Pilate was right: what is truth?

Few today can forget that memorable moment when Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to

President Trump referred to another member of Trump’s staff as offering what she

called alternative facts about numbers attending the presidential inauguration. In

other words, we were to believe what he was saying rather than rely on what we were

observing with our own eyes.

It was a smart way of speaking as it removed all negative connotations associated with

the statement and turned them into alternative facts. Not mistakes. Not errors but

alternative truths, alternative facts. He was not lying, just offering an alternative truth.

It is a bit like the Newspeak in Orwell’s novel. In his book Nineteen Eighty-Four,

“truth” is described as being designed and controlled by the state in order to suppress

free thought, individualism and happiness. The State decides what people are to

think, feel and observe. Truth is not some objective reality. “Truth” is something

someone chooses it to be, for reasons they alone understand and know. It is therefore

flexible, variable and always open to change as the circumstances of life change.

The problem of agnosticism among believers

How does this apply to us? It takes us back to some basics in the life of the Church.

Believers over the last century have;

argued over all kinds of aspects on the how of Church. What it should look like, the language of theology, ethics and morality along with its internal structures for mission and ministry

Today – perhaps going back over the last sixty or seventy years – the arguments are more likely to be about the existence of God. Our world is one in which unbelief reigns as a sad reality both inside and outside of the Church.

For too many of us, God is more like something clinging to the peripherals of our lives

but something with little presence in the bulk of what we do, think and plan. As Ronald

Rolheiser observes…rarely is there a vital sense of God within the bread and butter of life. We make space for God in our churches but He is given a very restricted place

everywhere else.

This is what philosophers and commentators like Friedrich Nietzsche mean when they

say God is dead. God no longer matters in the day to day events of people. Our

attitude to God has left a generation of men and women who are at best, ambivalent to

the possibility of a faith relationship with God. He has disappeared though there are

still some sense of the divine essentially because of past traditions to which we hold

fast. Those enduring practices are what Nietzsche calls the long shadow of God that

endures. The challenge for the Church is how people in the future will no longer have

even this shadow to sustain our parishes.

What this means is while we may be sustained by some experience of God we have

had in the past, He only rarely comes across as the giver of life, as a Living Being empowering all aspects of our lives, a Being to whom we listen and to whom we speak.

Not many relate to Him as a friend, a person a lover or as a child to a parent and yet those are precisely the relationships opened up to us in Jesus Christ.

Sometimes God is more concept than reality

One of the reasons we struggle to “sell” the Good News of the Kingdom is that we project an image of God that portrays Him being more of a moral principle than a living person. He anchors a way of living but has little impact on our day to day activities. We acknowledge the good things about God but are not radically challenged.

God is more often related to us as a religion, a church, a moral philosophy, a guide for

private morality, a driving force for justice. For too many in our parishes, God is a religion, the way of life experienced in a parish; He is guidance from the Bible, guiding us in all

matters of life – sex within marriage, honesty, no cheating, swearing and the need to love others and behave well with others.

When as Christians we become involved in social issues, works of justice and charity;

when we become active in parish life and building our faith communities we are often

motivated by our own self-interest, or by a kind of moral philosophy or even basic

human instincts rather than by a relationship with a God who lives, who has made His

home among us.

Here is the way Rolheiser sees the situation…There is more than a little unbelief

among us believers. God is a neurosis, a religion, a cause…and only rarely a living ,

informing, comforting, challenging person whose reality dwarfs that of our everyday

life. This is how Nietzsche put the situation in his book the Gay Scientist.

In that book, the madman turns and says to the crowd…God is dead, I tell you, we have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murders. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives…they

have done this to themselves. They have killed God.

The philosopher was addressing his parable to believers, to members of the church

communities. He presents church life as being a kind of agnosticism. It is not that

God is denied but rather that God is absent from much of our lives. He is not alive

enough or important enough and this is what kills off the possibility of faith by those

outside of the church. Nietzsche is right here: we have killed God but that does not

mean that God is indeed Dead, a person without a home on earth.

God is a Living God - but we struggle to tune into that life

One of the reasons for this may be because God appears to be silent, invisible when

we need Him most. It can seem as though God has withdrawn from us and has left us

to our own devices. But His “death” is more often the result out of our own blindness,

our preoccupation with the world around us and our need to achieve our human goals.

John of the Cross calls this apparent absence of God our dark night of the soul.

It is important to keep this understanding clear in our minds. This ongoing struggle to experience God as being alive within and around us, is our struggle to become aware of God. God is there but we have trouble discerning and responding in a personal way to that divine presence. It is our failure of awareness that is under consideration here.

God is always present, but we are more likely not to be present to God. The struggle

is ours. One author wrote…God is no more present in a church than in a drinking

bar, but, generally, we are more present to God in a Church than in a bar (Sheila

Cassidy). But we would probably not contemplate the possibility of a contact with

God in a bar. But why would God not be there? This becomes a sad reality because

of our own lack of a vital experience of God. If we are to bring God alive to those

who do not know Him, we must first of all train ourselves to build relationships with

God as a living Being in every corner, every aspect of who we are and in what we do.

This is not about blame. It is an invitation to discernment

We should not be dismissing this kind of thinking as being too negative and not

reflective of our personal faith lives. The Spirit is leading us forward into tackling the

question: why are we unable to bring people to Christ? If we can answer that

question, we are then in a position to reflect on the way we “do” Church work and

mission. It is also timely because the present Covid virus provides us with an

opportunity to listen more carefully to what the Spirit is saying to the Church. As

institutions in which we have placed so much trust fail to provide us with the kind of

life we have come to expect, people are encouraged to look around for something or

someone coming with a greater guarantee of peace, hope, mercy, love and healing.

We have that in Christ but we can only convince the world of the generative power of

divine love for us if we ourselves are alive in the intimacy of our relationship with

God. Could it be that we are unable to attract more men and women to life in the

Body of Christ because they do not experience Christ alive in us? Does the Living

Christ within us be seen to offer the world much less that what they feel they can find

on their own without God? Why then come to God?

There is more to come!

This is but an opening reflection and will be followed by an exploration of what might

have changed in the world around us. What are the roadblocks to faith, buffers to

which we need to focus our responses and alternative messages? Given the enormity

of the social changes across Western Civilization over the last century that is going to

be no easy task. But with the Spirit guiding us; by engaging with the Living, Risen

and Glorious Christ in our midst, this is not an impossible task for those who are

willing to leave all they have and follow after Him. The problem is not the challenge

ahead. The real challenge is to be found in our willingness or not to take up the

sacrifices, the personal transformation and the humility God’s mission requires.

The next essay will focus attention on the direction taken by the West and the kinds of

communal thinking and acting that makes our ministry so much more difficult.