Subjective Truth versus Objective Truth

When did subjective truth become the enemy of Christianity? As a teacher in Christian schools for about five years, one thing I noticed in the curriculum and in the overall academic stance is that, in the quest to insure that students have a clearly articulated belief system, the knowing that takes place in the head is emphasized over and above the knowing that happens through experience. In fact, I have very often heard postmodern thinking, which emphasizes experiential knowing, pegged as the enemy of Christian belief. Specifically, subjective truth is generally regarded as the biggest threat to Christian belief in such circles. Recently, I have come to realize that subjective truth is a victim of aggressive pendulum swinging. In efforts to protect objective truth, the subjective is often wrongly invalidated. It is the baby that goes out with the bathwater.

Perhaps semantics is the issue. When some think of subjective truth, they think of one’s own personal truth from within—as if each individual makes it up for himself. That is a problem. But truth can be personal or subjective without originating from within. In fact, I believe objective truth—or what some would call absolute truth— must be experienced subjectively. That’s not to say it originates from within, but objective truth must be moved there. Truth is not simply an object; it is given life when it touches our hearts and minds, when it is experienced. Otherwise, what good is it? Objective understanding has no value if it does not lead to change. If it simply sits, dead, it can’t change you. That’s not to say objective truth doesn’t matter. But it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t change you. Truth has to be both objective and subjective.

What we get without subjective truth is generations of Christians who know all about God, but have no personal experience of God. Personal experience of God leads to transformation. Ideas about God cannot substitute for experience of him. I’ve heard it said that a truth not practiced is a truth not believed, and I tend to agree at least in this sense, I don’t really believe something is true unless I’m willing to act on it. Last year, when I was coming to terms with this idea, I wrote these lines:

I know You rescue, but I won’t leap
I know Your gifts are good, but I won’t receive
I know You won’t leave, but I don’t want to wait and see
Because I know, but I don’t believe
So I don’t know
I don’t know You

If I really believe what God says is true, then I will take the leap of faith that Kierkegaard writes about. According to Kierkegaard, our choice is either to take a leap of faith and truly live or to just conform and exist inauthentically, “To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

In Deference

Though you could teach
You don’t have to speak
Each word as it beats through your heart

Every now and then cease
And let the truth be
And watch it take shape in the dark

Let quiet strength shout
And beauty cry out
From a life lived in graceful repose

Then you may learn
When seasons return
That God’s been at work in the throes

Significance or Safety?

"Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?" I hadn’t considered before that John the Baptist asks this question from prison after he has already professed that Christ is indeed the awaited Lamb of God. Yet, he asked the question. Like John, I ask this question. “Hey, are you gonna come through for me? I thought you were the Son of God. Should I find somebody else?” Jesus didn't come through. Later, when John was beheaded, Jesus was around. I guess no one told him how the game works.

I was just reading about this in Erwin McManus’s book The Barbarian Way. He writes, “The civilized view of Jesus is that he always comes through for us. Like Superman, he always shows up just in time to protect us and save us from disaster. His purpose is to ensure our safety, our convenience, and our comfort.” I guess somewhere along the way, I became civilized. If I’m faithful to him, he’ll come through for me, right? As I read this account in Luke 7, I realized I’m a lot like the people Jesus described,

“They are like children playing a game in the public square. They complain to their friends,
‘We played wedding songs,
and you didn’t dance,
so we played funeral songs,
and you didn’t weep.’”

Jesus wasn’t playing their games. He won’t play mine. He doesn’t respond the way I think he should. I’m coming to terms with my own tendencies to exploit and manipulate God and others to get what I want or think I need. I start with pleasing. If that doesn’t work, I rely on pity. I’ll resort to complaining and even tantrums if I have to. “Hey, are you gonna come through for me? Should I find somebody else?” But God has another purpose that is beyond me and my plans. It’s not about me.

McManus says, “Even then Jesus understood his purpose was to save us not from pain and suffering, but from meaninglessness. For Jesus, John was exactly where he needed to be, fulfilling God’s purpose for his life. Why would he save John from that? … God’s will for us is less about our comfort than it is about our contribution. God would never choose for us safety at the cost of significance.” God invites us to enter his grand epic. But he didn’t say it wouldn’t cost us. So why am I insolent when it does?

My pastor, Eric, said on Sunday that he’d give up everything else— friends, possessions, status— as long as he had Christ. Bold. I mean, what if God heard? I guess that’s what is meant by surrender. “He wants us to surrender our lives to Him and follow Him into the unknown. And if it means a life of suffering, hardship, and disappointment, it will be worth it because following Jesus Christ is more powerful and more fulfilling than living with everything in the world minus Him.”

Do I believe it? If I do, if I want to enter the story, I think it means I have to stop writing my own subplot with a script full of insolence and ease. Gotta surrender my pen.

Honesty

So now we come to it
The really deep-seated shit
The stuff I can’t quit
The me that I hate
My native state
So much for truth that dazzles
This truth just unravels
All my facade

Then there’s Your blood

You say that’s what it’s for
Still I treat it with scorn
A last resort
I don’t want to need
I prefer to sit here and bleed
Just get it together so I won’t have to ask
So I can keep on the mask
But behind my back
I secretly pray

Please don’t leave me this way

Then my dam breaks
I’ll do whatever it takes
That’s when Love falls
Because You see it all
And You stay with me still
So do what You will
My desire is for You
Only Love can undo
The me I won’t miss

You died for this

Fight Club Philosophy

“I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalog.”

I used to worship the IKEA catalog—that is, before they built a store in Portland so I could actually go worship on site. But I don’t care so much anymore. Maybe it’s because I have my sofa issue handled. Maybe it’s because I’m not a slave anymore. Either way, when I heard that line from the opening of the movie Fight Club I knew I was going to love this movie. I just saw it this week and I can’t stop thinking about it. I keep asking people if they’ve seen it so we can discuss it. But I’m a little late—most people saw it eight years ago and got it out of their system, so I decided I’d just write about it. I don’t know if I can recommend it because it’s completely raunchy, but I loved it still. And the thing I loved about it (besides it being totally trippy) was that it showed the meaninglessness of stuff, of success, of achievement—of all the things we put our hope in that fail. It’s all going to burn. Very Ecclessiastes-esque. Having been a slave to consumerism and image myself, I appreciated the premise—the call to let go, to surrender, to not be slave anymore to stuff, to things that bring false security.

Here’s a taste for the basic philosophical footing of the movie (minus the f-bomb):

“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

“We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra… Martha Stewart.”

“You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your … khakis.”

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy [stuff] we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

“I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect…”

Kinda biblical I think. At least in some sense. In fact, one line reminded me of something I read in the book of James very recently. In the movie Tyler, the main character, says, in reference to Martha Stewart, “Martha's polishing the brass on the Titanic. It's all going down, man.” I thought of James 4:5, “You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.” When I read that in James it really made me think. In what ways am I fattening myself with things that don’t matter? What am I wasting my time and money on? It made me think again about the kingdom of God and the idea that it’s not about me and it’s not about now.

Almost reminds me of Jesus’ own words in Luke 6,
Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when men hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their fathers treated the prophets.

But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep
Woe to you when all men speak well of you,
for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets.”

This is Christ’s reminder to us that there is a spiritual reality that is far more important than the material reality around us. It’s gonna burn, but the kingdom of God is eternal. Best cling to what is lasting. In one of my conversations about the movie this week, my friend shared with me a poem he wrote that includes quotes from the book Fight Club. I like this one, “Only after disaster can we be resurrected.” It's a common literary theme. Sounds like the Gospel to me. Die to self and be raised to new life.

Of course, Fight Club doesn’t quite draw the same conclusions about God and new life, nor does he see anything as lasting or meaningful. Tyler recognizes the futility of maintaining image and holding on to things, but he becomes totally masochistic about it. He promotes accepting failure and giving up control (which are Christian concepts), but he doesn’t identify anything or anyone to surrender to (“…God does not like you”), so it all becomes very hopeless and abysmally self-destructive. He just wants everyone to recognize their own worthlessness, and he destroys things to show the vulnerability of it all. But with Christ, there’s hope when we come face to face with our worthlessness—he offers more (because he does like us—he loves us). A friend’s blog just reminded me that God is more concerned with our character than our comfort. So, will God do whatever it takes to bring us to the end of ourselves, the end of false-security to show us our need for him? To give us true hope? To show us our value in him? To reveal what really matters?

I don’t know… it’s got me thinking about my view of God again. Is God like this? In a way, is Tyler a Christ-like figure? Would God burn us with lye to free us from fear? Would God frighten us at gunpoint so we move forward with our lives? Would God destroy our homes to show us what really matters? One of my friends says God is not that manipulative, but I wonder if manipulative and sovereign could be synonymous when it comes to God. Tyler, though, he destroyed for no other purpose but to show something’s meaninglessness and to shake people up, whereas God destroys to bring life. It’s always for our good. Like the phoenix rising out of ashes. The more we lose, the more we live. Really living comes through surrender. But that’s only when we surrender to something, to Christ.

I guess it comes down to the question that all of philosophy asks: what is the good life? What is truly living? Luke 6 seems to indicate it’s not what we thought. But that’s for another post…

Advent Conspiracy II

Christmas has changed since I entered the story. I guess I've changed. I’m starting to get it. I’m learning to worship Christ at Christmas instead of bowing to the gods of consumerism. I heard someone say recently that consumerism is individualism on steroids. And we tend to build our individual kingdoms of self most at the very time of year we ought to celebrate Christ’s kingdom. If Christmas is really a Christian holiday, why does it look so much like bowing at this culture’s high places of idolatry? Even efforts to “Christianize” Christmas seem to be no more than the same old thing with a Christian veneer — we pad the pockets of Christian retailers or really take a stand for Christ by having the audacity to only buy from retailers who will use the word Christmas to promote consumerism. (Using Christ’s name in vain? Hmm…)

I heard on a Christian radio station recently a plug for a book about how to keep Christ in Christmas. I expected something new, but I was appalled that the strategy seemed to center around innocuous decorating ideas—using more nativity scenes and spelling out Christian words with lights. Is that what entering the Christ story looks like? If so, I’d rather bask in my own brand of debauchery! (Which, I think, is the attitude of many in my generation, and is why so many are opting out of a Christian religion that only seems to offer platitude and pretense—but that’s a whole other post…)

But there’s a way of celebrating Christmas that doesn’t just include Christ, it is Christ-centered and Kingdom-oriented. It involves acknowledging the advent, or arrival, of God incarnate coming to earth to rescue us from ourselves, to redeem our brokenness, to set us free from captivity, to transform our warped ways of living, to give us life, and to bring his righteousness, peace, and joy. That is a story worth entering.

Advent Conspiracy

I'm remembering today how my past efforts to include Christ in Christmas fell sadly short because it was no more than an obligatory inclusion. Like, oh yeah, isn’t this materialistic orgy supposed to be all about him? We better read the Christmas story before we indulge in this gluttony of gifts. I knew it wasn’t supposed to be all about me, but didn’t know how to make it all about him without giving up the me, me, me part. Getting (and of course giving) was what Christmas was all about. All the anticipation built up to that moment. All of the talk was about getting and giving… stuff. To give that up and change the focus, that would be a little over the top, a little fanatic. It wouldn’t be Christmas.

So a few years ago my pastor asked, “What if Christmas could change the world?” Of course this appealed to my sense of idealism and the wannabe-radical within was alerted to the potential opportunity. Then the realist chimed in with, “You’ve heard this before. It can’t happen. Do you know what kind of fanatical living it takes to change the world?” Still I knew the way I had always done Christmas was not fitting in with my new understanding of Christ and what he was all about when he came to earth. If he was a homeless revolutionary who told us to give up everything and who himself gave his life for us, how does giving an X-Box celebrate this? How could it be that stampedes in retail stores and consumer debt and overspending is a way of honoring Christ’s coming to earth to save us from ourselves? Isn’t this, in fact, what he came to save us from?

My pastor asked—what would it look like if we resisted the pressures of consumerism? What if we made Christmas more meaningful and less cheap? What if we made it about relationships? What if we entered the Christ story? Christ brought redemption and new life. Christ became poor so that we could be rich. That year, Advent Conspiracy was born. That year, I entered the story...