Listening: the appropriate subjectiveness of truth

I think that in my younger years I at times suffered from an inappropriate oversimplification of my understanding of truth.  From my adult interactions with others, I can see that I was never alone in this.

Truth is always something that is contained within a certain frame of reference.  If I'm travelling in a car on the freeway, the car next to me may look like it's standing still.  Is it?  Some would say, "But it's not!  It's driving 5kmh over the limit!".

Yet if my 9 month old son were to magically be able to speak and said "That car's not going anywhere."  I'd agree with him.  Because that statement speaks truthfully of our experience of it.  It is true, within our frame of reference.  It's a narrow frame of reference, but the statement is an entirely valid expression of the experience of someone from within it.

Which is what allows me to listen well.  Well, better.

When I listen to someone, this allows me to listen actively and acknowledge their thoughts, experiences and feelings.  I can honestly nod my head when listening to someone explain how a situation affected them, even when I might have a totally different understanding of that situation.  I can truly hear that person, and allow them to feel heard and understood.

He who answers before listening--that is his folly and his shame. (Pro. 18:3)

All too often I have in the past, and sometimes still do, fail to hear a person well because I'm too busy putting together my 'objective' take on the situation.  We can all too easily invalidate a person's experience by helping them see it from another angle before we've acknowledged what it looked and felt like from their camera angle.

Our subjective experiences are real.  Real to us.  They are a truth, in that sense, however untrue they may be when a larger body of facts and broader perspective is available.  Having someone sit with you in your experience and feeling what you're feeling is a powerful thing. Being understood is massively powerful.

A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.   (Pro. 18:2)

In fact, often it is enough on its own to enable that person to evaluate their perspective and self-correct.  And you've managed to do so without ever acting as if you've got the omniscience to know all truth as God knows it.

When I was younger, I'd baulk at nodding my head to indicate understanding if I disagreed with what the other person was saying.  It was amazing how quickly my body language and posture towards them would make it clear that I was no longer with them, hearing them, understanding them and how quickly the other person would close up.

Understanding the appropriate subjectivity of truth allows me to acknowledge the other person's experience as their experience, and so to hear and understand them well without being scared of lying by nodding or saying 'right' as I listen.  To acknowledge their experience is not to validate their interpretation of it.

Listening is a language of love.  And it's only in love that the truth builds up.

Resurrection account: implications for manchester?

I suspect that there are some implications for the accounts of the resurrection that have not been yet rightly understood. Firstly, let's see what John has to say:

Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus ' head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. (John 20:6-7 ESV)

I propose that there are two exegetical implications for this passage:

1: Making one's bed is entirely unnecessary.

Now of course some will protest that Jesus wasn't going to sleep there again and so this principle isn't transferrable to non-necrotic settings. This, I propose, is negated by Jesus' knowledge that the angels and even some disciples would see the tomb in its unkempt state. If Jesus is happy to have beings, spiritual and corporeal, witness his room in a certain state then I'm happy to leave my room in that state while it's private. (This also provides assurance that if an angel did visit my room through the day that it'd be cool.)

2: You do need to have your pillow in its correct spot.

Now in saying this, I'm not suggesting that one needs to do this oneself. From the passage it's impossible to tell whether Jesus folded the face cloth, or whether his angelic minions did that for him. Hooking up some sort of spiritual housemaid would be heaps cool. But, failing this, you should probably pick your pillow up off the floor.

Does anyone else have any more neglected exegetical principles from the resurrection accounts?

Knowledge and wonder #1

The trans-continental journey aboard a train of thought often begins with a nagging idea in the back of one's mind. Wouldn't an eternal heaven become boring after the first few millienna?

If all the things that one might know is a finite set, then surely at some point I shall know them all. Even allowing for the possibility that in my glorified body there are some things that I may still be too dense to understand, the set of things that I may ever know will still at some point become known by me. Where's the fun in that?

Until, I began to wonder if my current experience of learning about God will hold true in heaven too.

When I was a child, I used to think I knew a lot about God. But then I started to go to Unichurch. After a few years there I thought I knew most things there were to know about God, then I went to bible college. Then I thought I knew most things you should know about God, then I started having to rely on Him in full-time ministry.

So, I considered the idea that my experience would continue into eternity. That as quickly as my knowledge of God might grow, my understanding of how much more there was to know about him would increase at an even greater rate.

At the moment, the only way that I can understand enjoyment in heaven is to consider the idea that my wonder would increase more quickly than my knowledge.

How do you think of heaven? There are plenty of bits and pieces in my mind to do with knowledge and wonder that haven't quite fallen together yet, so I'd love to hear your crumbs of wisdom.

A Christmas prayer

Merry Christmas everyone! :)

Thought I'd share a snippet of the prayer I'll be praying this morning at church.

Who else has a god like you? What other god would subject himself to the indignity, the mess, the limitedness, the pain and the shame of living amongst our fallen world as a human creature? 

Which other god can say to us of our experiences: "I know. I understand."?   

Which other God has walked our path for us, and qualified us so that we have no need to work our way up to God but are already in his presence? 

None. God, that's why there is no one like you. You are amazing from so many angles. We look forward to seeing you in the flesh in heaven, to be ruled by someone who is just that good.

I do my little turn on the catwalk...

When I first saw it, I was unsure what to think of Christian Fashion Week.  Was it a monstrous artefact of Western cultural Christianity having embraced materialism to its hilt?  Perhaps a delightful celebration of the glory of God in creation?  Or perhaps an industry-based para-church ministry?

I'm very much interested in finding an appropriate theological framework for aesthetics, so my interest was mildly piqued by the possibility of a genuinely Christian event focussed on all things sartorial.  So, I did all I could do being a male under 6 foot and with a waist rounder than 34 inches: I checked the internet.

Here's a selection of what I found.  What do you think of it?

Description of the main event:

"The runway is set for the very first Christian Fashion Week ® Fashion Show, giving designers the forum to showcase their most creative attempts to cater to the Christian fashion community. The night is filled with fashion, music, lights, flashing cameras, and industry VIPs."

From the event's vision statement:

"Christian Fashion Week ® is a mission to stand for dignity on behalf of our communities, families, and fashion consumers."

Finally, we come to the designers.  And in a statement that summed up the subtext of the rest, the final designer on the page stated their reasons for participation:

"I want to reach other markets in the Fashion Industry."

Christianity as a new market.  Quite understandable for the designers involved, but it's hard to see the organisers as anything but coming from the same place.  Especially when I saw the casting call.

Uck.

Moving in some very true spaces, and running from some

Blog posts like this one seem to tear me up a bit.  They probably shouldn't.  After writing this post I'm sure I'll have integrated my thinking and feeling on this in a way that'll enable me to even perhaps enjoy this kind of writing.  But I'm not there yet.  We're only at the start of the post.

The thing is, I think that there is a sense in which these piece is so truly true.  The lady who writes this has found some genuine wisdom.  She's engaging in the realities of human experience in a truly deep way that rejects caricatures that we'll often find in either lazy exegesis of texts, in our church cultures or in fundamentalist dogma.

I was witness a while ago to a conversation where two gentlemen were arguing/discussing the nature of the human will and limited atonement and salvation, etc.  (All the joyful kind of stuff, you know)  And one of them said to the other, "But you're sovereign!".  To which the other responded with a detailed questioning of doctrine moving towards a biblical proof of the sovereignty of God.

But what I was thinking in my head and heart when the first guy spoke was,

"Yes.  You're right.  There is a sense in which you are so, so right and it really matters that we recognise our own sovereignty.  And yet, there is now way the other guy is going to hear what you're saying as true.  And I completely understand that too."

The more I go on, the more I open up and am malleable to new patterns of thinking.  And at the same time the more deeply rooted I become in the gospel of the Lord Jesus and His rule by His powerful word.

Yet, so far, I'm still a shade uncomfortable when other people who are on that same journey are a klick or two to one or the other side of where I am.  And I wonder what that means.

I'm sure it means lots of things about my sin, insecurities and prejudices.  Surely, it must.  But I think it also means some things about my convictions about the gospel, and its supreme importance.  Even if the way I experience that is utterly different now.

P.S.  I'm not trying to say anything negative at all about Deborah B. Edgar.  The title of the post isn't about her blog post.  That's just where the train of thought/emotion started.

Lies #6 - The first conundrum

Ok, so I'm procrastinating. Sue me.

 Nathan put forward a juicy difficulty for my position on lies in a comment. It runs:

 "[God] also seems to either commend or participate in the deception of Israel's enemies, assuming the prophet in 1 Kings 22 is telling the truth, for example..." 

Let me quickly break the passage down for you.  Roughly summarised:

Ahab, king of Israel, consults his 400 non-Yhwh prophets to see if he should attack some cities.  They say yes, you'll win.  He gets advice to go a prophet of Yhwh, Micaiah (Mick to his mates).  Ahab hates Mick because he's always prophesying that Ahab's going to cop it, but he asks him anyway.   

Mick says, "Sure, go for it!"

Ahab says, "Yeah right, since when do you ever prophesy anything good for me?" 

Mick says, "Yeah, just joking.  You're going to get so smoten if you do.  Also, I saw a vision where God told a spirit to tell all your dodgy prophets that you'd win, just so you'd go for it." 

Then he tells everyone, "Mark my words, if he comes back alive from this battle, I'm not Yhwh's prophet."

Knowing the truth now, Ahab decides to have a crack anyway, but in disguise and with a stunt double.  Short story shorter, the stunt double makes it out alive but Ahab cops an arrow to somewhere more vital than his knee.

Now, there's lots to say about this passage about truth and lies.  And lots of it, I think, mitigates the uncomfortableness of what God does in the sense that through this incident truth massively wins.

Despite this, the fact remains.  God sent a spirit to deceive.  God made Ahab believe something untrue.  The thing that I think is most important to note is that God does so in judgement.  Much, in fact, as God killed Ahab in judgement.

You see, what I'm getting at is that God's denial of the truth to someone, and even his giving them over to their delusions, (and given the nature of the prophets Ahab consulted this was definitely a product of Ahab's delusions) is destructive judgement.  It was an act predicated upon his righteous decision as judge to finally destroy this wicked king after years and years of grace.  In this case of deception, the only case of this exact nature I'm aware of in Scripture, it is synonymous with the bringing of death.

Now, Ahab actually knew what Yhwh had said before he went to battle.  And Yhwh arranged that.  So it's not as if God doesn't actually tell him what's in store if he fails to take heed.  In fact, he makes sure the false information comes from the mouths of false prophets.  The word from Yhwh's prophet came perfectly true.

But in reference to our current question of ethics, of what is right for humanity to do, the passage raises question marks.  Is lying always wrong?

I would suggest that lying is in a similar category to killing.  It almost never the right thing to do.  I think that the kind and degree of reasoning that we ought apply before deceiving is of a similar order to that which we ought to apply before taking life.  Partly because that's what lies end up doing.  They destroy life.

God's purpose for this reality is life and thriving for people, and it is our duty to uphold this.

Yet, God reserves the right to destroy the destroyer.  It's the kind of thing that God is free to utilise in judgement, but not so humanity.  Not in the same way.