Third Truth Talk:

Being Genuine and Being True

First given June 20^th, 2004

We continue the series of talks I am giving on the subject of truth. This meeting will take up where my last one left off. In my last meeting we talked about the ways in which anti-thesis is undermined, and we saw that one of the ways this happens is when people accept the lie that truth doesn’t matter. You sometimes hear comments like, “It doesn’t matter what is actually true; it only matters what you believe.” Or “as long as you are genuine in what you believe, that’s what counts.”

To do justice to this topic we really need to subdivide it into two talks. The first talk, which I will be delivering this afternoon, will look at the question of being genuine and being true, while my next talk will look at some issues surrounding the importance of truth.

Being Genuine

The idea of being genuine, or sincere, in what you believe is something that you hear a lot about these days, almost as if genuineness is more important than the truth-content of one’s beliefs. Now before we are in a position to examine the Biblical teaching on this subject, we must define exactly what we mean by ‘genuine-ness.’

First of all, genuineness may refer to when a person really believes what they say they believe. This would be contrasted with, say, a politician who professes a certain position not because he actually believes it but because he wants to get more votes. So in this basic sense, being genuine means you are not lying when you say that you believe something. You really do believe it.

The Biblical position would affirm the need to be genuine, to profess beliefs one really holds. You do not have to look any further than God’s prohibition against lying to know the importance of personal honesty. Now, by definition, lying is not to do with true or false statements – it is to do with what the person uttering the statements believes. It is better to profess a falsehood that one sincerely believes than to profess a truth that one does not believe, because in the later case, the one professing the truth is actually lying.

But although it is straight-forward enough to say that one ought to be genuine or honest in this sense, the issue is complicated because of certain other assumptions and beliefs that are frequently attached to this imperative. A Christian needs to be fluent when it comes to identifying the hidden assumptions of secular thinking. There are many non-Christian ideas which, is isolation would be seen as totally illogical, but which can sneak into people’s thinking when conjoined with a truth. It is like a technique that politicians in America use to get certain articles of legislation passed. Sometimes when there is a disaster in America and congress needs to quickly pass a bill authorizing federal funding to help the disaster victims, someone will add a ‘rider’ onto the bill. The rider is another piece of legislation that is totally unrelated and would never get passed by itself but which can hide under the thing everyone agrees about. If someone stood up and opposed the bill because of the rider, then he could be brandished as being opposed to funding help for the disaster victims.

In the same way, often tenets of secular thinking enter people’s minds through the medium of an original truth that is Biblical. As Christians, we must constantly be disentangling the one from the other.

Being True to Yourself

So what are the ‘riders’ that have attached themselves to the true idea that we ought to be genuine or honest in our beliefs? There are actually quite a number. I have already mentioned one, namely the idea that it doesn’t matter whether one’s beliefs are true as long as one is being genuine. We’ll look at that in more detail later. But for the moment, consider another ‘rider.’ People take the truth that we ought to be honest and genuine, and then they attach to that all the other baggage that has come to be associated with ‘being true to yourself.’ Being ‘true to yourself,’ has come to encompass a lot more than merely personal honesty, but can now be elicited in defence of any action in which a person is accountable to one’s own desires. Even immorality can, and often is, defended under the banner of ‘being true to yourself.’ On the other hand, those who suppress the natural inclinations of their fallen nature, especially in sexual areas, are now often called hypocrites. As I remember one person saying, “We were in love, so it would have been hypocritical not to sleep together.”

In this way an entire framework of subjectively-based ethics has arisen – a framework in which the only wrong you can commit is a wrong against yourself, and the only standard one is accountable to is the standard of your own feelings. As a character in a film once said, “whatever you choose, that will be right for you.” When you are “being true to yourself” in this sense, you can hardly make a wrong choice, unless it is the wrong of not being true to what you wants or think. In this way the external standard of God’s laws are replaced by subjective parameters. One is reminded of the end of Judges when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25)

Such sinful thinking really has no logical connection with being genuine, yet under the rubric of ‘being true to oneself,’ it has slipped into many people’s minds as an unconscious consequence of genuine-ness.

Genuineness Not An End in Itself

Sometimes genuineness may be invoked as a reason not to enlighten an ignorant person of the truth. After all, one might think, why should you try to change a person’s mind if the person is being totally genuine in what they believe? To say that, however, is to imply that genuineness is an end in itself. In reality, however, genuineness is only valuable if it leads to the truth. Therefore, a person’s genuineness in believing falsehood is a reason to share the truth, not a reason to refrain from sharing it. Paul makes clear in his epistles that those who know the truth have a responsibility to share it with those who are ignorant or going astray.

When Genuineness is Not always a Good Thing

Another problem has arisen is that the importance of being genuine is often used in a way that masks over other important considerations about people. It is too simplistic to simply say, “So-and-so is genuine in what he believes,” as if that by itself removes any sense of moral wrong that might be attached to a false belief. When a person genuinely believes falsehood, the crucial question is how they got to the point of genuinely believing falsehood. And let me say that as soon as we ask this question we find that genuineness is not always a good thing. In the case of the person who lies to himself so much that he reaches a point whereby he genuinely believes it, genuineness is definitely a bad thing. The fool says in his heart “there is no God” because he wants to live life his own way, and he may reach a point where he genuinely believes his own lies. In that case, genuineness is the fruition of self-deceit and it can hardly be invoked as a good thing.

For this reason, I prefer to ask, not whether a person is being genuine, but whether they are being ‘true.’ In C. S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce, he illustrates a person who is totally genuine, but not true. The scene is the lower reaches of heaven where Dick and a visitor from hell are reflecting over their lives on earth.

“You went {to hell} because you are an apostate.”

“Are you serious, Dick?”

“Perfectly.”

“This is worse than I expected. Do you really think people are penalised for their honest opinions? Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that those opinions were mistaken.”

“Do you really think there are no sins of intellect?”

“There are indeed, Dick. There is hide-bound prejudice, and intellectual dishonesty, and timidity, and stagnation. But honest opinions fearlessly followed – they are not sins.”

“I know we used to talk that way. I did it too until the end of my life when I became what you call narrow. It all turns on what are honest opinions.”

“Mine certainly were. They were not only honest but heroic. I asserted them fearlessly. When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk.”

“What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came – popularity, sale for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric.”

“Dick, this is unworthy of you. What are you suggesting?”

“Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be rank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?… You know that you and I were playing with loaded dice. We didn’t want the other to be true. We were afraid of crude Salvationism, afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule, after (above all) of real spiritual fears and hopes.

“I’m far from denying that young men may make mistakes. They may well be influenced by current fashions of thought. But it’s not a question of how the opinions are formed. The point is that they were my honest opinions, sincerely expressed.”

“Of course. Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm. The beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do occur as psychological events in the man’s mind. If that’s what you mean by sincerity they are sincere, and so were ours. But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.”

So attention needs to be paid, not merely to the fact that a person has a sincere or genuine belief, but to the process whereby they have come to hold that belief. It is then that we often find that not everyone who genuinely believe a thing has been honest and truth-loving in the process of reaching that belief. During Jesus’ earthly ministry, He was a master of getting beneath the surface and finding out where a person was coming from – He didn’t just directly answer people’s questions, He revealed the hidden motives behind what people thought and asked. Even when people accepted His ministry because of the miracles and “many believed in His name when they saw the signs which He did…Jesus did not commit Himself to them, because He knew all men and…He knew what was in man.” (John 2:23-25) As it turns out, many of the very people who accepted Jesus’ ministry, who welcomed Him into Jerusalem with palm branches, were later among the crowds that yelled out ‘crucify Him!’ Human beings are fickle and turn with the tide – they have vested interests and are seldom guided purely by a desire for the truth.

This is a point that Paul brings out in his second letter to Timothy. Paul told about those who would depart from sound doctrine because of their own desires. “For the time will come,” he writes, “when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.” (2 Tim. 4:3-4) When a person’s desires lead them into believing fables rather than truth, it may be that at first the person knows deep down inside that what they are believing is false, yet they suppress that inclination like they suppress their conscience, because they don’t want to hear it. A situation like this occurs in Lewis’ book The Magician’s Nephew, where Uncle Andrew didn’t want to believe the Lion was singing. Lewis wrote that

he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing… And the longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.

When one considers how very quickly a self-deceived person reaches the point of genuinely believing their own lies, one is reminded of Isaiah 29, where we read about God’s punishment on Jerusalem for their many iniquities. Part of the punishment is that the people’s minds become blind to truth. Like Uncle Andrew, they become blind to the truth and are allowed to reach a point where they could not even see the truth if they wanted to.

Pause and wonder!

Blind yourselves and be blind!

They are drunk, but not with

wine;

They stagger, but not with

intoxicating drink.

For the Lord has poured out

on you

The spirit of deep sleep,

And has closed your eyes,

namely, the prophets;

And He has covered your

heads, namely, the seers. (Is. 29:9-10)

We find a similar message given in Isaiah 6:9-10:

And He said, “Go, and tell this people:

‘Keep on hearing, but do not

understand;

Keep on seeing, but do not

perceive.

Make the heart of this people

dull

And their ears heavy,

And shut their eyes;

Lest they see with their eyes,

And hear with their ears,

And understand with their

heart,

And return and be healed.

So we see that God does indeed blind people as a punishment against disobedience. God lets people reach the point where they call evil good and good evil (Is. 5:20) and genuinely believe it. One does not reach this point in a moral vacuum. It is through disobedience to God’s laws that an individual or a society become vulnerable to this kind of mental deception. As Paul says in Romans 1, those who disobeyed God’s natural laws and “did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind…” (Rom. 1:28) One is reminded of the case of Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord had to harden. As Talbott brings out in his book The Inescapable Love of God, sometimes the Lord knows that the only way a person will come to their senses is to be allowed to go far enough in the direction of falsehood.

This should suffice to show how the whole notion of genuineness is far from straight-forward and can mask over the real issues at stake. Uncle Andrew really did genuinely believe that Aslan song was nothing but roaring, but that false belief, genuine as it was, could hardly be considered innocent ignorance. It had arisen as a result of self-deceit. He was genuine but he was not true.

Ignorance

Now certainly not all false beliefs can fit into this kind of pattern. Scripture also brings out that many people believe falsehood as a result of mere ignorance – hence the emphasis in the New Testament about evangelism. People must be told the truth, for how will they hear without a preacher? Those who know the truth have a moral responsibility to enlighten those who are ignorant, and to do so in love. As Paul brings out in Hebrews 5:2, it is important to “have compassion on those who are ignorant and going astray…” Part of what it means to have compassion on the ignorant is to offer such people what they do not have, namely the knowledge of the truth.

There is not time to do a Bible study on the theme of ignorance, but suffice to say that God judges those who are ignorant with fairness and mercy, and all who truly love the truth will one day have the opportunity to embrace it, as Lewis brings out so poignantly at the end of The Last Battle.

Be Transformed

In describing these various conditions that may apply to people, it is important to keep in mind that rarely do people fit whole into any one category. False beliefs are often a mixture of ignorance and self-deceit. Even Christians who are truth-loving will be subject to self-deceit as well as ignorance. Given the Biblical descriptions of man’s fallen condition, I do not think any of us has any right to claim to have total intellectual integrity. Our Adamic nature is so pervasive that we can never be totally sure that our motives are a hundred percent pure, or that the process whereby we have reached our beliefs has been guided by nothing but a desire for truth. We can say we are genuine in so far as we are telling the truth when we say we believe a thing, but we should never claim to be totally innocent in the process whereby we reached our beliefs. We all have blind spots and will continue to have blind spots until the time we are changed. I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of the leaders of L’ABRI. He said that there were inconsistencies in Francis Schaeffer’s writings, but that didn’t really bother him because, he said, “everyone has inconsistencies. There are even inconsistencies in L’ABRI,” he said, “but we don’t know what they are or they wouldn’t be there.”

Not only do all of us have blind spots, but none of us love the truth as much as we should. It is when we are aware of these innate weaknesses and limitations that we realize how important it is to stay close to the Bible. Without constantly testing our thinking by the yardstick of scripture, Christians can easily slip into conformity with the mind of this world. Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” (Rom. 12:2) This process of having our minds transformation is something that should begin as soon as we meet the Lord, but will not be complete until we are changed. Even after we have been changed, our minds will continue to be transformed as we are changed from glory to glory.

I’d like to end with a quotation which, though not directly relevant to the topic of this afternoon’s meeting, nevertheless relates to the general issue of the Christian’s mind. The quote is taken from Harry Blamires’ book The Christian Mind:

…it is a feature of our culture generally that as we are rich in scholars so we are poor in thinkers. Occasionally, very occasionally, a man may be both a first-rate scholar and a first-rate thinker. But the nature of our modern educational system is such that this happy combination arises ever more rarely. Potential thinkers are being turned into mere scholars by the pressures of conformity so strong both in the educational world and in society at larger. The thinker challenges current prejudices. He disturbs the complacent. He obstructs the busy pragmatists. He questions the very foundations of all about him, and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives, and purposes which those who are running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate. The thinker is a nuisance.

…The scholar evades decisiveness; he hesitates to praise or condemn; he balances conclusion against competing conclusion so as to cancel out conclusiveness; he is tentative, sceptical, uncommitted. The thinker hates indecision and confusion; he firmly distinguishes right from wrong, good from evil; he is at home in a world of clearly demarcated categories and proved conclusions; he is dogmatic and committed; he works towards decisive action.

Return to Robin Phillips HOMEPAGE

You are invited to join my mailing list!

As a member of my mailing list, you will receive automatic notification about additional material and features on this site, as well as occasional newsletters. To join, send a blank email to

largerhope @ tiscali.co.uk

with “Join” in the subject heading. To unjoin, send a blank email with “Unjoin” in the subject heading.

(Note: for anti-spam purposes, the above email address has had spaced inserted before and after the @ sign. The address will only work after deleting these spaces.)