Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.1998, Qupperneq 52

Duncan B Forrester
street. His children can’t get places in college. He has to move house and take a
job sweeping the streets.
His little dissent radically shakes the assumption that truth and power are one.
His tiny protest is an earthquake: what is foolish in the world has shamed the
wise, what is weak in the world has shamed the strong. The powerless find
power when they live in truth. They do not live in truth in isolation but together,
in solidarity. The very notion of living in truth is inescapably concerned with
others. This community is responsible for the world and for those who are not its
members. It cannot be introverted, incurvatus in se, concemed only for itself.
Christians also believe that the truth is something to be lived and loved within
the fellowship of the church and reaching forward to the coming Reign of God.
It is not just a matter of thought, of systems of ideas, of propositions. Unlike the
great systems of thought so effectively denounced by Spren Kirkegaard, the
truths that emerge form the endeavour to live in truth are usually in fragments,
hints, clues, cries, questions, pointers. These are the ‘puzzling reflections in a
mirror’ of which I Corinthians 13 speaks. This Tmth cannot be manipulated,
comprehended or controlled; nor is it oppressive and coercive as most grand
systems are. This truth can only be loved, and lived in, and reverenced, and wor-
shipped. And only at the end will the dimness and distortion of the mirror be
replaced with a face-to-face personal encounter with the truth.
From a very different standpoint from Havel’s the philosopher-scientist Mic-
hael Polanyi makes a similar affirmation: religion is ‘an indwelling rather that an
affirmation. God cannot be observed, any more than tmth or beauty can be ob-
served. He exists in the sense that He is to be worshipped and obeyed, but not
otherwise, not as a fact - any more than truth, beauty or justice exist as facts. All
these are things which can be apprehended only in serving them.’16 Miguel de
Unamuno, from a very different angle, makes a similar point: ‘Those who
believe they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish
of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair,
believe in the idea of God, and not in God Himself.’17 God’s truth can only be
apprehended in the practice of discipleship, and discipleship involves passionate
commitment. That is the essence of the theme I have endeavoured to explore in
this lecture.
DBF/27 October, 1997
16 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. London; Routhlegde and Kegan Paul, 1958, p.279.
17 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense oj'Life. London; Collins, 1962, p. 180
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