Dr. Bill Arnold: Truth-Shaped Community
Reflections on my time at Asbury Theological Seminary, presented to the community meeting, April 12, 2024.
Bill T. Arnold
In these few minutes, I’ve been asked to reflect on what it means for us to value truth and truth-telling as a community—a community called to prepare theologically educated, sanctified, Spirit-filled men and women to be and serve the Church.
What does it mean for a Christian community like ours to live “Truth-Filled lives,” to borrow a phrase from Dr. Christine Pohl? In what ways can our community exemplify “truth-shaped living”? We say we value the truth. We want to live and love truth. Yet this must mean more than simply telling someone a thing they don’t want to hear. The more holistic practice of truth-shaped living must already be present in the community, so that when hard conversations do need to occur, the relationships and trust will already be in place that make those conversations effective.
Dr. Pohl referred to the “relational dimensions of truthfulness” that are, in fact, central pillars of any community of God’s people. Can we be more specific about these relational dimensions?
Look no further than the Ninth Commandment, “You shall not testify against another person as a false witness” (Exod 20:16; Deut 5:20). The commandment is thus one of Israel’s highest values, which in their Scriptures, they applied to create a fair and just legal system. In this way, justice and righteousness as abstract ideals become concrete, lived experiences. Just so, in the Old Testament, justice and righteousness are experiences to be enacted as much as propositional abstractions in theory. There is certainly a need and a time to investigate and study justice and righteousness as abstractions. This is part of what it means to know Jesus as the truth, and to experience the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth guiding us into truth. In the Bible, truth-filled living ensures that justice and righteousness are also lived out, so that a Christian speaking the truth about another person leaves no room for speaking with a quality of dishonesty or deception, or even with the intention of leaving a misguided notion.
And so, this is and will continue to be a high virtue in our lives together, because we are a called community, a Christian institution of higher learning. It’s that simple. And yet, it’s never that simple, is it? My concluding thought on this point is that institutions are like people; they have a way of disappointing us and letting us down. In my own experience, I have been guilty of loving Asbury Theological Seminary too much. By that I mean, at one point in my ministry here, I almost idolized the place. I had an inadequate perception of it as an institution. Please don’t get me wrong; I still love it, I value the ministry we share together here, and I thank God every day for the honor it is to live and work in this community. But I have a different perception of it today than I once did.
The reason is that people like us don’t always live into the theology we believe to be true, that we teach, preach, and hold up to the world as God’s highest and best calling. We believe in Christian perfection, and we teach that—in the power of the Holy Spirit—we have victory and power over sin, and we pray for continued growth in grace as we become more like Christ in our living and working together. Unlike some Christian traditions, we actually believe God’s grace is sufficient for us to become what he is calling us to be. But that’s not a sinless perfectionism; and it doesn’t mean we always get it right. Sometimes we fail. And when we fail (that is, when we become more concerned about how we are perceived and we fudge on the details instead of living a truth-shaped life), we not only fail in our commitments to Christ but we fail the community as well. We become part of the problem.
It took me a while, but I have come back to a relationship with my institution, with this venerable old Seminary, that I now believe is healthier. I know the Seminary from a new perspective, from a perspective that is realistic about its flaws and shortcomings (like some people I know intimately but love anyway), and I still believe this institution stands for the grandest and most compelling vision of Christianity in the long history of the Church. That is truth, and it’s a truth we are all called to live into as best we can for as long as we can, in order to create a healthier truth-shaped community. May God help all of us as we seek to become more Christlike in our truth-shaped living.
This is very helpful to me Bill! Thank you so much!