Later this evening I will be headed to the airport to board a plane to Wisconsin where I’ll spend the next week studying at Nashotah House. Because of the reading that I’ve had to do for the class that I’m taking, I’ve been thinking a lot about epistemology over the past few weeks. Epistemology is the study of the theory of knowledge or the study of how we know what we think we know. In the sciences, to know something to be true means to be able to demonstrate it through critical methodology, or at least that was the great claim of the Enlightenment and modernism. Postmodernism, however, reminded us that the subject (the person doing the thinking and studying) is always involved in any truth claim, so there is always a subjective element built into even the most seemingly objective studies. Nevertheless, in the sciences, claims to truth rest primarily on repeatable use of critical methodology to produce the same result. So, if you and I do the same experiment the exact same way and we get the same result, we have discovered the truth. 

In the humanities, however, what we mean by truth is not so simple and straightforward. What does it mean that a poem is true? Or a painting? What about Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia? Certainly, the Chronicles of Narnia are not true in the same way that a history book should be true, but what Christian could deny the truth of what the risen Aslan says to Lucy? “’It means,’ said Aslan, ‘that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know: Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” Is that true? There is no Aslan, there is no Lucy, there is no table, and there is no Narnia, but who in this room would say that that tale isn’t true?

On the one hand, we have the sciences with their claim to truth through repeated, critical experimentation, and on the other, we have the humanities in which what counts as truth or knowledge is far more difficult to define. So, where on this spectrum do we place theology? When we say that something is true in theology or in the Church, is that claim more like a truth claim in the sciences or in the humanities? Or, to be more specific, when we hear John the Baptist say this morning, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” what do we mean when we say that it’s true?

This saying by John is one of the most iconic sayings in the history of Christianity. Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is a prominent symbol in the history of Christian art, and it affected Christian imagination from the first century onward, even within the Bible itself, for example, in Revelation 5 where Jesus is the lamb standing as though he had been slain. The Agnus Dei, Latin for “Lamb of God,” plays a central role in the liturgy, and at the fraction, we repeat the words of St. Paul that Christ our Passover, really, our Passover lamb, is sacrificed for us. Some of us this Christmas, as a gift from Jimmy and Ally Thomas, went to the “Behold the Lamb of God” concert. This imagery is used in many ways throughout the history of Christianity, so it’s important that we ask ourselves, when John the Baptist sees Jesus coming towards him, when he sees a man, with probably long hair and a beard and dusty garments and dirty sandals, and he points to that man and says, “Behold the Lamb of God,” how do we know that to be true?

Are there scientific, repeatable tests that we can do to prove that claim like Qui-Gon testing Anakin’s blood to check his midichlorian count? Is there a test that we could run to check Jesus’ blood to see how much Agnus Dei was in t