Jesus told his disciples that he is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). The truth is absolutely vital to us as Christians. But in an era of fake news, media spin and social media manipulation, it’s never been more important as Christians that we are clear on what the truth is and how we as Christians should live as truthful people.
In this episode, Peter Orr talks to Lionel Windsor about his new book, Truth Be Told, which sees to help Christians live truthfully in a post-truth world.
Links referred to:
- Truth Be Told (Lionel Windsor)
- Our next event: Embrace AI and lose your soul? How to think about AI as a Christian with Akos Balogh (13 Mar). Watch a short video with Akos and Akos’ AI-generated avatar talk about the event:
Runtime: 25:47 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.
Introduction
Peter Orr: Jesus told his disciples that he is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). The truth is absolutely vital to us as Christians. But in an era of fake news, media spin and social media manipulation, it’s never been more important as Christians that we are clear on what the truth is and how we as Christians should live as truthful people.
In this episode, we’re going to hear Lionel Windsor talk about his new book, Truth Be Told. It’s a wonderful book and I’m sure you’ll find Lionel’s insights in this episode helpful.
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PO: Welcome to the Centre for Christian Living podcast. I’m Peter Orr. Today, I’m joined by my friend and colleague, Lionel Windsor, and we’re going to be talking about truth. But first of all, I thought we’d get to know Lionel. Lionel, can you tell a little bit about yourself: who’s in your family and also how you became a Christian?
LW: Yeah, hi Pete. It’s really great to be here. I’m a colleague of Pete. I’m here as a lecturer in New Testament at Moore Theological College. I’m an ordained Anglican minister. In my family is Bron, who’s my wife. We have three teenage and young adult children, one of whom is married.
I love to tell this story over a long period, but I became a Christian through Scripture teachers at our local primary school—through one Scripture/SRE (Special Religious Education) teacher, who helped me to understand more about Jesus. I became a Christian, my sister did, and actually my whole family came to know Jesus. That was back when I was Year 6.
PO: That’s wonderful.
The genesis of the book
PO: Lionel, you’ve just recently written a book that I think is about to come out called Truth Be Told: Living truthfully in a post-truth world. We’ll unpack some of the words in the title later. But tell us why you decided to write this book.
LW: Yeah. I actually initially wrote a blog post with an associated audio file. I was doing a whole series on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. There’s a part in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians where Paul says, “Speak the truth to one another” (Eph 4:25). I thought, “Well, what do I say about ‘Speak the truth to one another’?”
I’d just heard a speech by Barack Obama, where he was lamenting the loss of objective truth in our world. He was actually speaking in a political forum. He said,
Unfortunately too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up! They just make stuff up. We see it the growth of state-sponsored propaganda. We see it in internet-driven fabrications. We see it in the blurring of lines between news and entertainment. We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders, where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more. It used—look, let me say, politicians have always lied. But it used to be that if you caught them lying, they’d be, like, “Oh man.” Now they just keep on lying!1
In context, this was a year and a bit after his removal from office and his successor had come in. He was lamenting this loss of objective truth in the world, and I was fascinated by that, because I was thinking, “Yeah, but for the past 50-100 years, truth has been relentlessly dismantled in our institutions, in our educational institutions, in politics, in government, in the media, where people have said, ‘Well, there is no such thing as truth.’”
I thought, “That’s interesting: it seems that there is a more democratic, liberal president in the US who is now saying”—well, he grew up with the idea that there’s no such thing as truth and grew up with this postmodernism, and he is now saying—and I’m not saying that Barack Obama is necessarily saying this, but it appears he’s echoing what a lot of media institutions and others are saying: they’re saying, “Oh, when we said there’s no such thing as truth, we didn’t mean that!” [Laughter] “We didn’t mean this new politics that’s come in since 2016. I thought, “Well, the Bible a lot to say about truth. Maybe people are interested in objective truth now, because they’re seeing the devastating effects of what happens when you actually say, ‘There’s no such thing as truth.’”
So I wrote this blog post. Then Mattias Media the publisher got in touch and said, “How would you feel about turning this into a book?” I thought, “That’s a great idea!” So I followed it up and turned it into a book.
Post-truth
PO: Just to ask a little bit more about the phrase you touched on already: a “post-truth world”. Do you want to expand on that? It’s quite a striking term. We do hear it occasionally. What do you mean by that?
LW: Yes. “Post-truth” was the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016. It’s been going for a while, but it became very, very popular following the 2016 election in the US and the Brexit Referendum and other things as well.
The idea of “post-truth” has become very popular now. It’s the idea that we live in a world that isn’t just a world where people lie, it’s a world where people don’t even care about lies—where lies aren’t even a thing. The thing about post-truth is that nobody says that they’re post-truth [Laughter]; it’s everybody else who’s post-truth. Anyone who says “post-truth” means that they’re on the side of truth.
In philosophical terms, it’s the next step on from postmodernism. Postmodernism is that really friendly idea that we can all get rid of the idea of objective truth and we’ll all be happy and it will all be great. Post-truth is the next step, which is, “Oh: this is what happens in our world, in our relationships, in our technology, in our institutions and in our culture when we actually say that there’s no such thing as objective truth.” That’s actually a bad thing. Post-truth is generally a bad thing, as opposed to postmodernism, which a lot of people would say is a good thing.
PO: Can you give us some examples of how you see it as a bad thing in culture and society?
LW: Yeah, and it’s even seen as a bad thing. I was talking to a friend of mine at a school reunion. This friend of mine is not a Christian. She had worked as the head of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) office in Canberra, but she wasn’t working there anymore. I said, “I’m in the process of writing a book on truth.” She said, “That matters so much! I’m so glad you’re doing that, because there’s all these people around who really don’t believe in truth, and that’s the problem with Canberra: the people don’t believe in objective truth anymore.” She’s not a Christian at all, but that’s an interesting turn in the ABC and in other places. So it’s in the media, where there’s various well-trained journalists who are lamenting the loss of truth in mainstream social media.
There’s other places where truth is a problem. I quote Prince Harry’s book Spare, where he, very close to the start, says,
Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.2
That’s a strong statement of a post-truth culture. We see it in our culture, we see it in our technology, we see it in fake news and that kind of thing, we see it in the postmodern turn and then the post-truth turn. But we also see it in our relationships. That’s where you can make a big thing out there: it’s everybody else’s problem, but actually it’s in our relationships as well.
Truth is personal
PO: Yeah. So at one point in the book, you talk about truth being personal. Do you want to touch on that?
LW: Yeah. So I say, “Truth is personal”, and when I say that (and it’s quite deliberate), people go, “What? Do you mean it’s a matter of just subjective opinion?” [Laughter] I go, “No, actually, not at all.” I mean two things by that.
Firstly, truth can only be understood in relation to a person—that is, God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ himself, who says, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6) So instead of truth being just this kind of abstract concept, which is what the Enlightenment brought us and that’s what postmodernism was reacting against, truth is personal in that you actually need to understand it in relation to a person—that is, God and Jesus.
The second reason is that truth is personal is that it’s personal in us: we like to say, “Oh, truth! Yes, that’s a problem for that person over there and that person over there, and that politician, that neighbour of mine, that friend of mine, that relative of mine,” etcetera, but actually it’s a problem in us. It’s personal for us. So we can’t escape the fact that we ourselves need to own up to our own lack of truthfulness. It has to affect our lives.
When you talk about truth, it’s not just an abstract thing; it’s about God and Jesus.
Truth and emotions
PO: As Christians, we obviously live in the world, and as Christians living in the 21st century in a post-truth world, have you seen—do you think—that this is something that is particularly affecting even Christians today?
LW: It is. It’s affecting our world, but of course, as Christians, we live in this world and we’re highly affected by it. You can see it in social media. You can see it in the way that we interact with one another online—the way in which it’s often about black and white kind of divisions into tribes, and who’s on the right side and who’s not on the right side. Making decisions in terms of our impulses, rather than seeking to go, “How do you weigh that up?” We’re affected by that in terms of social media and that kind of tribalism.
We’re also affected by it simply in our relationships, where we’ve very much bought into the Romantic notion that what it means to be truly authentic is about how I feel inside. “Who am I?” Now, feeling are emotions. Emotions are really, really important. But if you say that the very core of your identity—who you are—is defined by how you feel—then what you actually end up with is there’s not God telling you who you are [Laughter] and there’s not any sense of objective truth telling you who you are. So it comes to the idea of your truth: you’ve got to tell your truth.
In one sense, that’s really helpful: you do need to speak your truth—what you know to be true, especially in the face of oppression, lies and that kind of thing. But sometimes it can be just all about me, my identity and how I feel. That really does affect us as Christians, because we can so easily make decisions about who I am based on how I feel. That can some through in what’s called the “therapeutic gospel”—the idea that if the most important thing about who I am is how I feel inside, then the very most important thing that I can ever do for somebody is just to make sure they don’t feel bad. If anyone feels bad or is having emotional suffering, that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. You’ve got to bend everything—change everything—change your structures—change everything just to make sure that people aren’t feeling that emotional discomfort. That can happen in our churches, our decision-making structures, and all sorts of things.
I have to say, emotions really matter. They’re a wonderful gift from God. They’re really, really important. But what we’ve done is in the place of what is true and what is real in our lives, we’ve replaced those with emotions—or maybe of us have. That’s a few ways it affects us.
As Christians, it also affects us—and I don’t think this is necessarily a new thing, but it is something that affects us—it affects us as Christians when it comes to abuse in our churches and church communities. Truth is a commitment to truth beyond simply loyalty. Loyalty is important, but if you just have loyalty and you don’t actually have truth in the structures of your churches and in how we relate to one another as Christians, you can very easily foster a place where abuse can thrive.
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PO: As we take a break from our podcast, I want to tell you about our next event coming up on 13 March 2024 at Moore College. Akos Balogh will be speaking with us about artificial intelligence. AI is obviously being widely embraced across our society. You’ve probably heard of Chat GPT and other AI tools. There’s a lot of concern about how it’s impacting education and other fields. Is it going to get out of control? Is it going to ultimately harm humanity? Should we be alarmed about it?
Akos will help us think as Christians about AI. What does the Bible have to say about how we should think about and use this important technology? How should it, or how might it, affect our faith? We hope that you will join us on 13 March and hear from Akos Balogh, writer and researcher, as he speaks about technology, humanity and theology at this event. Hope to see you there!
And now let’s get back to our program.
What the Bible says about truth
PO: Obviously the heart of the book is an unpacking of what the Bible teaches about truth, and you spend six chapters unpacking that. Obviously the Bible says a lot about truth, and this is not a long podcast, but can you just give us a bird’s eye summary of what the Bible says about truth?
LW: Yeah, that’s right. The three parts of the book are: the cultural critique, which gets very depressing [Laughter]; then the middle bit, which is about the Bible; and the last bit is about seeing how that applies in our lives.
I think I need to summarise the six chapters of the book. I could have written a whole lot more. I just read through the Bible and looked at all the different references to truth. One of the things I was really struck by, and this is the biggest thing that I was struck by as I was doing it, is that there is a word in the Old Testament and that word is a word that’s often translated as “truth”, and it is kind of the word for “truth”. But it’s also often translated “faithfulness”. It kind of means “reliable”: you can rely on it.
My first chapter in the biblical section is about God in the Old Testament. How can you summarise in the whole Old Testament [Laughter]and its view of truth in one chapter? You can’t! But I do my best. There’s two qualities that God often uses to describe himself, and that is “חֶסֶד/hesed” and “אֱמֶת/emet”. “Hesed” means “love”, “loyalty”, “commitment”—it’s a very relational word. “Steadfast love”: we often translate it that way. It’s often a covenant love word. The other word is “emet”, which is “truth”—“faithfulness”. Those two actually come together.
So God is not just a God of fuzzy, emotional love, who just loves you without any understanding of what’s real and true, and God’s also not just a God of abstract truth, who actually has no love or loyalty. He’s actually both. Those words hesed and emet—steadfast love and faithfulness or truth/truthfulness—they keep coming up throughout the Old Testament as a description of God. They go together: it’s like those 3D glasses you wear at the movies where one eye sees one thing and the other eye sees the other thing, and you put this picture together. That’s like hesed and emet: love and truth, truth and love. They come together.
When you come to John’s Gospel, which I look at, John introduces Jesus in his Gospel, and one of the ways he describes Jesus is the “only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Most people think that is a reference to God’s self-revelation: “full of hesed and emet”—steadfast love and truthfulness. All the way through John’s Gospel is all these different aspects of truth that Jesus fulfils.
There’s three big ones: Jesus is true or truthful in the sense that he’s the fulfilment of God’s promises—that idea of faithfulness. He’s true in that sense: he’s true to his promises. He keeps his word. God keeps his word through Jesus. He’s also true in that more big real sense—what’s really true—that more philosophical sense. Jesus is that. There’s also truth in the sense that it’s just true to the facts. There’s just these facts that are true. John’s very big on testimony and eyewitness testimony: this really happened. Jesus really rose from the dead. This is actually true, and here are all the witnesses who can attest. All those things come together in Jesus.
So what John calls us to do is to trust him—have faith in him. The flip side of Jesus’ truth is that we trust—that we have faith. It helps us to understand what faith means: do you trust a true person and the words of a true person?
This means words really matter in John’s Gospel—not because he’s some kind of academic intellectual, but because words are the way that we express our truthfulness, and that’s got to do with relationship and reliability. That’s true of Jesus, and ultimately it’s true in his death on the cross. He’s showing us as he dies on the cross. He comes across a post-truth politician [Laughter]—Pilate—and there’s that really interesting back and forth, where Pilate goes, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). Jesus says, “[I]testify to the truth” (John 18:37). Jesus is all about truth. People say that “truth is power”, and at that point, it looks like power wins over truth. Except actually, truth wins over power in the end. Those things are going on in John’s Gospel.
To cut a long story short, I go and look at the letters of John—especially 1 John, where John talks about truth in various ways in terms of living in light of that truth, but also, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). One of our first responses to truth is to admit that we’re sinners. Christians are fundamentally people who admit that we’re wrong. That’s so different to the world, because in the world, people can’t admit that they’re wrong, because you don’t have any security if you do that. But we can: we can admit we’re wrong. We’re secure, because if we say we have no sin, “we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us”. But “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9), because we have that in Jesus. I see that in 1 and 2 John.
I also look at a few other places. There’s lots of truth in Ephesians: the gospel is defined right at the start of Ephesians as “the message of truth” (Eph 1:13), and that means it’s trustworthy—so we can trust it, but we are also to live together, speaking the truth in love. There’s hesed and emet again. That’s how our community is to be defined. Also, we are to speak the truth to one another.
You see 1 Timothy: it’s full of truth. The truth there is the truth about the world that God has created and the world that God has redeemed. In 1 Timothy, truth is often caught up with living right, healthy, moral lives in this world, because that’s the truth of this world. So when we think about people today who are denying the biological reality of their lives, the truth is the truth of the world, which is created by God. That’s there in 1 Timothy.
Finally, at the end, I look at 2 Corinthians, which is really interesting, because there’s a lot of truth in there, and that’s truth in hard places. It’s where there’s a really fraught situation between Paul and the Corinthians. He shows them how he can hold onto the truth in the midst of these really messy, difficult situations.
There’s lots of other places I could have gone away, but they’re the six chapters I chose.
PO: It’s really striking how much there is in the Bible. It’s not a flat view of the truth as just simply that which is not false. It’s a much richer picture.
Practical implications
PO: The third part of the book is the practical reflection. Can you just tell us some of the ways that you draw out implications of this commitment to truth?
LW: Yeah. Again, it’s really multi-dimensional. I look at things like faith: what does that actually mean? Trusting in Jesus. But I also look at repentance, because repentance is turning to the truth. I also look at the seriousness of lies: sometimes we think that a little white lie or a bit of impression management—bending the truth a little bit, making ourselves look a bit better—that’s okay. But I look at the story of Ananias and Sapphira and see that this is actually really serious for us.
I look at the idea of habits of faithfulness: truthfulness and faithfulness are two sides of the same coin in our lives. The point in my third section is that if we do trust in the Lord Jesus, and we do admit our sin, and we come before him, we actually have the power from him through his Spirit to be different—to live truthfully. Not perfectly, but truthfully. We can actually change—not because the solution is all in us, but because it is all found in Jesus. He can actually change us to live truthful lives. I look at different habits of faithfulness: how can we be faithful? What I mean by that is when we think about truth, in one sense, truth is when our words match what is true. But also, on the flip side, when our actions match what our promises are—when what we do matches our words. That’s faithfulness. So how can we make sure that we’re faithful? It’s just things that I’ve learned and failed in over my life.
Sometimes we make little promises—even tiny ones: “Oh yeah, I’ll meet you at two o’clock” or “I’ll pray for you” or whatever. They’re words, and those words really matter. Sometimes we can treat words very lightly. So when we make those promises, how do we follow up on them and actually keep them? I think about how we can develop habits in that way.
What I didn’t start with, which everyone wants you to go to, is “Is it always wrong to lie?” I deliberately didn’t go there because that’s the philosophical question that everyone goes to in order to look for the loopholes. But I do have a chapter on that and think a little bit about that.
I think about, “Okay: what happens with difficult situations?” People with dementia, questions about warfare, what happens if the Nazis come to your door and you’re hiding someone who the Nazis want. What do you do there? I talk about the Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1:15-21 who lied to Pharaoh and God commended them for it. Why? Well, issues of warfare. But then I go on to say, “Well, actually, when it comes to, say, the spiritual war that we’re win, it won’t work in the spiritual war, because one of the the big weapons that we’ve got in the spiritual war is the belt of truth (Eph 6:14).” If you’re a nation and you’re at war with another nation, I can see why you might be okay to work in the intelligence service, which is deliberately spinning lies. If your job is to lie, I go, “Okay, that maybe is what you’ve got to do.” But that’s not what we’ve got to do in the spiritual war.
If start talking about the culture wars and say, “We’re in a culture wars, so we’ve got to bend the truth a little bit to make sure we win the culture war, or bend the truth a little bit to make sure that we evangelise rightly, and it’s okay to tell little white lies as long as we’re doing the big things.” Well, I’ve heard that said and it’s very, very wrong, because we’re going into battle without our belt. When you go into battle without your belt, you know what happens! [Laughter] So put truth on! Make sure you have the belt of truth on [Laughter] as you’re evangelising and other things.
I talk about our church community: how can we think about communities as well? How can we think about our structures and that kind of thing? How does that work? Why are commitments to one another that are formal—why are they not a bad thing? Why are they good, rather than just the enemy of fellowship or something? Formal commitments are a good thing—like in marriage. Marriage is about making a formal commitment and that’s a good thing for a relationship.
There’s lots of other stuff in there, but that’s what I talk about.
Conclusion
PO: Brilliant, Lionel. Thank you very much. One aspect of the book that we didn’t talk about is technology and truth, and we thought that that actually was worth an episode on its own. We’ll have an episode coming up soon on technology—particularly from this angle of truth. But Lionel, thank you very much for writing the book. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. We really appreciate it.
LW: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure.
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PO: To benefit from more resources from the Centre for Christian Living, please visit ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a host of resources, including past podcast episodes, videos from our live events and articles published through the Centre. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast and for you to leave us a review so more people can discover our resources.
On our website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre.
We always benefit from receiving questions and feedback from our listeners, so if you’d like to get in touch, you can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.
As always, I would like to thank Moore College for its support of the Centre for Christian Living, and to thank to my assistant, Karen Beilharz, for her work in editing and transcribing the episodes. The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.
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Endnotes
1 Barack Obama on objective truth, 2018 Mandela lecture, 21 July 2018: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4844867/president-barack-obama-objective-truth.
2 Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex, Spare (London: Penguin Random House, 2023) part 1 chapter 2 p. 13.
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Bible quotations are also from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by International Bible Society, www.ibs.org. All rights reserved worldwide.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
