“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…” John 16:12-13a
“You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” John 8:33 Because God is truth, people of faith must be people committed to truth. Whenever we discover truth, from any source, we are to recognize that as divine revelation, the spirit of truth.
That is why people of faith may embrace robustly the scientific quest for deeper understanding of the nature of reality. The scientific quest for truth is to religious minds a spiritual quest because God is truth.
When scientists in the 20th century discovered the mysterious and previously unknown nature of quantum mechanics, those of us who are people of faith could rejoice. The spirit of truth is guiding us through science into new things that God can say to us, truth that we could not bear in an earlier age because our level of knowledge had not grown enough.
When Charles Darwin uncovered the processes of evolution through whichGod’s spirit has drawn God’s creatures into higher levels of consciousness, people of faith could rejoice because we know more about God’s hand in creation through time.
But sometimes people of faith get stuck. Some who cling to a superstitious reading of scripture believe the story of creation in Genesis conflicts with the confirmed evidence of observation. They feel falsely threatened by the truth. The truth can never be threatening to people of faith because God is truth.
In earlier generations, some religious people were certain God chose kings as the only divinely sanctioned means of earthly government. After all, there are hundreds of verses in the Bible that address the rule of monarchs. The Bible presumes monarchy is normative. There is nothing in Scripture that directly authorizes democracies or representative governments.
Yet today, we rarely hear a call for a return to the Biblical governance of kings by those who claim to be followers of the Bible because our truth has grown. We have seen the fruit of the spirit revealed in the new truth of representative democracy.
Slavery was a given in Biblical times. The Bible has instructions on how to treat slaves. Even though the foundational story of the Hebrew Bible is a story of freedom from slavery, that same people when freed established slavery laws that are enshrined in our scriptures.
Abolitionists in the 19th century faced some of their strongest opposition from Christian believers who could quote dozens of verses to defend an ancient tradition of oppression. Yet it was a higher vision of Biblical principles, guided by the spirit of truth, that eventually succeeded in breaking the manacles of the institution of slavery.
The truth literally made us free.
Jesus told his followers he still had “many things to say to you.” Slowly through the centuries, the time is fulfilled when our ears can hear these new words of the spirit. The truth grows. Kings yield to representative government.
Slaves are freed. Many people of faith see themovements for equality for people of color, for women, for immigrants, and for gay people to be similar movements of the spirit, setting us free. As we open to the deeper implications of the truth that all human beings are God’s children, created in God’s image, we learn more, and we learn to dismantle structures of oppression.
But there is always resistance and backlash.
That resistance to the freedom of the spirit is sincere, often buttressed by Bible quotes. Sometimes it is reinforced by falsehoods.
Lies are the instruments of the devil, the father of lies. Commitment to truth is essential for our spiritual growth.
That’s why the soul of our nation is threatened when people deliberately peddle lies. When people say that Obama is a Muslim or was not born in Hawaii, their words are spiritually dangerous because they are not of the truth. When people ridicule the compelling scientific evidence about climate change, they are courting cosmic danger because they are resisting the best truth we know.
Let the truth be. It is the spirit’s path to freedom.
LOWELL GRISHAM IS THE RECTOR AT ST. PAUL’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN FAYETTEVILLE.
Opinion, Pages 9 on 03/14/2010