No Such Thing as Truth?

Thank you very much. It’s a privilege to be here and to address you this evening.

I’m taking as my text just one verse, from Isaiah 59:14, which reads as follows:

Justice is turned back,
 and righteousness stands far away;
for truth has stumbled in the public squares,
 and uprightness cannot enter.

If you remember the Authorized Version, it read in the AV, “Truth [has] fallen in the street[s].”[1]

What I want to do in the time that is available to me is make some comments concerning our contemporary culture—the environment in which we have the privilege of doing what we do as religious broadcasters—and then to say, “Here are a couple of ways that we are able to respond to the climate in which we live,” two of which I don’t recommend and one which I do recommend. And the one that I do recommend will then bring me to my conclusion.

Our Present Environment

So, let me begin by telling you that I know very little about art, and so when I say what I’m now about to say, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m some great art aficionado. But you will have seen in the Wall Street earlier this month that one of Gauguin’s paintings… Gauguin was a Postimpressionist painter. He painted all kinds of paintings of Tahitian women, and one painting of two Tahitian women sold earlier in the month for three hundred million dollars—a painting that had been painted in 1892. He could never have imagined such success, because he actually died in his fifties after a dissolute life. And in, arguably, his most famous canvas, which is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he wrote three questions that plagued him in his life:

D’où Venons Nous
Que Sommes Nous
Où Allons Nous

“Where do we come from? What are we? And where are we going?” He lived his entire life without getting an answer to that question. In many senses, he was a contemporary man, because many today are expressing the same kind of angst—the reality of an enemy that exists within our culture that is not hard to detect, and one stumbles over it on a daily basis.

George Weigel, in an introduction to a book by Joseph Ratzinger, says that the world that we live in today is

a world that … has lost its story: a world in which the progress [that was] promised by the humanisms of the past three centuries is now gravely threatened by understandings of the human person that reduce our humanity to a congeries of cosmic chemical accidents: a humanity with no intentional origin, no noble destiny, and thus no path to take through history.[2]

At a far more populist level, Henry Allen, the commentator in the Wall Street Journal, had a piece in the last year which began, “For the first time in my 72 years, I have no idea what’s going on.” And in a fairly humorous piece, he says in conclusion, “I worry that reality itself is fading like the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a smile that grows ever more alarming.”[3]

The predicament that we face as the people of God in the context of an alien world is that truth has fallen in the streets.

And this reality is found all over the place. It’s not something that we can locate within a certain demographic, in a certain socioeconomic framework. In The American Paradox by David Myers, he talks about the fact that the generation that has grown up most recently have never had so much, and yet they’ve never had so little. They’ve grown up being told they can become anything they want, but they don’t know what they want to be. They have never been more connected than any other generation in all of history, and yet they are more isolated and with a greater sense of aloneness than any generation before them.[4] And they really do not have an answer.

What is it that the Bible says concerning these things? Well, Isaiah, in a very different time, says the predicament that we face as the people of God in the context of an alien world is that truth has fallen in the streets. And, of course, here today in the continental United States, the prevailing and oppressive assumption is that there is no such thing as truth—that there is no such thing as right or wrong, at least not that one can assert all the time, everywhere, and for everyone. In other words, there is no absolute. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.

And when we think in these terms, we need to be reminded of the fact that this relativism—for that’s really what it is—has its roots and needs to be defined in terms of what the Bible says. You remember in 2 Corinthians 10, this is what Paul says:

For [although] we walk in the flesh, we[’re] not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not … the flesh but [they] have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God.[5]

“Every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God.” That is the context in which we view these things. We’re dealing with cosmic powers—the “present darkness,” “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”[6]—and behind all of that is the devil, of whom Jesus says in John chapter 8, “He … does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him”; that he is “the father of lies” and “a murderer from the beginning.”[7]

And so, in that context, we’re forced to deal with the ins and outs of life. And we could pursue it ad nauseam, but it wouldn’t be a good plan. Think, for example, for a moment just about the notion of reality. You see, under the postmodern sun, everyone has a right to their own version of reality. So there’s never really just one perspective; there’s just your perspective. I have my reality; you have your reality. Your reality may be real in a subjective sense and yet not real like my reality, which may contradict your reality—but at the same time being real for me. It’s all fitting together, isn’t it? It just makes perfect sense. It makes for a very, very unsettling and confusing existence.

And almost on a daily basis, in contemporary literature and in our news broadsheets, we’re finding stories of quasi reality, of virtual reality, of the place of avatars, of a currency that is not a real currency, and so on. That is the world in which our children and our grandchildren are growing up. What is this? It hasn’t jumped into the twenty-first century out of the blue. If you’ve lived a long time like me, you know that Paul Simon was addressing this in the ’60s and ’70s:

Through the corridors of sleep,
Past [the] shadows dark and deep,
My mind dances and leaps in confusion.
I don’t know what is real,
I can’t touch what I feel,
And I hide behind the shield of my illusion.

[And] so I’ll continue to continue to pretend
[That] my life will never end,
And [that] flowers never bend
With the rainfall.[8]

From reality to morality, you find the same thing. Everyone has their own perspective. Ethics become a matter of personal taste. Everybody charts their own course. Everything is permissible, as long as you don’t hurt anyone—according, of course, to your own reality.

And when you come to the issue of history itself, the ability to look back and say, “This happened then,” and so on… Just in the last couple of days in the Wall Street Journal, there was an interesting article on history. I wonder if you saw it in the Arts page: “Whose History Is It, Anyway?” the question asked. And what they were interacting with was the fact that we’ve had all these historical movies, and yet they’re riddled with inaccuracies. And they’re unashamed inaccuracies; they’ve just been changed, because the perspective of the directors is that there is not really any history, because everybody views history through their own prism. And in the article, it says we don’t like this inference, because “we’re trying to hold movies to a truth we can’t hold history to. History,” quotes, “is always someone’s opinion.”[9] And “the director of [Salem] dismiss[ing] concerns about … accuracy”—Selma, I mean—says, “‘Everyone sees history through their own lens …. And that [lens] should be valid.’” So, “in postmodern-style history, accuracy is [replaced] by advocacy.”[10]

Now, how are we to respond to this? How are we to train our children? We just saw that video. How are we, in the framework of the Shema, to teach these things to our children when we walk along the road and when we lie down and when we get up?[11] How are we to teach them to be able to deal with this? How do you live Christianly in a post-Christian culture? How do you do Christian ministry? Three possibilities—two bad, one good.

Possible Responses to the Culture

Possibility number one: to treat it in a spirit of admonition. Admonition. And I use the word in terms of rebuke or reprimand—essentially, to respond to the culture in a spirit of condemnation. Condemnation.

I first encountered this when I came to America for the first time in 1972. I was twenty. And it was on that occasion that I was introduced to a phrase and a concept that I had never heard in in the United Kingdom growing up. The pastor of a particular church that I visited declared that he felt very strongly that the USA was “going to hell in a handbasket,” as he put it. Actually, he said “is goin’ to hale in a handbasket!”—which was even more disturbing, because I can remember thinking, “That is strange, and that is not even the English language.” But what was most disturbing about it was that he seemed to be perfectly happy. He didn’t say it with tears. I thought, “What a strange perspective!”

That is in large measure why it is that Paul, when he encourages Titus, in the framework of a really alien culture in his world, to make sure that his people under his tutelage are reminded—Titus 3—“to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward[s] all people.”[12] In other words, not to respond to the cultural environment in a spirit of admonition.

Some of us, I think, are a little prone to this. We’re a bit like those two old guys on The Muppets. What were they called? Statler and Waldorf? Two miserable characters that just sat up in the balcony and just making noises and complaining about everything. They just woke up in the morning, and that’s what they did all day. But of course, Jesus had disciples who were dealing with the same issue. You remember when they come back from the Samaritan evangelistic campaign, and it hasn’t really gone very well. And the “Sons of Thunder”[13] say to Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”[14] It’s kind of the reverse of an altar call. It’s sort of an antithetic altar call. And Jesus said, “No. That would be a no. No.” I have to guard my own heart, lest I fall into the realm of simply admonition, forgetting that the only thing that distinguishes me from an atheist like Christopher Hitchens—whose work I read voraciously and for whom I prayed, as many of you did—the only thing that distinguishes me from him is the grace of God. That’s the only difference.

So, admonition is one possibility. Accommodation is another—equally bad and dangerous. 1952, a Scotsman, James S. Stewart, speaking to the Yale Divinity School, warned them about what he referred to as a “theologically vague and harmlessly accommodating”[15] gospel—“theologically vague and harmlessly accommodating” gospel—which, he said, is no gospel at all. Very few heeded the warning. And historically, liberal Protestantism has adopted an approach which sought to capitulate almost exclusively to the cultural elites in the country. And they came to approach it in such a way that they did not want to be regarded like the apostles, as “unlearned and ignorant men,”[16] and so they gave away large swathes of theological orthodoxy: “Creation is a problem? Fine; we can get rid of that. The atonement is a difficulty? Well, we wouldn’t want to say much about the blood of Christ. The resurrection—you don’t like that one, either? Well, let’s just change that to a spiritual experience,” and so on. And those churches are empty.

Incidentally, did you see the article on the empty churches in Europe, again in the Wall Street, there was on the something of the something? And I cut all these things out. My grandchildren are starting to say, “Grandpa’s very weird.” But it’s one of the saddest things you ever read. Jason McDonald, a supervisor in a pub in Scotland that “has become a Frankenstein-themed bar, featuring bubbling test tubes, [and] lasers and a life-size Frankenstein’s monster descending from the ceiling at midnight,” said there shouldn’t be any complaint about this: “‘There are hundreds and hundreds of old churches and no one … [goes] to them.’”[17]

And you all come back and tell me, “I was in Scotland. I was in England. I was in Germany. I was in France. What happened over there?” And I always say the same thing: “Hang on! You’re about to find out.” Because the same seeds that were sown in continental Europe have been sown for at least three decades in this country. And the issues that lie at the very heart of it are the issues that are here before us, where Jeremiah, concurring with Isaiah, says no one is “valiant for … truth,”[18] he says. Truth has collapsed in the streets.

The contemporary church has decided that if it is going to be successful, it’s going to have to accommodate itself to people: “If theology’s a bit hard to handle, let’s try psychology. If propositional truth claims are unwelcome, then we’ll just change it to stories. If the Bible’s clarity on marriage does not appeal to you, we can change that. If you don’t like his views on sexuality, if they come across far too clearly, then we can soften the blow, and we can blur the lines, and we can take care of it.” Dare we? Dare we accommodate?

J. D. Unwin, cited by Christopher Ash in one of his books, says that he “studied 86 different societies spanning 5000 years,” and “he found an unexpected and direct correlation between sexual continence and the ability of a society to grow and remain healthy. … ‘In human records,’” he writes, “‘there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence.’”[19] Being translated for the rest of us: premarital and postmarital sexual fidelity—the existence of that which God has created and the enjoyment of that which God has created in one place and in one context and in only one context. The historian says, “Societies cannot survive that.” Toynbee adds to it and says, “Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in” this evening.[20] They collapsed when those societies reached the place in which we now find ourselves.

So what are we going to do? Are we going to curse the darkness and complain and admonish everybody? Or are we going to accommodate ourselves because we don’t like it as our numbers dwindle and as our influence is dissipated? No. What we’re going to do is do what the Bible tells us to do. We’re not going the road of admonition or the road of accommodation; we’re going to go the road of proclamation. We’re going to tell the story. And we’re going to tell the story recognizing that the biblical assessment of the human condition is not naturally appealing. Because what the Bible says about man qua man is that we are by nature sinful, guilty, lost, and responsible. Have a nice day! You see, it doesn’t play. It doesn’t play. You can’t say, “Oh, thank you all for coming in, and we don’t want anybody to be uncomfortable this morning. We hope you’re having a wonderful evening and that nothing will ruffle your feathers and so on. But by the way, I just want to tell you that you’re sinful, guilty, lost, and responsible.” It doesn’t play. But that’s our story.

You see, the real skill in it (and if we had time, we could work our way through this, but we don’t) is in tracking, for example, with Paul when he goes to the intelligent people in Athens—actually, to all the people of Athens. And when he goes there, remember that he’s the one who wrote Romans chapter 1. He’s the one who, in writing to the Christians in Rome, said, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and wickedness of men who have done these things,”[21] and so on and so on. You know the passage. And he believes that passionately. He understands that to be the condition of man.

God is committed to his own glory, and he stands by those who seek to affirm it.

When he has the opportunity in Athens, he doesn’t begin there. He’s not soft-shoeing it. He’s not doing a shuffle. He’s not doing a change. He’s recognizing that he now has been given an opportunity to proclaim the good news concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, to seize the opportunity that is provided. And he does that as a converted Jew, as a man who’d grown up as a boy, again, saying, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord [your] God, the Lord is one.”[22] And if he was convinced of one thing, it was that reality: of the God-ness of God. And so when he is confronted by the idolatry of Athens, Luke says that it stirred him right to his core of his being.[23] And he was motivated not, ultimately, by a sense of pity nor by a sense of annoyance but out of a concern for the God of Abraham and Isaac and of Jacob to be glorified.

Will it do—will it do—for us to preach the gospel simply because we’re actually concerned about our own glory, about our own national identity, about our own freedoms, and our own securities? I suggest to you it will not. God is committed to his own glory, and he stands by those who seek to affirm it. The mainspring of mission, said another Scotsman, P. T. Forsyth, “is not pity but faith, not so much pity for perishing [sinners], [as] faith and zeal”[24] for the supreme rights of Jesus Christ.

So, he does the hard work. He gives them a crash course in biblical theology. When you read this for your homework, which I assign for you this evening, then go home, and you’ll realize that he tells them seventeen aspects about God that are just there. It would be tedious to go all the way through ’em. We have no time to do it, in any case. But this is… Where do you start with people who don’t read the Bible? Where do you start with the story? What do you do?

Well, you could start where Paul starts. He says God made the entire universe; he’s the creator and the sustainer of everyone and everything. He is in charge of all of history and all of geography. He’s transcendent. He doesn’t live in temples built by human hands. He seeks a relationship with his creatures, and he’s actually immanent as well as transcendent. He’s not far from every one of us, he says as he quotes the prophets and the poets. He’s merciful, and he’s righteous. He commands repentance, and he’s going to judge the world. And he has given proof of this by raising Jesus Christ from the dead.[25] That is the précis of a précis, for surely, it only takes two minutes to read that section of Acts 17, so I’m assuming he preached for longer than that. But the idea of a final judgment is unpalatable to modern man. They dismiss it by simply saying, “It’s not part of my reality.” But we have to be prepared to say, “You were created by God, you are accountable to God, and you’re going to face God.”

So although truth may have stumbled in the public square and although our culture may be filled with substitute gods… And if you want to get an understanding of where America is, then just watch as much as you could tolerate of the Oscars the other evening. It’s a symbolic representation of the demise of a culture. And if that’s not enough for you, just flip to the Super Bowl in your recollection, and add that in as well. But the idolatries of the human heart are so endemic in us that no amount of admonition, no amount of accommodation is going to actually penetrate the culture. We’re going to have to be prepared—kindly, graciously, imaginatively, sensitively, boldly—to say, “I want to tell you about the Lord Jesus Christ. I want to tell you who he is and why he’s come. I want to tell you that this really matters.”

This morning in the Wall Street, there was a piece, again, in the Business section. It said, “I Don’t Have a Job. I Have a Higher Calling.” I don’t know if you read it. And the whole point of it is that employers are trying to inject meaning into the daily grind. And the article says, “Traditional sources of meaning and purpose, such as religion, have receded in many corners of the country.”[26] So it just ties in with where I began, and it reinforces the fact that young people are saying, “There’s got to be something more than this.” And if all that we have to offer them is a spirit of condemnation, or if we would be so crazy as to accommodate their lostness, then we have nothing at all to say.

We’re going to have to be prepared—kindly, graciously, imaginatively, sensitively, boldly—to say, ‘I want to tell you about the Lord Jesus Christ.’

That’s why when Paul says to Timothy as he takes his leave of him in Ephesus—he says, “Timothy, this is what I want you to do: I want you to preach the Word. I want you to do it when it feels good, and I want you to do it when it feels bad. I want you to do it when you feel like it and when you don’t feel like it. And I want you to keep your head. I want you to endure hardship. I want you to discharge all the duties of your ministry, and I want you to tell people about Jesus.”[27] And if religious broadcasting is about anything, then it has to be about that. And I encourage you tonight to be bold, to be clear, and to be about the business.

Let us pray:

Father, thank you for your Word. Thank you that we can turn to it and discover its truth. Thank you that your Word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.[28] Guide us by your truth, we pray. And we ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.

[1] Isaiah 59:14 (KJV).

[2] George Weigel, foreword toLight of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times; A Conversation with Peter Seewald, by Benedict XVI (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010), x.

[3] Henry Allen, “The Disquiet of Ziggy Zeitgeist,”Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2013, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324110404578626314130514522.

[4] David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-Love of God Reorients Our World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 22–23.

[5] 2 Corinthians 10:3–5 (ESV).

[6] Ephesians 6:12 (ESV).

[7] John 8:44 (ESV).

[8] Paul Simon, “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” (1965).

[9] Jeanine Basinger, quoted in Edward Rothstein, “Whose History Is It, Anyway?,” Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/whose-history-is-it-anyway-1424215458.

[10] Rothstein.

[11] See Deuteronomy 6:7.

[12] Titus 3:1–2 (ESV).

[13] Mark 3:17 (ESV).

[14] Luke 9:54 (ESV).

[15] James S. Stewart,A Faith to Proclaim(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 16.

[16] Acts 4:13 (KJV).

[17] Naftali Bendavid, “Europe’s Empty Churches Go on Sale,” Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-empty-churches-go-on-sale-1420245359.

[18] Jeremiah 9:3 (KJV).

[19] Christopher Ash, Remaking a Broken World: The Heart of the Bible Story (The Good Book Company, 2019), 48. Ash quotes J. D. Unwin, Hopousia, or The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940), 84–85.

[20] Arnold Toynbee, quoted in Ash, 48.

[21] Romans 1:18 (paraphrased).

[22] Deuteronomy 6:4 (ESV).

[23] See Acts 17:16.

[24] P. T. Forsyth, Missions in State and Church: Sermons and Addresses (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1908), 16.

[25] See Acts 17:22–31.

[26] Rachel Feintzeig, “I Don’t Have a Job. I Have a Higher Calling,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-mission-statements-talk-of-higher-purpose-1424824784.

[27] 2 Timothy 4:2, 5 (paraphrased).

[28] See Psalm 119:105.