7. All truth is God’s truth. If it works and your conscience is clear, the beliefs and practices you hold are between you and God. We recognize that certain expressions of genuine faith will limit who can fellowship with us, and take no offense at what God prospers outside His work in our lives. We have more than enough to occupy ourselves with what He has for us. Taking yourself too seriously is a moral failure.
Ultimate truth is moral in nature, not a matter of cerebral facts. Truth is an aspect of God’s Person and does not exist outside of Him. There is no objective body of truth somewhere out there that we can somehow reach by our reason. If there were no God, there could be no truth. There would be only human perception of a limited individual experience. We can at best simply agree to be self-deceived together and share our lies. Unless we are linked by heart and spirit to God’s Spirit, there can be no appeal to any outside source. Nothing we think we know makes any difference, because we cannot understand what is morally important. He is the Creator and His moral character pervades all Creation; reality itself is whatever God says it is. Reality is subject to God’s whims and no one has standing to question Him.
Human reason is deeply deceptive and self-deceived; it becomes a false god, an idol by which we disguise self-worship. Reason is incapable of objectivity, even as it asserts that it alone is objective. We always manage to rationalize our lustful desires and never seem to notice that our appeals to reason always serve to satisfy some fleshly obsession or desire, until we restore the heart to its rightful place on the throne of the will. The heart alone is capable of discerning the truth.
It is through the heart that we realize no two of us can possibly have the same experiences and perceptions, and no two of us can know God in exactly the same way. No two of us can possibly have the same religion, and no one of us is so wise and holy as to rightly decide what religion must be for others. Any unity among believers must of necessity be pragmatic, a matter of whether we can bear with each other’s weaknesses as we bear our own. Our communion and fellowship must be a living thing, not static, because life and reality itself is not static. And God is a real Person who changes His mind; the Bible flatly asserts as much. Our own perception of things must also grow and change. So our fellowship and worship together must build on the assumption that we must change and the only valid question is whether we can still work together without violating our own sense of calling. It’s never a question of who is right and who is wrong; God has never delegated that task to anyone but His Son. There is no place in God’s revelation for binary thinking and linear logic.
The essence of God’s Law on the earth is to glorify Him by living in His heavenly peace while residing in the presence of human tension.
