On Absolute Truth

and This Here Actual Earth We All Live On

A young man recently told me he believed in absolute truth. As opposed to what I’m guessing he thought I believed. He never asked…

But I do believe in absolute truth.

So here are some thoughts on truth in our age of liars.

Truth has to do with the real.

Maybe at one time the fight over truth used to be a fight over what is actually real. It is now a fight over who has the most power to determine what everybody will say is real.

And the consequences of a purposeful divorce between what is real and what power says is real is now coming to bear. Every day we hear large swaths of people declaring the opposite of truth – the opposite of what really happened.

There is a term for this – a bully lie. Or a power lie. It is not a lie to deceive. It is not even a lie to convince. It is a lie to determine who has the power and who will win. As writer Masha Gessen writes, we all know that bully who will knock your hat off, put it on his own head and when you ask for it back he will say, “what hat? I don’t have any hat?” And then he will threaten all the bystanders into agreeing with him. For they fear that if they say there is a hat, let alone advocate for the wronged person, they too will be hurt or cast out. Someone like this convinces people to ignore their own eyes, their ears, their critical thinking skills, their own consciences. Someone like this has no regard for any experience other than their own. All for power over. There is no recourse against a bully lie.

You can’t argue with deliberate and obvious lies. There’s no common ground of consensus, no agreed upon reality to appeal to. Maybe that is why a lot of us are no longer spending energy on the socials trying to argue facts – the algorithm isn’t set up for truth – its set up for profit. So many of us are remembering where truth thrives – right in front of our eyes, right in our neighborhoods. (This is the theme for everything after).

Facts have become malleable or even completely irrelevant. There is no agreement on what is real. And there is no attempt anymore. Facebook will not even try to fact check and news outlets that actually do fact check are now called fake news. Media is flooded, lies and truth are treated as though they are equal and people who have been trained to only listen to power will follow whoever speaks the loudest.

But living by lies makes it so we don’t have to listen to each other. We don’t have to believe the weakest among us when they say what is true. Again because no longer does truth rest on the real, but truth rests on who has power and the megaphone. In this age, truth will never again be inconvenient to those who own all the resources… it will never again be glanced at…

What a time to trust in absolute truth. How will we ever speak of such things again?

In the long Christian tradition, truth has to do with what is real. It has to do with what is most human, most humane, what is most gracious and most divine. In the underground christian tradition, that has always run underneath the temples and towers, cathedrals, bishop’s chambers, mega churches and ministry centres, truth is always found close to the ground. The saints of the past that we still talk about were the ones who listened to the truth close to the needs and experiences of the poorest, the most vulnerable, the least pretentious, the most honest - sometimes it was even their own hearts. And their actions still reverberate and inspire. The “christian” leaders who were obsessed with power, might, strength, winning, ‘owning’ the other side? We don’t even remember their names because they, in the end, did not offer anything real.

There’s a story, that christians sometimes remember, about a man, arrested and charged by the religious folks for causing a stir in the public. Now he didn’t incite violence or cheat his neighbors. He didn’t accumulate so much wealth he had no need for anyone – in fact, he did the opposite. He gave all his power away and needed an entire community to help him survive. This man caused a stir by listening to the poorest, believing the most refused, valuing the sickest and despised – and he asked them what they wanted him to do for them – and then he did it. He told to come on in and eat at his Table, that there was a seat there. He forgave their debts. He said and did what was real, not talking points, not even idealism. And He caused an intolerable-to-power stir by taking the locus of power out from the system and putting it in the hearts, bodies, eyes, ears, souls of each person. Even those people, the refused ones.

And so of course he had to be arrested.

And the great authority and power of the time, when he was asked to judge this man unto death, asked him this question:

“What is truth?”

This great man of authority, the judge and arbiter of power at the time, of course was hearing all sorts of things from all sides. So many claims to truth. Those who wanted the disturber to die were telling the judge and each other that he was dangerous. But there nothing real behind that claim and this judge knew it. ‘I see nothing wrong” the authority said. His own eyes told him the truth. But he couldn’t stand up to power nor could he pour out his own power for the sake of another. So he fell in line behind the bully lie and ignored his own real eyes and pretended not to know.

“What is truth anyway?”

Some people will say that this story doesn’t answer the question. His question hangs there – tantalizing us with an almost sane moment in the halls of high and violent power. And it is true –a propositional answer to the question is not given.

But propositions are not always the truth. They can be manipulated to mean whatever you want.

Truth is Real. Incarnate. Experienced. Truth is a body.

Look closer.

The story does answer the question “what is truth?” It does so by having us look at, for an uncomfortably long time, a broken man. A violated man. A bruised human that knows where love is and keeps choosing it. That does not need to defend his own self. Truth is given and it is touchable. This kind of truth condemns the lies of convenience and power by its sheer existence. Which is why then, as now, it has to be silenced.

The truth this One states is the truth about bodies, about human nature and about what happens when small men reign supreme in their made-up kingdoms – this answer is laid out for anyone with eyes to see.

Truth is this embodied human, who perfectly shows us real life. Truth is both/and. Truth is messy reality but one rooted and growing. Truth is this One choosing to offer mercy, hospitality, service, touch, companionship, bread, wine and compassion. Truth is the One needing all these things. Truth is a man who said he would exactly be found among the most ignored, the poor, the foreigner, the stranger, the refused, the ones who need and do not have the resources necessary for full living. Truth is the One that said what you do to them you do to Truth. And truth is a man who makes crystal clear that fulfilling all the laws of God’s universe are bound up in how you treat your not-like-you neighbor. That is truth. And I believe in absolute truth.

We live in systems that lie about this earth, whose it is and who is worth living on it. We live in systems that require us to ignore our senses. We have to make our way in these systems. And it frays our souls. Ideas and beliefs have become modern day gods through which we can justify the punishing of others accordingly. We forgot that a real God becomes the least. It’s a fake god that projects his name onto the sky and demand all take a knee.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer is now famed for his resistance to and murder by nazis and was motivated to his resistance because of the way the church folk of his day distorted the gospel of Christ. He saw the way they lied to people and lied about christianity and he saw that this would destroy everything in his home. But he didn’t start out that way. he started his life as a nationalist, a triumphalist - a christian of his times.

He gave a lecture in 1929 about ethics where he wrote this, “Should not a Volk (a people) experiencing God’s call on its own life... be allowed to follow that call, even if it disregards the lives of other people? God is the Lord of history.” He was preaching that it was ok to disregard the lives of others if it served his own people who he called God’s people. He also wrote in these lectures that love is limited. “It is an utter perversion to believe that my first duty is to love my enemy...it is not possible to love my enemy and my people (my Volk). What I am, I am through my people, so what I have should belong with my people; that is the divine order of things.” Nevermind that Jesus said to love your enemies-Jesus was not what this group was worshipping. (As an aside, that we heard the VP of the states last month say something ominously similar about “ordering our loves” to benefit our in-group should not escape us and should properly horrify us.)

Had Bonhoeffer continued on in this path, he could have likely found himself in the same situation as thousands of other German pastors in the 30’s and 40’s - trying to appease a violent nationalism, that increasingly demanded that people hate their neighbors for the sake of a Divinely ordered system - to the point of violent degradation and genocide.

But Bonhoeffer didn’t continue on this path. In 1930 when he was 24 years old Bonhoeffer took a year-long fellowship to Union Theological Seminary in New York City which offered fellowships to three European students each year.

While he was there he became friends with a man named Albert Fisher, the 6th son of an preaching family from Alabama. Fisher’s grandparents had been slaves and he grew up in the height of lynchings of Blacks in America when over 5000 extra-judicial lynchings of Black men and women happened in the 60 years between 1870 and 1930.

So here’s the thing – Fisher’s christianity and his church in Harlem, Abyssinian Baptist, were fundamentally different than the christianity Bonhoeffer had encountered so far in his life. Fisher understood Christ differently than Bonhoeffer… because he had to. The christ of the lynchers was not the Christ that met Fisher or his family in their suffering. The community here had no divide between their public life and private faith. Fisher had a profoundly different vantage point – from close to the ground as it were. The christ of the nationalist power was not the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount. And it was here, finally here, in a community of learning with others not-like-himself, that Bonhoeffer began to see Christ anew and suddenly the Beatitudes become the key that unlocks reality. That told the absolute truth.

Blessed are the weak, the poor, the humble, the merciful... Suddenly “christian” meant something different than defending a “tribe” you belonged to. Or a system of categorizing people. Or something nice for your heart and life after death but with nothing much to say to now. Suddenly, Creator God was not the creator of hierarchies or ideologies, winners and losers but the creator of redemptive love made visible in the most unlikely and low down of places. Suddenly Grace was not an abstract thing where you punch some sort of “proper thinking” ticket and get to heaven – but God’s costly solidarity with us humans who suffer.

This journey changed Bonhoeffer and he was returned to Germany different. Here is how he wrote of the change himself:

“For the first time, I came to the Bible. That too is an awful thing to say. I had often preached. I had seen a great deal of the church, had spoken and written about it – and yet I was not yet a Christian but... my own master. I do know that at the time I turned the cause of Jesus Christ into an advantage for myself....but..the bible, especially the Sermon on the Mount, freed me from all this. Since then everything has changed.” (Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, 2021, pg 109)

Right before he was arrested for resisting the nazi regime and the nazi church in 1942, he wrote “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and the reviled, in short from the perspective of suffering....that we come to see matters great and small, happiness and misfortune, strength and weakness with new eyes.” (From Bonhoeffer’s essay, Ten Years Later, 1943)

“I would only achieve true inner clarity & honesty by really starting to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. Here alone lies the force that can blow all this hocu pocus [of Nazism] sky high.” (from a 1935 letter to his older brother Karl-Friedrich)

Here alone, in the Sermon on the Mount, lies the force that can truly transform this nationalism, individualism, atomization, polarization, of social and economic disparities, of culture wars and cancel culture and outrage spirituality led by bully liars in chief. Here alone is the force that can blow all this hocus pocus sky high.

What is truth?

The answer in the old story is not a philosophical argument. It is not an uttered word. It isn’t even a belief system. It is not an institution and it is not a systematic theology or diagram.

In a moment of utter humanness, a glimpse into something more real, Truth is declared to be a man who knows exactly what it is like to be harmed and human. Truth declares that in and amongst these ones is where truth will always be found. In the people who live closest to the ground, who do not have the means nor the stomach to pretend life is not a matter of survival, weather, generosity, gift, reciprocal community, letting go, surrender and the choice to choose good. To those who know what is real.

Truth is close to the ground. It is right in front of our eyes. It is found right at the root- where the trunk buries its roots in the humus, and where life unseen becomes tangible nourishment. It is where the human, growing from the adamah of this planet is closest to itself. Truth does not always mean tangible. It does not always mean material. Things happen all the time beyond our apprehension and comprehension. Truth might not be seen but it will always be real.

If you want to get to truth, don’t look to the man behind the curtain. Get to the most real parts of us, the stuff found in the dirt. The parts that need grace, the parts that need mutuality, the parts that are humble, the parts that are wise, the parts that know they will one day die and know that to gain the world and lose a soul is the ultimate death. Read history. Listen to the least. Listen to survivors. Get to the root of things and see how they actually grow. Watch the plants-they are real. See how the birds live – they are real! See how the flowers bloom in season, go to seed then fall to the ground so that life can keep coming again and again. This real world is truth. The one we make up about who is most powerful and who will save us and who speaks for God is not.

How do we be led in truth then?

Get close to the ground and see from below. Believe in this absolute truth.

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If you want to listen to the This American Life episode about truth and lies, it’s worth a listen and will make you uncomfortable in all good ways.

IF you want a good book on Bonhoeffer’s conversion to a Sermon on the Mount Christianity, I highly recommend Reggie L.Williams Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, 2021.

A Homebrewed Christianity podcast from 2020 in which I was first introduced to William’s work can be found here.