This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours | Faith and Belief - Part 1

There are many aspects of our faith that we might question, and which we need to come to terms with, and I’ve only covered a handful of them here. Working through the questions that we have can take time, and I have come to see that the work of figuring out our faith, is a long-term project.

 

When we start seeking answers to our questions, we soon realise that things aren’t as one sided as we may have thought. People have all sorts of different views and interpretations, which are all apparently valid and reasonable, but which are also contradict each other. This leads me to believe that there is only one definitive truth we can be sure of, that it’s impossible to have absolute knowledge of exactly who God is. We all have our own personal beliefs which we carry, which resonate and feel true for us, but we can’t know those beliefs are correct for certain, and so we can’t really judge the beliefs of others, which don’t resonate with us or feel true, to be wrong. We are all wrong in some way, because we are all deficient in our understanding of God. All of our beliefs are skewed because of who we are, even those which are grounded in good theological study, meditation, or tradition. We can have all of those things and still come to different conclusions about God, because we aren’t perfect, and therefore, our knowledge of God is incomplete and imperfect.

 

This leaves us in a place of uncertainty, but I think that this is a good place to be. When we wrestle with our faith we widen our knowledge of God, and in doing so I believe we can move closer to the Divine, by leaning into that mystery. I’m aware of the paradox here, and that really, by broadening our understanding of God we highlight the vastness of our ignorance, and the uncertainty we find can overwhelm us. Nevertheless, having been on this journey for a while, I can say that widening my understanding of God, has brought me closer to God, although it isn’t without complication.

 

This brings us to the crux of the whole problem of unanswerableness.

 

Our instincts tell us that there needs to be certainty in what we believe, and so when we hold the complexities of theology and faith, we feel the need to distinguish one view as being truer than another. We discern that truth based on our own experiences and capacities for knowledge, or to put it simply, we believe what we believe because of who we are. All the things which make us unique individuals, inform our reasons for believing what we believe. This isn’t something we don’t know already, it’s not a great epiphany, however, I think this is an important truth for us to hold, if we intend to find a way forward in the unanswerable. When we hold this truth, it informs how we see other people and the beliefs they have.

 

Other people can’t be wrong in their beliefs, because they are just like us, they believe what they believe, because of who they are, what they have experienced in their lives, and what they know of the world. This should make us more tolerant and accepting of each other, and it should change how we interact with one another. You can’t condemn someone for the thing they believe, because their beliefs are grounded in who they are, and likewise, others can’t condemn you for the things you believe, because your understandings are informed by who you are. 

 

There would be massive implications if we could all accept this, but for one, if Christians throughout history had understood this truth, then there would be more unity in the church today. We would have avoided all the various schisms and splits within churches, because people would have just accepted that they each had different understandings when it came to their faith, and that this was normal. Instead of fighting and arguing, Christians throughout history would merely have been politely inquisitive of other people’s beliefs, and engaged in respectful dialogue with them, and learned how that person had come to that particular understanding. OK, I know it’s not as simple as that, much has prevented us from engaging with each other in this way, hurdles like religious history, church politics, and basic human misbehaviour. These things aren’t insubstantial, and might even seem insurmountable when you think about them, but I still think we could be doing a better job of loving and respecting each other. If we were more like this, then the worldwide church today would look completely different. But the sad fact is that we aren’t even capable of being civil with each other when it comes to our personal beliefs. Just take a look at the comments made by Christians in the digital Gehenna, that is the bottom half of the internet.

 

It seems there is one common denominator which is at play here, that for whatever reason, people can’t or don’t want to accept that they might be wrong about what they believe. This is an unspoken theme that we’ve encountered throughout this book. The Catholic church couldn’t accept that they might be wrong about the Earth being the centre of the universe, so they put Galileo in prison. Pastors have bullied people into manifesting gifts of the Holy Spirit, because they won’t accept that the charismatic doctrines of their church might be wrong, or that the Spirit isn’t acting in their churches in the way they’d like it to. Preachers don’t accept the complexity of subjects like Hell, because it’s easier to double down and push the easily digestible truth they have been handed by someone else, than to wrestle with what the Bible actually says, and work out what they really believe.

 

There are all sorts of reasons why we don’t want to be wrong, but our response is to grasp the truth we find, and hold onto it for dear life, because the alternative, uncertainty and unknowing, is apparently too much for us to bear. We need the security of certainty in all the areas of our lives, but we need it all the more when it comes to our faith, because faith is the one thing that matters to us the most, that we can’t be absolutely sure of.

 

However, faith isn’t about certainty, literally, by definition, faith is belief and trust without proof. Faith is the opposite of certainty, and so professing absolute truth when it comes to our faith, to God, and to the Bible, is a fallacy. Besides, a faith of certainty is not something we could ever realistically achieve. For us to have absolute certainty in our faith, we would need to possess the ability to disconnect from who we are individually, corporately, personally and societally, and we would have to be completely conscious of ourselves, and know ourselves thoroughly. We would need to be able to consider every truth we encounter, whilst disregarding every bias which might colour our perceptions of that truth. You would basically need to become an omniscient spectator of your own existence, which I would say is probably impossible for a human to achieve. The fact that we have to write to-do lists, kind of suggests that the human brain isn’t really set up for omniscience.

 

Consequently, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that humans are incapable of providing completely objective interpretations on theology, and I don’t think we can confidently present our own personal beliefs as absolute biblical truths, even if God did reveal them to us somehow. God demonstrating absolute truth to a human, as God would understand it, is like a chef trying to demonstrate molecular gastronomy to a pig. Sure, the pig would enjoy eating the food, and it might even appreciate the different flavour profiles and textures going on, but it wouldn’t understand how the food was created and the story that the chef was telling through the meal.

 

We could get much further into this, but the bottom line is that we each hold onto our own truths, which are sometimes at odds with the truths held by others, which is what we have seen when looking at all these different topics. This can be summed up simply by the Aneurin Bevan quote/Manic Street Preachers album name, and title of this chapter, “This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours”.

 

We might come to accept that we each hold our own version of truth which is incomplete in some way, and that we can share our own personal truths with each other, in a spirit of reasonableness, love and acceptance, but we are still left with some questions. What do we believe about God and how do we know it is true? How can we trust that is who God is? How do we tell other people about God, and know that we aren’t telling them lies or misconstrued notions about the Divine? What are the implications when we do get it wrong?

 

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops. An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music