|
“The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you and among you.” (Luke 17:20f)
Time was, when truth was delivered by authorities – kings and emperors, priests and philosophers, the great initiates. Their status was the guarantee that what they were saying was true.
The progress of civilisation over the last 300 years has taken human beings away from accepting truths on outer authority. Starting with the Enlightenment, we can trace a line through to those thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s who cultivated a reflexive suspicion of authority. Many of us have grown used to questioning critically what is presented as the news, which inevitably reflects a set of editorial choices and is filtered by a set of values.
However, there is a danger, summarised by GK Chesterton:
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
If we apply this not only to belief in God, but to everything delivered by sources that could be seen as authorities, we come to our current situation.
In the last few years, I have encountered people who have set out on a quest to understand critically what is going on in the world, and who have started to question aspects of the narrative as presented by the media. However, the critical tools they develop there sometimes seem to fail them when they are presented with alternative theories about what is going on, or even sources that claim to have the whole truth, for example people who claim to have clairvoyant perception. In some cases, I have witnessed how friends have become isolated from their loved ones, who seemingly cannot reach them with reasoned argument or with appeals to shared values. And in extreme cases, they have taken actions that they later regretted bitterly, all because of the ‘truth’ that they had grown inflamed by.
Every time something comes towards us that makes a claim of truth, we are called upon to exercise our own power of discrimination. Particularly if something seems sensational, or if it offers an easy explanation of the problems of the world, Jesus’ words about the coming of the kingdom of God can be helpful. If the kingdom of God – which we could understand as the source of all truth – is already within us, we don’t need to abandon our sense of self to run after it; if it is among us (the Greek bears both meanings), then we can be sure that we will deepen our discoveries not by isolating ourselves, but through conversation – through community.
– Tom Ravetz |
