Church of the Holy City

What Is Truth?

What Is Truth?
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
October 17, 2010

Deuteronomy 30:11-20 Mark 4:30-32 Psalm 86

Today I thought we would reflect on what faith means. To some, faith means to believe what the church teaches without question. Even in doctrines that are hard to understand, or even can’t be understood, one is told to believe on faith. Another way faith is viewed in the Christian tradition is the belief that Jesus bore our sins on the cross. If we believe that He bore our sins, that belief is faith. We look at faith differently than this. For us, faith is the same as truth. Whatever is true is faith. Faith is the sum total of all we hold to be true. Swedenborg writes, “All the elements that constitute faith are truths. Faith, then, is nothing but an array of truths shining in our mind” (TCR 347). This means that we must understand truth. Faith is not a part of our minds and our souls unless we understand it and can make it a part of our lives. Blind acceptance has no part in Swedenborg’s definition of faith. So we are encouraged to question, to explore, and to find truths that make sense in our lives.
Truth teaches us how to walk in God’s ways. These are the commands mentioned in our Old Testament reading. Moses tells the Children of Israel,
See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep his decrees and laws; then you will increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess (Deuteronomy 30:15-16).
Faith is all those decrees and laws that Moses tells the Israelites to keep. While some of these decrees are oriented to life in the first millennium B.C., all we need to be saved can still be found in God’s Word, including the Old Testament. Swedenborg in many places stresses the importance of turning to the Bible to find the truths we need for salvation. He tells us,
Truths need to be taken from the Word, because all the truths that make a contribution to our salvation are there. These truths are genuinely effective because they have been given by the Lord and have been engraved on the entire angelic heaven. As a result, when we learn truths from the Word, without our knowing it we come into contact and association with angels (TCR 347).
And in the New Testament, we heard God’s kingdom compared to a mustard seed. The mustard seed starts our very small, but grows into the largest of the garden plants. This tells us that faith grows and increases. Our faith grows according to how many truths we learn and integrate into our lives. In True Christian Religion, Swedenborg affirms this idea, “Faith is perfected according to the abundance and coherence of truths . . . for then one thing strengthens and confirms another” (TCR 352). As we are on the path to heaven, we begin with a few truths that we may have learned when we were young. But if we seek God and His Kingdom, we continue to seek out new truths and greatly expand our array of truths. One truth then supports, illustrates and confirms another. And from some few truths, we become fortified with many more truths that strengthen our faith and show us ever more clearly the way to walk in God’s path.
We need to learn truths because we are not born with them. Babies know nothing and must learn everything they need to live. They learn to walk. They learn to talk. They learn to read and write. And as they grow and mature, a young person learns how to conduct themselves in life. We are born equally ignorant of spiritual truths. I just saw a movie about the founding of Facebook. Its creator is now the youngest billionaire. But along the way he alienated himself from his best friend–in fact, he alienated himself from everyone. He was smart enough to make a multi-billion dollar company, but was appallingly dumb in the spiritual truths of friendship, trust, loyalty, and love. We all start from different places in our spiritual journey, but we all need to learn truths that will guide us into heaven. So Swedenborg writes,
With the good of life from doctrines . . . the case is this: they who are regenerated, first do good from doctrines, for of themselves they do not know good, but learn it from the doctrines of love and charity; from these they know who the Lord is, who is the neighbor; what love is, and what charity, thus what good is (AC3310).
But learning truths isn’t the whole story. What really matters is what we do with those truths. Swedenborg describes the process by which truths turn into spiritual life. Spiritual life progresses in us by means of a twofold process. We acquire the truths that tell us how to live a heavenly life, and while we are learning truths, God flows into our minds and hearts with love. This process happens by degrees. We have higher and lower aspects to our minds and personalities. The lowest part of our mind is mere knowing alone. So knowledge is the lowest part of our mind. In this part of our mind, we store knoweldges in our memory. Then the next higher realm is our rational mind. It is our rational mind that makes decisions. We judge and choose by means of our rational mind. Then a still higher level of our mind can perceive and see that a truth is true. Swedenborg lists these levels of our minds,
Truth learned is one thing, rational truth is another thing, and intellectual truth is another; and these succeed one another. Truth learned belongs to knowledge; rational truth is truth learned confirmed by reason; intellectual truth is conjoined with a perception that a thing is so (AC 1496).
And above this is our spiritual degree where we love heavenly life and see spiritual truth. We progress from knowledge in the memory to life in the spirit. We learn truths ourselves. And as we learn truths, God flows into our memory and lifts up the truths that are genuinely spiritual and that can be filled with love. The truths that are then enlightened form our rational mind. This is a selection process whereby some truths are not lifted up into our rational mind, and some are not. This is because not everything we learn is true. We also learn things that are false and that do not conduce to heaven. Swedenborg describes how heavenly light enlightens the knowledges that are in our memory,
Divine good with a person flows into his rational, and through the rational into his natural, and indeed into its outward knowledges, or the knowledges and doctrinal teachings therein . . . and there by adaptation it forms truths for itself, by which it then enlightens all things that are in the natural mind (AC 3128).
After truths have been lifted up into our rational mind, then love flows into our rational mind and fills our hearts with heavenly affections for doing good and for loving God. Swedenborg describes the order in which our spirituality develops,
When a person is being instructed, the progression is from knowledge in the memory to rational truths, afterwards to intellectual truths, and at last to heavenly truths (AC 1495).
So it looks as if we raise ourselves up by how we progress in relation to truth. It looks like we learn knowledges, confirm them by our reasoning abilities, and then see their truth from inner light. But what is really going on is different. What is really going on is that spiritual love and wisdom are flowing down from God, through heaven and into our minds. This inflowing love and wisdom is forming the lower reaches of our consciousness so that it conforms with heavenly realities. So the real process isn’t us lifting ourselves up, it is God forming our minds to receive Him.
Order is, that the heavenly shall flow into the spiritual and adapt it to itself; the spiritual will thus flow into the rational and adapt it to itself; the rational will thus flow into the knowledge and adapt it to itself (AC 1495).
Truth actually has its origin from love, or what Swedenborg calls the heavenly degree. So not only are our minds formed by heavenly love flowing down into our minds, but truth itself is formed by that same heavenly love. Truth is living truth when it is filled with heavenly love. Truth has no other purpose than to teach us how to be loving Christians, and how to love wisely.
The truth has not any life from itself, but from the heavenly which flows in. The heavenly is love and charity; all truth is therefrom; and because all truth is therefrom, it is nothing but a kind of vessel. . . . [In heaven] truths are never regarded from truths, but from the life which is in them; that is, from the heavenly things which are of love and charity in the truths (AC 1496).
So it is incumbent on us to learn all God’s decrees and laws, in order for Him to flow down from heaven into our minds and illuminate the truths there. It is important for us to learn those decrees and laws so that we will know how to love, who to love, and how to live spiritually. It is the natural progression for those on the heavenly pathway to respond to the inflowing heavenly power that is adapting our minds to receive it. By remaining open to that inflowing heavenly life, our truths grow and support one another. Our faith grows as the mustard plant, so large that birds can perch in its shade.