Where is truth found?

It's interesting that Darrell Grizzle should ask, in Gay Spirituality & Culture, 'What is Truth?' I think truth is both absolute and relative. Absolute in that there really are fundamental (not fundamentalist) truths, at least in the abstract sense, such as God is love, or it's wrong to take an innocent person's life. Relative, in the sense that none of us can perceive truth absolutely, and so our understanding is always relative to our social location, perspective, disposition etc and that we apply our understanding of truth provisionally and not absolutely in daily life. This is not the same as moral relativism, or as Darrell says:

“If we never stand up for what is true – if we never speak our truth with conviction – we slip into a kind of moral vacuum, where every viewpoint is given equal weight, no matter how harmful the consequences of those viewpoints may be to others.”

This was in reference to Pat Robertson's latest outburst, and how we might, as Christians, respond. The reason it's interesting to me that Darrell should ask this question is that I was at church earlier this evening, and a passage from 1 John was quoted that stuck in my mind:

We can be certain that we know God if we keep God's commandments. Anyone who says, “I know God,” but doesn't keep God's commandments is lying, and doesn't have the truth. But if anyone obeys God's word, in that person we see God's love truly made complete. This is how we know if we're in God: If we claim to live in God, we should walk as Jesus did. –1 John 2:3-6

I've read this over and over this evening. To me it's saying that we can only find truth by following hard after God. This means living in love with one another and “walking as Jesus walked”. Easy to say but hard to do when confronted with the disorder and evil and confusion that abounds in this world.

It seems to me that Jesus had no trouble calling a spade a spade, or a corrupt religious establishment a 'brood of vipers' (Matthew 12:34) or 'white-washed sepulchres' (Matthew 23:27). Yet he also commanded us to love our enemies, turn the extra cheek and go the extra mile. This is a hard task for a lot of us given how religion has been used to abuse and oppress us. But I don't think we can really speak the hard truth with power unless we ourselves are truly living in God's love. Love without truth might be sentimentality, but truth without love is hypocrisy (and leads ultimately to totalitarianism).

Genuine prophets in any age speak with such power because they really speak the truth in love. Think of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Jesus.

I hate what people like Pat Robertson stand for, the vile things they say and do. I wonder deeply whether such people can ever glimpse the loving God I know through the dark cloth of self-righteousness they have wrapped themselves in. I pray that they will, and I have faith that God can really do anything. But loving one's enemy does not mean ignoring or tolerating the evil that they do. Truth and love both require that we resist evil.