more of the truth

I mentioned in my last blog that I was reading A Place For Truth edited by Dallas Willard. This morning I read an essay by Os Guinness entitled Time for Truth. Guinness quotes Solzhenitsyn: "One word of truth outweighs the entire world," and the Charter '77 slogan, "Truth prevails for those who live in truth." Charter '77 was the work of the engineers of the Velvet Revolution (including Vaclav Havel) that overthrew the Communist government of Czechoslovakia in November of 1989.

Guinness contrasts the "impossible" revolution of truth over power with the present "crisis of truth" in Western culture, most particularly in its universities. The kind of truth that overthrew Communism is now considered dead. "At worst, it's socially constructed," says Guinness; "it's a testament to the community that said it and made it stick, and the power they had in expressing it."

Or, to oversimplify perhaps a bit: Truth is relative.

At the risk of letting Os Guinness write my blog, I want to share a fairly good chunk of his essay with you here, because I think it makes for excellent fodder for discussion. Beginning on page 40, he writes:

I want to argue that this crisis of truth is enormously important for both individuals and for the American Republic. Far from being Neanderthal and reactionary, truth is a very precious, simple, fundamental, human gift, without which we cannot negotiate reality and handle life. The truth is absolutely essential for a good human life. Equally important, truth is absolutely essential for freedom. And in the American Republic, where the challenge is not just becoming free but sustaining freedom, any people who would be free and remain free have to grapple seriously with the real challenge of truth.

 Concomitant with the crisis of truth is a crisis of character. Integrity is no longer in vogue; the only ideals are appearance, placement, "product identification." Guinness quotes Mark Twain: "In America, the secret of success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made," and Groucho Marx: "Hey, these are my principles, my moral principles. And if you don't like them, I've got others." If there is no objective truth, then there is no standard on which to build character.

Likewise related is a crisis of ethics. Without truth as an objective reality, evil becomes relative. Guinness bemoans, "I've been on campuses where, to put it simply, today it is worse to judge evil than it is actually to do evil." The moral compass, bereft of truth, simply spins, the needle sweeping across a face with no markings.

These are frightening times; but we are not without recourse, we who believe in a core, central Truth, and the God Who is True. And Guinness encourages followers of Jesus to hang onto that very key idea: we follow God Who is True. When we place faith in this God, we wake up and shake off the nightmare of relativism ("I believe because it is true for me."), subjectivism ("I believe because I feel it deeply.") and pragmatism ("I believe it because it works for me."), and in the light of day believe simply because it is the truth. "The Christian faith is not true because it works; it works because it's true," says Guinness. "Ultimately truth, for both Jews and followers of Jesus, is finally a matter of who God is" [emphasis mine].

When we understand this, we can resist being manipulated by image and power. We can speak truth into relativism without fear of rejection. We can take the risk to ask the relativist to apply his principles universally, including to his own pet theory of the relativity of truth. We can point out the end result of relativistic truth: "If there's no truth and truth is dead, and knowledge is only power, then might makes right. The victory goes to the strong, and the weak go to the wall." But if there is indeed truth, then "truth prevails for those who live in truth."

...and that's a good thing.

what is truth?

I was reading in Acts chapter 17 today about Paul's visit to Athens, and his apologetic for "the unknown god". As I read I wondered if such an approach would work in today's world here in the West. Paul was meeting a culture that, while spiritual, had never encountered Jesus. We, on the other hand, are dealing with a culture that has been pretty well inoculated against Jesus, in no small part due to the efforts of the erstwhile Christian Church to preach a watered-down gospel, lacking in power because it is lacking in discipleship. That, though, is a conversation best left for another post.

In the meantime, as I was trying to imagine a true Mars Hill experience in our present culture, I glanced over at my bookshelf and there saw a book which my bride had bought me entitled A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life's Hardest Questions,* a compilation of essays from the Veritas Forum,  edited by Dallas Willard. I took it as a theophany, and opened it.

I love the way a new book feels, before the cover gets all curled and the pages all fanned out. I opened the book for the first time and began to read. The Veritas Forum began in 1992 when "a small group of Christians at Harvard hosted the university for a weekend of lectures and discussions exploring some of life's most important questions. Their hope was to restore within the university a space for asking deep questions, seeking real answers and building community around the search for truth" (p. 11). In the intervening years Veritas Forums have taken place at campuses throughout the US and Canada. Willard has compiled some of the best presentations therefrom.

In the opening essay of the book, Richard John Neuhaus declares:

We Christians have an inescapable obligation to contend that there is truth, and that all truths finally serve the one truth. There is one truth because there is one God and one revelation of God in Jesus Christ... It's not only for the sake of the Christian gospel, it's for the sake of our responsibility in our society. It's a socially disastrous, community destroying thing to deny that there is a truth that binds us together—Christian and Jew and Muslim and believer and nonbeliever and atheist and secular and black and white and Asian (28-29).

 So, perhaps we do have an Areopagus, like Paul, where we can proclaim "the unknown god". But how do we go about doing so? Neuhaus cautions,

But we have to demonstrate that we, as Christians, have understood... how Christians claiming to possess the truth can indeed be destructive of public discourse. Christians who are overwhelmingly confident that they actually possess the truth in the sense of being in control of the truth [emphasis mine] can become the enemies of civil discourse (36).

Or, as William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury is reputed to have said, "It's possible to be right repugnantly." If you want a concrete example of this, think of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, and their anti-homosexual-themed picketing of funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq.

I agree with Neuhaus that we who follow Jesus have an obligation and responsibility to declare that there is such a thing as truth. And the only way I see to avoid the pitfall becoming the enemies of civil discourse is to carry on those conversations in the context of relationships forged in our community.

I look forward to reading more of this book. I anticipate it will provide more fodder for this blog!

*InterVarsity Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8308-3845-5