Galileo: Truth isn’t Absolute

I’ll be hon­est up front: this entry has almost noth­ing to do with Galileo.

What this entry has every­thing to do with, how­ever, is the prob­lem I have with cer­tain peo­ple (notably authors and speak­ers) who call into ques­tion the nature of ‘truth’ through illus­tra­tions (Galileo being a favourite) which are in no way applic­a­ble to the nature of truth, how­ever rel­e­vant those illus­tra­tions may be with respect to our view and under­stand­ing (and nec­es­sar­ily inter­pre­ta­tion) of truth. What then occurs is that any sub­se­quent dia­logue con­cern­ing ‘what is truth’ is marred by this mis­un­der­stand­ing and fail­ure to prop­erly dis­tin­guish between nature and view (of truth), thus any ensu­ing dia­logue is inher­ently flawed. It’s a favourite of the Emer­gent church, which brings me to Doug Pagitt, noth­ing against Pas­tor Pagitt.

I was read­ing A Chris­tian­ity Worth Believ­ing when I came across the following:

“There it is in gray and white: ‘Truth = Absolute.’ Bill then jot­ted down two phrases that have haunted me for decades: ‘3 essen­tials to sal­va­tion’ and ‘3 assur­ances of sal­va­tion.’ Think about those words: absolute, essen­tial, assur­ance. These are the per­fect words for once-and-for-all con­ver­sions, but they don’t do much for the con­tin­ual growth of an uh-oh faith’”.¹

Since read­ing this quote (and sub­se­quently the book) I’ve been won­der­ing: why does the pres­ence of absolutes negate spir­i­tual growth? In actu­al­ity, it doesn’t, at least I can’t think of any good rea­son why it would (if you believe it does, please let me know!). I also don’t under­stand why the above two phrases have haunted Pagitt, though that will be for another time, maybe. In fact it seems to me that the pres­ence of absolutes (essen­tials and assur­ances) is what makes mean­ing­ful Chris­t­ian faith and spir­i­tual growth.

It seems to me Pagitt has con­fused (the nature of) truth with the pre­sen­ta­tion of truth (i.e., view, inter­pre­ta­tion), I’ll explain why I think this is so. Pagitt begins his fourth chap­ter (’The Wild Goose Chase‘), “It was shock­ing at first and increas­ingly good news as I real­ized that there was more than one ver­sion of the story of Jesus”.² He goes on to talk of John’s Gospel (dis­tinct from the Syn­op­tic Gospels, of course) as lack­ing angels, preg­nant vir­gins, doubt­ful hus­bands and wise men while inclu­sive of sto­ries not appear­ing in the Syn­op­tic Gospels: the res­ur­rec­tion of Lazarus, Jesus chang­ing water into wine and the heal­ing of the man born blind (pg. 29). The entire fourth chap­ter, in fact, is ded­i­cated to show­ing how the ‘mes­sage of Jesus’ has been pre­sented dif­fer­ent ways to dif­fer­ent audi­ences at dif­fer­ent times. Pagitt devotes pages 32 to 36 to the Celtic Chris­t­ian under­stand­ing of the Holy Spirit (by telling the story of how a papier-mâché goose came to be in his church). Celtic Chris­tians, appar­ently (and I thought this is inter­est­ing), view the Holy Spirit as a wild goose, ‘The Holy Spirit is like an untamed, wild goose.’³

Decon­tex­tu­al­ized (ironic, as sub­se­quent chap­ters deal with proper hermeneu­tic con­text), I agree with Pagitt. There is no one sin­gle, author­i­ta­tive way to present the Gospel mes­sage, cul­ture is sim­ply too volatile for such an approach. Brought back into con­text and applied to the pre­vi­ous chap­ter and we have a prob­lem: Pagitt seems to be deny­ing the exis­tence of truth as an absolute by illus­trat­ing the var­i­ous ways truth has been pre­sented. I believe the truth in ques­tion is absolute, while the pre­sent­ment of that truth may not nor need be. Let me make per­fectly clear, how­ever: truth doesn’t change.

Just a thought

Related posts:

1. Galileo: His­tor­i­cal Chris­t­ian (Church) Belief?
2. Truth as a symptom
3. John Wilkin­son: “Truth is Manufactured”
4. Truth and unbelief