“There’s an old Hindu proverb that goes something like this…

“Three blind men stumble upon an elephant. The first blind man finds the trunk of the elephant. He feels the long, smooth trunk and thinks it’s a snake. The second man grabs one of the legs of the elephant. It’s rough, textured and really thick. He thinks it’s the trunk of a giant tree. The third blind man grabs the tail of the elephant. He assumes it is a rope.

“The moral of this story is that we all perceive things differently. Many people would tell you this story shows us that nothing is real, that no one’s perception is more valid than anyone else’s, that everyone’s view is “true.”

“But there’s one problem with this interpretation of the story. The blind men were, in fact, holding an elephant. That was the truth. It wasn’t a snake or a tree or a rope. It was an elephant.” (from “Our Friend Pete” by Wes Halula, taken from passageway.org)

The funny thing about relativism is that we have to live with it. Some Christians get all up tight about relativism, the idea that your morality depends on what you believe, the idea that all religions are true, however you want to phrase it, some Christians get all worked up about this idea and really want to emphasize that no matter what you think it is, it’s really an elephant. The truth is the truth, no matter how you think you see it.

That’s all well and good, but the problem is we don’t know who’s seeing what. While we decry the “well that’s true for you,” response, we fail to recognize that there are a lot of things about Christianity that don’t exactly jive. There are things about the faith that vary depending on who you talk to, the “truth” changes depending on which brand of Christianity you’re dealing with.

I get the feeling a lot of Christians ignore this perplexing aspect of our faith, choosing instead to think that we have all the right answers, we have the correct version of the truth, we know we’re touching an elephant. When all along the brother in the church next door thinks it’s a rhino, not an elephant, which is a different version of the truth, and a different right answer.

There’s a funky contradiction that exists, and somehow God deals with that. Perhaps one of the Christian denominations has it right and all the others are wrong, but we never really think about that. I guess sometimes I think we just need to admit that we don’t have a monopoly on truth. We need to admit that it’s possible we might not know everything about the Bible, we might have screwed a few things up. It doesn’t mean the foundation of our faith is whack, it doesn’t mean our entire belief structure is going to come crumbling down. I think contradictions exist, and God has no problem with them. I don’t know how that works, but I know it does. I know I’m not right about everything (I’ve probably screwed my logic up right here), and that’s OK.

Modernism vs. post-modernism is a big debate a lot of cutting edge churchy people like to get into, and while I hate trying to define that sort of thing, this is one of things that fits neatly in the modern/post-modern debate. Modernity is about always being right. Post-modernity somehow finds a way around that and is just fine with being wrong. Of course these are simply different ways of interacting with your world and neither of them is necessarily better than the other, but that OK with being messed up idea seems to gel with my concept of grace — I’m all screwed up, but it’s all good.