For about 500 years now, give or take, human beings have been trying desperately to find truth without God, to locate it within the finite human sphere without need for the supernatural.
The first modern attempt could be seen in the Enlightenment, where truth was to be found in reason and science. There were universal, objective categories within reality that the human mind could discover, order, and harness for good. Reason could control nature.
Over time, this struck many as inadequate. After all, nature cannot be dismissed so summarily. Its undeniable power and vitality cannot be eliminated by rational ordering. The merely rational life is sterile, denying that Nature has its own life, which must be respected.
Thus Romanticism was born, which attempted to locate truth in the presumably simpler, more pristine, though far more unpredictable sensibilities of nature, something ignored by Rationalism’s headlong attempt to subdue it. Nature would not be ignored.
This bifurcation of the human being into two spheres, reason and nature, mind/spirit and body, caused a great schism. Reason opposed Nature. And Nature opposed the dehumanizing orderliness of Reason.
This eventually led to a hard and fast distinction between society and the quest for human authenticity. Society was now viewed as an artificial construct that robs life of its fullest expression. Society was the enemy of human flourishing.
Enter Friedrich Nietzsche, the brilliant 19th century German philosopher, who reluctantly concluded that the entire project of finding truth anywhere was a delusion. God was dead, he said, and truth is a fiction.
Notions of truth and falsehood, good and evil, were mere social constructs, that is, complete human creations. Ethics only appear to be true, but in reality they are fraudulent.
What Nietzsche decided was that any given “culture” is merely a set of agreed upon “values” and norms (given that we all need some kind of system or another within which to live). Such cultures, however, are not based on anything even remotely resembling objective truth.
Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and Mohammed, for example, did not reveal Truth; they simply possessed the creativity, will, and personal charisma to convince people to follow them. From the sheer force of their strength and self-determination each of their “movements” began.
But again, the movement itself was based on nothing more than the wholly subjective, creative force of its founder. The true leader does not recognize any truth outside of him or herself, but is instead the courageous artist and creator who alone establishes ex nihilo what is to be, by force of vision, personality, and will.
In many respects, we in the U.S. live in a Nietzschean world (albeit with a smiley face, as opposed the darker European version). There is no truth, only what we provisionally consider truth. “Culture” is a wholly arbitrary configuration. It possesses no universal truth and its values cannot be transferred to other cultures (as if any of its values were inherently True).
No, different cultures and their respective “values” are not transportable. There are no points of contact with other cultures. Each is unique and idiosyncratic. (Consider the tribalism of today’s political groupings. One group’s “identity” cannot be fathomed by anyone outside of it. Power, not persuasion, is the inevitable result.)
Instead of fealty to any one notion of truth, much less God-given truth, what distinguishes us are our “values,” “commitment,” even “caring.” These are all Nietzschean categories. It isn’t what you believe that matters, since truth is relative, but how passionately and sincerely you believe what you believe.
Back when I was serving churches in Connecticut, I was asked to join the “Church and Ministry Committee.” Among other things, we were tasked with assessing candidates for ordination.
As a part of this process, candidates had to write a three-part paper that addressed their “calling,” their theology, and their understanding of the structure (polity) of the U.C.C.
What I noticed was that the papers seemed focused mostly on the candidate’s “spiritual journey,” i.e. their calling. Also, knowing that the polity question was one of great concern to the committee, they usually went to some lengths to explicate their views on that.
But theology seemed largely an afterthought or, if not, an explication of the candidate’s own very subjective “beliefs.” Whenever I would ask about specific theologians, for instance, they’d invariably look at me as if I had three heads (I don’t, by the way).
What this suggests (and I could see it in my colleagues’ reactions as well) was that it didn’t matter what the candidates believed as long as they were sincere in what they believed. Any sense of objective truth, in other words, was immaterial; what mattered was the ‘authenticity’ of their subjective “values” and personal “spirituality,” no matter how quirky or distinct from the gospel.
If I am facing surgery, it’s comforting to know that the surgeon believes he or she has a calling to be a surgeon. Of greater value, however, as I’m sure you’d agree, is whether he or she has the requisite skills to do the job!
But somehow in religion and, unfortunately, in the church, we’ve come to reject the moral of this story. By that I mean we’re no longer in the truth business but in the “values” business. And because there are innumerable values out there, who are we to judge? It’s not like brain surgery, is it?
Again, what matters is that we’re sincere about what we believe. The rest, as they say, is all “caring and sharing.” Yet somehow, at our core, our souls long for something more than such thin gruel.
As Augustine once prayed, “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.”