Blackbirds: A Metaphor about God and Truth

"Now we see through a glass, darkly..."

~ 1 Corinthians 13:12a

Painting by the author, 24"x 24"

Imagine a flock of blackbirds suddenly rising into flight. A group of friends, catching a brief glimpse, tries to estimate how many there were. One says about twenty-five. Another guesses twenty. A third is sure there were at least thirty. None of them can state the exact number with certainty.

After discussing it for a while, one friend says, “Since we can’t agree on the number, how do we even know there were any blackbirds at all? Maybe it was just our imaginations.”

The others immediately recognize this as absurd. Disagreement about the precise count does not mean there were no birds—or that the number was whatever anyone wants it to be.

Yet this very logic is often used against Christianity today. People point to disagreements among theologians and denominations—differing views on communion, baptism, or the relative importance of certain doctrines—and conclude that Christian truth is entirely subjective. They claim there is no objective truth about God, that religion is just personal preference, and that we can never really know anything for certain.

That conclusion is as mistaken as denying the blackbirds existed.

There was a definite, specific number of blackbirds, even if the observers could not verify it or agree on it. No reasonable person would say the flock’s size was arbitrary or unknowable in principle.

The same is true of God and moral truth. God has a definite nature and specific attributes, whether or not human beings fully agree on what they are. Truth is not whatever we want it to be.

Agnostics often say, “We can’t know whether God exists or what He is like.” Others insist God is simply whatever each person imagines Him to be. But that is no different from claiming the flock contained whatever number of birds each observer preferred, rather than acknowledging there was one actual number.

The Bible promises the opposite: if we sincerely seek God, we will find Him. We can come to know more and more of His true character. In this life we see only dimly, “through a glass darkly,” yet many of us have glimpsed enough—heard His voice, seen His hand at work—to be certain He is there. And we trust that one day we shall know Him fully, just as clearly as we could have known the exact number of blackbirds if we had been given the chance to count them.

Revised from journal note of July 11, 2002