By George “Chip” Hammond
Truth has always been hard to discern. When Pilate asked Jesus if he was a king, Jesus told him, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Pilate pressed him, “So you are a king.” To Pilate’s frustration, Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. I was born and came into the world for this, in order that I may bear witness of the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to me” (John 18:37). Pilate retorted cynically, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).
What is truth? It’s always been hard to discern. It’s harder today with the (dis)information superhighway (the internet). Decades ago, journalists left behind their journalistic integrity, opening them to the charge of “fake news,” a term first used by President Barack Obama and capitalized on by President Donald Trump. The charge of “fake news,” of course, can be made even when the news is not fake so as to dodge the truth and twist the narrative in one’s own favor. Who can discern what is real, what is true? The criterion most people use to test truth is whether they want something to be true.
By the time Jesus stood before him, Pilate had been governor of Judea for eight years, and in that time Pilate had grown scornful. He saw the Judean elite (the Sadducees) and the Judean intelligentsia (the Pharisees) appeal over and over again to “religion” and “principle” and “truth” only to serve their own selfish agendas. Some of them were so deluded that they believed that, miraculously, “the truth of God” somehow always served their personal interests. Imagine that! No wonder Pilate was cynical about appeals to truth.
In the age of disinformation campaigns waged by both liberal and conservative sources, and internet operatives of foreign aggressors promoting faux liberal and conservative narratives in order to sow division, our own fantasy worlds are underscored by the “news” we choose, and the sites which reinforce our pre-conclusions and to which sophisticated algorithms direct us for profit. How can we possibly hope to know the truth of anything?
While it is unlikely that any of us can always avoid being duped, the answer is found in being those who are “of the truth,” which is bound up with being a part of Jesus’ kingdom. His is a kingdom not of this world, which means it will never fit in comfortably with any earthly nation, organization, economic philosophy, or political party. Jesus told us to make his kingdom our goal and highest priority and all else would be added to us (Matthew 6:33). C.S. Lewis put it this way: “Aim at heaven and you’ll get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you’ll get neither heaven nor earth.”
The Sadducees and Pharisees believed that if they aimed at earth and pressed God into serving their agenda, they could have heaven and earth, or perhaps heaven on earth. At least since the twentieth century, many American Evangelicals have thought the same.
For years, our church received and inserted “voter guides” into the church bulletin at election time. These were from a Christian organization and were (technically) non-partisan; they reported in summary where the candidates stood on issues that were important to Christians. It was always evident that the Republican candidate stood on the side that Christians would mostly approve.
Then one year a man was running for local office as a Republican. I knew someone who worked for his campaign. I got to know the candidate quite well and learned that he was pro-choice. He was firmly convinced that a woman had a right to choose whether or not to terminate the life of her unborn child.
When the local voter guides came out that year, the abortion question (which had always been question number one) was missing. Puzzled by the omission, I called the organization and asked why. At first I was told that they didn’t always have the same issues listed, but I told them I had received their guide for ten years prior and they had always been the same. After pressing them hard, they admitted to me that they knew the Republican candidate was pro-choice and thought that publishing that fact in church voter guides would hurt his chances of getting elected. What is truth?
Also, since (at least) the twentieth century, American Evangelicals have been gullibly susceptible to conspiracy theories. I can still remember the furor and fear surrounding the approach of “Y2K.” When midnight of January 1, 2000 came, all computers were supposed to stop working. Planes would fall from the sky. Cars, gas pumps and cash registers would cease to function, as would all production. We would be thrown back into a pre-industrialized age, a Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic world. It is embarrassing that most of this was driven by Christian radio stations, speakers, and authors, who coincidentally had products to sell to help people prepare for it. Sadly, many (most?) of those taken in by this conspiracy theory occupied pews in Evangelical churches on Sunday mornings.
A software engineer in our church who was in charge of his company’s Y2K compliance program discovered from his work that Y2K was going to be a giant non-event. When he told certain people this, he was accused of being a part of the conspiracy. What is truth?
When Y2K turned out to be a giant nothing, were those who had promoted it, dividing churches and sometimes families over the issue, properly repentant? Not most of them. Most of them continued to follow the very same people who duped them in the first place, going on to the next conspiracy theory as though nothing had happened. What is truth?
While we’ll probably never avoid having at least some of the people fooled some of the time, we can strive to be people “of the truth” by doing exactly what Jesus told us to do: make his kingdom our priority, which demands of us something radical: that we have no loyalty to anything else by comparison – no nation, no political party or organization, and no fealty to any political personage.
This is indeed radical. In fact, you’ll find no one in the world doing this but the followers of Christ. But the reason for the necessity of such a radical realignment is apparent if you think about it. Jesus is not merely a truth teller, not merely the witness to the truth. He is the Truth (John 14:6) with a capital “T.” All truth, as Augustine said, is God’s truth, and all truth flows from him. When people are committed to something or someone other than Jesus, truth becomes a means to an end. I began to realize this about a dozen years ago in reflecting what loyalty meant with regard to my own associations.
At the risk of offending you, let me tell you that I am a member of the NRA. This would surprise people who knew me thirty plus years ago, as I was then an advocate for “reasonable gun control.” But someone challenged me in my assumptions about the effectiveness of gun control, and I began to study the subject (in the days when you actually had to go to a library and read published works). I apologize in advance if it troubles you for me to tell you that the data shows that guns in the hands of private citizens save many more lives than they cost. It is also true that in the twentieth century untold millions of people around the world were exterminated after they were disarmed by their governments. As one woman put it after she had studied the issue, “The question is, do you for now and forever in the future trust those leaders and enforcers of government at every level to safeguard your life, liberty, and property? If the answer is no, the gun control debate is over.”
I tell you this, not to make a pro-gun argument, but rather to illustrate something about loyalties and truth. The truth I discovered persuaded me of something I did not want to believe, and I was compelled to change. This truth did not come from the NRA, but the NRA publishes, promotes, and uses it.
But the question that brought me to a radical reorientation a dozen years ago was this: Is the NRA so committed to the truth that if ever the truth leads to a conclusion other than that which supports their agenda, will they publish and promote the truth? Of course, the answer to that question is “no.” They are not committed to truth, they are committed to the agenda of preserving gun ownership. By saying this I am not “dinging” the NRA. It is simply to point out that when any person or organization is committed to an earthly loyalty, be that loyalty to a nation, a political party, an economic theory, or a social agenda, by necessity truth becomes important only in as far as it serves the cause.
This is why while I’m a member of the NRA, I am loyal to the organization only in as far as it serves the truth, knowing that it will only serve the truth as far as it useful for it to do so. At the point it ever sacrifices truth for its agenda (which by definition it must if the truth ever conflicts with its agenda) it will also sacrifice my loyalty. While I may still agree with the organization’s aims in principle, I cannot sacrifice truth on its altar. Jesus said we must “hate” even father and mother if we are to be his disciples (Luke 14:26). I thus can have no loyalty to an earthly organization, or to any political party, economic theory, or social agenda for that matter. My highest loyalty is to truth because my highest loyalty is to Jesus.
As long as one’s loyalty is to the proposition “Republicans must be kept in office at all costs,” truth will be the cost when it doesn’t serve Republicans, as was the case with that voter’s guide (“Democrats” could easily be substituted in the sentence above). As long as capitalism (or socialism) must be promoted and maintained at all costs, or gun ownership (or gun control) must be promoted and maintained at all costs, or anything must be promoted and maintained at all costs, eventually the cost will be the truth.
Being committed to Christ means being committed to truth. You should be suspicious of your real commitments if somehow “faith in God” always seems to baptize and confirm what you want to believe and achieve. If you are committed to truth, then you are committed to correction and rebuke (see the book of Proverbs). It should be a frequent experience that the truth challenges and confronts your natural desires rather than confirms them (if we actually believe what the Bible says of our natural desires. I think most Evangelicals believe what the Bible says about other people’s natural desires, but they’re not so sure of the Bible’s accuracy when it comes to assessing their own desires).
The world largely does not care about truth. This is not to say that there is no truth to be found there. If you take the time to read and understand the actual research surrounding the physical sciences, or the actual court cases surrounding legal issues, or the actual primary sources about historical issues, the methods used to arrive at conclusions are observable, repeatable, and open to publish inspection. But the systems and organizations, governments and parties of the world have agendas. They have goals they want to accomplish. Truth is not the goal. The goal is the goal. Truth is important only to the degree that it is useful to their agendas and goals.
It should be different in the church. And we should not make the mistake (as my old friend Mike Bauman used to say) of thinking that “a negative of Satan is a picture of Jesus.” It’s not quite as simple as looking at what godless people, or earthly governments and institutions do, and doing the opposite.
“Because of you, God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles” is the invisible sign over the door of many Evangelical churches in America today because they are committed to something other than, or in addition to Jesus. As long as they are, truth will be the casualty when it doesn’t serve the agenda.
What is truth? Do you care?
