It’s not often you find yourself passionately defending Christ’s divinity in the thick snow outside Westminster station, shivering and blowing on freezing fingers whilst throwing shade at someone’s dodgy and presumptuous translation of John 1:1, or find yourself referring your interlocutor to the original Greek of John 6:48-59 in defence of transubstantiation. And that’s a shame. Street preachers. We’ve all seen them and been harassed by them, or have ignored the Jehovah’s Witnesses who stand with their stands and leaflets around Westminster and Victoria stations, and we’ve all looked down on them. Scorn them though we might, they present us with a challenge, and a necessary one at that. They are a witness to the dissenters, and remind us that we ourselves are dissenters.
There is (surprise, surprise) a serious problem in our society. But I am not going to pretend that this is a new thing, or moan for the good old days of the 4th century, as I occasionally find myself doing. It has existed on and off for centuries- it was prominent in much of the Roman Empire, when gods and pagan religions were aplenty, and in almost every period of cultural and religious diversity in history (though not, however, in the 4th century Mediterranean early Church, a shining example of the opposite of this problem). The great evil that faces our generation is a simple but deadly one – relativism. The ‘I have my own private beliefs and you have yours’ culture, the ‘I can see your arguments for that but it doesn’t apply to me’, and, one of my most hated phrases, ‘let’s just agree to disagree’, as used pathetically when someone cannot refute your argument. One in which pluralism and being nice is the highest ideal at the expense of truth. And one where we stop caring about bringing people to the truth.
This pluralism comes from the noblest of intentions. But it is based upon a false idea- that to say someone else’s beliefs are wrong is to hate them, despise them, and not care about them. I do not entirely blame anyone suffering from such a delusion- it is easy from the state of political and social debate at the moment, littered as it is with personal insults and raised voices, to confuse caring for someone with agreeing with them. But, being as there necessarily is some objective truth about whether or not God exists, and whether or not abortion is objectively wrong, and whether or not the Eucharist is Christ’s flesh and blood, among other things, if you have an opinion, you must (or should) have a justification for thinking that your position on these topics is true. Because if we believe things about the objective world, those beliefs must be objectively true or false. Hard though it may seem, either Protestants or Catholics are right, Atheists or Theists, Muslims or Christians, or neither. These are mutually exclusive, precisely because they make claims about objective truth. And if you dare to take a position on these issues, if you dare point to one and say ‘I think there is the fullness of truth’, you would be a jerk indeed if you were willing to justifiably think that, but not care enough about others to want them to see what you see. It is the antithesis of loving not to desire to bring others to the truth, if you value truth at all! This is not to say we should not be intellectually humble- the opposite. It is in trying to convince others that the flaws and strengths of your argument are laid bare. So by all means argue! For it is only by holding each other accountable that we can point out untruths and, even if apophatically, come at last to a closer understanding of truth, so long as that is our goal, and not just to prove that we personally are right- or that everyone is.
And here is where I get back to street preachers. They irritate us because they will not let us just accept our beliefs and theirs. They irritate us because they demand our souls and an explanation if we refuse. They demand a position. They care about truth. And yes, I do think the most of them are wrong- most often about transubstantiation- but at least they force us to dissent, reject, and be an objectivist to believe that. Personally, I think we should take a leaf out of the Ordo Praedicatorum – commonly known as Dominicans after their founder St. Dominic – and bear the simple motto, ‘Veritas’- Truth.
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