Below is lifted from Colossians Remixed. It begins with the authors' translation of Hosea 4:1-3
There is no truth or steadfast love,
and no knowledge of God in the land
Swearing, lying, and murder,
and stealing and adultery break out
bloodshed follows bloodshed
Therefore the land mourns,
and all who live in it languish
together with the wild animals
and the birds of the air,
even the fish of the sea are perishing
- - - - - - -
Because truth is deeply relational, when there is no truth or intimate knowledge in the land, all human relationships are broken. Everything from our social and personal to our ecological relationships takes on the pall of death when there is no truth.
...
There is something ironic about Hosea's comment when read in light of the postmodern suspicion that large-scale truth claims invariably serve to legitimate violence. In contrast, Hosea insists that it is the absence of truth that gives rise to ever-escalating bloodshed.
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- Steve Allison
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4 comments:
In the words of Pilate, "What is truth?"
Newbigin, The Open Secret:
“Interpersonal relatedness belongs to the very being of God. Therefore there can be no salvation for human beings except in relatedness. No one can be made whole except by being restored to the wholeness of that being-in-relatedness for which God made us and the world and which is the image of that being-in-relatedness which is the being of God himself. A glimpse of this is given to us in the consecration prayer (John 17) where Jesus prays that those who believe may be made part of the very unity of the divine being, united by that which binds the Father and the Son, which is nothing other than the glory of God.
“The biblical insistence that God’s universal purpose of salvation is accomplished through the choosing of particular people arises from this fundamental insight concerning human nature. If each human being is to be ultimately understood as an independent spiritual monad, then salvation could only be through an action directed impartially to each and all. But if the truly human is the shared reality of mutual and collective responsibility that the Bible envisages, then salvation must be an action that binds us together and restores for us the true mutual relation to each other and to the world of nature. This means that the gift of salvation would be bound up with our openness to each other… ” (70)
Ware, The Orthodox Way:
"Why, then, believe in God as Trinity? In the last chapter we found that the two most helpful ways of entry into the divine mystery are to affirm that God is personal and that God is love. Now both these notions imply sharing and reciprocity. First, a "person" is not at all the same as an "individual." Isolated, self-dependent, none of us is an authenticated person but merely an individual, a bare unit as recorded in the census. Egocentricity is the death of true personhood. Each becomes a real person only through entering into relation with other persons, through living for them and in them. There can be no man, so it has been rightly said, until there are at least two men in communication. The same is true, secondly, of love. Love cannot exist in isolation, but presupposes the other. Self-love is the negation of love. As Charles Williams shows to such devastating effect in his novel Descent into Hell, self-love is hell; for, carried to its ultimate conclusion, self-love signifies the end of all joy and all meaning. Hell is not other people; hell is myself, cut off from others in self-centeredness."
Thanks Len and Kirk for some pertinent and beautiful thoughts.
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