Truth and guesswork

Blue skies, milder air and sunshine again today. It makes me feel so much better. I didn't feel the need to do much apart from go out shopping for fresh fruit, as we'd nearly run out. I enjoyed a nice quiet solitary  morning, before heading into town for an afternoon in the CBS office, working on updating our inventory of lost and stolen radios and bad debt. Now we have a proper secretary and I don't have to keep focussed on invoicing and revenue generation, I can pay attention to making sense of information which has been accumulated but not analysed. 

With more office moves behind us than years of operation, it's amazing we lost very little from the paper trail. Getting it all organised and filed away is one thing. Making good use of the information contained by the paper trail is another. The new accounts system gave us what we think is a high figure for money owed to the company, but doesn't categorise it yet, as relevant information still needs to be fed into the Sage accounts program. So, a review of equipment losses and its impact on revenue was needed. 

This was initiated by our new secretary soon after she started work. But, it had to be set aside because of the need to tackle more urgent things. Nine months later, the forgotten file was brought out of obscurity, and didn't take long to update. What was interesting was to see how our general guesswork about the cost of equipment lost was close to what could be calculated. This made it possible to estimate revenue losses from missing equipment. And that made it possible to make proper sense of the accounting data. It's not hugely complex but requires a little effort to move away from guesswork, however accurate, to a factual estimation. Guesswork hides assumptions that can distort a true picture. It's better to try and understand the argument and the facts for what they are, even when they contradict what you think is happening. This much, I inherited from a youthful training in science and philosophy.

When I started training for ministry forty five years ago, I was attracted to the theological discipline that sought to make sense of 'facts' , whether this concerned scriptural texts, historical narrative, or those of philosophical and moral argument. Analysing the meaning of statements, recognising different ways in which words could be used and human experience described remains fascinating to me. But, I'm not sure this is shared by the younger generation of contemporary 'digital native' seminarians at St Mike's. They have different experiences, also different ways of working on the given data of Christian scripture and tradition, if norms of post-modern culture are believed.

The critical analysis of meaning which came naturally to my generation seems on times to be perceived as a threat to the rising generation. Come to think of it, my generation found the ideas of Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and their contemporaries hard to engage with, because they challenged some assumptions taken  for granted. Each rising generation has the opportunity to explore and interpret the world experimentally, and must expect to be challenged critically by its predecessors. Not as a defence against change, but to ensure that truth is not obscured by guesswork, however 'inspired'.