Why am I so truthless?
Trigger alert: contains autism and theological language
Let’s begin with the earnest adolescent Christian. Everything was so utterly serious, the truth was a matter of more than life or death; salvation or Dalmatian, with Cruella de Ville swishing her satanic furs around the barren churchscape.
Enter the decidedly ‘small c’-charismatic preacher, whose wit often overstepped his theology and caused trouble. What a tour de force was Uncle Tom!
I didn’t understand him in the slightest.
But then (reader, thank Gxd I never married him! Despite my teenage crush, there was an ocean of everyday things I didn’t understand – a poor undiagnosed teenager with autism) who did I understand?
He gave me the nickname, so here I am: Truthless. Of course he was teasing, but it took me several decades to learn what teasing was.
But Uncle Tom was uncannily prescient, because to be truthless is the opposite of untruthful.
Mark C Taylor writes about the current theological landscape in his phrase After God. He’s writing postmodern theology, what comes after the death of Gxd which was announced in the 1960s. So here I am in this blog posting an after.
I remember as a student being discomfited during a seminar where the visiting professor looked over his glasses and said “you all know postmodernism’s a joke, right?”
I get the joke now, after all those years, post haste.
Modernism in the early Twentieth Century was about the novelist Henry James telling us to “make it new!” So the Twentieth Century did make amazing new things, ripping up dog eared old hymn sheets: Cubism, Bauhaus, Electronica, nuclear weapons. But in the moment of the new, the new is always passing, unbearably, instantly lost. The point of the professor’s joke was that we never get post-postmodern (that tired old other joke) because we have already always been postmodern – always leaving what we have made, always saying goodbye. I’m dying (“cancer, how awful, I don’t know what to say” etc.) but so are you. Every cell of us. And that’s ok, how else can we keep changing and growing without shedding our dead skin cells? Ashtrays to ashtrays – dust to belated duster.
So a postmodern theology isn’t merely a moment in church history (though already Neo-orthodoxy wants to eat it up and spit it out). Something deeper, subtler – the kind of joke that might just make Gxd laugh. To recognise that every glimpse we catch of Gxd – or of any thing, or word, or meaning, for that matter – is always swept into another and another new. Or do you think your dogma will save you from this perishing nuisance? Try interpreting Scripture, a book, a play, the conversation you had with your loved one five minutes ago – are you sure you’ve got the meaning right? Might your understanding change in the light of something new (ah, you snapped at me because someone cut in front of you in traffic … why didn’t you say so? …)
And if you’re absolutely sure you’ve got it watertight, does that let the water of baptism in at all; are you sure you’re not the one who’s dead?
So when Mark C Taylor writes that we are perpetually After God, it’s the paradox that the death of Gxd realised in us is also the life of uncertain truth, which is alive in constant searching, growing, seeking After God.
Apparently in some Buddhist schools, to be truthless is to be the one fallen from the noble path, the lowest of the low. I’m happy (if happy’s the right word) to follow that path which the apostle Paul learned to take.
Truthless, of close, is close to ruthless by the skin of its T. Relentless. Truth, the Spirit, doesn’t relent in leading us on.
