No Nonsense about God 2: The Truth of God

I’ll begin by stating the obvious: God must be the God of truth. If God were different from the truth, that would mean there is something untrue about God, which is impossible if God is God.

So far, all Christians can agree: the difficulty comes when we start asking what sort of truth we are talking about. What kind of thing is the truth of God?

Now, as far as individual people are concerned, it’s fairly clear that our understanding of truth develops as we grow, as we mature; and that this is as it should be. A young child will have a simple and childish understanding of the truth, and thus a simple and childish faith. But, as we grow, as we are challenged by our own and other people’s experience and questions, our perception of the truth also needs to grow in response: if it doesn’t, either it will wither and die, or it will become unreal and of no use, an infantile faith which is ultimately in conflict with adult life. And most Christians (though not all) will agree that our faith, our understanding of God’s truth, should not be infantile.

But the strange thing is that, although we mostly agree that this should be true as an individual person develops, it becomes far less obvious that the same is true in the story of the development of the Church. There is a very large body of opinion which says: God’s truth was revealed once and for all at some definite point in the past: when Moses or Jesus had spoken their last word, when Paul had written his last letter, when the Bible was finally put together, when the council of Chalcedon was over, or whenever. After this cut-off point there can be no messing with God’s revealed truth. It is precisely the same for us now as it was for the first generation of Christians, and for the early Fathers, and for the Church of the middle ages, and for the Reformers, and so on: what is more, it will remain the same for the next 2000 years, indeed the next 20.000. Anyone who messes with this absolute, revealed Truth is a dangerous liberal and a heretic: for, to this body of opinion, a heretic is someone who tries to add further truths to the original and final Truth given by God once and for all, for all times and for all peoples.

It seems to me, however, (and not just to me) that this attitude is as foolish and infantile as the one which says “I have no need to rethink the faith I acquired in my first year at Sunday School”. The Church’s experience has changed and grown just as an individual’s does, and, just like an individual, the church has had to search for more insights into God’s truth in response. The Bible and the early Church cannot tell us what to think about In Vitro Fertilisation, or GM foods, or what we should watch after the 9 o’clock watershed, because such questions simply weren’t around 2000 years ago: to answer them, we need further investigation into, and revelation of, God’s truth. The heretic isn’t the person who dares to allow God’s truth to grow, but the one who tries to limit it. A few weeks ago we saw how St John in his gospel moves from the one Word of God spoken at the beginning of all things, to an infinite number of revelations of God’s truth in and through Jesus Christ. And in Chapter 16 of his gospel Jesus says “I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But the Spirit of truth, when it comes, will lead you into all truth”. In other words, there is more to come: there is always more to come. We cannot limit or restrict the truth of God any more than we can restrict the God of truth. Our business is not to police that truth, but to let it unfold as history and human understanding also unfold.

I want to end by giving three examples of the way in which this needs to happen.

First, we have to take seriously the findings of science: they cannot be denied or ignored. In Brecht’s play about Galileo, there is a conflict between him and the Pope, who has an unshakeable view of the universe with the earth at the middle and a succession of celestial spheres surrounding it. But Galileo has discovered that Jupiter has moons – a discovery incompatible with current Catholic dogma. They are standing on the Vatican roof with a telescope: look through it, says Galileo, and you will see that your beliefs have to change! But the Pope refuses to look. If we believe in the God of truth, we cannot do this.

In many ways Christians still (sometimes unconsciously) look at things as if the earth were indeed the centre of the universe, and therefore of God’s creation; as if humans were necessarily God’s last throw of the creative dice (we are “the crown of creation”, says one of our new Eucharistic prayers); as if the whole enterprise began 6000 years ago in the Garden of Eden, and is going to end within a similar timescale when Christ returns for the Last Judgement. Never mind what astronomers and physicists have discovered, never mind Einstein and the time-space continuum. We go on talking as if humans and animals all came into being at the same time, and are quite unrelated to one another – never mind the dinosaurs or Darwin. Even if we don’t really believe all this, we still tend to carry on as if we ought to believe it. But it won’t do any more, and, if we pretend that it will, we aren’t standing up for Truth, we are just bringing Christianity into disrepute. Whereas if we dare to accept and celebrate the discoveries of science, we shall have much to contribute to human knowledge and understanding.

The second example of how “traditional” belief has been challenged is in the findings of modern psychology. In some of our attitudes to gender and sexuality, for example, we may suppose we are standing up for some eternal truth or morality, whereas in fact we are becoming a laughing-stock and a dinosaur. If we are really open to God’s truth, we cannot go on treating women as inferior to men, in our structures and in our language. We cannot go on treating all gay people as perverts, and all loving, stable gay relationships as against the will of God. And so on. To do so is not merely unjust, but, once again, it brings our whole religion into disrepute.

Thirdly, we cannot continue to take, deliberately or unconsciously, a fundamentalist attitude towards the Bible; we cannot ignore the biblical scholarship of the past 200 years. It is absurd to go on insisting that the Bible is all “literally true”, when we know that much (though by no means all) of it is inconsistent with the discoveries of history(1), science(2), and archaeology(3), and quite a lot of it is inconsistent with itself(4). It is not helpful to maintain that all four gospel accounts are accurate to the smallest detail, when there are actually so many contradictions between them (5). A fundamentalist approach not only sets up a sort of internal schizophrenia in our minds, but it also stops us going on to discover the real glories and truths which the Bible actually reveals. For, in truth, we do not find a finished portrait of the true God on every page of the Bible, but a gradually developing picture of him which emerges as we move from the most primitive texts (where God is a jealous tribal God) (6) to the most mature, where he is the transcendent and loving Lord of heaven and earth and all that is in them (7). And the truth of God continues to emerge as human history and experience continue to unfold.

God’s tradition, God’s truth, are not some lifeless corpse, embalmed for all time in the past and now entrusted to us so that we may keep it safe and hand it on unchanged to the next generation: it is a living organism, constantly developing, constantly giving off new light, new insight, and new life. And as we and the Holy Spirit continually seek to mould together the truth we have inherited with the truths and insights of today, so new glories emerge and new patterns form, as if we were looking into a multi-dimensional and ever-changing kaleidoscope: and God is revealed afresh, as we travel, once again, “further up and further into” God’s eternal, unlimited, and unfathomable Truth.


For example, Daniel did not wield so much power over successive Eastern monarchs
The earth did not come into being before the sun
The entire population of the world was not destroyed at the time of Noah
The accounts of creation in Genesis 1 & 2 are inconsistent with one another; there are different accounts of history in Kings and Chronicles; Acts gives a different account of Paul’s conversion and its aftermath from Paul himself in Galatians 1.
For instance, did Jesus cleanse the temple at the start of his ministry (John 2) or at the end (Matthew 21)? Was it James and John themselves who asked for places on either side of him in the kingdom (Mark 10) or their mother (Matthew 20)? etc etc etc.
See for example Exodus 34.11-16)
As in the resplendent second part of Isaiah from chapter 40 onwards.