The Search For Truth
At the end of his life, Jesus of Nazareth stood before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and testified at the trial for his life.
“You are right in saying I am a king,” Jesus said. “In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”
To which Pilate infamously replies, “What is truth?”
Pilate didn’t expect an answer. His rhetorical question was his reply: With truth embodied before him, Pontius Pilate said he did not believe objective truth existed. Even today, many question whether objective truth can be found.
As followers of Jesus, who proclaimed, “I tell you the truth,” no fewer than eighty recorded times in the gospel stories, we Christians do believe objective truth exists. We believe in right and wrong, truth and falsehood, sinners and saints, sin and redemption.
Agreeing on what truth is, and on what behaviors, beliefs, or people fit neatly into these categories has proven quite a bit more troublesome. It may be true that the church, defined as the body of believers and the church institutions that shepherd them, has disagreed more than it has agreed since well before the time of Jesus.
The Pharisees and Sadducees, legalistic religious leaders, constantly disagreed with and misunderstood Jesus. But so did his closest disciples. They quarreled over who was the best, who would be Jesus’ right-hand man in heaven, and whether Jesus should be crucified! Jesus spoke in parables that befuddled many in his audience. Eat his flesh? Drink his blood? Disgusting!
Is it any surprise that we, who live two thousand years removed from the days when Jesus walked among us, might sometimes be confused and in error?
Jesus brought truth to the world, but he didn’t provide all the answers. It seems we must search for truth via a lifetime of faithful seeking. This presents many dilemmas! How can we distinguish God’s everlasting truths from human perspectives and opinions about God’s truths, which change from culture to culture and from era to era? Can we trust our feelings? Can we trust our rational mind? Can we trust science? How can we know whose science to trust? Why is consensus on truth so hard to find?
It is our premise in this book that God lovingly provides us with two primary means for discovering truth. We call these God’s dual revelations: His revealed truth in Scripture, and His revealed truth in Creation.
As Christians, we believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and is God-breathed, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and recorded by his prophets. Few, if any, Christians question that we can find truth in its pages.
We can also discover truth from what God created, His creation. In the eloquent beginning of the gospel of John, “Word” refers to Jesus, who both is God and was with God in the beginning. This Word came into the world, “from the Father full of grace and truth.” The original Greek term for Word is logos, which provides the root for logic. In other words, the Word is logic, rationality, and by extension, wisdom and knowledge.
The discourse goes on to say, “in him was life.” In the Word -- the logos, the logic, the rational truth -- was life. Before studying the original language, I always thought of life in this passage as “eternal life.” But Scripture uses the Greek word zoe for life, which relates most closely to creation. Zoe, the root for zoology, implies plants and animals and all living creatures. It also represents the spirit of life that differentiates a living creature from a nonliving entity. In the Word is life (zoe) and logic (logos), and as John so beautifully says, this life (zoe) is the light of men.
If the Word (logos) created all life (zoe), certainly we can study life and the created world in a rational, logical manner and expect to find truth (FOOTNOTE Romans 8:22). We can study plants, animals, and the inanimate earth that God created, and also the behavior and life of humanity, which the Word created in His likeness. Like the Word made flesh, we are rational and logical, can gain knowledge and wisdom, and can grow in stature with God and men.
In this book, we will explore God’s dual revelations, Scripture and Creation, and the means God has given us to seek truth and learn from them. This first chapter will explore the concept of truth, a cornerstone for the rest of the book. We will discuss tools for excavating truth from God’s dual revelations, and how highlighting on different tools has affected history. We will emphasize why all people must prayerfully and honestly seek truth throughout our spiritual journey, and the dangers inherent when people avoid this responsibility. Then we will discuss why people disagree about truth, and how those who disagree can move from bitterness and pride toward grace and understanding.
Tools for Seeking the Truth
I’ve heard it said, “Don’t talk about religion and politics at social gatherings!” You might think that differing opinions would allow for a humbler, more encompassing view of reality, but more often than not debates involving religious or (political) beliefs turn acidic.
One particularly bitter feud within the church involves science. Since the advent of the scientific revolution over five hundred years ago, Christians and the Christian church have struggled to understand the role science plays in understanding the world and our religion. Much of the struggle centers on the weight we -- and society -- place on Scripture, scientific knowledge, and our own individual selves (mind, senses, and spirit) in ascertaining truth from falsehood. Figure 1 depicts how these three may work symbiotically together to reveal truth, which is created by God.
Many Christians think of Scripture as the highest truth. Indeed it provides us with our primary source of information about Jesus and living a Godly life. Paul writes “All Scripture is God-breathed, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness,” (2 Tim 3:16). Yet because so many Christians hold different and often conflicting interpretations of Scripture, we must conclude that Scripture alone can not provide the only way to discover truth. Throughout history, certain people have taken the view that only one interpretation exists, and inevitably that happens to be their interpretation. This phenomenon has caused “fundamentalist” to become a four-letter word! Christians can hold a quite conservative view of Scripture and still accept the mysteries inherent in interpreting and understanding God’s revelation in Scripture.
We can the use tools that God provided us within ourselves to learn about truth -- our mind, our senses, and our feelings. We can see forest trees before us, feel their leaves and bark, and smell the crisp forest air, and we know it exists, and is real. Our minds, senses, and spirit help us read and understand both the intellectual and “heart meaning” of a Scripture passage, and can help us connect with God and one another. But our mind and senses alone can not discern truth, for they can deceive us. We can’t trust our feelings alone, because strong feelings, such as anger, lust, or pride, can cause us to sin or abandon our values. Optical illusions easily trick our eyes and our minds. The entire world's intelligentsia thought the sun rose and set as it revolved around the earth, because that is what they saw, and what they thought Scripture said. Today, we know the earth actually revolves around the sun and the previously incorrect understanding was a relict of our position on earth. Using the senses alone, with a limited intellectual understanding, can easily mislead us. We use our minds as powerful tools to gain knowledge and wisdom, but even the most knowledgeable human being is limited in the amount of knowledge they can gain during their lifetime. Only God knows all, and, as Paul says, “knowledge puffs up.” Great knowledge leads to pride, which in turn limits one’s wisdom.
Many people today embrace science as a tool of choice for understanding the world. Indeed, our entire modern society is basically a scientific one. Science relies on rationality and logic, put to the test. Early scientists -- many of them Christians -- developed an unbiased method to study the natural world. But while science powerfully and accurately reveals truths about one of God’s dual revelations -- Creation -- it by definition only studies natural phenomena. Science is unable to explore religious or spiritual truths, which are indeed a whole other realm of existence for believers in God. Though some Christians may believe that a conflict exists between science and faith, most Christian denominations now accept that what we learn about the natural world through science can not, and ultimately will not, conflict with the Bible. Let’s explore how we got to this point in history.
You Say You Want a Revolution
For many thousands of years, people believed that the Earth sat, immovable, at the center of the universe. It was so obvious. Everyone clearly saw the Sun rise and set each day. And it defied common sense that the massive Earth, with its vast seas and mountains, could move. Christians used the Bible as indisputable evidence to support their belief. “The world is firmly established. It cannot be moved” (Psalm 93:1). Who could question that?
But in the 2nd century A.D., a Greek astronomer and philosopher named Ptolemy began to do just that. Through mathematical calculations, he figured out that the Earth-centered model just didn’t match what was happening in the real world. His initial attempts to determine the truth about the starry skies paved the way for later scientists, including Copernicus and Galileo, who ushered in the advent of the scientific revolution.
No rational person today believes that the Sun and the planets revolve around the Earth (Footnote about Romans 8:22 rejection of all science). Everyone accepts that Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun -- and it doesn’t challenge anyone’s faith in God or the Bible. But at the time, these scientific discoveries challenged the very heart of the church’s belief in an absolutely literal interpretation of Scripture. The church fought these new ideas with all their political strength.
They don’t call it a revolution for nothing. The scientific revolution utterly changed the world.
It heralded a new era of discovery – of cells, germs, disease cures, antibiotics -- but more importantly it ushered in a new way of thinking. For the first time in history, people sought to determine the actual truth about how things worked -- even if the finding initially appeared to challenge their understanding of God and the Bible.
Prior to the scientific revolution, philosophers would create detailed, logical explanations that made great sense. But they were never tested against reality! For example, Aristotle created eloquent and logical arguments about why a heavier object would fall at a faster speed than a lighter object. Even though Aristotle never tested his idea, everyone believed it.
Until Galileo Galilei. Like Ptolemy with planetary motion, Galileo did some calculations and decided Aristotle must be wrong. Instead of just stating his case, he put his prediction to the test. In a famous experiment, he dropped two objects of different weights from the leaning tower of Pisa. The objects fell at the same speed. In just one experiment, Galileo proved Aristotle’s long-believed prediction wrong -- and learned a great deal about gravity in the process. The experiment has since been repeated thousands of times and is confirmed beyond any doubt. But for five hundred years <?how long?> between Aristotle’s time and Galileo’s, everyone just accepted Aristotle’s argument without question.
All the scientific discoveries in the world would never have happened had scientists not developed the scientific method, designed to keep human pride and prejudice from biasing the results of experiments. It works like this: observe phenomenon, develop hypothesis, design and conduct experiment, analyze data, and draw conclusions.
Scientists are curious people. They come up with ideas by observing and being curious about the natural world. They think, “maybe this causes that,” then they formalize that prediction into a hypothesis. Next they design an experiment to test the hypothesis in a way that prevents human bias from skewing the results – including large sample sizes and representative samples from the population at large. After scientists collect their data, they analyze the results using statistics to see whether, mathematically, the result matches the prediction. Statistics can also reveal the probability that a positive result is a fluke.
To further ensure integrity in research, the scientific community developed a peer review system. For a study to be accepted by the scientific community, scientists must submit their completed research papers to be anonymously reviewed by three to four other scientists in the field. Peer reviewers ensure that an experiment was adequately designed, that statistics were conducted accurately, and that the conclusions drawn match the mathematical results of the study. If any of these fail, the study will not get published.
When scientists have foregone conclusions before beginning their inquiries, such as insisting the sun must revolve around the earth, and we’d better find the data to prove it, science doesn’t work – in other words, it doesn’t reveal truth. That is like trying to make a puzzle of a cat look like a horse! Scientists certainly may have beliefs, egos, and research dollars invested in having their hypothesis be true. But if followed properly, the scientific method and peer review system prevent scientists from forcing data to fit their hypothesis. Each single study provides one piece of a gigantic puzzle of truth about the natural world. The more studies that support a hypothesis, the more confident we become of the verity of that idea, and the more detail we see in the big picture.
The more we all learn about science, the better equipped we will be to distinguish scientific evidence, theories, and facts from scientific-sounding explanations that do not actually have any truth – or at least evidence -- behind them. Our answer to whether we can trust science is clarified through this book. In short: it depends whether the scientists follow the scientific method and peer review system with integrity.
We Want the Truth: a Result of the Scientific Age
Even those who are skeptical of science live in a modern society that relies on advances made through science and technology (applied science). We keep ourselves and our cities clean to prevent the spread of disease – an advance made possible by discovering that germs in human and animal waste spread disease. We take antibiotics and medicines to cure illness. We go to hospitals for surgery. We clean up air and water pollution using technology. We call a friend five thousand miles away by pushing numbers on a small bit of wireless plastic. Electricity powers our light bulbs, our refrigerators, our washing machines and our dishwashers. Computers connect us instantaneously to a virtually unlimited library of information.
In addition to everyday use of scientific advances, we employ scientific thinking without second thought. If I feel ill, I may develop predictions about the cause of my stomachache and nausea. Did I eat something that made me ill? Am I coming down with the flu? Am I pregnant and have morning sickness? Though I probably will not conduct a scientific experiment to figure it out, I do indeed look for evidence to find out the real cause of my nausea. Do I have other symptoms of flu – a fever, weakness, chills? Does the nausea go away in a day, in which case it probably was something I ate, or last a few? If I take a pregnancy test, it will rule pregnancy in or out. We live in an age where enough scientific information exists that we can identify real causes, instead of thinking illness comes from say, seeing a black cat, or some other superstitious idea from past ages.
This scientific type of thinking is firmly entrenched in our modern lives. Not only do we search for reasons and explanations, but we want to know the truth about things. We don’t want to be deceived. We want our news media, our bosses, our families, our doctors, and our government to give us the complete, unbiased truth. If we take our computer in for repair, we want the real problem diagnosed and fixed. If we go in for a medical diagnosis, we want the correct one.
I believe this desire for the truth holds even for religion. In our modern age, most of us don’t believe in God because of superstition, or think that God is a pie-in-the-sky magician. We believe He actually exists and He created the world. We believe that Jesus actually lived, died, and was resurrected. We look for and find evidence for God in our daily lives – answered prayers, love and fellowship between believers, the awesome Holy Spirit, and the logic and wisdom of the Bible and in Jesus’ life and death. Seeking evidence for God doesn’t negate faith, it strengthens it.
Mission Critical: Your Search for the Truth
Even though we, in our modern lives, desire and demand the truth, as individuals and in societies we still cling to denial in some areas: acknowledging our painful childhoods, admitting our addictions and sins, and accepting contrary new information or ideas. At times, we deny, we ignore truths about situations we find ourselves in, or we let others make decisions for us.
This can have catastrophic results. Many men and women die from cancer because they ignore early warning signs. Whole nations have followed evil leaders because individuals did not scrutinize the beliefs they were ascribing to. On smaller scales, gang and cults indoctrinate new members, typically ordinary folk desiring acceptance, into their strange, devious, often violent ways. If those examples seem extreme, they are. However, they exemplify the dangers inherent in not scrutinizing ideas.
Most ordinary folk don’t end up in gangs, but many join institutions that make decisions and prescribe beliefs for them – the military, a highly structured corporation, or a church or religion. Some people commit crimes and go to prison, another highly structured institution. Psychology research shows that many of these people find themselves unable to function without structure provided for them. Once out of the military, or out of prison, or unemployed, such people become helpless and lead chaotic, unstructured, and often unprincipled lives.
While the military, churches, corporations, and prisons fill essential roles in society, they need not prescribe the beliefs of their members. Anytime we let another person or institution make decisions and select beliefs for us, we avoid taking responsibility for our own lives. Very young children naturally accept their elder’s teachings, but as early as five or six can begin to question them, if allowed the freedom to. Sometimes parents hammer the natural curiosity and questioning out of children. And all too frequently, we adults become lazy, or proud, and stop questioning ourselves and others in our circle. Whenever we assume our teacher, doctor, father, mother, or pastor must be right, just because something “makes sense,” we essentially give away our freedom.
Sometimes we trade freedom for a sense of belonging. Like denial, this can have tragic results. Thousands of Germans allowed Hitler to become the machine that thought for them, with horrifying consequences. “It is for this reason that Erich Fromm so aptly titled his study of Nazism and authoritarianism Escape from Freedom,” writes Christian psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in the best-selling book The Road Less Traveled.
I have no doubt that this same phenomenon is at work in milder forms across the world, among Christians and non-Christians. When we don’t exercise our ability to think for ourselves, we are not truly free. In America, we treasure freedom and hence democracy, because as a nation we understand the dangers of dictatorship. Democracy allows citizens to change the government if it becomes oppressive, whereas dictatorships do not. In America, freedom allows us to hold our own beliefs, speak our minds, and get together peaceably. Freedom is also a Christian concept. Paul understood this when he wrote, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” (Gal 5:1)
Jesus didn’t refer to us as sheep for no reason! People have a strong tendency to flock together, and wolves-in-sheep’s clothing easily lead us astray. God even allowed us the freedom to discover the wisdom of following the good shepherd on our own. No one can or should make that decision for us.
To ensure we follow the spirit of Christ rather than a human message – whether it seems harmful or not -- we must exercise our freedom to continually search for truth. Indeed, according to Peck’s experience with patients, emotional and spiritual health demands total dedication to the truth.
“Superficially, this should be obvious,” Peck writes. “For truth is reality. … The less clearly we see the reality of the world – the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions, and illusions – the less able we will be to determine correct courses of actions and make wise decisions.”
Peck explains that in order to be dedicated to the truth at all costs, we must be willing to expose our beliefs and ideas to the criticism and challenge of others. Unfortunately, this isn’t always as easy. Peck discusses how people struggle tenaciously to hang onto outdated views, and deny things they are not emotionally ready to reckon with.
What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information. Often this act is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the world than would have been required to revise and correct it in the first place.
When we can recognize that a certain concept or idea makes us uncomfortable or angry, or that we may just not want to deal with something, we can then begin on the path toward understanding – understanding ourselves, understanding the world around us, understanding God’s mysteries. Then we can begin to question: Is the information we learn or believe accurate? Are we rejecting the truth because we fear it or hate it? Am I ok with the discomfort of not knowing?
If the information we believe is not true, we believe in lies, or distortions of truth, and worse, we may be teaching lies to others. We must also acknowledge how our beliefs and behaviors influence others. In a sense, we all are teachers. We inadvertently teach our friends, our colleagues, and especially our children through our behavior and our choices. But when we literally step up to become a teacher of wisdom and knowledge, whether in a school or church, or by writing a book, we should heed James’ sage advice when he admonishes us, “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly” (James 3:1). Hence we all must exert extra efforts to ensure that what we teach is truthful – not just “what we believe.”
We must remember that only God sees the whole truth, and we see but “through a glass dimly” (1 Cor 13:12). Because of this, we must approach all intellectual debates with a humble spirit. Even our most intelligently reasoned or most firmly held beliefs may still end up somehow incorrect or incomplete.
Why We Disagree
Once upon a time there was a certain teacher who called to his servant and said, “Come, good fellow, go and gather together in one place all the men who were born blind... and show them an elephant.”
“Very good, sire,” replied the servant, and he did as he was told. He said to the blind men assembled there, “Here is an elephant,” and to one man he presented the head of the elephant, to another its ears, to another a tusk, to another the trunk, the foot, back, tail, and tuft of the tail, saying to each one that that was the elephant.
When the blind men had felt the elephant, the teacher went to each of them and said to each, “Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?”
Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, “Sire, an elephant is like a pot.” And the men who had observed the ear replied, “An elephant is like a winnowing basket.” Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.
Then they began to quarrel, shouting, “Yes it is!” “No, it is not!” “An elephant is not that!” “Yes, it's like that!” and so on, till they came to blows over the matter.
The teacher was delighted with the scene. “Just so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and unseeing. In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus."
Then the teacher uttered this verse of uplift,
O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing.
This ancient parable contains much wisdom about why people disagree. Compared to the all-seeing, all-knowing wisdom of God, we are all blind men. We disagree with one another because we don’t realize we have only been shown, in our lives, a small part of the whole elephant. Our little corner on reality is imperfect and incomplete. As Paul emphasized to the Corinthians, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Cor 13:12).
The parable ends with blind men arguing over who is right. They never move from argument to understanding. Sadly, that is too often an accurate description of where we stand in our dialogue with others. We put up a mental wall and keep on talking about why we are right. We may think we consider other perspectives. We come up with eloquent sounding arguments in favor of our position and against others. In the end, we prevent ourselves from gaining a broader understanding. In order to learn about reality, we must listen to other perspectives on truth, even if those perspectives ultimately are wrong -- or like the other blind men, only partially correct.
Pride makes us argue and defend and deny, like the blind men with the elephant, which prevents us from learning helpful information from one another. As wise King Solomon said, Pride only breeds quarrels, but wisdom is found in those who take advice (Proverbs 13:10). It can be quite challenging and humbling to take advice, to listen to, digest, and assimilate new information into our “map of reality.” However, none of us Christians would be Christians if we hadn’t set aside pride and listened to the life-changing message of Jesus.
In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis argues powerfully that pride is the ultimate sin. While sins such as lust, greed, or anger work on our animal nature, pride works directly on our spiritual nature. Lewis writes, “It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” And the greater pride one has, the blinder one is to its presence. Thus, pride gets mixed right up there with people who think they are quite religious: In Jesus’ time, the hypocritical Pharisees; In the Crusades, the church leaders who murdered in God’s name; Today, suicide bombers.
While these are certainly extreme examples, pride affects all people. It keeps us from setting aside our preconceptions, and listening to new or different ideas. This takes humility, the opposite of pride. Knowledge can make one proud, as Paul rightly notes, but it doesn’t have to. Jesus was the Word made flesh; the all knowing One, incarnate. Through the power of God's spirit he was able to keep his infinitely knowledgeable human self from becoming prideful -- and that is one of the things differentiating him from all the religious leaders of his day and beyond.
Knowledge can puff up one’s head with hidden pride, and will probably always have that tendency, but I can't imagine that God wants us to remain ignorant. God made humans with a more highly advanced brain than any other creature by far. It seems foolish to think that the brain and intellect and ability to reason -- the very thing that makes us human on a "natural" level would be something God wants us to not use! Instead, we must temper our knowledge with humility and love, to ensure we don’t take the Lord’s name in vain – in other words, use God’s name to promote lies or sin.
In reality, we know much more about what humankind has done than what God did, does, or will do. The working of God’s spirit is a grand mystery that we do not understand very well and probably never will. When we fail to recognize that, we create problems for ourselves and for others. Our pride leads to unnecessary disagreements. This feuding among Christians causes the church to lose credibility, and turns people away from a faith whose people should radiate God’s hope, love, and grace.
Thomas Merton, late Trappist monk and bestselling writer, wrote, “A man of sincerity is less interested in defending the truth than in stating it clearly, for he thinks that if the truth be clearly seen it can very well take care of itself.” Pride leads us to defend our idea of the truth instead of stating it and letting it speak for itself.
Finding the Truth
Nowhere is the struggle for intellectuals to prove themselves right more evident than in the bitter disagreement over certain scientific ideas -- evolution, age of the earth, intelligent design, to name a few. Some Christians mistrust scientists, who may be dismissed as atheists or humanists. Indeed, many scientists are skeptical of religion. Secular society repeatedly rebukes attempts by churches or schools to teach children about a God-inspired creation, which offends most Christians.
On the other hand, churches and Christian schools often discard current scientific ideas without critically analyzing whether they are accurate, because they are distasteful to their understanding of the Bible. And churchgoers listen to and often accept the seemingly scientific teachings of their church, without thoroughly considering their truthfulness.
So how are we supposed to figure out what is true and what is not about the natural world? We don’t have the luxury of conducting scientific experiments to test every idea, so how can we know when to trust the science of others?
END - CHAPTER IN PROGRESS
FOOTNOTE Romans 8:22 -- God clearly states that all creation is good, but since the fall of humankind and the entry of evil into our world, people may easily be deceived and even creation itself groans as in the throes of childbirth. Some have taken this to mean that the earth itself is deceptive.
Figure 1. The interactive roles of Scripture, Science, and Self (which includes an individual’s mind, senses, and spirit) for finding truth. Note that this is just a diagramatic representation of an idea of how we understand truth in light of our own senses (self), the tools of science and inquiry into the natural sphere, and spiritual revelations in Scripture. It is a hypothesis.
In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made:
without him nothing was made that has been made.
In him was life,
and that life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness,
but the darkness has not understood it. …
The true light that gives light to every man
was coming into the world.
He was in the world,
and though the world was made through him,
the world did not recognize him.
He came to that which was his own,
but his own did not receive him.
Yet to all who received him,
to those who believed in his name,
he gave the right to become children of God –
children born not of natural descent,
nor of human decision or a husband’s will,
but born of God.
The Word became flesh
and made his dwelling among us.
We have seen his glory of the One and Only,
who came from the Father,
full of grace and truth.
John 1: 1-4, 9-14
bohemian@wendeeholtcamp.com
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www.wendeeholtcamp.com
Copyright © 2005 Wendee Holtcamp