What is truth? That is the question - or perhaps it was more of a statement - that Pilate asked Jesus just before concluding his examination of the accused blasphemer of Jewish religion.
It was the Roman governor’s response to Jesus’s comment that he came into this world to testify to the truth.
I don’t believe the days in which you and I are living are any different than those that have come before us. But with the information age, we are privy to a world of alternative facts.
What is truth? It’s what I want it to be. It’s what I make it to be.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address at Harvard in 1978 wasn’t received well. Solzhenitsyn, as you may know, was a dissident, stripped of his citizenship, and expelled from the Soviet Union. (This was back in the days before Putin when dissidents were more likely to be expelled than murdered, as Alexi Navalny recently was.)
But in his Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn made this rather upsetting statement - “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.”
If you want to make Americans made just call them cowards. But the fact is only cowards bend and shape “truth” to suit their own needs.
Politicians, university professors, militant atheists, celebrity pastors; there are many in these days (as always) whose “facts” are shaped to suit the “truth.”
To borrow a line from Forest Gump and change it up a bit - Coward is as coward does.
I’m convinced that the preeminent quality of godly, maturing followers of Jesus is their willingness to relentlessly and courageously seek truth, whatever the personal cost to their lives, careers, and relationships. And that means, among other things, the courage to reject anything and everything that contradicts the truth.
You may be asking, But what is truth, Dan? How can we be certain of what really is true?
The answer to that question is found in the words of Jesus - I am the way, the truth and the life.
Truth is not found in the facts we believe; truth is found in the lives that we live.
We are surrounded by people - and we may be those people - living lives that deny the truth. Lying to themselves about themselves. Deceiving themselves about who they really are - and who others are.
It’s easier than one might imagine to lie about why we say what we say or do what we do or don’t do. This is nothing less than cowardice. Shapeshifting - becoming what we need to be to obtain what we think we need, what will benefit us the most.
But the words of Jesus cut through all this B.S.
This is the verdict: light has come into the world. (light, a metaphor for truth)
Light has come into the world but people loved darkness (a metaphor for falsehood, the lie) instead of the light.
And why do people love darkness more than the light? Why do people cling to their lies and reject the truth?
As my favorite line from Jurassic Park says, “Hold on to your butts!”
Because their deeds - the lives that they are living - are evil.
In other words, their lives are not lives of honesty, integrity, truth.
And because of this -
They will not come into the light for fear that their deeds - not their facts, not their information, THEIR DEEDS - will be exposed.
But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light so that it may be plainly seen that what they have done - what they have DONE - has been done in the sight of God.
Solzhenitsyn was right on, his words prophetic. Cowardice may be the defining mark of American culture in our day. Hiding behind alternative facts, data, statistics, and, dare I say, orthodox doctrine and statements of belief, while living lives in the darkness.
The multitude of scandals in the church today is evidence of this cowardly, insipid, hypocritical faith so prevalent in our day. Scandals that are - and should - rock the church, leading to mass rejection by the people we are called to live among as light.
Sadly, the followers of Jesus in this day who have the courage to live in the light are the very ones causing scandals among the popular, celebrated, overtly political, and worldly Christian celebrity leaders among us, just as Jesus scandalized the popular religious leaders in his day.
More on that next time.
In Christ,
Dan
“Solzhenitsyn’s Warning,” by Eliot A. Cohen can be found in a recent edition of The Atlantic.
Scriptures quoted may be found in John 3, 18, and Philippians 2.
The problem with truth is that it means there’s a right and a wrong. Untrue ideas, thoughts , behaviors, lifestyles l, ways of treating people. Americans especially never like to be wrong, to lose, to be told what they’re doing or saying is not “true”. Who are you to tell me I’m wrong? Truth from Scripture cuts like a double edge sword and we are all susceptible to it piercing our own selfish ideas and behaviors. Ouch