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Truth and Sublimity

by Terry Barlow
06/07/17
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I now see reflections of theologians Karl Barth and Emil Bruner in some of my earlier attitudes toward truth as a young man.  R.C. Sproul reminds us that it was Barth for example who claimed that being able to embrace both sides of a contradiction at once was a sign of intellectual maturity, and that it was Bruner who went so far as to say that contradiction was the hallmark of truth.  As for me as a young thinker I had the idea that the more unintelligible a statement or proposition was, the truer it had to be. The more confusing or even absurd it sounded the more profound it must have been.  This I now realize was more a characteristic of immaturity than maturity.  It follows that when I was espousing this kind of thinking or "non-thinking" shall we say, I was busily destroying my mind piece by piece with various substances.  I thought spirituality had more to do with thought inhibition than the promotion of inspired or enlightened thought.   Barth seems to have had it exactly backwards in that matter.  Why would the search for truth mean a repudiation of our God-given ability to reason, when reason is such an important instrument in that search, employing the law of non-contradiction?  How can we apply truth to our lives and explain it to ourselves and others if that truth is incomprehensible?  That would be a parody of human rationality, a mockery of the human mind which is made in the image of God.  And, as the saying goes: be not deceived,  God will not be mocked.