Category Archives: Truth

The First Casualty of War

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Truth often eludes even those who seek diligently it. But we live in a society that no longer seeks truth, that can think of no reason to seek it, and that mocks those rare individuals who do seek it. What do people value more than truth? What is truth’s replacement? The opposite of truth is falsehood, but people don’t love falsehood—at least not directly. Perhaps, some people wish something to be true so much that they deceive themselves or allow themselves to be deceived to enjoy the illusion for a time. But no one likes to be deceived against their will, because being deceived puts you at a disadvantage. It takes away power and freedom from you and gives them to the deceiver. I conclude that people love not falsehood but power, power over themselves and others. And of course power is useful in retaining the goods one has and in acquiring the goods one wants.

The first casualty in war is truth. In a state of all-out war, power is everything, and truth and falsehood are useful only as means to gain power and defeat the enemy. But not all wars are “all-out” contests where any and every means is used to win and winning means the total domination of the enemy. War is any encounter where gaining power over another person is the chief end. Many sectors of contemporary society have become in effect battlefields where different factions seek power over others. And words and pictures are the weapons of choice. The words and pictures are chosen, not because they are true but because they are effective in disempowering the enemy and gaining power for the speaker. Love for truth plays no part. Desire for power is everything.

Prominent among these sectors are politics, education, the press, jurisprudence, social media, and religion. To be more precise and use a postmodern slogan, “Politics is everything.” The power struggles of the political sphere have invaded these other sectors and the political end of domination has replaced the original ends of these other activities. In the minds of its originators this expression (“Politics is everything.”) meant that every encounter, even superficially innocent ones, is really about the power one person or group attempts to gain over another. All truth claims are really masks for power moves. What seems to be different today, as opposed to the 1980s when the slogan “Politics is everything” came into vogue, is that no one tries very hard to mask their desire for power and their disdain for truth. They know “their side” is lying, but they love what they hear anyway. Whether the “other side” lies or tells the truth, they hate what is said because it tends to empower the enemy.

Clearly, God is the missing factor in these war games. Anyone who loves God will love truth. If you don’t love truth, you can’t love God. If you don’t seek truth, you can’t really be seeking God. God is the origin of truth, because God is the origin of everything real. And truth concerns reality. Jesus explained to Pilate that “the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” But Pilate replied, “What is truth?” (John 18:37-38). “What is truth?” is the cynical question asked by everyone for whom power is the chief value and winning is the exclusive goal. Later on in Jesus’ trial, the governor explained that he had power to have Jesus executed or released. But Jesus replied “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above” (John 19:10-11). To all appearances in the moment Jesus, the lover of truth, lost and Pilate, the lover of power, won. But appearance is not the same as reality and the voice of power is never the word of truth.

We live in a society that sees the world through Pilate’s eyes. It doesn’t love the truth. It loves the appearance of winning for the momentary thrill of victory. In the end, however, truth wins and reality stands, because in the end God wins. But do we have the courage to wait until the end?

Authentic Living in a World of Imitation Games and Fictional Lives?

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Are you living your own life, or is it being lived for you by some other force? From where did you get the script for your life? Do you know who cast you in the role you are playing? Are the passions and thoughts and goals that drive you through life based on reality, or are they elements of fictional story-world? Most people never ask such questions. They just live as they are told to live. They seek what others seek, love and fear what others love and fear. They worry about what concerns others. Most of us are simply personifications of the values, loves, and dreams of the society in which we live. We are the hosts within which live society’s demons. There is nothing inside. There is no substance to us. Take away our masks, costumes, and memorized lines, and nothing remains. And this is not my pessimism speaking; it’s the clear-eyed teaching of Jesus and his apostles.

In the parable of the sower (Mark 4:1-20), Jesus warned his disciples that their mission to preach the good news would not meet with complete success. He speaks of four different reactions they will receive. The third one strikes me as highly relevant to our situation:

18 Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; 19 but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.

The seed of God’s word can impart truth and authentic life. As it enlightens and enlivens us we become “fruitful,” that is to say, we begin to live the life we were meant to live and become what we were meant to be. But if we focus on “this life” we will grow anxious about what might harm us. We are deceived into a false sense of security by wealth. We are driven by our animal passions to seek immediate pleasure and by our human passions toward envy, jealously, anger, and hatred. With our minds full of other things, we can’t think about the life that exists in God.

And of course we must listen to John when he urges us:

15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. 16 For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.

“Love” in this text does not mean “unselfish self-giving to another.” It means desire for something as if it were the source of life and joy. When we seek our true lives in the world, we lose them completely. The world is driven by the irrational desire for pleasure, unbridled curiosity, and overweening pride, which is a feeling of self-generated, comparative worth based on falsehood.

Let’s now ask an even deeper question: What would it mean to live your own life? Where does one find the script for the real world? How do we get out of the fictional story-world into light of reality?

Popular culture recognizes to some degree the problem I’ve been describing. Its solution sounds simple: write your own script, cast yourself in the role of your choice, in defiance, live your own life! The problem with this advice is that it is but one more subtle and deceptive way the world’s demons colonize our minds. From where do you get the storyline for your script, and on what basis do you choose your role? How can you live you own life, if you don’t know in what your own life consists? The “do your own thing” approach to life always ends up living according to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” These things may feel like our true selves because they move us from within and are always with us, but this too is a deception. And when we live according to these feelings we are doing what everyone else is doing! The differences are superficial.

But Jesus said,

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life (John 14:6).

If you want to live your own life and not be colonized by the world and driven by irrational passions toward death and unhappiness, you must live according to truth. Authentic living is not about merely existing as a thing or in our automatic animal processes. It’s about acting to achieve goals, about becoming in actuality what we are potentially, and about embracing and enjoying good things. It’s about freedom. But apart from the truth about what goals are worth achieving, what we are meant to become, and what things are truly good, we cannot truly live. Apart from truth, freedom is an illusion.

Jesus is the truth, the truth about God and the truth about human life. We usually think of truth as a quality of an assertion; it is the perfect fit between how the assertion describes reality and reality itself. Jesus is the truth because he is the reality of God manifested in the reality of a human life. He is the truth not merely in the words of an assertion but in the reality of a life, and for that reason he is also the way to the Father.

If you want to live your own life, stop imitating others and give up attempting to write your own life script. Follow in the way of Jesus, let yourself be guided by the truth who is Jesus, and you will find yourself living your own life. Only the God the Creator knows the goal of human life, only God knows the way life must be lived, and only God can give us a life that is truly ours. And only in Jesus can we begin to live that life as our own free act.