2 The Importance Of Truth
Some time ago I was speaking at Oxford University to a group of theological students on the subject of communicating the gospel to those people who are dominated by the consensus of twentieth-century thinking. When I had finished speaking, a Canadian postgraduate student stood up and said, “Sir, if we understand you correctly, you are saying that pre-evangelism must come before evangelism. If this is so, then we have been making a mistake at Oxford. The reason we have not been reaching many of these people is because we have not taken enough time with pre-evangelism.” I said that I totally agreed.
TRUTH STANDS BEFORE CONVERSION
Before a man is ready to become a Christian, he must have a proper understanding of truth, whether he has fully analyzed his concept of truth or not. All people, whether they realize it or not, function in the framework of some concept of truth. Our concept of truth will radically affect our understanding of what it means to become a Christian. We are concerned, at this point, not with the content of truth so much as with the concept of what truth is.
Some who consider themselves real Christians have been infiltrated by the twentieth-century thought-forms. In reference to conversion, in a Christian sense, truth must be first. The phrase “accepting Christ as Savior” can mean anything. We are not saying what we are trying to say unless we make completely clear that we are talking about objective truth when we say Christianity is true and therefore that “accepting Christ as Savior” is not just some form of “upper-story leap.”
TRUTH AND SPIRITUALITY
Just as this matter of objective truth needs to be stressed before we can do effective evangelism, so the same thing must be considered before we can talk about true spirituality. From the biblical viewpoint, spirituality is not fragmented. Therefore, it has to be distinguished from modern concepts of spirituality, both in the West and the East, and, unhappily, from some evangelical concepts. It is not fragmented because it concerns the whole man in his whole moment-by-moment life. Over against this true biblical view, some evangelicalism has been Platonic in the sense that it has placed too much emphasis on the soul in contrast to the whole person, including the body and the intellect.
It is very important to realize, over against modern concepts of “spiritual experience,” that the biblically based experience rests firmly on truth. It is not only an emotional experience, nor is it contentless.
We can think of true spirituality as having three parts. The indispensable beginning is to consider who (or what) “is there,” and how I can have a relationship to him (or it). That something must be understood and defined. You cannot have a personal relationship with something unknown. Then, having understood who it is with whom I am to have a personal relationship and how I may have it, comes the actual step of entering into that relationship. The Bible calls this being converted, “born again,” and this is a step which a person can take only as an individual. We cannot be born again in groups, but only one at a time. But to say that this is an individual matter is not the same as to say it is individualistic. The words may sound alike, but they are worlds apart. This gives the basis for a whole sociological and cultural concept.
True spirituality cannot be abstracted from truth at one end, nor from the whole man and the whole culture at the other. If there is a true spirituality, it must encompass all. The Bible insists that truth is one—and it is almost the sole surviving system in our generation that does.
To avoid confusion, let us notice what this emphasis on the unity of truth does not involve. First of all, from the biblical viewpoint, truth is not ultimately related to orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is important, and I am known as a man who is a convinced orthodox theologian. But truth is not ultimately related to orthodoxy. Second, truth is not related ultimately to the Creeds either. I also believe the historic Christian Creeds are important, but we must realize that, while the Creeds are important, truth is not finally related to them. Truth is related to something back of both orthodoxy and the Creeds.
Third, truth is not ultimately related even to the Scriptures. Let me explain. Though I firmly believe what the early church and the reformers taught concerning the nature of the Scriptures, and though I would emphasize that what they have to say concerning the Scriptures is crucially important, yet again, truth is finally related to something behind the Scriptures. The Scriptures are important, not because they are printed in a certain way nor bound in a certain kind of leather, nor because they have helped many people. This is not the basic reason for the Scriptures’ being overwhelmingly important. The Bible, the historic Creeds and orthodoxy are important because God is there, and, finally, that is the only reason they have their importance.
The force of this was brought home to me several years ago when a young Swiss-German architect was reporting at one of our Farel House seminars in Switzerland on Max Planck’s last essays. He pointed out that Planck, speaking in terms of his discipline, which was physics and not religion, said that modern man has had to move the screen back several times in our generation, and the question he posed was: what will be the final screen? Planck was saying that we do not know what the final screen will be in the material structure of the universe. This idea of a final screen started to bore away in my mind as a Christian, and as one speaking into the twentieth-century world. What is the final screen of truth?
The answer can only be the existence of God and who he is. Therefore, Christian truth is that which is in relationship to what exists and ultimately to the God who exists. And true spirituality consists of being in the correct relationship to the God who is there, first in the once-for-all act of justification, second by being in that correct relationship as a continuing moment-by-moment reality. This is the biblical emphasis on true spirituality. It is a continuing moment-by-moment proper relationship with the God who exists.
THE GOD BEHIND TRUTH
I have chosen to use this expression “God is there” as being equivalent to “God exists,” not because I am unaware of the theological discussions today, nor because I have met anyone who, holding to the truth of the Bible, believes in a three-story universe, but in order to meet the problem of the modern theology, which denies that God is there in the historical biblical sense. We must have the courage to say that God is there, or to use different terminology, that the final environment of what is there is God himself, the One who has created everything else.
Let us notice carefully that in saying God is there, we are saying God exists, and not just talking about the word god or the idea god. We are speaking of the proper relationship to the living God who exists. In order to understand the problems of our generation, we should be very alive to this distinction.
Semantics (linguistic analysis) for a certain period made up the heart of modern philosophical study in the Anglo-Saxon world. Though the Christian cannot accept this study as a philosophy, there is no reason why he should not be glad for the concept that words need to be defined before they can be used in communication. As Christians we must understand that there is no word so meaningless as the word god until it is defined. No word has been used to teach absolutely opposite concepts as much as the word god. Consequently, let us not be confused. There is much “spirituality” about us today that relates itself to the word god or to the idea god; but this is not what we are talking about. Biblical truth and spirituality is not a relationship to the word god, or to the idea god. It is a relationship to the One who is there. This is an entirely different concept.
Following on from the discussion as to who or what God is, springs the second fundamental question of today, “Who or what am I?” In order to make it possible to have a meaningful relationship between God and man, an answer to both questions must be given.
The answer we give here profoundly affects our idea of the form of the relationship between God and man. Whether we regard this relationship as mechanical, deterministic or—infinitely more wonderful—personal will turn upon our answers to the questions “Who is the God who is there?” and “Who am I?”
Many sensitive people today are really struggling for their lives, asking the question “What is the purpose of man?” In fact, modern man has not come up with a satisfactory answer to this question in any of his fields of thinking. It does not matter much whether he has approached it along the lines of naked rationalism or the leap into the dark of modern secular and theological mysticism; twentieth-century man has failed to answer this question.
When someone asks me the Christian answer to this question of purpose, the reason for man’s existence, I always take them to the first commandment of Christ. In passing, let us note that there is no reason to think that the first commandment—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength”—is merely a first commandment uttered by Jesus. We know it is not so because he quoted it from the last book of Moses, the book of Deuteronomy. But we can say something more. Surely it is the first commandment because it is the one that expresses the purpose of man and, individually, my purpose.
But it is not enough to quote this on its own. Without the answer given by historic Christianity that God is really there, such an answer can only be another cliché to the honest inquirer, just one more twentieth-century “religious answer”; and we cannot blame him if he stops listening. When I hear this first commandment to love the God who is there with everything that I am, it carries with it a total concept of life and of truth. A man can love only a God who exists and who is personal and about whom he has knowledge. So the fact that this God has communicated is also of supreme importance. But this commandment carries something more; it tells me something very fundamental and exciting about myself.
There is indeed something to be excited about if we know the dilemmas of our generation. If you could see the sober, sensitive men and women who come to our chalet asking the question “who, or what, am I?” with real longings, you would realize there is something electrifying to know about “myself.”
As far as the modern mentality is concerned, it is shattering to be told that there is nothing intrinsically nonsensical in calling upon me to love the God who is there, and that God is of such a nature and that I am of such a nature as to make this a valid proposition. Those who understand what is involved will not dismiss this as “something I have heard since I was little.” To think through the implications is totally exciting. The God who is there is of such a nature that he can be loved, and I am of such a nature that I can love; and thus this first commandment, or basic purpose of man, is the very opposite of a nonsense statement. I know what man is, and I know who I am.