Chaplain's Corner

In my world, the world of spiritual care, there is a lot of talk about being inclusive and about respecting diversity. At this point I am out of step with many of my colleagues. Let me try to explain.

Augustine wrote, “If you believe what you like in the Gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the Gospels you believe, but yourself.” We are living in times when people are feeling quite comfortable picking and choosing what they will believe. My mother-in-law (she is now deceased) was very much this way. She took bits and pieces of the Christian faith, bits and pieces of Buddhism, bits and pieces from the occult, bits and pieces from many other spiritual sources and came up with her own, custom made spirituality.

Why isn’t that a legitimate approach to spirituality? Well, some may argue that it is and the foundation of their arguments would be this, “All spiritualities contain a grain of truth and it is for each individual to sift through the many grains and commit to what he or she will believe”. If there is no absolute truth, then it is hard to argue with such an approach. But this is the issue, is there or is there no absolute truth? By absolute truth I mean things that are true regardless of the time, place or culture in which a person confronts them.

The Bible makes this claim for itself. But fewer and fewer Christians believe this any longer. But this is where Augustine’s point must be reckoned with. If every individual is free to pick and chose what to believe as true in the Gospels (and all of the Scriptures for that matter) then truth becomes simply a matter of personal opinion and the very claims the Bible makes for itself must be denied. At first this “pick and chose” method of accepting the Scriptures sounds appealing, but in the end, it proves to be absurd. This is true about the whole idea of truth being relative. If nothing is absolutely true, then nothing is true at all.

Being inclusive, as I understand it, can not mean that everything that anyone believes is true; this is a logically absurd proposition. Being inclusive means that although I may be convinced that what others believe is not true, I give them the same respect that God does to chose to believe that which is not true and at the same time I respectfully, at appropriate times and when invited, share why I believe that what I believe is “the truth”. This is not a posture of arrogance, but one of logical, philosophical and spiritual integrity. To put it in the simplest terms, white cannot be black. I may respect you if you make this claim and if invited dialogue with you about why such a belief is absurd, but the simple claim that white is black doesn’t in itself make it true.

When it comes to spirituality, when we make such statements as “we all worship the same God” or “everyone’s ‘truth’ is true for them” we are making a white is black statement. We are not espousing a congruent belief but simply insisting that I can have it my way and no one has a right to question it.

Interestingly we would absolutely refuse to accept this in almost every other endeavor. I would not want to fly in a jet that was designed by people who held this belief about the laws of aerodynamics nor would I want to entrust my banking to a bank whose policy espoused this for its employees.

So why is it that we demand absolutes when it comes to the laws of physics or mathematics, but then think that that same necessity for absolutes is not in effect for matters of spirituality? That’s a question worth pondering.