Church of the Holy City

How Truth Points to Good

How Truth Points to Good
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
March 8, 2009

Exodus 22:16-23:9 Matthew 5:17-48

Last Sunday I talked about doing good to the neighbor and love to God and the neighbor. There were a lot of questions and comments that followed the talk. So I thought in the next few Sundays I would go into love and doing good, and hopefully address some of the issues that were raised last Sunday.
When Plato tried to talk about the Good in his dialogue entitled The Symposium, he realized that he had a very high and lofty subject to discuss. He thought it was so lofty that the closest he could come to the Good is one step down, namely, the True. He thought that truth was as close as he could get to the Good with his mortal rationality.
In some ways, Swedenborg says a similar thing. We can’t come to good except through truth, though Swedenborg does say that we can get to good. All genuine truth points the way to good. Truth is nothing else than what leads us to good. “All truths are knowledges of good; the truths which are not from good, or which do not regard good as the end, are not truths” Swedenborg writes in AC 3680. Likewise we find that, “when good is formed so as to be intellectually perceived, it is called truth” (AC 3049).
That is why this Sunday, our Bible readings were all laws, or rules for conduct. I deliberately picked Bible passages that we would identify as truth, or as laws for behavior. And they all point to what is good, or how to be good. In Exodus I picked a section that has a lot of what lawyers would call “case laws.” They are laws about how to adjudicate matters regarding property and social interaction. So we find laws like, “If you come across your enemy’s ox or ass wandering off, be sure to take it back to him” (Ex. 23:4). And in the New Testament we find this teaching reinforced by Jesus when He says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:43-44).
The relationship between love and case law can be seen in these two passages. If you do love your enemy, when you see his or her ox wandering off you will return it to them. This is because you care for them and want what is good for them—that is what love is. But to reinforce what to do on a strictly behavioral plane, in case a person does not feel love, we have the law that tells you to return the wandering ox to its owner, your enemy. The case is the same with all the laws we find written in the Bible. In case a person doesn’t feel love for their neighbor, we have a list of laws that tells us how to act toward them. These laws can be called truths. They tell a person how to behave in order to be a good person, and then ultimately in order to be a loving person.
Our first inkling about how to be good comes in the form of truth. We call this conscience. Our conscience tells us what is right and what is wrong. But conscience must be formed. And it is formed out of truths.
Conscience is formed by means of the truths of faith, for what man has heard, acknowledged, and believed makes conscience in him. . . . Hence unless it is the truths of faith that he hears acknowledges, and believes, he can have no true conscience. For it is through the truths of faith . . . that man is regenerated. . . . From this it is evident that the truths of faith are the means by which he may become, or live, a man according to what faith teaches, the principal of which is to love the Lord above all things, and the neighbor as himself (AC 1077).
We are created such that our natural instincts are not always good. Often, perhaps always, we need to be taught what it is to be a good person. This teaching is done by truths. But there is a tricky part to truth.
We none of us have actual truth. None of us are able to grasp Divine truth. All we have now, and all we ever will have is an appearance of truth. Appearances of truth are approximations of truth that are suited to our mindset and to what we have experienced in life.
Truths Divine themselves are such that they can never be comprehended by any angel, still less by any man, as they exceed every faculty of their understanding. That still there may be conjunction of the Lord with them, truths Divine flow in with them in appearances, and when truths Divine are with them in such appearances, they can both be received and acknowledged. This is effected by adaptation to the comprehension of every one . . . (AC 3362).
This brings us to the questions raised by Darren and Lynda. I affirm Darren’s comment that whatever a person does in the moment according to his or her understanding of good is good for that person. We none of us ever have anything more than that. We only have the appearances that fit with our best understanding of good. And that understanding of good may be very flawed. This brings us to Lynda’s question about the child molester. Obviously, this individual’s conscience is perverted. But conscience continually grows and our appearances of truth become more and more genuine. Our mind also acquires more and more truths of different kinds. This means that the child molester can be instructed by the law or maybe by a treatment facility to see the sickness of his or her behaviors. Such instruction and treatment would be truths that improve the sick conscience into one more healthy.
Faith is perfected according to the abundance and coherence of truths . . . True faith, by abundance of truths coherent as it were into a bundle, also becomes more lustrous, perceptible, evident and clear; it also becomes more capable of conjunction with the goods of charity, and consequently of being separated from evils; and successively more removed from the allurements of the eye and the lusts of the flesh . . . Especially it becomes more powerful against evils and falsities (TCR 352).
So for all of us, truth that we learn, truth that has become a fact in our memories points the way to good. Truth begins to live when we start to do good from what we have been taught. When the truths we have learned are put into practice, then they become part of who we are as people. They enter our intentions. They become things that we will. In Swedenborg’s language, they become part of our will. Like Aristotle, we start to do good because we have been taught what good is. This becomes habit. And ultimately we enjoy doing what is good.
Truth does not have life from itself, but from good, and it has life from good when man lives according to truth; for it then infuses itself into the man’s will, and from his will into his actions, thus into the whole man. . . . when a man wills truth, it is then on the threshold of his life; and when from willing he does it, the truth is in the whole man; and when he does it frequently, it recurs not only from habit, but also from affection, and thus from freedom (AC 4884).
This is why it is so critical to learn truths. As we heard above, “Faith is perfected according to the abundance and coherence of truths” (TCR 352). We are born totally dumb. We don’t know anything. Everything has to be taught to us. This includes teachings about what it is to be good. We learn truths everywhere. We learn them through experiences in life. We learn them through reading the Bible. We learn them through preachings in church. We learn them through theology, philosophy, and literature. I would suggest here, that TV, movies, and Media, along with society in general and the specific neighborhoods some live in are not very good places to learn genuine truths. We need the presence of the church and holy scriptures especially in today’s society.
The knowledges we have of truth are filled with love and good by God when we start acting on them. Swedenborg calls truths vessels that hold good, or love. We learn truth, and God fills these containers with good and gives our truths life. We apply principals of truth to our lives and begin to do good—for all truth is a statement of what good is. In the course of time, the truth becomes transparent and only good itself shines through. When we have so committed teachings about good to our hearts that we instinctively do them, then good is all that appears.
When a man is being regenerated, that is, when he is to be conjoined to the Lord, he proceeds to the conjunction by means of truth, that is, through the truths of faith; for no one can be regenerated except through knowledges of faith, which are truths, by means of which he proceeds to conjunction. The Lord goes to meet these through good, that is charity, and applies this to the knowledges of faith, that is, to its truths; for all truths are recipient vessels of good, and so the more genuine the truths are, and the more they are multiplied, the more abundantly can good accept them as vessels, reduce them to order, and at length manifest itself; so that at last the truths do not appear, except so far as good shines through them (AC 2063).
With this background of truth, we are now in a much better position to consider what good is next Sunday. After that, we will be able to look at love.