I've been chewing some more on Scot McKnight's June 11 post, "Spiritual Formation Forum," http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=2454. Great stuff. Scot writes:
"1. John thinks with the term “life” or “fellowship”: the light of God invading a person’s life so that they live in the light of fellowship and love.2. John’s primary category for spiritually formed people is “love God, love one another”: 1 John."
What about truth, Scot? The light of God invading a person's life not only is a light of fellowship and love, but also truth.
This is pretty simplistic, but once I went through John's gospel and epistles and just underlined "truth" in one color and "love" in another. I was amazed to discover just how many times those two concepts seemed to always within reach of one another in John's mind, as if there could be no love without truth and no truth without love. Could it be that John's primary category for spiritually formed people is love-truth? (cf. in John 17:17; 1 John 2:8 and 3:18; 2 John 3.)
Isn't truth-love also the point at which Jesus, Paul and John all three agree about spiritual formation? The Kingdom will be a place where God's will is done and that will is loving and true, because He is Love and Truth ( John 14:6; 1 John 4:8). The Church will be fellowship of the Spirit of Truth where the kingdom vision of Jesus is realized through the Spirit of Truth. (Jn. 14:17, 15:26, 16:13, 1 John 4:6). Finally, that Light that enables us to live in fellowship and love is full of grace and truth (Jn. 1:14, 16)
I wonder if it isn't easy for us to marginalize "truth" because
1) Moderns whittled down the concept so that it only referred to what is "objective--" verifiable by other knowers in time and space
2) we live and move in a postmodern culture that has seen how hollow that modern conception is and so despaired of "truth. " Instead, our world rushes to the opposite extreme and instead substitutes the purely subjective notion of "meaning" for truth.
At our best, we Pietists are always trying to strike the balance and not be carried away to the extremes. At one point in our history we needed to emphasize the Lord's "love" in order to witness to the kingdom vision. Might it not be time for us to become reacquainted with the Spirit of Truth and rehabilitate "truth" into our Christian vocabulary, in order to continue to live out our faithful witness to Jesus Christ? Or does being faithful to the mission He has given us require us to speak the language of the world, in which case "truth" will not be part of the lexicon?
These are tough questions and I don't know the answer. I am even less able to predict how they ultimately will be answered. I'm going to read Scot some more to see what he thinks. Meanwhile, what do you think?
2 comments:
I think the big problem is that we have such a hard time getting agreement on what "truth" is. This is particularly the case when we are dealing with unbelievers. As you point out, the modernist dogma is that truth= only that which is observable with the five senses and verifiable through repetition (the "scientific method"). As someone who works in the secular academy, I encounter this attitude all the time. Even mentioning the role of faith in discerning truth evokes (at best) condescension or (worse) outright scorn.
Even among Christians, while we agree on the ultimate truth of God's existence, Jesus' divinity, and the Holy Spirit's guidance in our lives, we are often at odds over the specifics of what the "true" way of worship should be. That is why I think we put so much emphasis on the love part. If we are willing to deal with one another in love, we can tolerate a little more of what we perceive as a misunderstanding of the truth part. As Sara Groves put it beautifully in one of her songs:
O love wash over a multitude of things,
Love wash over a multitude of things,
Jesus save us from a multitude of things
and make me whole.
welcome and thanks for your comments, Ted! (Wow, someone out there is actually reading this stuff?!!) God bless you and all the other Christians at the U of O who are quietly shining the light of Christ to those around you.
Sara Groves' song is indeed a beautiful reminder of 1 Peter 4:8,
"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins."
Isn't it also interesting that the other way Scripture says a multitude of sins can be covered is given by James:
James 5:20
"Remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins."
Genuine love--not sentiment--aims at truth; genuine truth--not faultfinding--aims at love. The center of the target is Jesus, Who as God is love, and as Son is Truth. If we are aiming for Him, we will not be able to emphasize one without the other.
So it seems to me that the Lord wants love and truth to work in tandem, not to be separated. We can't have love without truth; we can't have truth without love.
That's why I'm wondering if Scot's reading of John isn't somewhat forced. He seems to want to emphasize John's "love" and "fellowship" in order to balance out his hermenuetic of Jesus' "kingdom" and Paul's "church," but I wonder if this isn't dangerous for modern/postmoderns, who--as you have already noted, Ted-- have given up on the premodern notion of truth.
Post a Comment