True Truth - Part 2

In the last posting I described a student encounter during which he objected not to the content of my gospel presentation.  Rather he objected me making any truth claims about religion at all.

It struck me then, and has proven true since, that what was missing in this student and in many others was any personal experience of true religious conviction. If one only experiences religious ideas as opinion arrived at by the shallow exercise of personal preference, then one lacks the ability to imagine that someone else's religious ideas are constituted in a different way. The starting assumption is that all religious ideas are merely expressions of opinion and everyone who makes truth claims about their religion are knowingly foisting "opinion" upon others in a coercive way.

So in conversation about religion I have since found it necessary to first introduce the concept of true religious belief.  It often goes like this.  "If you were standing in the middle of the road and a truck was barreling down on you from behind I would yell 'get out of the road, there's a truck!'  I would not then be trying to impose my view on you.  I would be trying to save your life.  I hold my religious ideas in much the same way.  I am convinced that they are in fact true and that, being true, they are of absolute importance in my relationship to others.  We can discuss the reasons why they might be true or not true, but understand that I am only talking about this because I believe it is truly true."

We'll explore later how we might relate "true truth" to "hope" for much that we hold to be true we hold as a hope and not as a realized reality.

True Truth - Part 1

While I was in seminary everything changed.  After serving for 5 years at the University of NC in Wilmington, I went off to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to "get some skills and learning".  After all, my engineering degree had been a bit short of courses on Western Civilization, Greek, and the Bible.  Then it was off to Duke U. to serve among  undergrads through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

The "change" came to light most clearly on the night of a dorm talk early in my first semester.  I gave a clear, clever and Christ-centered explanation of the gospel and, just as before, someone began to argue with me.  Except this time the disagreement was not about the content of what I had said.  There were no counterpoints, no presentation of arguments as to why the claims of Christ were untrue. Instead there was an accusation that it was improper to make any such truth claims about religious ideas.  I had gone counter to what everyone else apparently already knew.  You can't really know anything about religion - all religious ideas were mere opinions and, corollary to that, all claims to know anything about religious truth was merely an attempt to impose one's view upon another. I was, by this student's assessment, being a religious bully.

Something essential was missing from this student's imagination and I had to pursue a steep learning curve.

Welcome to "Hoping to Know"

Christians live with an acute sense of the "no longer but not yet".  Much of what we talk about and pray about is not part of our present experience, at least not fully.  We are a people characterized by HOPE, but it not a trivial hope.  We live by a hope that is at the core of our very being, a hope that, at least ideally, changes everything about life.

Hebrews asks the cogent question, "Who hopes for what he already has?"  We don't have reconciliation with one another.  We don't have freedom from sin and brokenness.  And we don't have "a new heaven and a new earth".  These all lay on the horizon of our hope.  We are striving toward them, practicing them in our present life as if they were actually coming.  "As if" because we fully expect that what we now hope for we will one day know with certainty.  We will see, touch, hear and feel all that comes with the breaking in of God's kingdom.

This blog will be an exploration of what it means to live by that hope, to practice living toward what God has promised.  Setting aside the demands of "certainty" in its most rigorous sense (which we all do every day) gives room to explore the content of and reason for our hope.  And along the way we can ponder what the consequences of our hope might be.

I hope you'll find this interesting (else I would not publish it) and I hope that writing helps me live faithfully in anticipation of the "eternal glory" of worshiping God.