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“If I claim to possess the truth, I will be unlikely even to entertain the possibility that others may be right, or at least partly right, and I wrong, or at least partly wrong; unlikely to enter imaginatively into the world of others so as to learn to appreciate the force of their account. . . . Claims to possess the uncontestable truth aren’t always wrong, but they are always dangerous–especially when a person’s claim to possess the truth matters more to her than the truth itself.” –Miroslov Volf, The End of Memory

I’m not a relativist, moral or otherwise. I believe that some things are true and other things are false, and that it is often possible (though rarely easy) for human beings to know the difference. And I believe that the difference matters.

And yet, it has been years since I have been able to say with conviction the words, “I know they Church is true.” Like nearly all life-long Latter-day Saints, I learned to say these words in primary, and I said them faithfully on the first Sunday of every month for many years. When I got older and learned bigger words, I started saying, in effect, “I REALLY, REALLY know the Church is true,” and “I know that they Church is REALLY, REALLY true.” (Adverbs, for a while, seemed important.) I was in college, I started to worry that the Church might not be true, and this thought felt too awful to even entertain.

Several years ago, though, it occurred to me that I have no idea what the phrase “I know the Church is true” means. It’s not that I think that the Church is untrue. It’s that I simply can’t comprehend what it might mean for a group of 15 million people or so to “be true”–or, for that matter, to be untrue. Statements can be true. Ideas can be true. Accounts of specific events can be true. But a Church, it seems to me, needs to have some relationship to truth other than just being it.

Along with not being a relativist, though, I’m also not an idiot. I know what people usually mean when they say “I know the Church is true.” They mean that the Church makes accurate claims about the nature of God and humanity, that it has the right understanding of sacred history, that its claim to have the authority to represent God on the earth are factually and uniquely correct.

It is important to point out here, without belaboring the point or trying to use it to prove too much, that a fair number of the horrible things that have been done in the world have been done by people who felt absolutely certain that their claims of divine authority were factually and uniquely correct. It does not follow that everybody who thinks that they have divine authority does horrible things, nor does it mean that everybody who claims authority from God is wrong. As Miroslov Volf says, claims to absolute and uncontested authority aren’t always wrong. But they are always dangerous. We need to understand why.

Volf’s 2006 book The End of Memory is as good a meditation on truth as I have read in some time. Volf is a Croatian theologian who endured the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the genocidal campaigns that followed among the Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim inhabitants of the former Communist nation. Absolute truth claims, whether theological or historical (and Volf is mainly interested in historical claims), have consequences–and these consequences can be awful even when the truth claims are accurate.

For Volf, the most dangerous claims come “when a person’s claim to possess the truth matters more to her than the truth itself.” Let’s call this the “testimony trap,” or the tendency to believe that the mere fact of making accurate claims about the nature of God or the universe is an end in itself rather than the means to accomplishing something of genuine moral or spiritual value.

Jesus had a lot to say about this kind of thinking, none of it good. It is a major focus of the Sermon on the Mount:

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. (Matt. 5:13-16)

Jesus was not telling the Jewish people in his audience that they, the Jews, were “the salt of the earth” or “the light of the world.” He was telling people who already thought that they were these things that they were indeed but that it didn’t matter. Simply being the salt of the earth is meaningless; you have to actually do salt of the earth. Same with light. And the same with “being true.”

We fall into the testimony trap when we start to think that “being true” is the sort of thing that churches are supposed to do. This can stunt our spiritual development in many ways. It can cause us to think that being right is more important than doing right. It can encourage us to turn obedience into a sacrament and to confuse displaying loyalty to an institution with loving God.

But the most damaging thing that can happen is that we can start to think of spiritual truth as something wrapped up in a neat package and handed to us at church. When this happens, we don’t feel the need to do the hard work of searching for truth ourselves. We will never be willing to entertain the possibility that we might be a little bit wrong, and that other people might be a little bit right. And we will be “unlikely to enter imaginatively into the world of others so as to learn to appreciate the force of their account.” And this, it turns out, is how real spiritual truth gets found.