The Truth Word

"You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. (Deuteronomy 5:20)   This word honours and guards the integrity of all words by keeping honesty and integrity at the forefront of our dealings with one another, particularly in a court of law.  We are not to falsely use the name of God: the same applies to the name of our neighbour—it ought not be falsely dragged through the mud.  By extension, this word upholds truth and bars us from deceit, slander, and falsehood.    This ninth word is one of the clearest invitations for us to defend the truth.  But there are perhaps two different notions of truth to distinguish here, which we tend to use interchangeably without noticing what we've done.  One form of the truth is that which I myself have witnessed: that I have seen, heard, and experienced firsthand, in person, myself.  When we are called upon as a witness in a legal court, this is the form of truth we swear to tell—an accurate portrayal of reality as we have witnessed it.  This form of truth is inherently subjective and not infrequently the testimony of truthful witnesses will disagree with one another—just as the four Gospels in the New Testament do—because we each witness events from our own vantage point, interpreting what we see and hear through our own assumptions, biases, and experiences.  Historians see these slight variations in witness accounts as a mark of authenticity.  When a narrative is too flat or when different accounts are too identical, as if a set of witnessed "practiced" together what they were going to say—judges and historians get suspicious.  And rightly so.  Human life and reality has a natural and necessary variation to it.  We do not all perceive the world the same way.  But that does not make our account of reality as we've experienced it any less truthful. The second form of truth is a much more modern notion not known to the times of the Bible, but more often than not, this is the sort of truth we are talking about in Christian circles these days.  This is a truth that is—as much as possible—flattened and codified into an objective, identically repeatable formulation.  It is a systematic truth—or a systematic theology sort of truth.  It is removed from the inconsistent world of subjective experience.  And yet, this second form of truth depends on the first for its existence.  The second form is logically deduced from the first, making it a secondary, or derivative form of truth—disembodied from the messy embodied reality of human life and perception.  In this process, subjectivities are supposedly eliminated to create a smooth, coherent, linear formulation of "the truth" in a universal, abstract sense that applies everywhere to everyone in exactly the same way. If the first form of truth—the subjective, eye-witness sort—is a living stone admitting of hundreds of variations, the second form of truth is a brick: flat, monotonous, and infinitely repeatable.  However, God's people were told not to make bricks anymore.  Rather, we've been made to become living stones built together into a holy temple that rises to witness as eye-witnesses to the works and wonders of the living God that we ourselves have subjectively experienced in our own day-to-day lives as the Spirit works the salvation of Jesus into us and sanctified fruit out of us for the sake of the world.  When we are called to be witnesses of Jesus and his truth: this is what is meant.  And when we are called not to bear false witness, this is what is meant.  So when this command is extended to demand that we defend the truth of words and the Word—the sort of truth we are called to defend is not the "objective," systematic theology sort that demands logical apologetic arguments of us (which C.S. Lewis likens to a pinning of God's wings to the cork board like a dead biology project).  But rather, what we are called to defend is the truth of our eye-witness confession of faith: "look what the Lord has done for me!  I cannot do otherwise than believe and love this Jesus because I know him, I talk with him, and having seen him for myself, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he lives!"  These days, the places we are most tempted to slander another are those places where things get heated: places of political rancour or culture war—whether internally against fellow Christians or externally against the world of neighbours around us.  Our desire to force others into the mold of what we believe to be objectively true seems to give us the green light to use any means necessary to accomplish this end: including slander, defamation, false witness, embellishing, and plain ol' lying.  The "conservatives" are guilty of this.  The "progressives" are guilty of this.  And, many of us who live in between and get angry with the polarizing voices that are rocking our boat are guilty of this too!     Speaking God's name without false use requires that we speak our neighbour's name without false use too.  When our words no longer ring true in this personal, subjective sense, when we no longer hold a relational fidelity to speaking truthfully with and of one another, the basis for any form of trust between people erodes and relationships become difficult to tend—as we've experienced these past years.  God knows this, and so his 9th word of covenant fidelity is a gift to us, that when lived, can restore trust and relationship between people in God's world.