truth

a lot of smart people have contemplated and written about what constitutes truth, and done so well before my time. i'm not trying to add to that conversation - primarily because I haven't mastered what has gone before me. but for the little slice of reality that i call home (the conversation recently emerging from evangelicalism) - i would like to talk about the nature of truth.... not to hear myself talk, but because i think a conversation about this important.

for most of us in or recently coming from evangelicalism, we say "truth" and mean "facts" (like saying "worship" and meaning "music"). in practice - we never say the later and mean the former... probably because we indeed think or even know that truth is more than facts (and likewise, that worship is more than music...) it's just that we have so few instances of this occurring in practice. the church just doesn't worship without music and doesn't talk about truth without facts.

if we were to talk about truth without facts, we would discover a world that is larger and bigger and more beautiful than we could possibly understand/know/comprehend with facts alone. this is because any given fact is a subset of a given truth (like using words to represent a music performance). furthermore, the subset itself is an artificial construct / parameter which arbitrarily selects a portion of truth from the truth God created - (like language is to music).

for a while we viewed reality as concrete and unique in places. holy ground was understood to be very real - real in a cosmic sense. But to be holy ground, a given location would need to be understood as different from other locations around it, and also fixed.

It would be difficult to conceive of holy ground in the same way today - knowing as we do that our planet hurls through space at 67,000 mph while rotating at 1000 mph. once you've seen the earth rise over the moon, you just can't go back.

for a while we viewed reality as both concrete and amorphous. existing in an either. hung with a T-square. we wanted desperately to believe this. and for Newton, is was a breakthrough thought... that the gravity that holds us on earth extends to the heavens and holds the moon in place. That truth is the same everywhere.

It would be difficult to conceive of space in the same way today, knowing as we do that there is no "absolute" either... and about the holy marriage of space and time and resultant curvatures. this special relationship means that every thread of consciousness that traverses space-time experiences a unique path. indeed we understand that twins could experience radically different trajectories though time and that observers traveling in different directions but from the same location could perceive different causalities while observing a given event.

truth is the same everywhere (as far as we know). but facts do differ, based on your point of view... it's hard coded into the universe.

this isn't anti-truth. this is truth.
this isn't anti-christian. this is christianity.
this isn't anti-God. this is God's nature.
and these are things nobody is trying to deconstruct(!) ... things like;

Love God. Love Others. God is Eternal. and, Seek Him.