Back from Seattle, and back in the saddle.
I had a great time at the wedding, and I really enjoyed catching up with the usual relatives and a few friends from my college days.
I love the sun, and I love thunder storms. We had both today. For a while the sky was an eerie orange color that made me feel like I was on a movie set instead of in my front yard. There was a distinct storm-flavor to the air. The taste is probably just humidity, but in Oregon it always means that a big storm is close.
Tonight at Vibrant we talked about truth. What a stirring conversation. Truth, the term that we lean our philosophies and actions against, is frustratingly slippery in nature. Is it subjective or objective or both?
In relation to God (as though is could be separated from God), I try to make truth objective. I want knowing what to expect and how to judge. I want the divine to make sense. Yet the mysterious Trinity consistently defies my objective push-pins and reshapes my expectations.
When it comes to my own life, I tend to allow truth to take on a subjective flavor. My words and actions often do not match. My truth is relative to my situation and company. It carries weight, but it is often informed by my not-so-innocent self interest. The inconsistencies of my own interactions with truth often comes back to haunt me when I make objective-truth errors such as, oh, blatantly contradicting statements.
So somehow I need to merge my understandings of truth. I need to be allied with some objectivity while being comfortable with the necessity of subjectivity. Neither should be applied alone or in excess. I don’t think I really know how to do that.
This brings me back to an earlier post about faith. (June 10). Sometimes I am taken aback by the claims of faith because it projects itself onto truth. How can we know truth? It is a bold presumption to make, and it carries ramifications that I am not sure that I can answer. But perhaps it has more to do with a balance of perspective. Like Hebrews says, faith is the substance of what is hoped for and the evidence of what is unseen. That seems to combine the concrete and the abstract relatively well.
Faith then is inextricably connected to truth (or at least one’s perspective of truth), and it directly affects the behavior of the individual. Here is a little equation that I came up with:
Faith Action
----- ≥ ---------
Truth Understanding
So maybe my theological mathematics it won’t hold up, but the idea intrigued me. Both faith and truth contain undeniable attributes of the known and unknown, and these directly connect to the interior and exterior life of the individual. I just hope that someday I will be better at balancing these within myself.
I love the sun, and I love thunder storms. We had both today. For a while the sky was an eerie orange color that made me feel like I was on a movie set instead of in my front yard. There was a distinct storm-flavor to the air. The taste is probably just humidity, but in Oregon it always means that a big storm is close.
Tonight at Vibrant we talked about truth. What a stirring conversation. Truth, the term that we lean our philosophies and actions against, is frustratingly slippery in nature. Is it subjective or objective or both?
In relation to God (as though is could be separated from God), I try to make truth objective. I want knowing what to expect and how to judge. I want the divine to make sense. Yet the mysterious Trinity consistently defies my objective push-pins and reshapes my expectations.
When it comes to my own life, I tend to allow truth to take on a subjective flavor. My words and actions often do not match. My truth is relative to my situation and company. It carries weight, but it is often informed by my not-so-innocent self interest. The inconsistencies of my own interactions with truth often comes back to haunt me when I make objective-truth errors such as, oh, blatantly contradicting statements.
So somehow I need to merge my understandings of truth. I need to be allied with some objectivity while being comfortable with the necessity of subjectivity. Neither should be applied alone or in excess. I don’t think I really know how to do that.
This brings me back to an earlier post about faith. (June 10). Sometimes I am taken aback by the claims of faith because it projects itself onto truth. How can we know truth? It is a bold presumption to make, and it carries ramifications that I am not sure that I can answer. But perhaps it has more to do with a balance of perspective. Like Hebrews says, faith is the substance of what is hoped for and the evidence of what is unseen. That seems to combine the concrete and the abstract relatively well.
Faith then is inextricably connected to truth (or at least one’s perspective of truth), and it directly affects the behavior of the individual. Here is a little equation that I came up with:
Faith Action
----- ≥ ---------
Truth Understanding
So maybe my theological mathematics it won’t hold up, but the idea intrigued me. Both faith and truth contain undeniable attributes of the known and unknown, and these directly connect to the interior and exterior life of the individual. I just hope that someday I will be better at balancing these within myself.
posted by Erin 12:39 AM
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