What about truth?

I have grown up with the firm belief that there are truths that God has revealed and that anyone who denies those truths is on the road to damnation.

Of course there are scriptural passages that support such a belief.  “If you remain in my word, . . . you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32).

But there is this philosophical movement labeled “postmodernism”  that is influencing the way a lot of people think, and, following our Franciscan tradition of facing challenging ideas head on, for example, the way William of Ockham did, not to mention Thomas Aquinas using Aristotle, I have struggled to appreciate what writers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are saying to us.

Definitions are important, both in philosophy and in my field, sociology. We cannot measure something until we define what we are measuring, and we cannot talk about something until we have some common understanding of what we are talking about. So I have developed two definitions:

Truth: Truth is the story that God would tell.

Postmodernism: “Any time someone claims to be speaking the truth, look out, because that person is angling to get power over someone else.”

The postmodern definition certainly fits the history of the Catholic Church. It also fits the recent history of truth in the Trump vs. anti-Trump struggles.

So I ask: isn’t it presumptuous to claim to know what only God knows?

No one can definitively tell the story of anything except God. All stories are fictions created by human beings.

We try to determine the truth in two important ways: courts and science.

In the courtroom, competing stories about what happened are compared. A judge or a jury makes a decision about which story is closer to the truth. No one can say definitively that either story is true, because judges and juries can be manipulated. We accept a decision by a judge or jury so that we can get on with life without resorting to armed struggle.

In science, we use observation as a tool in developing theory. Theory is fiction, narrative, a story. Observation without theory is meaningless—in fact, meaning in general is simply applying a story to something.

Because scientific theories are fictions, we use peer review as a way to determine whether a story is close to the story that God would tell. We know that peer review is imperfect. Peer review is assembling reports of observations that confirm a particular story. People are imperfect in describing their observations, and reviewers are imperfect observers of other people’s work.

We live in an age where scientific observations have upended many religious beliefs. “Evolution” is an older example. Today we are struggling for a story to describe the experiences that transgender people report. It is dangerous to turn too quickly to scripture, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim.

Religious organizations are in trouble today because people are wary of religious leaders who want to share the truth with others, especially when the leaders’ version of the truth has political or other implications. So people are staying away from churches. They may still be seeking the truth. It is just that religion has lost credibility in the search because religion has been too confident about its knowledge of what God would say.

No one really knows God, and certainly no one controls God, or what God wants people to do. We are all seekers.

Here is how I approach the issue. I do not know God very well. The stories of Jesus Christ are my most important source for knowing what God is like, but when it comes to my own personal knowing God, I am speechless. Every day I spend about an hour carefully repeating words of the Old Testament psalms, in the hope that somewhere, somehow along the line, God will speak to me. I think that has happened, but God’s speech is always very very quiet and unclear. So I return to the psalms. Then I look for God among the people I encounter from morning till night, and in the times when I join others for worship.

And in the meantime, I am not disturbed if churches are losing membership and attendees. God is still active in the world. I have to go around looking for where God might be speaking to me, looking for people who want to know God without telling me how I should live my life. And trying to be open to occasions when I can share with and learn from other people’s visions of the truth, even when those people seem as committed to their visions of the truth as much as I am to mine.