Thank you for this. We're dealing with something at the very center of human existence when we start to confront whether our words are true.
I want to offer this because it changed something in my life a few years ago when I first saw it. It clarified the essence of the challenge which must be surmounted for me to be truthful in the conduct of my life and relationships. Basically, it's this: I once thought of "faith" as if it were about "believing" this or that proposition is accurate, as if to have had faith is to assent to some sort of theological or cosmological proposition about the nature of things. As if faith was about belief, about doctrine, about descriptions of the world, about truth claims. I no longer think of it that way at all. Faith - it now appears to me - is only ever expressed in those actions whose basis is the unprovable confidence that good is better than evil, and that truth is better than lies. To tell the truth is to assert in my actions and trust in my actual lived life - not in my head - that God is great, and that whatever ensues from the truth is higher and better than what ensues from lies and withholding. Faith, in short, is being truthful, and trusting wherever that takes us. Jesus showed us what this looks like. It's no small thing.
Thank you for this. We're dealing with something at the very center of human existence when we start to confront whether our words are true.
I want to offer this because it changed something in my life a few years ago when I first saw it. It clarified the essence of the challenge which must be surmounted for me to be truthful in the conduct of my life and relationships. Basically, it's this: I once thought of "faith" as if it were about "believing" this or that proposition is accurate, as if to have had faith is to assent to some sort of theological or cosmological proposition about the nature of things. As if faith was about belief, about doctrine, about descriptions of the world, about truth claims. I no longer think of it that way at all. Faith - it now appears to me - is only ever expressed in those actions whose basis is the unprovable confidence that good is better than evil, and that truth is better than lies. To tell the truth is to assert in my actions and trust in my actual lived life - not in my head - that God is great, and that whatever ensues from the truth is higher and better than what ensues from lies and withholding. Faith, in short, is being truthful, and trusting wherever that takes us. Jesus showed us what this looks like. It's no small thing.