Truth

This is going to be one big post! I have just started reading ‘Velvet Elvis’ by Rob Bell.
This morning while I was on the train I read the following and was greatly encouraged, challenged, and left feeling free after having felt bound by certain ideals for years.

Please do try read it all, its really insightful.

"Truth is everywhere, and it is available to everyone. But Paul takes it further,
because for him truth is bigger than his religion. Notice what he says in the
book of Titus. He is referring to the people who live on the island of Crete
when he writes that even one of their own prophets has said, "`Cretans are
always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.' He has surely told the truth." So
Paul quotes one of the Cretan prophets and then affirms that this guy was right
in what he said. "This testimony is true." What the prophet said was true, so
Paul quotes him. For Paul, anybody is capable of speaking truth. Anybody, from
any perspective, from any religion, from anywhere. And these words from the book
of Titus, the quote from a Cretan prophet, are in the Bible. So the Word of God
contains the words of a prophet from Crete.

Paul affirms the truth wherever he
finds it.

But he takes it further in the book of Acts. He is speaking at a place
called Mars Hill (which would be a great name for a church) and trying to
explain to a group of people who believe in hundreds of thousands of gods that
there is really only one God who made everything and everybody. At one point
he's talking about how God made us all, and he says to them, "As some of your
own poets have said, `We are his offspring.'" He quotes their own poets. And
their poets don't even believe in the God he's talking about. They were talking
about some other god and how we are all the offspring of that god, and Paul
takes their statement and makes it about his God. Amazing. Paul doesn't just
affirm the truth here; he claims it for himself. He doesn't care who said it or
who they were even saying it about. What they said was true, and so he claims it
as his own.

This affirming and claiming of truth wherever you find it is all through the writings of Paul. In 1 Corinthians, he tells his readers,
"All things are yours,... and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God." He
essentially says to them, "It all belongs to God, and Christ is of God, and you
are of Christ, so...it's all yours."

Claim it. If it is true, if it is beautiful, if it is honorable, if it is right, then claim it. Because it is from God. And you belong to God. The philosopher Arthur Holmes is known for saying, "All truth is God's truth." It is such a great statement, because what other kind of truth could there be? So as a Christian, I am free to claim the
good, the true, the holy, wherever and whenever I find it. I live with the
understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God's and
everything in it

Do you know anybody who grew up in a religious environment,
maybe even a Christian one, and walked away from faith/church/God when they
turned eighteen and went away to college?

…Let me suggest why. Imagine what happens when a young woman is raised in a Christian setting but hasn’t been taught that all things are hers and then goes to a university where she’s exposed to all sorts of new ideas and views and perspectives. She takes classes in psychology and anthropology and biology and world history, and her professors are people who have devoted themselves to their particular fields of study. Is it possible that in the course of lecturing on their field of interest, her
professors from time to time say things that are true? Of course. Truth is
available to everyone.

But lets say her professors aren’t Christians, it is
not a "Christian" university, and this young woman hasn’t been taught that all
things are hers. What if she has been taught that Christianity is the only thing
that is true? What if she has been taught that there is no truth outside the
Bible? She’s now faced with this dilemma: believe the truth she’s learning or
the Christian faith she was brought up with.

Or we could put her dilemma this way: intellectual honesty or Jesus?

How many times have you seen this? I can’t tell you the number of people in their late teens or early twenties that I know, or those I have been told about, who experience truth outside the boundaries of their religion and abandon the whole thing because they think it’s a choice (which is a fatal flaw in thinking we’ll address in a moment). They are experiencing truth in all sorts of new ways, and they need a faith that is big enough to handle it. Their box is getting blown apart, and the faith they were handed doesn’t have room for what they are learning. "

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