DE Ponderings by Kevin Kessler

¹² “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³ When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
John 16:12-15 (NRSV)

About six months ago I subscribed to another magazine—Plough Quarterly. It is published by “the Bruderhof, an international movement of Christian communities whose members are called to follow Jesus together in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and of the first church in Jerusalem, sharing all our talents, income, and possessions (Acts 2 and 4).” A sampling of articles and materials can be found at www.plough.com.

The theme of the Autumn 2014 issue is Building Justice. One article is an interview with Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, on the subject of marriage as social justice. Professor George maintains a very traditional view of marriage and, from additional research I did, I learned that he is a prominent conservative thinker. His views were evident in the article.

A little over mid-way through the article, the interviewer presents this statement to the professor: “You have surprised people by your friendship with Cornel West, the famous Afro-American Studies scholar...who often takes positions radically opposed to yours, including on marriage, affirmative action...and a host of other hotly contested issues.” Cornel West is also a professor at Princeton and from research I learned he holds a very different view on various subjects than does Professor George. I don’t know either one of these professors and have never heard of either of them before, but from what I’ve learned about each one it would be hard to imagine them as friends, or sitting down in the same room and having a civil discussion. Their views seem that divergent. Yet the interviewer’s statement suggests that the two men are friends.

Professor George offers a response to the interviewer’s statement that points to the reason they can be friends and interact with each other in a civil manner. He responds, “There is no bond between people more powerful, in my opinion, than a shared love of truth. That will include the desire to be corrected when one is in error. My vocation as a scholar and as a Christian is to get at the truth. That means I need to avoid falling so deeply in love with my own opinions that I prefer holding them, even when they are erroneous, to being corrected.” The professor continues saying that he and Professor West share a similar vocation, that they both love the truth, that they are engaged in a cooperative venture to pursue truth. And then Professor George adds: “So when we engage each other, we know that neither of us is seeking victory—something only one party in a contest can acquire. Rather, both of us are seeking truth—a common good that interlocutors can share.”

A couple paragraphs later, Professor George talks about his efforts of criticizing the thought of John Stuart Mill, a great nineteenth-century liberal thinker. He notes that in the middle of one of Mill’s essays he found a compelling point, that all of us “need to earn the right to have our opinions, and we do that by considering very carefully, sympathetically, and in the best possible light what reasonable people who disagree with us have to say.”

Professor George is quick to point out that the right to one’s opinion is not “freedom from government interference with the expression of one’s views.” What he means, rather, “is that if you don’t understand why some reasonable people of goodwill disagree with you, then you don’t really grasp the basis of your own view, you don’t have a grip on the reasons for holding it. You are a mere ideologue. That’s why the kind of open-mindedness Mill calls for—in other words, the virtue of intellectual humility—is critically important.”

As I read and pondered over this article, I thought about truth. I searched the scriptures where truth is mentioned. I liked the verses from the gospel of John printed above stating that when the Spirit of truth comes we will all be led into truth. Implied is that truth comes from the Spirit. Truth is not ours but it is something that comes to us, that leads us. How easy it is to claim truth as our own and insist on others knowing it as we know it. Is this more like opinion rather than truth? I wonder.

As John Stuart Mill claims, we have a right to our opinion. But it seems inappropriate to identify our opinion as truth. More appropriate, in my opinion, is that we together seek truth as we seek the presence of the Spirit in our midst and within our lives. All of us seeking truth puts us on a level playing field. We may have strong opinions and very ably vocalize our position. But our goal should not be to win or defeat the other. A better objective is to find more truth than either of us knows. The words from the Gospel of John seem to say this, in that the Spirit of truth will declare to us things that are to come. In other words, there is more truth we don’t know that is yet to come, to be declared by the Spirit.

I am convinced that we have only glimpses of truth. So how can we claim to have truth and declare that others do not have? Would it be more accurate to say we all share some truth and that there is more to come for all of us? Now then, together, let’s search for it, wait for it, celebrate it when it arrives. Again, it’s my opinion, but this way of being community sounds inviting. What do you think? Is this possible for the Illinois/Wisconsin District, the Church of the Brethren, the Church in general? In my opinion, I think it is.