Fourth Truth Talk:

Does Truth Matter?

The talk I am giving today really should have been the first talk in my series about truth. That is because today I am going to directly consider something that has been an axiom behind all my earlier talks. I am referring to the importance of truth.

At first it may seem that the importance of truth is so self-evident that there is little I can say on this topic. While the importance of truth should be obvious, sadly in today’s world it is not. Even amongst the Christian community, truth is not as central as it should be. I’d like to illustrate this with some anecdotes.

First, I am reminded of some conversations I had with a friend in America – a man whom I initially assumed was a Christian. It is hardly surprising that I assumed he was a Christian, given that he claimed to be a Christian and went to church.

In the course of our conversations, however, it emerged that my friend had a very different idea of Christianity to that of the historic tradition. To be a ‘Christian’ for him meant that he accepted the existence of God as a ‘significant unknown’ that is ‘out there’, while rejecting the Biblical doctrine of God which he considered to be self-contradictory. It also meant that he embraced Christ’s teaching about loving each other while rejecting the more difficult claims about salvation through His blood. I learned, further, that when this man had his, so called, ‘conversion experience’ and ‘became a Christian,’ this symbolized his commitment to the fact that there is something more than himself out there and that his life is part of a larger ‘spiritual’ context. Therefore, his Christianity didn’t stand or fall on whether an historic resurrection occurred, or whether Jesus was really the Son of God; rather, his so called ‘Christianity’ was based on something he considered far more important. Take away the literal truth of such things as the existence of God, the resurrection of Christ, the authority of the Bible, and you still have the ‘spiritual’ truth that our belief in these things pointed towards.

My friend was quite happy to go to church, to mix and mingle with evangelicals and to hold conversations about the central tenets of Christianity. Few people knew that when he used certain Biblical terms and phrases, what he meant was radically different to what the person he was talking to meant. It was only if you stopped and made him explain what he meant by certain key terms that the dichotomy between himself and the other Christians emerged. But few people bothered to do this and just assumed that when he used certain terms he meant the same thing as all the other Christians.

The reason I mention this is because of something my friend said after I began to realize that he didn’t hold to the central tenets of Christianity. I asked a natural question: “Well then,” I said, “if you really think that historic Christianity has been barking up the wrong tree all this time, why aren’t you out there trying to convince all the Christians that they’ve been believing a lie?”

I’ll never forget the man’s answer. “Because,” he said, “of what I call the ‘pleasant pseudo effect.’” What the ‘pleasant pseudo effect’ basically meant, if my memory serves me correct, was that if people are happy and content with what they believe, if it gives their life meaning and purpose, then the right thing to do is to leave them in that condition, even if their beliefs are not literally true.

Before making any comment, I’d like to share another anecdote, this time from a conversation I had whilst living in England and working at a nursery. There was an occasion where I was trying to share my faith with an elderly man for whom I worked. In the course of our conversation this man began to tell me the various reasons why he thought Christianity wasn’t true. But then he stopped himself and said, “You know, it doesn’t really matter. If your faith gives you something to believe in, if it gives your life purpose and meaning, who am I to say that is a bad thing?” Like the friend in America, this man seemed to think happiness was more important than truth.

My employer continued, telling about a conversation he had had with another Christian. “As I was arguing against her faith,” he said, “she stopped me and said, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, because my faith is a great solace to me. Why should you want to undermine something that gives motivation and meaning to my life?’ You know,” the man reflected, “I think that lady had a point. Why should I try to knock down something that is a harmless source of happiness to her?”

In vain I tried to expostulate that as far as I was concerned, I didn’t believe in Christianity simply because I needed something to believe in like that. “Yes,” I said, “it does give my life purpose and hope, but that’s not why I believe it. The only reason to believe in Christianity is because it’s true. And if it isn’t true, then people should try to knock it down no matter how much happiness might be derived from it.”

“Look at it this way,” I continued. “Suppose I believed I was a purple elephant or the King of England or something like that; and suppose further that this false belief gave me enormous purpose and happiness. Wouldn’t you be doing me a kindness to enlighten me about my error, regardless of whatever solace I might gain from my illusions?”

“Well,” my employer replied, “that’s totally different.” He didn’t explain why it was different and, like most of our conversations, it ended with him suddenly remembering something he needed to attend to. If that conversation had happened today, I would have quoted the following words of C. S. Lewis:

If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.

As usual, C. S. Lewis has a way of hitting the nail on the head.

The problem is that today people don’t think in terms of truth nearly enough. As I talk to people about their beliefs and views, I find that so often the reasons people do or do not believe something has nothing to do with truth at all. As Peter Kreeft writes,

Seldom do you hear the naïve question, “But is it true?” Ideas are accepted because they are relevant, dynamic, viable, radical, traditional, non-traditional, useful, comforting, challenging, or for a hundred other reasons or rejected because they are abstract, unfashionable, unworkable, irrelevant, upsetting, traditional, non-traditional and the like. Our civilization seems to echo Pilate’s indifference: “Truth? What’s that?”

Next time you read the newspaper, watch commercials or listen to political discourse, think back to this quotation and see how many times ideas are criticized or appealed to for reasons other than their truth-content.

I’m not going to talk about post-modernism today, except to say that if the philosophy of post-modernism could be reduced to one single thing, it would be the denial of objective truth. The denial of objective truth is high on the devil’s agenda, since God is source of absolute truth. Without God, there would be no absolutes, no objective truth. Therefore, to deny objective truth is, by implication, to deny God. Similarly, to deny the importance of objective truth is to deny the importance of God.

A minute ago I mentioned about the conversation at the place I used to work. It so happened that there was a Christian lady who also worked at this same place. One day I was working in the greenhouse with this Christian lady and the wife of the man to whom I had earlier spoken. The subject of truth came up again, and I naturally expected that the Christian lady would join me in defending the importance of truth, especially as regards the Christian faith. You can imagine my surprise when this, so called, ‘Christian’ lady, joined with the non-Christian in asserting that truth didn’t really matter! “I go and buy lottery tickets,” she said, “because I like to believe that some day I might win. I probably won’t, but it gives me something to put my hope in. In the same way, my religion is a great source of hope in my life. I like to think that there is something better out there and when I die I will go to heaven.”

I was aghast and didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have to think of something to say because the non-Christian lady quickly contributed. “I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “For you it’s your Christianity that gives your life purpose; for me it’s my plants. I love walking around and looking at my plants. We all need something like that, you know, something to live for, something to give a bigger meaning to our lives.”

Again I countered this view by reasserting the centrality of truth, only to find the conversation changing into a moral issue. Apparently, for me to believe in absolute truth meant I was being intolerant of what other people had chosen for their lives. I was trying to ‘force’ my religion onto them and all that sort of thing. It reminds me of something I once heard Josh McDowell say. He told how in the past when you presenting Christianity to people, they would say things like, ‘Prove it.’ But now they say things like, “Who are you to try to force your beliefs on me?” Or “How dare you be so intolerant of differing beliefs?” As David Wells puts the matter,

Critics of Christian faith used to set themselves in opposition to it on the grounds that this or that tenet was unbelievable. Today, postmodern critics oppose Christianity not because of its particulars, but simply because it claims to be true. (Losing Our Virtue, p. 19)

This brings to light one of the main problems that exists today in the sharing of the gospel. The evangelist is thinking in terms of truth, but he is not always addressing an audience that shares that foundation. When people explain the reasons they are not Christians, although sometimes they will say something to do with not thinking that Christianity is true, more often we find subjective reasons like the following: “God has never done anything for me,” or “All the Christians I’ve known have been hypocrites,” or “If you follow the Bible then you’re not being true to your own conscience,” or “I’ve just never felt I needed something like that to give my life meaning,” or “You don’t have to be a Christian in order to be a nice person,” or “religion is the cause of war and division,” or any number of reasons that avoid the central Christian of whether Christianity is true. When people say these sorts of things, it is tempting to respond directly to these challenges. While this may sometimes be necessary to clear away obstacles, it is usually better to show that the whole point is being missed, and that is the question of truth.

This is a point that C. S. Lewis emphasized, because of what he found in his own work as an evangelistic. “One of the great difficulties”, Lewis wrote,

is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue ‘True – or False’… You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point…. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. (God in Dock, p. 368)

I said a minute ago that the evangelist will be thinking in terms of truth. In actually, however, there are many Christians who do in fact try to reach unbelievers not on the grounds of Christianity being absolute truth, but on the grounds that Christianity is good or attractive. Hence, so much evangelism is done with the aim of making Christianity more appealing.

My friends, is Christianity attractive when you are being burnt at the stake for refusing to deny Jesus? Perhaps a good dose of persecution would do the church some good, for it would make a lot of people think twice about why they are Christians in the first place. As I wrote in my recent Wake up Call to the Church, so many times people are persuaded to accept Christianity like accepting a pill: they are told that Christianity will give their life meaning, purpose and happiness. Now when a person accepts Christianity for purely pragmatic reasons, what happens when the going gets rough? What happens when they are asked to take up their cross and follow Jesus? Of course, they want to bail out, and you can hardly blame them. They haven’t understood lesson one about what the Christian faith is all about.

Now Christianity does give a person’s life meaning and purpose, but not the kind of subjective meaning and purpose that people look for today. Because Christianity is true, it gives objective meaning to the world, to man and man’s dilemma. Because Jesus is the Truth, to believe in Him gives a unified field of meaning to the whole of reality. It is a meaning that exists independent of how it affects the subjective conditions of our personal lives. Likewise, Christianity does give us a sense of purpose, but here again, the purpose is very different to the lady who lives in hope that her lottery number will win. Rather, the purpose Christianity gives to life is the purpose Jesus had as He willingly let Himself be nailed to the cross. It is the purpose of knowing there is a joy set before us, that when we die or are resurrected we will meet our Lord. But “if,” as Paul says, “in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.” (1 Cor. 15:19) Because our hope is anchored in the age to come, Paul knew that it makes no sense to talk about our faith as something we need for our own sakes to give meaning to our life in this present age. The only reason Christianity gives meaning to life in the present age at all is because it tells us that there is something more than life in this present age. It matters infinitely whether that ‘something more’ is true or false. If it is false, then it is a worthless lie no matter how many people it makes happy. If it is false, then the appropriate philosophy, according to Paul, is “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!” (1 Cor. 15:29-34) What a contrast to Bultmann’s oft’ quoted words that Easter faith should remain just as firm even if Christ’s bones were discovered tomorrow in a tomb in Palestine!

You’ve all seen the fascinating film called The Body in which a Jewish archaeologist discovers a tomb and skeleton which seem, for all intensive purposes, to be the body of Jesus. It looks as if she has it in her power to categorically disprove the resurrection and hence to destroy the entire Christian religion. It is interesting to see how the various characters in the film respond to this problem, especially the Christian characters. Though the Jewish archaeologist is not a Christian, she is conscious of the fact that if she goes public with her discovery, it will dash to pieces the hope of millions of Christians? What is more important: the happiness of millions of Christian or the truth? As it turned out, the body was not that of Christ, but the fundamental question remains valid: what is more important, happiness or truth? “Suppose,” writes Kreeft again,

the truth would make you unhappy and believing a lie would make you happy (or you think it would), is it so bad to believe the lie? Yes. Truth is prior to happiness because a happiness without truth is not true happiness. George MacDonald says, “I would not favor a fiction to keep a whole world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep any man out of is doubtless the very best place for him to go. It is truth…that saves the world.”

It is truth that saves the world because Jesus is the Truth.

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