Falsehood in Isolation

Toward the end of my last post but one, I wrote that “at the most basic level pain and truth are one—we cannot help but be aware of our alienation from God, such alienation being both undeniable and acutely uncomfortable.”  I will add as well that, if we were not alienated from God, the very notion of “truth”—existing in its substance as a concept because there exists something called “falsehood”—would probably mean something different to us than it does now.  “Truth” means as much to us as it does because we are perpetually enmeshed in falsehood.

This is bound up with the essential reality I have tried to represent with “roused, readied, reaped.”  We are born into an existence of contrasts or conflicts among the elements of which we are aware.  We are born with needs—we know not why—into a universe of greater or lesser potential satisfaction of those needs—we know not why.  We can try to understand the elements of our existence, each in their isolation.  We can try to find out the truth of every such element.  None of this changes the fact that any conceit we have about understanding any such element is saturated with falsehood—any notion we have of any isolated element is ultimately unintelligible outside of the context of that element.

So we are born into a context of the contrasts or conflicts among the elements of which we are aware.  We are cut off from the seamless truths that might be afforded by communion with God.  This being the case, then the only way we can hope to have any understanding of our existence is through understanding how its elements interact.  Life hurries past us in motion.  We cannot see beginnings, or endings, or totalities.

None of this would seem to be all that profound, yet in the realm of religion there exists a stubborn tendency to act in practical denial of what I have described.  In a maddening way, we insist on acting like it is an act of piety to hinge our conceptions of existence on the presumptuous insistence that we can understand things being created from nothing or—which amounts to the same thing—things being created in un-relation to their contexts.  The gospels, however—despite their dealings with the mysteries of God’s creations—rely most heavily on describing things in relation to other things.

Sure, we can say that God made Creation out of nothing (and we can make a theological case for that if we choose), but God in the gospels (and in the writings that Jesus presents as authoritative) does not typically confront us with the “made out of nothing” scenario.  The beginning of Genesis describes a state, not a moment.  We are shown a chaos of already-existing elements, elements interacting with each other most vigorously.  We are presented in Genesis 1—as well as in John 1—with the sudden creation of light, but in both instances it is the interaction of light with dark that is emphasized.  We might decide that dark is simply the absence of light, but that is not our visceral, creaturely experience of the matter, and that is not how the matter is expressed in the gospels.  Dark is a thing, and light is a thing, and they are expected to interact.

So it is with the particulars of Creation.  Heaven is the separation of the waters; the dry land is the sequestering of the waters; the plants are generated from the earth; the lights of heaven are installed in their contexts and their timing; the swimming, the flying, and the creeping are described in the contexts of their habitations—even the creation of man “in the image of God” is contextual.  So also is Creation figured in John: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

Our existence is a matter of particulars in their contexts.  Things described in themselves are ultimately phantasms.  That is why understanding—to us—is a matter of contrasts, if not conflicts.  Worship of God is rendered unintelligible if this truth is forgotten.  On the one hand, we want to recognize God as beyond measure, yet we cannot really conceive of a God beyond measure, so we are flirting with a lie on our part.  Or we can call God huge—belittling him with the conceit that his size is bounded in reality as it is in our conceptions—and we are flirting with impiety.  Only a God of mercy could ratify our feeble efforts to bridge the inevitable gaps in our understandings.

No better example of this mercy—leavened with an undeniable element of challenge—might be found than in the introduction to John—and I understand that “introduction” to consist of everything up to the moment he meets the Samaritan woman in Chapter Four.  Just before that point, we are confronted by statements, one from Jesus and one from the Baptist, that can be seen to crash into each other—a distressing thought, unless we remember that such conflict is the way of truth, while apparently seamless ideologies are typically falsehoods.

Jesus says, “For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.  But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.”  In that very same Chapter Three, John the Baptist says, “The Father loveth the Son, and hath giveth all things unto his hand.  He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.”

To conventional Christianity, those two passages (residing, as I said, in uncomfortable proximity to each other) represent a puzzle to be solved.  Usually “doeth evil” is understood to mean “rejects the gospel and is deprived consequently of the ministrations of God’s grace and so descends farther and farther into depravity” or some such, while “believeth on the Son” is taken to be the controlling element, and the key to salvation.

We can choose to accept such reconciliations, if we desire, but the danger of such contrived reconciliation does not reside simply in the fact that it involves subordinating one passage to another in what can become a ceaseless, ever-tightening maelstrom of human pronouncements.  Additionally, such reconciliation—evincing the desire to eliminate the conflicts in our perceptions (which are really unsurprising contrasts springing from our limitations)—leads as well to our ignoring plain examples of conflicts presented to us manifestly with purpose in the gospels.  It is not, presumably, for nothing that the gospels present “the Law” as authoritative and normative, and then proceed to have Jesus tell us that Moses permitted divorce out of indulgence for his stiff-necked congregation.  Reconciliation of the texts in such cases is simple falsehood.

And then there is Jesus telling us that murder as a real and eternally punishable offense extends far beyond the bounds of anything contemplated in the Law (Matthew 5).  The contexts of human life, the conflicts of human interaction, the contrasts in human behaviors and outlooks—all these militate toward our understanding that we can “kill” each other by many means other than physical death, and all these have existed to bedevil every generation.  Only people who accepted being “hung out to dry” by the Old Testament teachings would have been primed to accept Jesus’ heightened expectations (and the history of Judaism shows many examples of people led to sublime enlightenment about moral issues precisely by being courageous enough to live forthrightly with unreconciled conflicts of understanding.)

Conflicts are truth.  Contrasts are truth.  Such things truly exist, and if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that conflicts and contrasts are interspersed with all of our perceptions.  To align ourselves otherwise is to flirt with idolatry.  This is something to keep in mind when the contention is floated that “Bible-based” Christianity (or, more particularly, “Bible-alone” Christianity) amounts to bibliolatry.  It is not so much “Bible worship” that is a matter of concern (and in any event few people will admit to being so aligned.)  What is really of concern with all of the “this-or-that-alone’s” is the fact that nothing is ever alone.

“Bible-alone” (that is, the contention that the Bible does its own interpretation, absent any divinely-intended participation of the organic workings-out of issues in the minds of readers) is a danger not simply in that it constitutes worship of the Bible.  That is really beside the point, and will scarcely be admitted to.  This-or-that-alone, however, stands apart from the teachings of Jesus not only because any such idea of isolation conflicts with the context-rich presentations of the gospels, but also because any such idea is an idol in itself.