From the Salmon

This past Easter, I shared a passage from N.T. Wright that I still find pretty compelling. Wright wrote that Easter marks not so much the end of an old story but the start of something new:

The gospel resurrection stories end, not with “well, that’s all right then”, nor with “Jesus is risen, therefore we will rise too”, but with “God’s new world has begun, therefore we’ve got a job to do, and God’s Spirit to help us do it”. That job is to plant the flags of resurrection — new life, new communities, new churches, new faith, new hope, new practical love…

I thought of this image over the weekend as I considered how to continue with my previous posts about the pitfalls and possibilities of this interactive medium. Is it possible, I wondered, that a humble site like this (or some of the others I visit) could possibly aspire to be a “flag of resurrection”?

I realize that’s a pretty highfalutin’ assertion. And as with my previous discussion of community, it’s quite possible that I’m taking on a tad more than I should.

And yet, over the past year or so that I’ve been regularly reading the sites listed on my sidebar and others, I’ve learned a lot, I’ve been challenged quite a bit by my interactions with others, and I think I’ve grown both intellectually and spiritually. So maybe a lofty aspiration to “new conversations” might not be too much of a stretch.

But what do I mean by that?

Well, if you remember back to the beginning of this discussion, I wrote about David Dark’s idea that the lifeblood of a vital community, be it that of the American democracy or the Christian church, is the lively give-and-take of honest conversation. Yet I went on to show how easily our conversations in this medium can become fractious and can reinforce already entrenched divisions in our society and our churches.

I propose that it doesn’t have to be that way, that we might instead pursue transformational conversations that point to reconciliation. After all, that’s what “God’s new world” is all about, right? Renewal, restoration and reconciliation.

If we are to aspire to this, I’d like to suggest that these conversations need to be marked by three characteristics: truthfulness, openness, and humility.

Tonight, we’ll look at the first of those.

Truthfulness

To begin with, I think that truthful conversation is about more than just being honest. Honesty in conversation refers to how we go about presenting ourselves. It means that we don’t engage in rhetorical trickery just to win an argument. It requires us to say what we really think, even if that means admitting weakness or confessing that we don’t know something.

And this honesty is certainly important.

But I think that truthful refers to an orientation. It means that while we are being honest, we are working to point our conversations in the direction of truth. I don’t want to belabor the mechanics of this idea, but I think it changes our conversations in a few ways.

For one thing, it gives each discussion the potential of becoming part of a journey. And that means we can’t stay in our trenches, lobbing rhetoric and ad hominem attacks at each other. We have to leave our positions of safety, approach each other (more on this later), and together move our conversation towards truth. This last part can require quite a bit of negotiation and may ultimately lead to failure. But if we’re finally able to come together, face the same direction and set off in pursuit of a common goal, then perhaps reconciliation is within reach.

One more thought on this before I move on. When Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus about the goal of unity among the people of God, he said that one of the chief ways to bring about that unity was to begin ”speaking the truth in love.” While just about every English version of the Bible renders the phrase this way, I’ve read a few commentators (most recently Volf) who suggest that this translation is inadequate. They claim that the the verb is not “to speak” but rather “to truth.” Now, I’m no Greek scholar (Leighton?), but if we accept this, it means Paul is calling us to something broader than just speaking truth. He’s calling us to do truth, to live truth. And, most importantly, to do so in love. Maybe we can talk more about what this looks like later, but for now, I’m just trying to give us new ways to think about conversation, and I particularly like where this one leads.

Part 2 is now up.