In a college history of philosophy class I learned of Immanuel Kant’s insistence that ethical imperatives are universal and absolute. For instance, one must not lie in any circumstances, including to save the Jews hiding from the Nazis in your basement. Many of us, including yours truly, would conclude at that point that Kant is just silly and that the expedient, life-saving lie is sometimes necessary and morally acceptable (yes, I know the Corrie Ten Boom story).
The problem with that, I think, quite reasonable approach to Kant’s absolutism is that it leaves us open to further and further inroads on the truth in the name of expediency. How many lies by public officials shall we tolerate in the name of various political goals? For some the answer appears to be, “Quite a few.” The outcome, though, is that in culture accustomed to public lying the truth becomes almost indiscernible.
The prophet Isaiah, in chapter 59, pictures for us a society in which truth has taken a bad fall, a culture filled with, even based on lies. It has become almost impossible to tell what is true and false. Verses 3 and 4 report, “Your lips are full of lies. . . No one cares about being fair and honest.” Then verses 14 and 15 state, “Truth stumbles in the streets, and honesty has been outlawed. Yes, truth is gone, and anyone who renounces evil is attacked.”
The overall concern of Isaiah in this chapter is justice, but he correctly discerns that justice depends heavily on truth-telling. Without truth, justice falls too. Even Superman knew that in the late 50s television show that told of his “never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.” These days I might wonder about whether Christians can embrace the third of those aims, but at least they are in a healthy order, with truth coming first.
In Hebrew the word used by Isaiah for truth is ehmet. Evidently some rabbis like to point out that the three Hebrew letters of the word are the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They conclude that truth embraces the beginning, middle and end of every concern. That again gives truth its proper priority in the pursuit of human aims like a just society.
I believe that one of the great gifts Christians can offer the world is a thorough-going commitment to truth of all sorts. Good Christian scholarship is ruled by a dictum perhaps first stated clearly by Augustine, “… let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master…” But even earlier Christians like Irenaeus and Justin Martyr argued that all truth should be properly claimed by Christians. Justin said, “Whatever things were rightly said among all [people] are the property of us Christians.” Those sentiments are captured in the simple slogan, “All truth is God’s truth.”
Of course we also ground our Christian claim to truth in the fact that our Lord tells us that He Himself is the Truth. Commitment to the truth is at root a commitment to the One who is the Truth. But if all truth is rightly the possession of Christians, then we ought to be a little jealous about it, and maybe a lot upset when it is abused. And I mean being upset not just about the distortion and denial of our own peculiarly Christian truth in Scripture and doctrine but being concerned about truth of all sorts, whether it is speech in the public square, science, history, or even simple attribution of authorship for Facebook memes.
So my hope is to let the words of Isaiah call us to the assistance of truth in every arena where it is stumbling, putting it back on its feet in our own speech and communication of every sort. Let us seek truth and thereby seek true justice in and through the Lord of Truth.