Words Worth Noting - August 4, 2024

“I hope that Christianity will participate in that [“ecumenical encounter of the world faiths”] dialogue in a way that is respectful but not too apologetic or appeasing. Integrity requires us to speak for the truth as we see it, and we need to remember Farrer’s warning that ‘the acknowledgement of a vital truth is always divisive until it becomes universal’. I sometimes fear that Christianity is a little too eager for dialogue, a little lacking in nerve to hold fast to what it has learned of God in Christ. We Europeans must shake off lingering guilt arising from our colonial past. We certainly do not want to be triumphalist, but nor do we wish to forget that there may well be issues on which we are right and those who do not share our view are mistaken. In the end, it is the question of truth that matters, and there is an inevitable exclusivity about truth. If you tell me that you hold the view that the phenomenon of heat is due to the subtle fluid caloric, I do not say that you are entitled to your opinion and I respect you for it. I try, instead, to convince you of the correctness of the kinetic theory of heat energy. Either Jesus is God’s Lord and Christ or he is not, and it matters supremely to know which is the right judgement. Of course, we must be careful to distinguish between the necessary intolerance that truth has of error and a social intolerance exhibited by failing to respect as people those whose opinions we believe to be mistaken. I do not despise you for your caloric belief, nor do I try to impose my kinetic belief on you by harassment or manipulation…. A religion which has resisted its own dissolving into a gnostic account of timeless truth should be open to meeting the historic idiosyncracies present in all religious traditions, without reducing them to merely contingent collections of opinion.”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist