Knowing What I Know is Truth

“She’s postmodern,” Justin told Benji Wednesday night at Bible study.

I agreed. We were in a discussion about belief, and how it affects our actions, after the Bible study that evening.  The chapter in Ordering Your Private World, that we were discussing, argued that Christians should be the most able, flexible, creative thinkers in the world. Arlyn Nisly, the guys’ teacher, had further expanded by saying that we will live what we believe, so it is absolutely vital that we think and believe the truth.

I was talking to Justin when I heard Benji firing questions at Arlyn a few feet away. I started listening, because it sounded interesting.

“If we work on building head knowledge, head belief, do we really end up living differently? I can learn all the time, and accumulate it endlessly, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a big change in my lifestyle,” Benji pointed out.

[All the quotes in this post are loose ones. My apologies!]

I inserted a comment after Arlyn had responded. “Am I hearing you correctly, Benji, that perhaps the problem is that we’re always getting stuck in the theoretical, rather than living in the practical? That’s where I often find myself.”

Arlyn repeated then that if we believe something, we will begin to live it. I questioned him on that, asking, “Does mental assent produce immediate results? Can I recognize that an idea, proposition, or report might be true, but hesitate to act on it?”

Arlyn clarified “It’s not necessarily an instant, complete change. It can be gradual, over a long period of time, but if we come to believe something, we will eventually change our behavior. You cannot go on living something you think is false.”

This I found interesting. Benji agreed with Arlyn, but said that he finds it frustrating when older people expect him to immediately adopt their beliefs, when they tell him how they found them to be true. Quoting Sir Francis Bacon, he said, ”If a man begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end with certainties.” This, Benji said, is why older people should let younger people doubt and question, not immediately swallow the beliefs the older people want to pass on to us.

My frustration with those who have strong belief differs slightly from Benji’s. I can politely evade the beliefs pressed on me. What I find astonishing is how much people think they know, and how certain their knowledge of it. It doesn’t seem to matter how old or young they are! I cringe when I hear sweeping generalizations of people they disagree with (“Homosexuals just want to get all the rights they can; they don’t care about the rest of us.”), and glib remarks about what God is doing (“God is just testing him to see if he’ll keep believing.”).

I went off about some of these things to Justin and Benji and Arlyn, and other random people sitting around. “Why is it that people feel they must map out every little detail of their belief, and find some kind of backing from God, or some other authority, for it? I do think that there is probably absolute truth, and we can know some basic, foundational things.

“But frankly, I have come to be less and less confident of my ability to be absolutely certain that all I think is true. I have cultural biases, religious biases, and personal biases. I have a limited mental ability, limited time to research, limited reasoning power. How in the world can I claim positive belief in many things beyond a few basic propositions about reality?”

This is when Justin, after quietly listening to this, told Benji, “She’s postmodern.”

We all laughed, and agreed with his canny observation.

Arlyn had told me earlier that belief must be a process, and a journey. He continued to assert, though, that a journey to Christian belief is one that inexorably marches us down the path toward changed desires, changed actions, changed direction of life.

I think he understands something people twice his age have difficulty grasping: that belief cannot be forced. It is a choice, at times, but usually a choice to investigate, and test. True belief is a response to the results of that investigation: to the sorting through the heaps of ideas, to the discovering of the ones that define reality.

What am I trying to say in all this? Very simply, it is this: pride and overconfidence are not our friends in defining our belief, since we are severely limited in our understanding of reality. This is one truth that the relativism of postmodernism highlights!

Yet its weakness is that it excludes any positive belief in truth. This is irrational, for cursory observation will tell you that refusing to define belief at all is not an option. We will believe something: the choice is only between choosing to reason our belief, or passively absorbing the dominant belief in our family, culture, or church.

So how do I know that what I know is truth? That is a persistent question with which I have struggled. So far I have learned what is apparent belief, and how to struggle badly; but as for coming to true belief, struggling well, and determining what truths define reality– this is still in process.

There is one prayer I have prayed over and over, to the God I hope is there and listening:

“Keep me humble.

Keep me honest about my own weaknesses and limitations.

Keep me on the path to truth.

Keep me, no matter the cost in personal pride, comfort, or confidence, whether it means struggle, ambiguity, or hardship.

All that matters is that I find truth, and that truth finds me.”

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I would really like feedback on this.

And a postscript to those in my youth group… this happened a month ago.  It’s been sitting in my drafts folder for a long time, and I decided to finish it, and put it up.