding that you can see and there was a point where
Christians and Gnostics had to figure out are we the same or are we different.
And as that process happened,
Christians began to push back very strongly that revelation,
if it is true
revelation, if Jesus Christ is the revelation of the true God,
then that revelation by definition
is true for everyone.
And therefore it’s accessible by everyone that if you make your understanding
of truth something that can be contained in this sort of human spark,
then ultimately it couldn’t
possibly be of a universal all powerful God.
That’s too small of a view of God is what the
Christians ultimately came to decide.
But that is a very tricky sort of nuance to thrust into that conversation.
And it’s actually Gnosticism,
I don’t think you could say ever was completely
squelched or pushed out.
I mean, we’ve always had temptations of it in the faith
that’s popped up throughout history.
Yeah. And the difference becomes that Christians will
eventually argue that the Gospel,
the revelation of Jesus Christ is evident.
It doesn’t need decoding.
It doesn’t need secret knowledge,
that it is available and accessible
to all.
And if you were talking to a Gnostic and they would tell you, “Well,
we’re supposed to do
this,” and you would say,
“Well, what do you mean?” Or the Gnostic would say,
“This is true.” And you
would say, “Well, how do you know it’s true?” “I just know.
It has been imparted to me.
I don’t need evidence.” They arrived at truth through a very different path than,
say, the Christians who were seeking the Scriptures and looking to verify their experience and having conversations.
And what that creates in the Christian community is the idea that truth should be visible,
that truth should be defensible.
One did not simply stand on something and say it was true disconnected from
the community or other people’s experience.
There was a kind of commonality to truth.
It could be observed.
It could be showed.
It could be, in some sense, verified.
And I don’t mean proved.
I mean that you could look at it.
You could listen to it.
It would make a kind of sense.
There was a certain amount of reasonableness or rationalism to it as opposed to,
“This is true because I know it’s true.” And that sounds subtle,
but the starting point is very different and very
important as it pertains to the conversation we’re going to have.
So for now,
keep a hold of this
idea that Gnosis is secret knowledge that not everyone has and not everyone understands.
We’re going to do something very different with that in our conversation,
but that is a part of our Christian history.
Right. And so I think maybe one way to illustrate that is when Paul speaks
about the prophet prophesying in worship,
do you remember he says that there should be someone
who can verify that prophecy,
this idea that just because you stand up and other these words of God
does not mean that that should be accepted as the community without someone who can come and say
that I verify I have heard the same or that we see that in the scriptures themselves,
this idea that a truth should be submitted to this community.
And I think that’s a significant turn here.
It’s going to be picked up in Christian history by different thinkers,
and it’s going to be fleshed out in other ways.
But I think that is a fundamental building block of what makes Christian theology Christian
and not Gnostic is that fundamentally,
the Gnostics are tempted by the idea of individualism.
It leads you to this place where you say,
well, I have the secret decoder ring.
And if you had my ring,
then this would be plain and evident to all Christians say no,
no, no, no, no.
God’s revelation
is true and therefore evident to all of God’s created beings.
So therefore,
revelation is by definition, communal.
And if you accept that is true as Christians as Orthodox Christians have,
that actually presents a whole new slate of problems.
Because now you got to talk about,
well, what do you do with variances in perspective or different understandings?
What do you do with
the conflicts that come from humans and community?
Some of that we’re going to deal with in this conversation.
But so it doesn’t make it easier claim.
That’s the point I want to make that
that reflecting that revelation must be evident,
that truth must be engaged in the community,
does not make it easier as you work it out.
In some ways, it’s easier than just say,
I had the decoder ring.
And if you had the decoder ring,
you’d agree with me.
That’s easier.
But that’s not the Christian way of engaging with what’s true.
Yeah.
And often in those situations when,
from a Gnostic perspective,
the most dynamic, the loudest voice tends to end up winning the argument.
Not the best case,
but the one who
makes it the most forcefully.
So I want to put Gnosticism on the shelf.
Just hold on to that in
the back of your mind that we have this part of our Christian history.
And I want to jump
forward several centuries to a man that you probably heard of,
John Calvin, in some ways,
many ways, theologically at least, the father of the Presbyterian Church.
And John Calvin had
within his theology this idea that he called or that has been called the life of the mind.
And essentially, to try and summarize that,
Calvin argued that Christian people ought to be thinking people.
We ought not separate ourselves from the ideas of the world.
We ought to engage in them,
whether they be medicine or whether it be history or whether it be science,
that Christians are to be people who,
inspired and shaped by the truth of Christ,
engage the ideas of the world and look for facts.
And some Christians have gone other directions in that.
There are Christians who have said, “Look,
the world is dangerous and we should separate ourselves from it.” That is not our heritage.
Our heritage is one of connection,
of engagement.
Our heritage is one that says,
“God has given us this incredible ability to think and there ought to be thinking Christians
at every nuance and in every place in the world,
in academies, in universities,
in hospitals, that the people of Jesus Christ are to exercise the gift of thinking and to use it in benefit to
the world and to pursue the broader truth for all people of Jesus Christ.
And that’s rooted in the
ultimately when God created everything,
God is the sole arbiter of what is true.
That ultimately everything there is to discover is already God’s intellectual property.
That when God speaks,
we just see the reverberations of that speech.
So anything that we see rightly is in some way a
reflection of God.
This is tempered by John Calvin’s understanding of human fallibility
in sinfulness.
In other words,
what God has made is evident.
That’s not necessarily followed that
we always see it and understand it because we are seeing through glasses that are cloudy.
We don’t see rightly because of our own inner brokenness,
but yet whatever we do see truly is a reflection
of God and whatever we see is coming from the grace of God.
And this has actually lived out
in the symbology of our family of the faith.
When we wear robes in worship,
that harkens back to
a time when Calvin wore his academic robes.
It was for him,
not really, it was used in worship,
but it was a civic symbol of a thinker,
of someone who engaged with the world deeply.
Because for Calvin,
whatever we thought of that was true was bringing glory to the God who created that truth.
So our tradition sort of lacks some of that suspicion of exploration,
some of that fear
that we might get into a place that’s murky and dark.
Calvin doesn’t have that suspicion or fear
at all.
He has no anxiety that we’re going to discover something that unravels God because
Calvin completely 100% believes that God is the creator of all things,
that anything that we find
could only draw us closer to that creating God.
And so I do think as Reformed people,
if we can live into the best of that, Clint,
we can engage in conversations with a kind of freedom that
certainly some in the secular world may struggle to do,
but even some Christian families might
struggle to do.
We could enter if we are living into the best of our family of faith,
the heritage of our faith.
We could walk into some conversations and ask questions and just say, “Hey,
I don’t know where this question is going to lead us,
but do you mean that or should we think that?”
And we can trust that God will lead and guide us by the power of His Spirit.
When we proceed on the assumption that all truth is God’s truth,
we historically have felt
no need to be afraid of engaging the idea of complexity.
Again, there are other families
within the faith tradition that really have a difficult time with complexity.
Say something like the creation question.
Well, it says it in the Bible that it uses the word “day.” That means
“day.” The Reformed family.
And the downside is we have been accused of occasionally being more worldly,
but the upside is we have been able to navigate some of those conversations and the complexity
in them and say,
“Look, we’re not sure that the point of that story is a 24-hour reference.”
So that allows us to bring to bear a system that handles complexity and faith
at our best pretty well.
That’s something we do well when we live up to it.
That’s important
because—and this is why we’re having this Christian history lesson—that’s important because we have
found ourselves in this time—and this harkens back to our us versus them conversation—we found
ourselves in this time where a dividing line is drawn on some issue.
And then the idea is that the
only options are A and B,
that things are binary,
that this is good or bad,
and that that’s all—there
is racism or there isn’t racism.
COVID is dangerous or it isn’t dangerous.
And we have struggled in
these moments to find middle ground where we say, “You know,
it’s actually way more complicated
than that.
This is not a simple thing.” And that is where we should land.
And as Presbyterians, we should be comfortable there,
but we have to acknowledge that we live in a world that for
various reasons finds it preferable to just simply say,
“You have this side and this side,
and there’s no middle ground.” And as that middle disappears in our public speech,
it becomes more difficult to stand in that place as faith people.
I was having a conversation with someone—we were not even halfway through the year,
and they were reflecting on their soul tiredness in trying to ascertain what is true and what isn’t
true.
And they confessed,
“I don’t have the energy to do it anymore.
I don’t know.” And that has,
I think, been a very widely shared experience in this time,
that trying to live in the midst of
complexities while sides are shooting across very deep trenches is wearying.
It is hard to stand
trying to tease out nuance and trying to have conversations when the conversation partner wants
nothing but for you to just listen to what is true.
And you say, “Well, I understand that you
believe it, but I’d like to talk about your assumption behind it.
I’d like to talk about
how we got there.
I wonder what you would say if someone else reflected on this aspect of their
experience.” What would you say to that?
And there’s a kind of wearying-ness that has come
in this season to do a thing that I think as Presbyterians should come relatively natural to
us, but we would be foolish to think that the culture,
the conversation, the tenor of the world
and the nation in which we presently live doesn’t come with us to our faith formation,
that it isn’t reflected in our desire as people to worship God,
to pray, to praise,
to seek out what we believe is
spiritually true, what is ultimately true,
with a capital T,
true.
And I think one of the things
we need to return to is really the fundamentals of what makes us strong as a family of the faith,
and that is ultimately a non-anxious,
humble presence before an almighty God to say,
“We are here to learn,
to confess our weakness and our bias in all of its senses,
and then to seek to
learn and grow as a community in the thing that is true.” And that,
it almost sounds far-fetched.
It sounds like it sounds in this moment like a dream world that couldn’t possibly exist,
but that is what we’re called to,
and we do have some deep resources,
I think, to draw from as we seek to live into it.
Yeah, and I want to be clear that Michael and I are not suggesting that this is a correct
interpretation of the moment we’re in.
What we’re saying is that as we have had conversation,
we have wrestled with these ideas,
and we find a couple of these things in our history helpful.
So the situation as it appears is that you have a moment with a lot of stress in it,
you have a moment that is tribal in the sense that people have, for whatever reason,
increasingly been drawn to the idea of us versus them.
You have a great deal of rhetoric about they and we,
and you couple that with the primary expression of people’s opinions being for nearly
a year on social media platforms,
which are by default designed to bring me the information
I’m interested in and to essentially prove that I’m right.
In other words, they are always going
to be showing me evidence of what I already believe because that’s how social media works.
And if you haven’t seen that conversation,
you might want to pause this one or after this one,
go back and watch last week’s.
But social media is designed to do that.
So I have this constant
reinforcement of the idea that I know the truth and that they don’t.
And this moment is just
fraught with opportunities to jump on board with that.
We don’t go through a day without somebody
posting something in our feed or sending us an email that makes us go,
well, that doesn’t seem right.
I have a person in my life I’m close to,
and I won’t go into the details because it doesn’t
matter and we don’t need to stir all that stuff up.
But let me just say that they are convinced of something as true.
And when I have tried to engage in conversation with that,
tell me about that.
What about this?
Did you read this?
Where did you get that?
The refrain more often than not has been,
I know it.
I just know it,
which is Gnosticism.
I mean, it’s not religious Gnosticism,
it’s cultural Gnosticism, but it is this expressed thing that despite all evidence to the contrary,
despite anything that might contradict my place,
I am unwilling to move because I know the truth.
Regardless of anything else you could say or do or show me,
I already know the conclusion,
and therefore I don’t need that.
And it’s a very strange thing to realize,
“Oh, this is a 2,000-year-old pseudo-Christian philosophy.
How did it show up in the 20th?
Where did this come from?” But I think it’s a helpful framework to ask some questions.
Yeah, I think there’s a couple things there,
Clint.
One is that we are tempted to simplify
very complex things when we really don’t understand them.
This has been a consistent
trend in my life.
The things that I look at and think,
“Well, good grief, that’s easy,” is a thing that every time I later learn,
I knew nothing about.
The more and more that you learn about a thing,
it becomes far less simple.
In fact,
the more you learn about a thing,
the more complex and nuanced it becomes, right?
And so as you make this journey forward in
knowledge, I think that is an immediate sort of spiritual checkup for all of us.
In every area,
I think the one that’s maybe pressing and comes quickest to most people’s mind is the news that
you read and the stuff that you believe about what’s happening in the world.
But this applies in a much broader area,
and I want to make that clear.
This is about what we believe about our
family members, about their motivations.
Do we know that that’s their motivation?
Have we actually engaged with them in conversation about that,
or do we assume it’s true?
This is as applicable
in our places of work that the people who are leading,
that they’re out to get us instead of
that maybe they have a different advantage than we have,
right?
This is far more extensible than just
what news you watch and what assumptions you make about the world.
But the truth is,
if you see something and the impact to you is just so plainly obvious that anyone else who didn’t see
the same thing would be a fool,
that may be a place to pause and to question.
That’s not to say that
there aren’t things that are true,
that others, as they have come to different conclusions,
that if you sorted it all out,
that that’s the wrong conclusion.
That’s not the point.
The point is,
it says something about who we are and how we arrive at truth.
If we believe that something
that is nuanced and complex and far beyond our ability to simplify in a few short thoughts,
if we think that is simple,
that’s a sign that it’s a place that maybe we have begun to rely
on the decoder ring of understanding our world instead of this incredibly all-powerful,
complex, nuanced creation made by God that we are unable to understand in God’s fullness.
God is, by definition, mysterious.
And if we can simplify the world that God made and we can understand it
and others can’t, that’s not a good sign.
Very early in the pandemic,
I read a book called
The Death of Expertise,
and it makes the case,
and it was not related to anything that then happened in 2020,
but it makes the case that one of the unhelpful side effects of our social media
culture is that it has created a confidence in us that we often don’t deserve,
that we read an
article about a thing that has thousands upon thousands,
and that we take a side in debates
that are happening among PhD scholars who have spent decades researching a thing.
And we come into that armed with our Facebook article and our Google search,
and we feel like
that’s an even conversation when the reality is we would likely not understand a great deal of the
depth that it would take to have a real opinion on that subject.
But because we live in this little
bubble of social media and of the information that is narrowed to my perspective,
we often feel like I have a right to weigh in on this.
And it’s a fascinating phenomenon.
It’s a pretty good
book.
It’s not a great book,
but it’s a very interesting premise.
And I suspect that we have
all seen that.
I think all of us have seen people with essentially no medical background
weighing in on medical issues.
We’ve seen people with no legal constitutional expertise weighing
in on constitutional matters.
And all we’re doing is parroting something that we heard somewhere
and trusting somehow that that must be right because it sounds right to us.
In other words, I know it should be that way.
I have gnosis,
and I like it,
so it must be true.
And this is the
point at which as pastors,
we have to say that as people of faith,
there need to be some steps between those places.
There needs to be some humility.
Before the email gets passed on,
before the Facebook post gets posted,
we owe it to our faith and our tradition and this idea of
the life of the mind to understand that most things in a complicated world are not as simple
as we’d like them to be.
And when we fail to look for and understand the complexity in any given
issue, and I don’t care what it is,
that we are not living up to the invitation of Presbyterian
heritage to be people with deep and thoughtful approaches to their faith and their world.
Yeah, and if I could,
I want to speak to just a moment about truth and what Christians
understand truth to be.
I think we sometimes put too much emphasis on one of the sides of truth.
Truth is propositional.
What I mean by that is,
we have statements and creeds and things that we
say these things are true.
Christians spent, if you followed us in some of the arguments of the
faith podcast that we did,
things like the Trinity,
the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ,
these things are,
we have made propositional statements that this wording of that thing
matters if you’re going to understand it rightly.
That said,
we sometimes underestimate the
absolute importance and essential quality that truth is also relational.
And what I mean by that
we forget that this fundamental claim of our Christian faith,
that Jesus Christ is fully God
and fully human, is incarnate.
What that means is that what Jesus not only said,
which we emphasize,
but also what he did and how he lived and how he literally displayed,
that’s why we use the word revealed.
How the truth of God was seen in the reality of his life.
That is truth with a capital
T.
He is truth.
And when we boil truth down to be only propositional,
it becomes something very
tempting for us to own and control ourselves.
Because if truth is only propositional,
then you can write a book that contains it.
But even the scriptures,
I think the gospel writer,
John’s a great example,
the gospel writer literally says,
I’ve included in this the stuff
that you need to know to have faith.
But if all of the truth of Christ was to be written,
it couldn’t be contained in all of the books of the world.
That’s the sentiment that we need to
remember is that ultimately truth is relational because it’s always rooted deeply in the person,
revealed person of Jesus Christ.
And so that has implications as implications for how we understand truth,
truth.
And let’s relate this to our normal sort of human experience.
We know that for every
person in our life,
including the ones that were closest to our spouses or children or siblings,
these individuals, though we know them intimately well,
we know that there’s parts of them we don’t get.
Every human being is beyond the ability to capture in just a book or a propositional statement.
So much more true in Jesus Christ,
who is even beyond our ability to comprehend as merely
human.
He’s God taken on flesh.
So as we then come to the idea of truth,
we must recognize even as we
have some simple statements,
Jesus is fully God and fully human,
what Christians mean by that simple
statement is not a shallow implication.
It’s that there is an unbelievably deep sea of mystery
that we are barely capturing with just a sliver of poetry in our words that the real truth,
if it is to be held,
is the person Jesus Christ.
And I think that is essential and important,
Clint, because that resists our ability to own and possess and to hold truth from others.
Jesus Christ
is revealed and so therefore anyone who sees him has access and anyone who seeks to help us discern
what is true must turn to Christ and Jesus Christ must be the central interpretive place for us to
find truth or we’re going to miss it.
And I think that we do have a significant amount of guidance
from our scripture there.
If we look at public conversation as an extension of our own voice,
we have a great deal of caution about what do we say,
how do we say it?
Does this need to be heard?
Does this need to be passed on?
Is this gossip?
Can this be verified?
There’s a great deal
in scripture about how we speak and how we use our voice.
You can look at the book of James.
There’s several sections in Paul.
The idea of how Christians communicate and how we speak in
our context, both verbally and digitally,
I think is well attested in scripture.
There is a lot in
there that should give us some guidance and give us some pause.
Michael, you and I have talked
about this a thousand times.
One of the most frustrating and depressing moments for me is
whenever I receive an email or see a Facebook post that will have something clearly not accurate in it.
The heaviness of that for me is that someone has posted that with the very tool they could use
to check it.
It would take 10 seconds of inserting a step before posting to simply say,
“I want to make sure that I’m not participating in something that may not be accurate.
Let me look that up.”
Again,
I know that we’ve talked in social media.
A lot of times verifying would bring me what I want to know.
But with a little bit of effort,
and we’re not talking a great deal of effort,
with a little bit of effort,
one could easily say,
“That is suspicious enough that I don’t think I
want my name associated with it.
I don’t think I want to pass that on as something I believe
because it’s not yet clear to me that it’s accurate.” And if Christians would do nothing else than that,
we could have a great deal of impact in public conversation.
We should, as people of Christ,
strive never to have something untrue come from us.
Now, is that an attainable goal?
Likely, it isn’t.
But it should be our goal nonetheless.
I don’t want to put out in front
of people something that isn’t true.
I’ve done it.
I’ve done it in sermons.
I’ve used illustrations that I turned out were not accurate.
I’ve quoted things wrong.
It happens.
I understand that it happens.
But my goal as a Christian ought to be that in the public space of the world,
I am not going to try.
I am going to try not to be affiliated with something that I cannot prove
to be true or that I cannot accurately depict.
And also, that demands the humility of saying,
“Okay, I’m not sure I get all the nuances of this conversation.
Maybe I should listen first and then
speak,” which is also scriptural, by the way.
Yeah, and I think that speaks to another very practical implication,
and that is that Christians should resist doubling down.
And I’m about to say
something.
I don’t know if it’s true.
So check me if this is right.
But when I think of the phrase
doubling down, I’ve not done the etymological research of that phrase.
So this could be
completely wrong.
But I think of it as being associated with the idea of gambling,
that when a thing’s not going well,
you double down.
You go all in more so that it might turn out well in
your favor.
And if that’s true,
which it might not be,
but if that’s true,
we would, as Christians, never want to associate the pursuit of truth with a gamble,
with the idea that,
“Well, I might be right,” and so I’m going all in on this idea whether it’s right or not.
Christian humility demands that we recognize that because the mystery of God’s revelation is so beyond our human
capability to fully understand that when we hear something that makes us think a lot,
that doesn’t seem right.
Instead of doubling down on the thing that we already believe,
we must practice the
humility to step back and say,
“Hey, listen,
God is so much bigger.
I may be missing a part of this,
and I need to double check this.” Now,
is that always going to result in you saying, “No,
I was
because if all of us double down on everything all of the time,
there will never be the kind of
communal conversation that is required.” And by required,
I mean not just scripturally required,
but historically required.
The church has always pursued truth in community by conversation and
the struggle that happens in it.
And in our lifetimes,
for some of us,
there has never been
a time in our life where we’ve experienced the kind of struggle that we’re having right now
to have those difficult conversations,
but that’s not just a good idea.
It’s an essential nature of
how Christians have pursued truth.
We have done it together,
and so we have to trust that the God
who calls us by grace is going to give us the courage and strength that we need to continue
you to do that work because that is a fundamental core proposition that Christians have always
relied upon, that God does not just speak to one who then disseminates to all,
but that God gives
and that we together discern truth as a community.
Yeah, and to try and merge the various threads of this conversation,
I think as we speak into the world,
it is incumbent upon us to ask some questions.
Is the thing that I’m sharing true?
Can I verify it?
Have I explored it?
Do I understand enough to know if it’s true or not?
Those are not easy questions,
but they’re important questions.
And if I find myself driven back to the idea that I just know it,
well, I don’t know what
other people say about it.
I don’t know what studies show.
I don’t know what research looks
like.
I just know it.
Then I think we have to be very,
very cautious about using the word truth.
Now, if you want to slap opinion on it,
perhaps that’s better.
I still say that the Christian
approach is probably to remain silent instead of participating in falsehood,
but I’ll leave that
to you to navigate.
The second and most important question is,
this thing that I’m about to say or spread,
does it serve the cause of Jesus Christ?
Is it a reflection of my faith?
Not my political allegiance, not my opinion on this,
not my thought on that.
Is this a reflection of who I am and who
I’m called to be in Jesus Christ?
Is it helpful to anyone?
Is it honest?
Is it accurate?
Those are all questions that I think we have to wrestle with.
If we’re going to live up to our tradition,
be thinking people of faith who use both heart and mind well in the service to Jesus Christ
and who do so in this public sphere that we all inhabit now in the 21st century.
I’ll just be honest.
This is not scolding,
but there are many,
many Christians, I think, who need to perhaps think that through.
I think that is not a thing that portions of our church
family, and I mean the large church, not Presbyterian church,
portions of our Christian
family are struggling with that right now.
I think that 2020 has shown me at least,
and in our conversations,
I am convinced that’s a thing we need to do better.
I think my last word here,
Clint, is that there’s some good news in the history that the Presbyterian Reformed family
has carried with us,
and this has been one of the most fundamental good news for me in our church
family.
I didn’t grow up Presbyterian,
and what I found in this family was a sure,
confident trust
in the almighty God.
And I grew up with some real anxiety and concern that there were some pillars
that if that pillar got knocked out,
it was all or nothing,
that if that thing fell,
my faith would crumble, that everything would just be dissolved to dust.
And friends,
let that anxiety be
rid from our hearts,
because ultimately,
we’re reminded by those who have gone before us,
the saints of the faith,
though that’s not language we maybe as Reformed people use very
often, but those thinkers,
those faithful men and women,
they have reminded us God is big enough
that if we’re wrong about anything,
right, if you’re wrong about that thing that you said on
Facebook, or that thing that you believed your entire life,
or that thing that your parents
taught you, or if you were wrong about the thing you just read in the newspaper and you have an
opinion about, does not matter.
If you’re wrong, the universe will not collapse.
Why?
Because it is God who is true.
And any truth that we have is a gift given to us by grace.
But we do not need to
live a world where it’s all or nothing.
The only all that matters is God.
And the only nothing that
we should fear is a life that is not lived in God.
So friends, let us live in that hope and trust,
and if you can,
all of the anxieties and fears and tribalism and echo chambers,
that begins to fade away.
It’s not less important,
but it fades in the presence of a God who is everything.
And I think we should remember that.
One of the things that I try to teach,
having learned the hard way
to couples that are about to get married,
is that if you have to hurt your spouse
in order to prove you’re right,
you’re not.
You may be correct,
but you’re not right.
Because right from a Christian perspective always also involves how we are connected and how we relate to other
people.
Because Christ calls us to love everyone,
even and maybe especially those that we consider
enemies or disagree with.
Now, if that is true,
if you are wrong when you are correct,
imagine how much worse it is to do damage when you’re incorrect,
when you haven’t understood
the fullness of a thing,
or when you haven’t stopped to look for layers instead choosing this
worldly black or white A or B scenario,
which is almost never helpful.
It just rarely is the right
way to frame things.
And so as we’ve come through these moments together,
I think there will be
lots of opportunities for follow-up conversation about the nature of truth and how Christians
participate in public conversation.
I think that will be something we need to continue to work on
as a people of faith as we go forward from these moments.
We’ll have a small version of that here
in a few minutes at seven o’clock.
You’re welcome to jump on the live portion of this conversation
that you’ll find in the description of the videos or on the email links that have been sent to many
of you.
If that’s something you’re interested in,
if you want to follow up on some of this,
or maybe you have questions about something we’ve covered tonight,
we’d love to continue the topic with you.
Thanks for being with us for this conversation.
It’s not an easy conversation to allow to form
within us because it requires us to practice some difficult spiritual discipline,
some humility,
some recognition of our own place,
and some of our own temptations of presentation to others,
and all of the things that are present.
But friends, I do think if we humbly submit to God,
we will find more than the help that we need to walk through these seasons together.
Thanks for listening.