Letter #197: What is Truth?

No, Really — What?

My Dear Mr. Spencer,

As we consider the variations of the American revival, I think it’s important that we confront a paradox that keeps resurfacing in our discussions.

The paradox is this. On the one hand, we believe in tolerance toward different religious beliefs and find it best to be humble, rather than overly certain, in our orthodoxies. On the other hand, we believe that theological orthodoxies are necessary in order for our churches to provide a right relationship with God. After listening to the Unitarian Universalist minister deliver the sermon at my wedding, one of my hilarious brothers deemed it “The Church of Amorphous Rambling.” We agree, I think, that such a church won’t take us far. If God is real, and he is, then there are truths about him and falsehoods, just as with every other reality.

When Pontius Pilate wonders aloud, “What is truth?” we tend to take it as a token of his decadent relativism. But as with the question “What is a woman?” the answer may feel obvious, but is difficult, if not impossible, to put precisely into words. Statements of physical correspondence — saying “I am visiting New York,” when here, in fact, I am — hold up well enough everywhere but in Philosophy class. But when it comes to matters in any way less fleshy and immediate, we can find ourselves at a loss.

Such matters have engaged the minds of the greatest philosophers who ever lived, and it’s unlikely a writer of detective stories is going to suddenly stub his toe on the ur-stone of definitional precision. But I do think it’s important, when considering the truth of any church’s theology, to at least avoid ramifications that are absurd or cruel or both.

When, for instance, someone tells me that the profligate Jew is barred from salvation because he rejects the Christhood of Christ, I immediately imagine some five-year-old Jewish girl gassed to death by Nazi monsters. Will the Lord refuse her at Heaven’s Gate because she did not proclaim him? My imagination simply will not form that image. I do not think it’s so.

There is also the question of what effect an orthodoxy has on the living man. Many of the religious dictums governing sexual behavior make perfect sense to me on a societal and metaphorical level. It would be a better and more comprehensible world if only husbands and their wives conjoined. And yet, confronted with the reality of human passion, it’s hard to have much sympathy with finger-pointers and prigs. I doubt that God is one of them.

It seems to me clear that what the gospels are calling for is full immersion in the baptismal of our God-made humanity. Not stoicism exactly — Christ fell on his face and sweat blood at the prospect of death — but love, peace and joy through all the tragic vicissitudes of the world.

Maybe it would be best to start there and work our way back to theology.

Love, Mr. Dad