A local retired Episcopal priest, Norman Siefferman of Stafford County, Virginia, has a letter to the editor to the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star that raises some important questions about the nature of religious truth and our ability to know it that is worth taking a look at. I will grant at the outset that one can hardly say all that needs to be said about such an issue in a letter to the editor (or, for that matter, a blog post), but a lot of people in our culture make up their minds about such things based on brief arguments. So here’s what Rev. Siefferman says:
Let us make a rule for ourselves: I may say I know the truth and I am permitted to say I know the difference between reality and the unreal, but I am never allowed to say I possess absolute, unconditional, unqualified knowledge.
I could be wrong.
It’s true that I could be wrong about lots of things, but that doesn’t mean I can be wrong about absolutely anything. I can say with an absolutely, indisputable certainty that the 16th century German Reformer Martin Luther died before I was born. I suppose one could bring up the possibility of temporal paradoxes or time travel that would falsify that statement, but the realm of the totally hypothetical (not to mention science fictional) cannot exercise a veto over what is otherwise something that can be known with ironclad certainty. Oh, and it also has to be said that the statement, “I am never allowed to say I possess absolute, unconditional, unqualified knowledge” is itself an expression of something that Rev. Siefferman claims to know in an absolute, unconditional, unqualified sense. Thus, it is self-contradictory.
The idea of unqualified truth, in the hands of mortals, is risky. But I hear you say, “Of course we know some things that are unconditionally true.”
Don’t be too hasty with that reply. It is not likely, but some bright physicist may discover that Newton got it wrong about his laws of motion. Newton was also a mere human being.
No matter how basic or fundamental, all human knowledge is limited.
The limited nature of human knowledge is a truism. Being open to the possibility that even our fundamental understanding of the nature of the physical universe makes good sense, especially when one considers the expansion of that understanding from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Galileo to Newton to Einstein. But there’s a crucial distinction that many people, including Rev. Siefferman, miss here. That’s the difference between our understanding of the physical world, which is limited by our capabilities for experiment, observation, and analysis, and our understanding of God’s truth, which is revealed to us because we are incapable of discovering it on our own.
St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13 that “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (v. 12) There’s no question that in this life we do not, indeed cannot, know all that we might theoretically know about and of God. But does that mean that we can know nothing certainly, or be able to only engage in conjecture regarding God? I would answer, “no, thank God!” Because He has revealed what was otherwise hidden, we can say with the certainty of faith that 1) God exists; 2) God is personal; 3) God is at work in human affairs; 4) God loves all that He has created; 5) God has sent His Son into the world that people, and ultimately all creation, might be saved from the ravages of sin. There’s more, but let’s go with that.
The only matter upon which this reasoning is dependent is the assertion that God has revealed Himself to humanity. I would hope that Rev. Siefferman and other Christians who are skeptical of our ability to know anything with certainty about God would grant that revelation is a reality If it’s not, then we are still completely in the dark about God, and our faith is in vain, ultimately no more connected to reality than Scientology.
For all you knew, your neighbor might be an agnostic who happened to like the superb English of the Prayer Book, or he/she might be a zealous, red-hot evangelical who secretly wished to convert the world to total-immersion baptism. In either case, no one tried to bother you with his or her private beliefs.
Worship was corporate; we were all in it together, but the finer points of doctrine were left to the individual.
This would be true, except that what he describing isn’t really worship, at least not on the part of the agnostic. Just because he enjoys Prayer Book English doesn’t mean that he is giving an act of adoration to a Being who may or may not exist. And one would think that the existence of God is not one of the “finer points of doctrine.” In a debating society, perhaps. In the Church of Jesus Christ, no.
Why all that latitude in belief and doctrine? Because, as the preacher (if he had a theological education worthy of the name) told us, none of us knew for sure. None of us had a grip on the absolute truth, and we were willing to admit it.
Actually, if that preacher had a “theological education worthy of the name,” he would understand the difference between the certainty of faith and the certainty of knowledge. He wouldn’t claim that what he knew was of any credit to him or his intellect, but give glory to God for revealing Himself to His people. He would explain that this was not cause for pride on our part, much less for arrogance, but rather for humility.
The Bible often tells us that only God can know the absolute truth, and any human claim to know it amounts to idolatry. Idolatry means regarding something that is entirely human (doctrines, for example) as eternal and divine.
Except that what is human is the linguistic and rational expression of those doctrines, rather than the realities that they reflect. God has revealed Himself as Trinity–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–and while we may be open to new ways of expressing that truth, it is not the truth itself that changes, but our understanding and formulation of it.
Rev. Siefferman, and many others with him, has created a bit of a red herring in this piece. No Christian who has any real understanding of theology claims to have the “absolute truth,” in the sense of knowing all there is to know of God, including the minutiae of His will and plans for humanity. (Sure, there are dispensationalists who would claim to know every jot and tittle of the future, but they’ve been proven wrong so many times it’s a genuine wonder that anyone still pays attention to them. But even most dispensationalists recognize that there are things we don’t know, such as the time of Christ’s return.) What we do claim to know is the truth that God has revealed to us, that He desired us to know, and that was given foremost in Jesus Christ, and in continuing form in Holy Scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing its truth to our understanding. I appreciate that Rev. Siefferman is concerned about the institutional future of the Episcopal Church, and well he should be. But that concern truly doesn’t compare to the importance of upholding the truth of the gospel as it has been handed down to the Church over the last two millenia. It is that truth, and the God who gave it, that will save His people, and hardly worth trading for a mess of institutional pottage.
(Thanks to Titusonenine for the heads-up.)
The Reformed Pastor 