“What is Truth?”

John 8:31-36

 

Scripture:

31 Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." 33 They answered him, "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, "You will be made free'?" 34 Jesus answered them, "Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. 36 So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.

Introduction:

          For those of you who listen to Pop radio or pay attention to the R&B charts, you may have heard of the 21 year old artist Tinashe. Her debut album Aquarius has proven to be a bit of an oddity within this year’s R&B releases. In an interlude entitled, “What is there to lose” she asks the question, “What is reality? What is truth, if truth is subjective?” As the Brooklyn critic Meaghan Garvey suggested, this question can sound like a “dorm-room stoner koan.”[1]

          Pundits of all genres have notched countless publications, if not whole careers, to their resumes in the critique of such seemingly foolish questions. Many might believe that such thoughts are best left to the late-night haze of the dorm rooms of yesteryear. Yet, this question has plagued many. Philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Mathematicians like Kürt Gödel have changed the way academics think about the question. Likewise, in the 1950’s and 60’s we saw an outpouring of these sorts of ideas and questions beyond the doors of the ivory tower. First came the beatniks and then the hippies. For many, society seemed to be unraveling.

          At the heart of all of this was a fundamental question. “What is truth?” Many may believe that the answer is obvious. Many others have dedicated their lives to the study of this one question. When Pastor Mayra assigned me today’s text and topic, she gave something akin to both a blessing and a curse. I could not ask for a topic that intrigues me more. Yet, I also have to be honest with you. Humanity has been wrestling with the details of this issue for thousands of years. My efforts, here this morning, will be but a modest attempt to bring the significance and application of John’s thoughts on these issues into your hearts and minds.

          This sort of question is not something to be easily answered. Rather, like Jacob’s wrestling with God, this is a question to be tried and journeyed.[2] So it is with a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation that I approach you with today’s sermon. The topic before us is both lofty and academic, but also immensely practical. It is perhaps the question at the heart of all questions. So let us journey together with John this morning and see where the Spirit might be leading us.

What is Truth?:

 

          In the text we encounter this morning Jesus is speaking to “the Jews who had believed in him” (8:31). What follows is a progressive unraveling of what these followers believed. Rather than providing some smooth messages of assurance, Jesus rattles the perceptions and sensibilities of his listeners. He suggests that they are enslaved (8:32) – something they wholeheartedly want to reject (8:33). Christ’s point was that the whole world is enslaved to sin (8:34). Luckily, Jesus also adds a message of hope. Through the Son, who is Christ, we can find freedom from our entrapment, from our slavery (8:35-36).

          We also find that Jesus is making a big claim. "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (8:32). This phrase, “continue in my word” is more than the belief his audience had based upon his words. Jesus is now asking those who believe to ‘follow’ him (8:12) or ‘walk with him’ (6:60) in the sense of giving him their allegiance.

          So when we look at this passage, we find that Jesus is telling us some very important things. For one thing, humanity is being held captive. But that captivity is not the end of the story. Instead, God has sent a person who can break us out of that captivity. God has sent us the Truth.

          The fundamental issue at hand, when we look at this passage of scripture, is that God has sent Godself – in the form of the Son Jesus Christ – to liberate us from our captivity. And it is this captivity that limits us, chains us, and isolates us. When we ask, “What is truth?” in relation to this passage of scripture, we are also asking what is not truth?

          We find that sin and darkness are the opponents of Truth in this passage, but their meaning extends well beyond the lists of “You shall not’s” we find elsewhere. Instead, sin is “a state of alienation from God […] that precedes all human acts.”[3] Sin is the category in which the world exists apart from God – it is separation. People are naturally centered upon themselves and what they can perceive about their own worlds.

          It is this separation from God that enslaves us. It confines us to what we can see and makes us blind to the “signs” of God’s work that the Gospel of John makes such a big deal out of. But just as importantly, our separation of God is a separation from the Truth.

          If you remember, I quoted Tinashe’s question earlier. She asked, “What is truth, if truth is subjective?” In response I ask, “but what if Truth is not subjective?” By that I don’t mean to be snarky or critical of her question. I embrace it! Instead, I concede that OUR truths are subjective. Each of us is limited by our context, our limited range of experiences and knowledge. But God is not.

          God is all-knowing, and only God exists apart from the created order. So ‘absolute truth,’ beyond the boundaries of subjectivity, (beyond our human capacities) can only exist with God. Since God is the only one who exists outside of context, only He can be called Truth. This is what John means when we read words describing Christ as the “Word.” Christ is God’s plan of deliverance. Jesus came to bring us back into a relationship with God the Father.

 

Truth as Relational – God:

          So when we ask, “what is truth?” and reply that it is God, we are acknowledging that it is only through our relationship to God that we encounter ‘Truth’ beyond context, beyond subjectivity, beyond us. God’s truth can break through the confines of our limited perspective and bring us into the Kingdom of God, where new things are possible.

          In other words, when we lose track of our relationship to God, we limit ourselves and the work God can do through us. We frequently here lists about the problems of society from our musicians, artists, and poets. At points we all experience humanity as cold, hurtful, and selfish. Yet, amidst all the problems that face our human race, perhaps what we really need is a change of focus!

          We need focus less upon who we are, and more upon WHO GOD IS! We all know that we are limited and finite. We are each subject to the contexts of culture, ethnicity, health, family, language, and psychology. But God takes us beyond all of that. And that is Good News! I believe that the Truth, is to be found in one’s relationship to God. Only God can claim to be absolute truth, and as a consequence our relationship to truth comes through our relationship to God.

Truth as Relational – Humanity:

          When we lose track of our relationship to God, we begin to focus more upon what we can perceive – what we think. We start places people into the boxes we make with our heads. When we categorize people we often fail to grasp the significance of their experiences and context. In other words, we fail to be empathetic because we fail to get beyond ourselves.

          All the categorizes that make us different from one-another begin to pile up until we have completely dehumanized another person. This is often done unintentionally, but is often done all the same. When we let our differences pile up so much that we stop trying to even attempt to put ourselves in each other’s shoes, we have forgotten what is most important.

          We don’t have a grip on the Truth. It is not something we can control or mold to our will. Instead, when we place ourselves into discipleship, the Truth can take hold of us. God is the Truth, and through his help we can begin to see a bigger universe. The categorizes that confine us to our little dominions begin to disappear and we begin to see a whole human race crying out for help – longing for a savior, longing for something that can release us from our slavery.

           Some of you may remember the Five Man Electrical Band song, “Signs.” In it, the lyricist famously sings, “Long Haired Freaky People Need Not Apply.” The artists are referencing a hippies attempt to get a job. But as you can guess the long-hair and look the hippy carries make this difficult because they brought about an immediate judgment. Even little things like hair or clothing inhibit us from being able to walk a mile in another person’s shoes. These categories let us place people here or there, all the while diminishing from who those people might really be.

          We do this because we are small and we do not understand. But we have Good News. God is big! And God knows each and every one of us intimately. God has been there with you through every pain and trial. While other people may not always get it, God does. And it is perhaps from this empathy that God shows us, that we can begin to show empathy towards one another. We may not always understand what another person may be going through, but we can have faith in our God – who is the way, the truth, and the life. Through Him we can find our liberation.

Conclusion:

 

          Before I wrap up, I just want to summarize a few things. We are limited, but God is not. Instead, God is the absolute Truth. In God’s son Jesus, humanity is brought back into relationship with God and reborn. In earnest supplication we need to go to God each day with a prayer for empathy. We need to be reminded that although we often fail to relate to other people’s situations, God knows everything. Through His strength and guidance we can begin to go beyond the things that separate us from one another, and show the love that God has shown us to others.

 

Let us pray before we sing:

          “Lord, send out your light and truth among us. Let it lead us and bring us into a deeper commitment to you and to others. Let it soothe our souls and give us peace. In the name of you son, our Lord, Amen.”

---

[1] See: Meaghan Garvey, “Tinashe, Aquarius” on Pitchfork Reviews, www.pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19910-tinashe-aquarius/

[2] Jean-François Lyotard’s incredulity toward metanarratives is something to be embraced, rather than feared. It pushes us to recover the narrative character of the Christian faith, rather than understanding it a collection of propositions or ideas. Lyotard reminds us the confessional nature of our faith narrative. See: Jean-François Lyotard, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

[3] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. ii (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991-1998), 262-263.

Hope

"The ultimate reason
for our hope is not
to be found at all in what
we want, wish for and wait for;
the ultimate reason is that we . . ....
are wanted and wished for
and waited for."

–Jürgen Moltmann

The Seed Growing Secretly

A Quote From Karl Barth's Commentary on the Book of Romans

"They know the COSMOS to be theirs: they seek to find their rest in Nature and in History. But instead, with fatal necessity, they discover everywhere - their own unquiet."

Book List

I'm building a collection of books in a new genre of history sometimes referred to as Transference Studies, Reception History, or the History of Consequences. So far I have Ratner-Rosenhagen's "American Nietzsche" (Thank you babe!), George Cotkin's "Existential America", Martin Woessner's, "Heidegger in America", and Francois Cusset's "French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & CO. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States."

Future titles I'm hoping to acquire include:

Lawrence A. Scaff, "Max Weber in America"
James Ceasar, "Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought"
Richard Wrightman Fox, "Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession"
David Armitage, "The Declaration of Independence: A Global History"
Steven Biel, "American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting"
Carl Degler, "In Search of Human Nature"
Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau"
Sudarshan Kapur, "Rasin Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi"
Cynthia Eagle Rusett, "Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response"
Hofstadter, "Social Darwinism in American Thought"
Henry Jenkins, "Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture"
J. Rodden, "The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of 'St. George' Orwell"
Goetzmann, "The American Hegelians"

An Interesting Quote Regarding Correlational Models of Theology

"One of the concerns I have about the shape of the postmodern or emerging church is what could technically be described as a correlationist model. 'Correlation' refers to a theological strategy whose pedigree is distinctly modern. It operates as follows: beginning with a certain confidence in the findings of a secular discipline - whether philosophy, psychology, history, or sociology - a correlationist theology adapts this neutral or scientific framework as a foundation and then correlates Christian theological claims with the facts discovered by secular science. For instance, Bultmann accepted the neutral (supposed) facts of Heidegger's existential account of the human condition and then correlated Christian theology to fit this model. Or liberation theology took the findings of Marxist sociology as disclosing the scientific facts about human community and then correlated Christian theology with this "scientific" foundation. In every case, correlationist theology has a deeply apologetic interest: ultimately, the goal is to make Christianity intelligible or rational to a given culture (even if it operates on the assumption of a transcultural, neutral, objective reason). In the process, however, primacy is given not to the particularity of Christian revelation or the confessional tradition but rather to the poles of science, experience, and so on, which are taken to be neutral 'givens.'"

James K.A. Smith, "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church." (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 123-124.

Cartesian Certainty, A Problem?

"Figures such as Derrida and John D. Caputo rightly point out (and many who are part of the emergent conversation and very sympathetic on this score) that the modern Cartesian dream of absolute certainty is just that: a dream, and admittedly, one that has been a nightmare for those who have become victims to such rational confidence (colonized peoples, an exploited creation, etc.). And far too often, some version of Cartesian certainty has attached itself to particular religious expressions - the result is what we call fundamentalism - and engendered untold harm." ~ James K.A. Smith "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?" pg. 118

Some Brief Thoughts On Foucault

Through the course of his analysis, Foucault documents the formation of what he calls a "disciplinary society" - the primary goal of which is the creation of the individual - a "reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that [he has] called 'discipline'" (DP, 194). So the goal of a disciplinary society, and the institutions within that society, is the formation of individuals by mechanisms of power. Society makes individuals in its own image, and the tools for such manufacturing are the disciplines of power. Here Foucault adds an important provisio: "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes,' it 'represses,' it 'censors,' it 'abstracts, it 'masks,' it 'conceals.' In fact, power produces; it produces reality" (DP, 194).

Some Thoughts On The Relationship Between Power and Knowledge

Question: If power is knowledge, and knowledge is not power, does a pluralit of competing power machinations give rise to a higher probability of the discovery of transcendent truth? Is it possible that trans-epicurean presuppositional narratives are more abundant in societies that maintain a higher degree of competition? (Context: Foucault's “Discipline and Punish”)

Poetic Thoughts On History

The past has been a mint
Of blood and sorrow.
That must not be
True of tomorrow.

~Langston Hughes

A Christian Perspective On Postmodernism

“The church does not exist for me; my salvation is not primarily a matter of intellectual mastery or emotional satisfaction. The church is the site where God renews and transforms us – place where the practices of being the body of Christ form us into the image of the Son.” ~ Smith, James K.A.. "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church". Baker Academic. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 2006. pg. 30.

"...classical apologetics operates with a very modern notion of reason; 'presuppositional' apologetics, on the other hand, is postmodern (and Augustinian)! [...] The primary responsibility of the church as witness, then, is not demonstration but rather proclamation - the [...] vocation of proclaiming the Word made flesh rather than the thin realities of theism that a supposedly neutral reason yields." ~James K.A. Smith, pg. 28. 

An Interesting Perspective On The Church of The Holy Sepulcher

"At the center of the old city [Jerusalem] stands the Church of The Holy Sepulcher, reputedly on the sight of the original Calvary and the original Garden if the Ressurection. It stands, but only because ugly steel scaffolding permanently supports the walls inside and out. This church is one of the dirtiest, most depressing buildings in all Christendom. It should be torn down and rebuilt. This is not possible, however, because the Church of The Holy Sepulcher belongs jointly to the Abyssinians, Armenians, Copts, Greeks, Syrians, and Roman Catholics, and their priests will hardly speak to oneanother, let alone cooperate in a joint enterprise of rebuilding. Each communion preserves its own seperate chapel, and conducts its own ceremonies; and to make the situation ludacrous, the keys of the church have been entrusted to a family of Muslims who in order to answer the call of Allah five times daily, have turned the entrance into a Muslim Mosque. Nowhere in the world can you find a more tragic symbol of the mutilation of Christ's body than the Church of The Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem."


~Arthur Leonard Griffith, God's Time and Ours (New York: Abingdon Press, 1964), 83.

Dualism's Effect on North American Christianity

"With a sharper thrust but from a different angle, Peter Berger moves beyond the role of the clergy in the secularization of the world to the role of Protestantism as a whole. He concludes that in their preoccupation with 'otherworldliness' and in their emphasis on redemption as 'personal and individual,' Protestants unwittingly abandoned the arena of this world itself, leaving it a vacated venue. The 'New Jerusalem' became the place of focus for them, and this world was relinquished to secular causes and activity, In effect, with 'angels' no longer in this world, the astronomer and, indeed, the astronaut could now interpret space and time."

~Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us From Evil, 51.

Political Consequences of the Sophists

"It was the clear relativism of the Sophists, not the mystical insights of Plato, nor Aristotle's aspiration after the Supreme Good, which dominated the thinking of the classical Greeks in their decadence. The failure of the Greeks to find an enduring popular religious sanction for the order of civilization had been a main cause of the collapse of the world of the polis."

~Russel Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 93-94.

Social Commentary in Poetry

First dentistry was painless.
Then bicycles were chainless,
Carriages were horseless,
And many laws enforceless.
Next cookery was fireless,
Telegraphy was wireless,
Cigars were nictotineless,
And coffee caffineless.
Soon oranges were seedless,
The putting green was weedless,
The college buy was hatless,
The proper diet fatless.
New motor roads are dustless,
The latest steel is rustless,
Our tennis courts are sodless,
Our new religion-godless.

~Arthur Guiterman, "Gaily the Troubadour," from Gaily the Troubadour (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1936).

A New Kind of Man - Reconceiving Identity and Society in 1957

Norman Mailer predicted a new kind of man in the 1950's who would enter the arena of ideological conflict:

"He was the hipster, who knew from the atom bomb and the Nazi concentration camps that societies and states were murderers, and that under the shadow of mass annihilation one should learn... to give up 'the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,' to live in the moment, to follow the body and not the mind, 'to divorce oneself from society,' and 'to follow the rebellious imperative of the self,' to forget 'the single mate, the solid family, and the respectable love life,' to choose a life of 'Saturday night kicks,' especially orgasm and marijuana. For 1957, this was prophetic. It contained in a nutshell much of the self-liberation part of the cultural program of the sixties."

~Norman Mailer, "The White Negro," 1957. Quoted by Myron Magnet in The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow, 1993), 35.

Saint Augustine On The Interpretation of Genesis In Relation To Science

"Now, sobered by his own earlier speculations and by repeated contact with learned individuals of his own age, Augustine, while defending the need to interpret Genesis "literally" (as he defined the term), nonetheless had no patience with those who used the early chapters of Genesis to promote views about the natural world that contradicted the best science of his day:

'Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and the orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and the moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of the Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think that our sacred writers held such opinions, and to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the ressurection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].'"

~Mark Noll's quote of St. Augustine's The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1:42-43.

Biblical Literalism Quote

"A biblical literalism, gaining strength since the 1870s, has fueled both the intense concern for human origins and the end times." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 194.

Intellectual Giants of Christendom

"What J.S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Johnathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A.H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle's research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T.S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicaanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind - precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 138.

Evangelical Thought

"Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind , 55.


"In a culture that mounted a frontal assault upon tradition, mediating elites, and institutions, the Bible very easily became... 'a book dropped from the skies for all sorts of men to use in their own way.'" ~Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 182; the quotation is from John W. Nevin.

"The Keswick, "higher-life" movement ... also contributed to a reduction of interest in biblical theology and deeper scholarship. No Christian in his right mind will desire anything other than true holiness and righteousness in the church of God. But Keswick had isolated one doctrine, holiness, and altered it by the false simplicity contained in the slogan, "Give up, let go and let God." If you want to be holy and righteous, we are told, the intellect is dangerous and it is thought generally unlikely that a good theologian is likely to be a holy person ... You asked me to diagnose the reasons for the present weakness and I am doing it .... If you teach that sanctification consists of "letting go" and letting the Holy Spirit do all the work, then don't blame me if you have no scholars!" ~ Iain H. Murray, D. Marytyn Loyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith, 1939-1981 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990), 72-74.

"If that community's habits of mind concerning those things to which the community pays most diligent attention and accords highest authority - that is, to the Bible and Christian theology - are defined by naive and uncritical assumptions about the way to study or think about anything, so will its efforts to promote Christian thinking about the world be marked by naivete and an absence of rigorous criticism." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind , 130.

"Thus, when fundamentalists defended the Bible, they did so by arguing for the inerrancy of Scripture's original autographs, an idea that had been around for a long time but had never assumed such a central role for any Christian movement. This belief had the practical effect of rendering the experience of the biblical writers nearly meaningless. It was the Word of God pure and simple, not the Word of God as mediated through the life experiences and cultural settings of the biblical authors, that was important." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 33.

Sleep Now In The Fire

Just to clarify for some of my more conservative friends, I do subscribe to the ten principles of economics - including the relationship between a nation's standard of living and it's productivity (Principle #8). There is, however, principle #7 which deals with the positive market outcomes government can produce in relevance to property rights, market failure, externalities, and market power. Generally speaking, economically liberal (by this I mean economic liberalism, rather than political liberalism) economic policies enhance a nations productivity and thus its wealth. However, one might ask at what bright-line the trade-offs become too costly? What about social programs? The widows, the orphans, the disabled, the helpless. This can be a trade off. A larger pie is obviously a good thing, but at what cost? As with most things there is a balance to be played. 

Welcome!

Hello,

In case you haven't noticed this project has been my attempt to place all of the websites and database resources I use on a regular basis in one place. To that end I hope other people find it as convenient and useful as I do.

Thanks for dropping by.

KW