The following article was published in the Spokesman-Review July 1, 2000.
To Understand God’s message, biblical evidence must be weighed contextually and you must be willing to admit you may be wrong, Rev. Paul Graves says.
Facts don’t always add up to God’s truth
I spent a little time reading the Declaration of Independence the other day. Its most famous phrase, “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” was not a unanimous observation. King George III certainly did not think those truths were self-evident.
In fact, the Declaration spends most of its time listing the “facts” of how King George denied equal treatment of all people, how he usurped God’s authority to endow people with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I’m sure the king even questioned whether the colonists’ list of “facts” was factual. For the king, those facts certainly didn’t add up to the “truth” that resulted in the revolutionary War and our Fourth of July/Independence Day celebration.
You see what happened there? With the same “facts” before them, the colonists and the king arrived at different truths. Hmmm . . . I thought they were supposed to be self-evident.
This seems like a classic case where truth can be discovered in spite of the facts. So for a few minutes today, let’s look at the slippery relationship between truth and facts.
Illustration No. 1 comes from a recent religion column by Mike McManus. While discussing the recent Southern Baptist Convention, he identified two facts: (1) the denomination has moved in “a more conservative and biblical direction,” and (2) this denomination has added millions of members in recent years while certain mainline denominations have lost millions. I do not dispute his facts.
But the “truth” he derives from these two facts appears to be that the Southern Baptists’ rigid biblical stances must be right because their membership rolls are growing.
It is easy to assert the truth that 1 + 1 = 2 in mathematics. It is something else again to assert that bigger church membership adds up to being “true” (read “faithful”) to God’s word. The “truth” of McManus’ assertion based on the facts presented is a very incomplete truth at best.
Which, of course, is often what happens to each of us when we grab a piece of truth and believe it is the whole truth.
Illustration No. 2 comes as the Bible itself. Controversy flourishes anytime biblical stories are discussed because we will never have a totally accurate translation of the Bible for a variety of honest reasons. One plus one cannot equal two when discussing the Bible because we can’t be completely sure that “1” has the same value now as it did when it was first written.
But that certainly doesn’t mean the truth that is found on the pages of the Bible is unworthy of our embrace. A month ago I referred to the story of Jonah. Is the truth of God’s grace to the people of Nineveh discarded for you just because Jonah’s big fish wasn’t necessarily a whale?
With minimal apology to readers who may subscribe to a literal reading of every word in the Bible, my truth-piece is this: The fanciful, imaginative nature of biblical stories may not be always factually accurate. But that likely fact certainly does not detract from the powerful, life-changing truth of these same stories on millions of people over the centuries.
Truth is always much greater than the sum — or lack — of facts presented!
I believe our most consistent struggle is to keep searching for truth instead of just settling for facts. I think you can easily know what I mean by a simple review of your life over the past week. How many times in the last seven days were you faced with some facts that somehow didn’t add up to “the truth” as you had experienced it before?
All it takes to spout the facts and total them up is a combination of memory and knowing where to confirm the facts. Fact-finding is so often easier than truth-finding.
Because, to find the truth, you need to do at least two things: (1) put the facts in their larger context so you can see how they relate most fully to each other; and (2) approach the search for truth in a special way.
I shared with story from Sr. Joan Chittister almost four years ago. It bears repeating.
“Once upon a time a visitor came to the monastery looking for the purpose and meaning of life. The Teacher said to the Visitor, ‘If what you seek Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else.’
“ ‘I know’ the visitor said. ‘To find Truth I must have an overwhelming passion for it.’
“ ‘No,’ the Teacher said. ‘In order to find Truth, you must have an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.’”
I say again: Truth — especially God’s Truth — is always greater than the sum of any facts that we can conjure up. No matter how right we think we are.
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