Truth, Identity, and Love. And God?

I've been doing some deep pondering lately over how these three things relate.  Those of you who know me extremely well may be able to place the "what" in my life that acted as a catalyst for these reflections.  These reflections come from relationships in my life without which I would very substantially not be me.  All that to say, everything I say here in this post matters -- it matters a great deal to me.

I will be 30 in a few days, so in part these writings are a reflection on how the last few decades have treated me.  But to be 30 is also to have lived long enough to be able to start to become comfortable with fluidity, with change, and with the unexpected.  I've learned what it means to go on a quest for my own identity more than once, and come up with answers that surprise everyone, including myself.  I've learned what it means to love with abandon, and to be abandoned.  I've learned what it means to lose one's best friend to an early and tragic death, and I've learned what it means to continue to live on.  All that to say, I've sought for lines to help clarify my life and put things where they belong -- and instead I've found that life is stronger than the lines we try to give it.

In the quest for identity, we employ truth.  All of us do.  When we find it, we seize it, we acquire it, lay hold of it, and wrap ourselves inside and through it as much as we can.  We want to be identified with it, because intrinsically we feel that it is quite possibly truer than we are.  We want to stand on it, and say both to our quiet selves and to the world out there, "I have found something that is greater than I am, something that is so wonderful, I can be defined by it.  look!"

The joy of this revelation of truth in our lives (a joy that also reveals us to ourselves as well) is completely thrilling.  But it can also be dangerous. It is easy to love those who have let their identity be shaped by the same truth we have found.  They seem like us because they are like us.

Of course, the more systematic this truth is that we have found -- the more rigorous in its internal boundaries and definitions -- the more we are given an identity by it.  We find that our ability to identify as a person who believes this truth is increased in direct proportion to how comprehensive that truth is in relation to the rest of the world.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, when we run across someone who has their identity formed by a different truth than we do, loving them becomes hard.  We can love them in terms of our own truth, in terms of our own system -- we can love them in as much as we think they'll "come around" and see things "our way" but how do we love them without the expectation of change?

I suppose that last paragraph was relatively easy to see coming along in the line of thought I'm following here.  But this next one is a bit trickier.  What do we do with God?  What happens when we make a statement like the following, "this truth is a truth about God"?  Well, there a couple of interesting things here that happen at once.

1. We better darn well hope that our true statement about God actually comes from God -- aka, is in reality a theophanic revelation of God by God.  We can refer to this hope as faith -- and apply it to the Scripture -- but I think that faith is also a bit more than the acceptance of Scripture as the Word of God.
2. We run up against what Jean Luc Marion refers to as the Epistemic Mirror.  In the human quest for the divine, we approach the divine with all of our expectations and hopes and fears of what the divine should be.  We then refer to the reception of some or all of these expectations from what we approached as the voice of the divine.  In so doing we essentially "divinize" (or rather, we give the voice of God to) our expectations, hopes, and fears about what the divine can or should be.  
3. We also increase the stakes of the quite natural human quest to fulfill identity by finding truth.  There is no concept that is larger in the human psyche than who or what God is.  By increasing the size of the stage, so to speak, we make it incredibly difficult to move around -- paradoxically the more that is at stake the less wiggle room there is for error -- and for reasonable thought out discussion.

So then, what do we do?  And, supposing that God does in fact break the mirror, and come into our world (a reverse of the second half of Alice in Wonderland) where does that leave us?  More particularly, (and more personally) what happens when the way in which I think God broke the mirror is different from the way in which you think God broke the mirror?  Or, what if we both think God broke the mirror through Christ, and witnessed to that breaking in the words of Scripture, but we interpret that Scripture in different ways?

Reconciling the different interpretations of Scripture will never result in unity.  This attempt has been the fuel of theological argument and discussion for thousands of years.  Rather, there is a different approach that bears hopefully a bit more fruit.

If Jean Luc Marion is right, and his Epistemic Mirror concept works, then i think it also applies to humans in our sphere of influence.  In other words, we approach the human other with just as many expectations and hopes and fears as we approach God.  The only difference is in the clarity of their voice -- we know without interpretive distance that they've broken through our little mirror.

Perhaps this then is finally what St. John meant when he said, "unless you love man whom you can see, how can you claim to love God whom you have not seen?"  Indeed, unless we love precisely those who interpret how God broke through the mirror in a different way than we interpret how God broke through the mirror, how will we love God?

For me, as a historical theologian, this is especially difficult.  For me, it means I have to love precisely those teachers with whom I disagree with the most passionately.  There are those in the Christian World that teach an interpretation of Scripture that I find to be spiritually dangerous, harmful, and a distortion of the rich tradition of our faith.  Yet, it is precisely these people, despite the truth that they hold and the truth that I hold, that I must love.

In conclusion, reconciliation does not mean we hold the same truth.  Reconciliation does not mean we are reconciled as to our opinions on interpreting Scripture.  If it did, then Christian unity would be precisely as deep as our exegesis -- surely there has to be better foundation!  Rather, (for me at least) reconciliation starts with the commitment to love people who teach things about God that I think are wrong.

What does that look like?  Well, it means opening up space for them in my heart -- even when I think their words cause more damage than they do help.  It means giving up (to God) the desire to see them "come around" to my point of view.  It means that Christian love is not a love that says, "when you are healed, you will look like this" rather, Christian love is a love that just simply relishes in the delight of loving.  Anything short of that, and we are not, with Dosteovksy, "loving men also in their sin" rather... we are attempting to love man out of his sin... and such an attempt always appears together with its agenda.