Sermon Central
Truth Matters Because the Heart of What We Believe is at Stake
The path of postmodern Christianity bears some chilling resemblances not only to early Church heresies (such as Montanism), but to the theological liberalism of the last century, which led some Protestants to abandon the basic propositions of Christian doctrine. A late defender of theological liberalism, Deane William Ferm, writes,
What are the motifs of liberal Protestantism? Perhaps the most important one is the priority of firsthand personal experience as the authority for one’s religious beliefs. All doctrines must be extracted from “the inward experience of Christian people.”In the last line, Ferm is quoting famed German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, nineteenth-century progenitor of twentieth-century Protestant liberalism.1 Doesn’t that sound hauntingly like the arguments we hear today?
The great conservative leader, Princeton professor J. Gresham Machen, resisted this trend heroically early in the last century, arguing that when doctrine and truth are abandoned, you don’t get liberal Christianity, you get another religion altogether, which he called liberalism. We saw how this led to the decline of mainline churches in the last century, and conservative churches are at risk of the same thing today.
Without Truth, the Gospel is Perverted
Weakening our commitment to the truth allows us to undermine the Gospel without arousing even a protest. When Katherine Jefferts Schori became presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of the U.S., Time asked her for her prayer for the Church. She answered, “That we remember the centrality of our mission is to love each other. That means caring for our neighbor. That does not mean bickering about fine points of doctrine.”2 But as we have seen, right doctrine leads to the love of neighbor Schori would like to see practiced. And without first loving God, the first commandment she ignored, we can’t love our neighbor with the consistency and stamina this world demands. (Bishop Schori’s answer reveals that the current fracturing of the Episcopal Church is not primarily over gays being ordained, but over the authority of Scripture.)
The mission of the Church is perverted as well. When truth is abandoned, therapy takes its place. We learn how to cope with our problems instead of curing them.
Rejection of Truth Results in Biblical Illiteracy
Abandonment of the truth shows up in widespread biblical illiteracy. Pollster George Barna has discovered that most churchgoing adults reject the accuracy of the Bible, the existence of Satan, and the sinlessness of Jesus. Many see no need to evangelize and believe that good works are one of the keys to persuading God to forgive their sins. It would be humorous if it were not so tragic that the most widely known Bible verse among adult and teen believers is “God helps those who help themselves,” which is not in the Bible—it’s actually a quote from Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac (1757). When given thirteen basic teachings from the Bible, only one percent of adult believers agreed with or accepted all thirteen. I encountered the same thing in my personal survey. This is why Barna describes this as “an age of spiritual anarchy . . . [while the] Church is rotting from the inside out, crippled by abiblical theology.”3
Rejection of Truth Leads to Ethical Confusion
Denial of the truth of God’s revelation undermines any attempt to deal with contemporary ethical questions, particularly in regard to sexuality, which plays a major role in all of our lives. It’s often the place where we want to make up our own rules.
At a prayer breakfast in the Midwest some years ago, I met a doctor active in a good Bible study and a strong evangelical church. The subject of homosexuality came up, and he told me that as a doctor he believed homosexuals have a natural instinct and desire that needs to be satisfied, so how can we as Christians deny them the same pleasures heterosexuals have?
It’s an argument I’ve heard many times—one that evokes some sympathy; no one wants to denounce anyone’s desire for sexual pleasure. Christians who do are viewed as being bigoted. But I pointed out to my new friend that homosexuality is contrary to God’s design, the natural order, and the truth about God’s creation, as he could read in Romans 1.
It is important to understand the context in which Paul wrote in order to grasp how we understand moral truth. In the first part of Romans 1 he tells us that God’s eternal power and divine nature are plainly seen from His creation. So “men are without an excuse”; though they knew God “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:20-21). Paul then uses homosexuality as a prime example of the consequences of denying the obvious: “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity . . . their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones . . . [and] the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another” (Romans 1:24-27).
Now why did Paul single out homosexual behavior? Because he thought it was the most obvious example of defying the self-evident created order. On Larry King one night, Rick Warren answered the question plainly: Stand a naked man and a naked woman together, he told Larry, and you can see how God has designed us. (King was, for once, speechless.)
There is a self-evident connection between God’s created physical order and the corresponding moral order that enables our behavior to “fit” the physical. I have found whenever I’ve explained this it takes much of the sting out of what appears to be God’s “puritanical” desire that people have no fun and explains why Paul used this one particular sin (which is no more grievous than heterosexual sin) as the most obvious example of defying the creation.
It also answers the charge, which many younger people raise, that Christians are homophobic to the extent we all must repent. But the charge is wrong, I believe. I’ve worked lovingly with hundreds of prisoners stricken with AIDS and have witnessed many Christians doing the same. Catholic Charities, after all, runs most of the AIDS facilities in America.
The Rejection of Truth Undermines Cultural Development
From the time of the Church’s emergence during the Roman Empire, the Christian faith, and the reason that relied on it, built the greatest society in human history. During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, however, nonbelieving philosophers and scientists argued that since God wasn’t necessary for explaining creation, He wasn’t necessary to explain the moral order either. Reason alone would govern.
The problem was that reason without revelation lacked authority, which leads to chaos and tyranny.
The history of the twentieth century, particularly World War I, World War II, and the Holocaust, were horrifying testaments to this. German philosophy had culminated in the fascism that nearly destroyed civilization.4 Another godless philosophical newcomer, communism, was already ravaging the world and would continue to do so.
But in the aftermath of World War II, Western intellectuals did not renounce the formative influences of fascism and communism and return to the authority of faith. Instead, they despaired of any true understanding of the world—of both faith and reason, ushering in the postmodern era.
We see the effect of this everywhere in the West. Without a basis for morality, no moral consensus can be reached, which is why we are in an ongoing and increasingly strident culture war. Human rights and the law, once seen as God-given, now lack their former authority. Instead of being based on “Nature and Nature’s God,” as our founders wrote—“rights” are determined subjectively. If Dawkins is right that there is no good or evil, we shouldn’t have tried the Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg. And the culturally powerful can do what they like with us, from euthanasia and cloning to engineering babies. Ethics become utilitarian—that is, we do what produces the maximum happiness rather than what is objectively right. This is why liberal churchmen were in the vanguard of the eugenics movement before World War II, which led to Hitler’s gruesome medical experiments.5
These circumstances jeopardize the very existence of Western democracies. If people are not guided by conscience and self-restraint, government inevitably becomes increasingly coercive to stave off chaos. That’s why our laws are proliferating as never before. This is even more obvious in Western Europe, where laws have been elaborated to an almost unimaginable extent to protect people’s rights. Yet overwrought legalism cannot be sustained. It leads to repression and then tyranny. It all comes back to the lack of a basis of authority in the truth.
Rejecting Truth Leads to False Gods
When the God of the Bible is rejected, people choose a new god. The postmodern age has anointed secular tolerance as its god. Tolerance once meant listening respectfully to all points of view, freely discussed in our common search for the truth. But the creed for the new god of tolerance is that knowing truth is impossible. So everyone is free to think and act as he likes, with one exception: those who have the audacity to believe that they know the truth, particularly if they think God has revealed it to them, are not tolerated. The result is that those who crowned the new god of tolerance have become the absolute arbiters of culture. The new god of tolerance becomes, in the guise of liberalism, an absolute tyrant.
Public endorsements of secular tolerance have now become a new public ritual. I watched a debate in the 2006 elections in which a supposedly conservative candidate for governor said he was pro-life. But he quickly assured the questioner that he would not seek any changes in the law. He would not want to “impose his personal views on others,” he explained. That’s the logical equivalent of saying, “I believe it is wrong to molest a child, but I’m not going to try to prevent anyone from doing so.” Why would you want to be governor if you could not seek, through the proper legal means, to prevent moral injustice? In a commentary not only on the politician but on the people, he was handily elected, having succeeded in offending no one at the expense of abandoning his professed convictions.
The only thing the god of tolerance hates more than Christians making truth-claims is Christians proving them. Beginning with a facility in Houston, Prison Fellowship now runs residential programs, “spiritual boot camps,” within prisons in locations scattered across the country. This is called the InnerChange Freedom Initiative—or IFI. We have, since the beginning, contended that these demonstrate the truth of the Gospel in transforming lives. In 2003, the first peer-reviewed academic studies validated our claims. University of Pennsylvania researchers reported that IFI graduates had an 8 percent re-incarceration rate versus 20 percent in a comparable control group (and 67 percent nationally). Prison officials were astounded.
It was the first empirical evidence that this faith-based approach to corrections works—in other words, that the Gospel is true. And that’s when Barry Lynn of the Americans United for Separation of Church and State decided to sue.6 To prove our truth-claims proved an outrage that tolerance could not abide.
If Christianity is Not the Truth, it is
Why does truth matter so much? Because the Church simply can’t be the Church without being on the side of truth. Jesus came as the champion of the truth and of those on the side of the truth. Without understanding this, the Church cannot even present the Gospel. Without truth, it resorts to therapy and has patients, not disciples.
Much of Christianity’s retreat from the truth or tempering of our witness in the West has been motivated by good intentions—not to offend or be judgmental, the desire to feel more personally connected to God and to make Christianity more relevant and culturally acceptable.
The history of Christianity, including the faith’s surge in the Third World today, shows the reverse to be the case. While we always want to be sensitive to other cultures, we cannot be co-opted by them. The early Christians who treated plague victims certainly weren’t embracing the pagan culture. Nor were they trying to make Christianity more relevant and win over the hearts of an empire; they were simply carrying out the truth of their faith—that every person is made in the image of God and therefore possesses dignity.
The task of this generation—as it will be in every generation—is to understand Christianity as a complete view of the world and humankind’s place in it, that is, as the truth. If Christianity is not the truth, it is nothing, and our faith mere sentimentality.
In February Zondervan published The Faith, Given Once, For All: What Christians Believe, Why They Believe It, and Why It Matters. This excerpt from Chapter 4: “Truth” is reprinted with permission. Learn more about The Faith and download a free study guide here.
Notes
1. Deane William Ferm, “Protestant Liberalism Reaffirmed.” The article originally appeared in the Christian Century (April 28, 1976), 411-16. At the time of writing this article, Dr. Ferm was the dean of the chapel at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts.
2. Jeff Chu, “10 Questions for Katherine Jefferts Schori,” Time, 10 July 2006).
3. George Barna and Mark Hatch, Boiling Point: It Only Takes One Degree (Ventura, Calif.: Regal, 2001), 185, 202. See also 2003 edition.
5. See Joseph Loconte, “Christianity without Salvation,” Wall Street Journal, 5 May 2007.
6. Subsequently, Federal Judge Robert Pratt declared IFI unconstitutional, ordering that the Iowa IFI program shut and that Prison Fellowship pay the $1.5 million Iowa had paid for the secular services corrections officials said were ably provided by our fellowship. [Editor’s note: In 2008, Iowa ended the IFI program in that state.]
