Suppose someone wanting to learn to dance said: “For hundreds of years now one generation after another has been learning dance steps, it’s high time I took advantage of this and began straight off with a set of quadrilles.” One would surely laugh at him; but in the world of spirit such an attitude is considered utterly plausible.

– Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Preamble from the Heart

I discovered this truth at age 14, when I took the faith I was raised with and wrestled with it and made it my own. I soon found that I had to repeat this discovery with every truth I had learned in my life. I’d learned the difference between an objective truth and a subjective truth. You can say something is true without actually being able to articulate why that thing is true. You can know something is true without being willing to change your life because of it.

The term “subjective truth” has gotten such a bad rap in the church at large simply because people don’t understand what it means. I think any serious Postmodernist would agree that letting every person decide for themselves what is good and evil represents a rather shallow and egocentric understanding of truth.

What’s more, I think the church could really benefit from teaching people to discover the roots of truths rather than just saying that they’re true. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people that fall apart because they don’t know the foundations of what they uphold as true.

I’m not saying that die-hard Modernists don’t understand the things the hold to be true. I’m just saying that the church in general seems to have a bit of a problem with that, and it could be helped by a change in approach.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Church, Philosophy, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.