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.