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"Listen, Galileo! The science of the world was built on the pillars of Aristotelian wisdom. For two thousand years men have lived and died in the belief that the earth is the center of the universe and man the lord of it... After Aristotle, our Lord Jesus Christ descended upon earth and saved us, giving us his wonderful gift of Christianity. This Christianity has perfected Aristotle, spiritualized him, made his teachings Christian knowledge... Learning and teaching have both brought me peace and happiness... Leave me my peace of mind! I refuse to look into that tube."

"But the truth, Cesare, the Truth! Doesn't that mean anything to you? To me peace and happiness have always meant one thing: to see truth and admit what I found."1

This dialogue between Galileo, the first to use the telescope, and his companion, Cesare, places before us an age-old dilemma that is still with us today. In fact, it could be said that Galileo started the whole thing. He was the first modern religious person to challenge the accepted truth of his day. He was the first member of the established church to stand up to the authorities and say, "But the truth, doesn't that mean anything?"

There have a1ways been those who take another road. They are the Cesares of this world who find peace and happiness in the established truths of the past. So convinced are they that truth lies behind them that they will not even look into the future for fear that they might be proved wrong.

Galileo was unlucky enough to be born at the wrong time. He was born when those in charge were not receptive to the new discoveries he was making. Because he refused to deny his findings (at first, finally he was forced to recant of them), he is still revered by those who seek truth wherever it is found and acknowledged as such. Perhaps the reason why the church had so much trouble with Galileo was the premonition of what might happen if he were allowed to go on reporting the things he said he was seeing through his tube.

In some way, we can almost understand their concern. For in some respects, life had never been more peaceful and happier than during the Middle Ages -- at least intellectually and religiously. People might not have had all the money they needed. Surely their physical health could have been much better. But they knew what was to be known and they believed what was to be believed. The church told them what both were so there was no doubt about either. If all one studied was Aristotle's politic, Aristotle's poetics, and Aristotle's ethics, there was little room for confusion. It was a rather peaceful time for thought.

Sometimes even the most liberal among us long for an authority who can say that this is the way it is. There are times when we all long for a guide and a guarantee in life.

Shortly, before Jesus left his disciples, he told them,

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
-- John 16:12-13 ESV

These words of Jesus tell us that the Holy Spirit is the real guide and guarantee of life. We can trust where the Spirit leads us for even the Holy Spirit is subject to the authority of God the Father.

Two permanent longings of the human mind and heart are fulfilled in the two functions the Holy Spirit performs in our lives: leading us into truth and giving us certainty regarding it.

Even then, there is still room for discussion. Does the Spirit bring peace and happiness about things we already know, as Cesare thought it did, or does the Spirit bring the peace and happiness that results from seeking new truth, as Galileo hoped for? That is something we still need to consider.

There are those who would insist that the truth the Spirit brings is the truth Jesus brought when he was teaching on the hills of Galilee, nothing more, nothing less. Anything Jesus' disciples needed to know after the resurrection could only be more of the same kind of information they had already received from him. Surely Jesus would have shared with them anything of major importance before he ascended to heaven. If this is true, it would, of course, include teachings that Jesus might have given them on eternal life, along with the knowledge that it was possible to go directly to the Father in prayer. Indeed it was this sort of thing the disciples are to learn in the last chapters of John's gospel.

However, I cannot bring myself to think that the enlightenment of the Spirit of Truth is limited to the explicit teachings of Jesus alone. That cannot be the end of the matter, at least not for me.

The whole truth seems closer to this: God's Spirit not only brings to remembrance the teachings of Christ while he was on this earth; the Spirit also continues to teach new truth.

We see this in the way the primitive church went about dealing with problems that Jesus never had to consider. In order to answer problems of their day and time, the early church did not feel restricted only to the teachings Jesus had explicitly mentioned. They were convinced that the Holy Spirit was still speaking to them and revealing to them God's will. The gospels, the letters of Paul, and the remaining writings in the New Testament give evidence that this is the way the early church looked at things. They sought new truth wherever and whenever the Spirit led them to find it. It was not so much a movement away from present known truth but it was somehow beyond it.

For instance, Jesus had no reason to deal directly with the circumcision issue. It did not become a problem until later when the church extended its membership to the Gentiles. For Paul it was a crucial issue. It became a test case for the faith. Eating and having fellowship with Jewish and Gentile Christians was another issue that had to be decided. Eating meat sacrificed to idols in the Greek markets was another. In an effort to deal with these pressing issues, the early church did not sacrifice the truth of the past but it did have the nerve to go beyond it and accommodate itself to the new truth guided by the Spirit.

There were many more times throughout the years when the church had to go beyond what Jesus had directly taught. What were they to do with the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit? What were they to make of them? Was speaking in tongues a genuine expression of God's action, something to be sought by all people, or just by some? How did it compare with rational interpretation of the gospel? How were those who had the gifts to get along with those who did not have them or even appreciate them? Under the guidance of the Spirit, the early church, and Paul, especially in Romans and the letters to the Corinthians, a new course had to be charted about what to do with these problems.

What about the End of the Age? Was it coming soon or had they misunderstood? Did they have something more to learn about the way God was directing history? Even Paul himself had to adjust his thinking more than once with regard to this issue. He first thought the end of the world was imminent. Toward the end of his ministry, he revised his ideas in light of what was happening (or not happening) and the knowledge that God had given him. Maybe we Christians should begin to find a way to live in the world and minister to it rather than biding our time until we are snatched out of it. Paul came to the conclusion that the time was not as near as he first thought. What was their response to the government supposed to be? There are at least three answers to this one in the New Testament.

I can hear some of you saying, "All of this may no doubt be true but once the canon of the Bible was decided upon, didn't the Spirit give over its direction to these sacred pages? What need is there for the Spirit now? The Bible says what it means and means what it says." The obvious answer is that not everyone seems to agree on what the Bible says and means. Besides, there's no evidence in scripture or in Christian history that the Holy Spirit ever closed down the home office and issued a catalog instead. God is still in the business of direct services. We should never forget that it was the church, under the guidance of the Spirit, that decided which books in the Bible were acceptable and which were not, which were within and which were beyond the limits of regular Christian faith and practice. The Spirit of God has not stopped working since the canon of scripture was closed. The Spirit has continued to work right on down to the present and will work right on through to the future. When Christ says the Spirit will lead us into all truth, he surely means we will be led into truth after the Bible was written. If the early Christians were not restricted to what the Spirit had done, should we not be open to what the Spirit is doing? As one early church father put it, "Wherever the Christian finds truth, he should greet it."

I know of at least two brilliant people who left the church because they felt it no longer had room for new truth. One of them was a first-rate psychologist who left the Christian ministry. He said he could not work in a closed system. The church's resistance to discovering new insights was suffocating him to death. The other person turned to philosophy because he felt "theology was the deadliest of studies imaginable." He said it was no fun to study theology because everything had already been decided beforehand in Jesus Christ. There was no excitement for him because everyone already knew how it was going to turn out.

I'm sympathetic to what these two were trying to say, and I regret that two of the best minds I have known were lost to the church. I think they misjudged the church a little. Not much, maybe, but a little, enough to make a big difference. First, I don't believe some people, including these two, really appreciate how much we human beings need limits. When things are left up in the air for a while, it can be exhilarating. After a while, it becomes terrifying if things are not pinned down. Dogs that are never given a name or called by a different name every time they are spoken to eventually become insane, I understand. We can live with just so many things left up in the air for so long. Eventually some things need to be tied down. The Spirit guides us into new truth, but it also is the guarantee of old truth so we can know what to count on.

If the church is and remains attracted to the truth she knows, it's because she sees the necessity. The word guarantee means to make secure. With that said, I would urge us to keep the door ajar just enough to let in a little new truth. Not too much lest we get scared but enough to liven things up a bit. Pope John XXIII gave the best example yet for changing things. When asked why he was calling a council to look into the health of the Roman Catholic church, he walked over to his study window and symbolically opened it to let in a little fresh air. The Spirit of Truth is limited to the teachings of Christ but it is also open to what is out there to be discovered. We can accept it insofar as it is in line with the truth of Christ. That's the catch if there is one. All the psychologist and the philosopher could see is that the church was not open to any new truth, so they left. They could not appreciate the twofold task of the church to be open to new truth but also to see how it stacks up with what is already known in Christ.

Personally, I'm convinced that the Spirit not only leads us to remember old truth and to seek new truth but eventually to lead us into all truth. For that reason, we Christians should never have to be afraid of learning anything that is true. Because all truth is God's truth, we can embrace it.

Let me see if I can apply this a bit more concretely. Galileo was condemned by the church because he seemed to be teaching new ideas that were unacceptable to the Christian faith. Yet we know that what he had to say about the earth and the sun was no more against the Bible than it was for it. It was only out of ignorance that the church was afraid of what he had to say. (To the credit of the present-day Roman Catholic church, Galileo has been officially reinstated into the faith.)

Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, at first also had difficulty being accepted by some in the church. Freud came up with new notions about how our minds work (or don't work), how they are obsessed with sex and power, and how they are confused or afraid. In the beginning, the church was afraid of what he had to say because it sounded strange. Yet as time went on, more and more Christians began to see what Freud was actually doing was giving scientific documentation to sin and new insights into how to heal it. The apostle Paul could have written much that Freud wrote. Now we have psychologists and psychiatrists talking about real sin and guilt again, instead of guilt complexes and the like. We now have ministers trained in counseling and pastoral care.

At one time, the battle lines were sharply drawn -- religion was a dirty word to psychology and psychology was a dirty word to the clergy. Thank heaven that day is largely over!

Take Darwin and his theory of evolution. Now I know there are some in the church who still have trouble with this one: Genesis or geology? Some still fight over that! All because of the same misunderstandings that caused the church to try Galileo for heresy and deprive even his friends of the joy of looking into his telescope. Evolution is a beautiful way to describe scientifically how God created the universe, just as the first chapters in Genesis describe even more beautifully the religious meaning behind it. In my view, the Bible describes the why; evolution the how.

The church may have had a hard time accepting new truth about the universe and about hidden unconscious motivation and about how much a part of nature we really are, but there is one area in which the church has had more trouble in accepting new ideas than in almost any other. That area is in the realm of religion itself, which is her realm to seek and hers alone. One of the most regrettable things to me is that the church has such a difficult time accepting any new discovery in religion. We seem to want everything new but "give me that old time religion."

For instance, it has taken a long time for the church to see that qualifications for ministry and service have nothing to do with gender. Denomination after denomination still struggle with the question. A former presiding Bishop of the Episcopal church has put it this way: "Ordination is not an obstacle to Christian unity, but an occasion for the expansion of ministry." Several years ago, as a minister of the Christian church (Disciples of Christ), I became convinced that inclusion of women elders was not only a good idea whose time had come but theologically and biblically essential to the unity and fullness of the gospel (as are women deacons and ministers). I became convinced the day the words of Acts 2:17 leapt out at me: "Your sons and your daughters will prophesy." It's no coincidence, I think, that the pentecostal churches were some of the first to welcome women into the ranks of the clergy. Where the Spirit guides us into new truth in religion, it guides us into seeing the fullness of ministry in all areas of the church's life. We have a guarantee. The Spirit will see to it.

Those of you who have purchased a home or a piece of property can remember the feelings you had the first time you did it. You were both excited and scared. Then came that time when you were about to close the deal. You were asked to put some money down as an "earnest" payment, a sign of good faith that you were good for the remainder. Unless someone had explained the term to you before, the concept was probably a new one at the time.

Our thinking about the Holy Spirit is equally new and many of us have not had much experience or opportunity to reflect upon it. It catches us off guard unless someone takes the time to explain it to us. Paul put the two concepts just mentioned together in at least three places in his letters when he was trying to explain his message. At one point Paul writes: "... he has put his seal upon us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee" (2 Corinthians 1:22 RSV). The Revised Standard Version translates the Greek word as a guarantee. A more accurate translation would be earnest. The New Revised Standard Version spells it out even further. The Spirit is "a first installment." Then it is that we learn who the Holy Spirit is and what the Holy Spirit does for us. The Spirit is God's earnest payment or first installment to us, a promise of bigger and better things to come, a tangible reminder that God will make good on the rest come what may. We don't even need to make the first payment. God has already taken care of that for us. We have his word on it. More than that, we have God's down payment about our future welfare, the promise to be the guide and guarantee of our lives. Amen.

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Zsolt De Harsanyi, Paul Tabor, trans., The Star Gazer (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1939), 282.