Truth Or Harmony?

When I was growing up, there was a game show on TV hosted by Bob Barker called “Truth or Consequences.” I don’t remember just how it worked, but without truth, contestants were left with consequences—usually involving something sticky or messy.

Interestingly, no one questioned this. No one asked, Whose truth do you want, mine or his? No one asked that the consequences be waved because truth was relative. Truth was viewed as a fixed point, not a sliding scale.

Clearly no one’s playing “Truth or Consequences” today. In fact truth has shrunk in stature.

No longer do our courts try to find out what the truth is in a case — they look now for “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” which might or might not lead to truth. How many people have been imprisoned based on “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” only to have DNA evidence turn up and disprove the previous “proof”? How many criminals have walked free because there wasn’t enough proof to convince a jury there was no reasonable doubt? Good (expensive) lawyers know how to insert that kind of doubt. The point is, our courts are now about winning, not about truth.

Our schools aren’t about truth either. They are about self-esteem and emergency training and anti-bullying and equality for all. Somehow truth has been shuffled down the playlist and may have actually fallen out of the top ten.

Truth disappeared on the athletic field years ago, aided perhaps by a World Cup soccer player scoring a winning goal with his hand or by basketball announcers declaring that whatever contact occurred wasn’t a foul as long as the ref didn’t call it a foul.

Truth is now in the eye of the beholder, or so says the postmodern culture. “Reality” depends on your “situated-ness.”

So the ref standing at mid-court didn’t blow the whistle because from his vantage point he didn’t see any contact; therefore, his reality is, There was no foul.

The guy with the broken nose, however, says, There was contact across my face, which most definitely is a foul.

So there are two truths, or four if you add in the other refs, or thirteen if you add in the other nine players on the court, or forty-three if you add in the bench players and the coaches, or 15,043 if you add in the fans in the stands, or … You get the idea.

What, then, is truth?

Our culture has reduced it to a shifting perspective.

Sadly, many Christians have fallen in line with this thinking. Just recently I heard a conversation in which a group of Christians decried all the disagreements about what to believe. Everyone should just learn to get along!

Well, yes, we should get along. We should learn to respect each other and treat one another as more important than ourselves. We should not enter into discussions to win. We should listen more than we speak. And yet …

Has harmony shoved truth further down the list? For Christians?

Clumping all the old divisive theological propositions into the vast unknown allows us to link arms and sing “Kumbaya.” After all, harmony is a higher value than truth.

Actually, Jesus did put great emphasis on unity, praying for this very thing:

“that they [those who believe in Jesus] may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one” (John 17:21-22)

Clearly if unity was a priority for Jesus, it should be a priority for His followers. But does it rank above truth?

Jesus, you may recall, said that He Himself is Truth. In fact, John identifies the Father as “full of grace and truth,” reports Jesus stating that He is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and declares the Holy Spirit to be “the Spirit of truth.”

Jesus also prayed for us regarding truth:

Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.

The unity that Jesus prayed for was predicated on the Truth. He did not consider this to be fuzzy ground. He saw a clear demarcation based on His person and His word. To the Pharisees who did not believe He was the Messiah, he said

“You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me.” (John 8:44-45 – emphases mine)

Truth first, and unity will follow.

Some professing Christians have this backwards. For them recreating the first century Areopagus where men gathered to discuss ideas, is the highest good. The goal of “finding truth,” or in today’s parlance, “answers,” is beside the point. Seeking is the great good, improved only by being in harmony with others in the process.

Few who don’t know Christ, I submit, will go to church on Easter looking for Truth, and sadly, too many pulpits around this country will be silent about the subject.

The subject is not a “feel good” message—this “choose whom you will serve,” drawing-of-the-line between truth and non-truth. It’s not conducive to harmony, which our culture values so highly these days. It demands Christians go against the flow, choose the unpopular side, be in the minority, be out of harmony with those who disagree.

It’s not comfortable. But I don’t think taking up my cross daily is supposed to be comfortable.

This article is a lightly revised version of one that appeared here in April, 2012.