When is it appropriate to lie? More pointedly, when is it right to lie in and as a church? Just yesterday I learned that deception is okay when it is in service of outreach to the modern world.
I was at the meeting of a new para-church ministry established to promote a return to biblical-based thinking. The committee is securing spiritual support from local churches and their pastors. One particularly generous church tied their support to the committee’s mirroring of that church’s own ministry directives. The pastor was particularly concerned about the language we would use outside the church. He wanted to insure that our presentation of the Gospel and the Faith would be in “contemporary American vernacular.” Now on the face of it, that seems an unnecessary injunction. I don’t know where he travels, but I never hear anything other than contemporary American in the churches in which I move! Even in those pesky King-James-only churches, folk still speak American!
But all facetiousness aside, something else lay behind his directive, and sure enough it was immediately revealed. To illustrate speaking “in the vernacular,” he drew a parallel between our efforts and those of missionaries on foreign fields. Missionaries, we were told, learn to preach in the “native [sic] language.” In my missionary experience, where there were so many different languages that English was the default lingua franca, one still had to be on guard against using foreign idioms. In our early days in Botswana, I came to recognize that many of my sermon illustrations and stories consisted of things relevant to American culture. So I had to ‘purify’ my English by finding local illustrations and adopting local nomenclatures (lift rather than elevator; cool drink instead of pop, etc.)
However, when it came to preaching—speaking of God, the Bible, and the actual condition of humanity as dead in sin—there was no need of any linguistic transformation. And that realization revealed the agenda behind the injunction to speak in the “American vernacular.” It is not that we needed to learn a new language; after all, we are in the midst of our own people. Rather, we must abandon our old language—the language of theology, God and the Bible. That language is out of step with contemporary culture. Rather than teach the language of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, we must abandon it and seek new approximations for it in contemporary culture.
The reason for doing this was conveyed by another illustration. A story was told of a church in New York that purportedly exploited “liberal language” to mask their “conservative philosophy.” They consciously used language to paint pictures of themselves, their purposes and agendas that did not correspond to reality. They designed their language to ingratiate themselves to the surrounding culture, knowing that if they professed their true beliefs, they would likely alienate their neighbors rather than seduce them into attending. In short, they pretended to be something they weren’t in order to achieve their goal. It was a little deception made palatable by a greater good.
Apparently the strategy succeeded: the church grew in the midst of a community not known for conservative religious values. Therefore we were encouraged to adopt the same plan: drop the language of God and faith, and speak the language of contemporary culture. I suppose that means that instead of sin, we might talk about problems; instead of death and separation from God, we could speak about postmodernity and its loneliness; instead of righteousness, we might talk about compassion. Instead of God and His Word, we could speak of each other and our feelings.
So here we were, a group of Christians impanelled to expose other Christians to a biblical world-view, being encouraged by a pastor to drop biblical language and even fudge our public motives lest we offend those “far from God.” To his credit, I’m sure that this pastor did not derive that strategy independently; he probably read it in a book distributed by some megachurch ministry that he finds inspiring. But whatever its origin, I find it to be both loathsome and cynical.
Christianity is not a content-free spirituality; it is about Truth—transcendent, eternal, personal and objective Truth. How can any deception ever serve the Truth? That such deception might even be considered reveals that some in the church are less in pursuit of a people of the Truth than a large number of people. When one is after a crowd, then truth be damned. One need only reflect on the ministry of Jesus as recorded in John’s gospel: great crowds followed Him until he began teaching the Truth (Jn. 6:1–69). And as it was for Jesus, so too will it be for His disciples.
I have been told that my objection is foolish, even over the top; that this is just a matter of marketing, or of encouraging the church to appropriate the mode of political persuasion. “When one controls the language,” I’m told, “one controls the debate.” That adage conjures up visions of 1984 in my head and it echoes the inauthenticity and cynicism of today’s political discourse. What I hear is that language and words are elastic; their meaning can be shaped and moulded to fit the purpose of the moment. Truth then is no longer an objective reality external to all speakers; meaning and truth lie within the purpose of each speaker. As a result, nothing is a lie when everyone speaks his or her own truth.
Yet what does this mean for those who claim to be people of the Word? What does it mean for those of us who hold to the sovereignty of an eternal, omniscient God? Is the Bible the Word of God. Is it inerrant, infallible and perspicacious? Or must it be re-envisioned by each succeeding generation? Do we believe that culture must submit to God—or must we redefine God by culture? I for one believe that culture should be conformed to the Judeo-Christian revelation and not the other way around. However, I do not pine for a theocracy imposing that revelation on all humanity; but neither will I abide the subjection of the Christian faith to the definitions of pagan secularism. Men do not need to change God’s word to make it acceptable to the lost. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to call men and women to Christ, and it is our job to preach the Truth. We do not need to abandon His Truth as articulated in His scripture in order to reach the people of our time. God is not so addled and inept to have left us in a world where His Word is no longer relevant. If the culture no longer recognizes it, it is not the failure of the Word, but of the church which stopped preaching and teaching it.
I am a man of many faults, a sinner saved by the grace and mercy of God. My sins are numerous; I need no pastoral encouragement to abet them. I will not abandon the language of faith to win this world nor deceive the world to achieve a larger congregation. No lie ever served the Truth. May God have mercy on us all.
