Truth: Is There An Absolute Truth Or Are We All Masters Of Our Own Truth? | John Ortberg

Hey, this is John R. Berg, and I want to talk to you for a few moments about truth, and loving the truth, about God, and life, and faith, and what's real. And I know those are heady words. I don't want this at all to sound like an abstract philosophical discussion. I'm not a philosopher, but mostly because this matters more than anything. Whether there is a God, am I building my life on something solid? Is there good and evil? Is there truth and falsehood? Those are terribly important. But we live in a day when, for a lot of us, we wrestle. We've lost confidence. We're tormented by doubt or not sure if it's possible to come to faith. Or we think of religions just as tribes, traditions that people get socialized into with customs and habits. And I understand that. Nancy and I were with two couples that are very good friends. I mean, I was in the beaches last week, and we were laughing really hard and crying really hard. And at one point, we decided that we were going to pray together. And this is sometimes the case with a group like that. We decided that we would hold hands while we prayed. And then my wife said, just the tiniest bit irreverently, now when we're done, we all have to squeeze each other's hands when we're finished praying. Because God forbid you should ever pray with other Christians while you're holding hands and not squeeze their hands at the end of it. That's what you have to do to make it Christian. The Bible says, thou shalt squeeze the other person's hand at the end of thy prayer. And then Warren said, yes, but it cannot be a sensual squeeze because God forbid that you should squeeze the other person's hand in a tempting or sensual way. We were laughing so hard. I was the one that had to pray, and it was very hard to pray at a time like that. But Paul said, we have this treasure, the truth about God, the gospel, the goodness, life beyond ourselves in jars of clay. And every religion, including Christianity, has got lots and lots of clay in it. But sometimes people think it's all clay. They think all there is is just these kind of strange traditions. And for the most part in our day, the idea that spiritual claims about how things are could be true or false has been largely lost. And we'll often think that people who are really rigorous thinkers must not be people with religious commitments. In fact, over the centuries, the term free thinker became a synonym for a person that did not have a religious or spiritual commitment. Now, the words that I want to read speak directly to this and rebut this idea. They're from C.S. Lewis, one of the great minds of the 20th century. We're in this series together, if you're just joining, called Passage to Wisdom, looking at great thoughts from great minds. And his was one of the best, one of my favorite books of his. We're going to be in for a little while because it's so rich. It's called The Screwtape Letters, and it was written in the form of diabolical advice given from a senior demon tempter, Uncle Screwtape, to his young nephew, demon Wormwood, about how to keep his patient, his human being, away from God. And in the very first letter, Lewis is laying out the role of reason and critical thinking in keeping someone from faith. This is what he writes. My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading, taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument, that is reason, logical thought, was the way to keep him out of the enemy's, God's, clutches. That might have been so if he'd lived a few centuries earlier. At that time, the human still pretty well knew when a thing was proved and when it was not. And if it was proved, they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But we have largely altered that. By the way, folks who study the history of education will tell you, it used to be the case that in order to graduate from a college or university, you had to take at least one course in logic so that you can understand when a thing was proved. That is no longer the case. Lewis goes on. Your man has been accustomed ever since he was a boy to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines, that is ideas or claims, as primarily true or false, but as academic or practical, outworn or contemporary, conventional or ruthless. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the church. Just one reflection of this in our time, you might have seen a story, it's gotten quite a bit of attention over the last week or two, that at Harvard, they've selected a new head of the chaplaincy corps. They have 30 or 40 chaplains there. And for the first time, the head of the chaplains is himself an atheist. And he may be a terrific person. He may do a wonderful job in that role. What's interesting in this is what it says about how we think of spiritual truth claims in our day. At Harvard, they would not select somebody to be the chair of the biology department who does not believe in evolution because it's thought that your beliefs about how things are would really matter in the sciences. But over time, something has happened to the notion of a claim for spiritual or moral truth. Now, things were very different when Harvard got started, and I think it was 1632. It was started by followers of Jesus to shape the minds, to logic, and reason to ministers of the gospel. The initial motto of Harvard was truth, veritas, or Christ and the church. But then over time, notions arose like, well, really, the only thing that we can know is something that can be empirically proved. And so science, what we can touch or taste or see or measure, became the standard for truth. That was kind of modernity. And then post-modernity came along and said, well, yeah, but empiricism itself cannot be empirically proved. So really, there's nothing that we can know for sure. And yet, we cannot live without truth. And this is a very important thing as we think about what do we base our lives on. People will sometimes say, well, really, you know, your truth is your truth, and my truth is my truth. But it's interesting. If somebody comes to me and tells me that, then I say to them, I disagree. I think you're wrong. I think truth can be known, and it is independent of human belief. What they're likely to say, no, no, no, no, no. The reality is that my truth is my truth, and your truth is your truth, and you should stop thinking about truth the way that you do, and adopt my truth. See, we cannot live, we can't function without assuming truth, without the belief that our ideas about how things are corresponds to reality. And in fact, truth is quite independent of belief. It's interesting that we'll use the phrase, the bitter truth. When I was at my friend Jimmy's house, he had in the garage, several red plastic gas cans. I asked him why, and it turns out that he has run out of gas several times, and had to walk to get gas and fill up the car. So he's got a collection of these cans, just a reminder of this. Jimmy's a brilliant guy, Harvard MBA for crying out loud, engineering degree from SMU, an Olympian, and he cannot keep gas in his car. Here's the thing about gas in the tank, either it's there or it's not. Now that's an issue of truth, and no matter how enigmatic we might claim we think truth to be, we actually cannot live apart from it. And if there is no gas in the tank, you can try to get yourself to believe that there is gas in the tank all you want to, you will end up with another red plastic gas tank, because we live at the mercy of things being true. And now this is what we're invited to do, to become lovers of truth. The reason that it matters that we know truth is not so that we get an A on our theology exam with God, it is people who love and know truth who are able to successfully navigate reality. And Jesus would be the first person to say, you must follow truth wherever it leads. See, spiritual life begins not with the love of God, but with the love of truth. Because if God is true, if Jesus is truly who he said to be, then if I love truth, truth will lead me to him. But if I start with him and I'm afraid of truth, then I will end up loving neither truth nor Jesus. So today, make a commitment with your mind, be a free thinker, be inquisitive, be curious, be wide open, follow the truth with your mind wherever it leads. Jesus made a promise to his followers. He said to them, if you hold to my teachings, and by this he did not mean if you profess to believe this stuff, whether you do or not, but if you actually do what it is that I say, if you trust me enough to try out what it is that I, the wisdom that I give for human life, then you really are my disciples, my students, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Interestingly enough, those words, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free, are written on the walls of more universities, more academic institutions than any other words ever spoken by anybody, and they are spoken by Jesus. So here's where we start. Love the truth. Anybody can do that. Whatever you think about, love the truth. Seek to be a person of the truth, because I'll tell you a little secret. Coming to see and know truth is more a matter of character than it is of IQ. There are people with real high IQs who are living in such a way that they have, we have a vested interest in not recognizing the truth about accountability or justice or love or the dignity of every human being. Love the truth, speak the truth, follow the truth, and then we have great days ahead. So I will look forward to seeing you the next time.