The Truth Behind the Absolute

So, what is real? I ask myself this often. Why? Well, because there was this time when I fell in love. Deeply in love, with a Godman. I lost who I was, I didn't care, and all I did was follow. By no means was I perfect, not even in the Saint sort of way, but I had heart. Then came along something binary to faith, a system. This system stole my thoughts, hijacked my core. This system was foundational Enlightenment thinking. Everything was provable, because everything rested on 1 single perfect absolute truth.

The problem? The problem rests in the fact that the need to know everything, especially spiritual and Godlike, consumed me. I became so wrapped up in this Enlightenment, modernist thinking that I lost myself to something else. I forfeited myself over to something that I thought was greater, but what I didn't realize was how forsaken and limiting this was. I thought absolute truth existed. I mistook God, my love, for another. I left my first love, a relational God, for abstract truths in the forms on conceptions and single know all statements. Rational Logic, damn it, damn it to hell. Okay, maybe not entirely, not in the most foundational, modernistic sense maybe. In the sense that any one thing can be so scrutinized and studied to be known perfectly and absolutely, as in absolute truth.

I know where I am going with this. I'm treading on thin ice, almost on water itself (and we all know only one dude, well two have done that). I officially renunciate truth in the most absolute form. No, I did not say that I renunciate truth, I only do so in the most foundational, absolute forms of it. I renunciate the life-stripping, soul-damning forms of this way of thinking.

If my thoughts are convoluted, I apologize. What I mean to say is that truth exists, but we as finite, created beings have no right in knowing truth completely. Why? Simply, because God is truth. Truth is like God in that it can only be experienced in a limited form. Yes, truth can be experienced, not only can it be, but it is. Truth is not an abstract, conceptional thing out there, but a relational being in here. We live with truth, experience it, and relate to it.

Here's an analogy to clear things up a bit. We, in our most modernistic, Enlightenment ways of thinking, like to think of truth as a picture. If we study something hard enough, and objectively enough than we can know the truth of it absolutely. The end result is that our ideas of truth become a picture of reality, no faults, just a picture resembling (if not exactly duplicating) the scene of truth.

Instead of a picture though, I like to think of truth as a blueprint. If you've ever seen a a blueprint than you'll know what I'm talking about. Blueprints do not reflect exact reality, but only a part of it, the part that is focused on communicating. We need blueprints that'll work together to make a complete picture, to paint a whole, at least the best we can picture it. Assuming truth as a blueprint means that we allow the fact that we are subjective and no knowledge is known outside of our own experiences. Thus, we do not hold the single WAY of knowing life or truth, but we have a blueprint of knowing it that must be used alongside other blueprints to know better. There is no single harbinger of truth. Rather, relationally truth works together to paint portraits of reality to the best we can know it. Sometimes our portraits are widened upon accidental findings, think of many modern experiments and discoveries, and sometimes truth is revealed, i.e. God's means of Scripture and men known as prophets or the Incarnation.

Jesus points to the fact that truth is not absolute when he says that "I am the way, truth, and the life" Jn. 14:6. Truth is hardly something to be known, but experienced. Jesus is not an abstract concept, but a personal being to live with. No one has claim to this truth, but God.

So what is real? What is real is that no absolutes exist, even the absolute that I stated just now that no absolutes exist. Maybe, I'll continue this thought later, but for now I rest my case. Discuss, and know that I'm hardly a heretic, but simply a Christ follower.