I greatly appreciate Os Guinness' emphasis on truth. (This video may also be accessed at the Lausanne Congress website.)
Following is a transcript of much of Guinness' talk:
. . . At first sight, the biblical view of truth is obscene to modern minds – “it’s arrogant," “it’s exclusive," “its intolerant," "its divisive." It’s "judgmental" and “its reactionary.”
But on a deeper look, the biblical view is profound, timely, and urgent for today, even for those who reject it. But obviously regardless of what the wider world thinks, we follow the One who is "the way, the truth, and the life." We therefore worship and serve the God of truth, whose Word is truth, and who Himself is true and may be trusted because of his covenant faithfulness.
Let me therefore sum up six reasons why truth matters to us supremely, and why those Christians who are careless about truth are as wrong, and as foolish, and as dangerous as the worst skeptics and scoffers of our time:
First, only a high view of truth honors the God of Truth. Too often, truth is considered merely a philosophical issue. For us, the philosophical issues are crucial and always to be taken seriously, but truth is primarily a matter of theology. Not only is our Lord the God who is actually, objectively, really and truly there, so that what we believe corresponds actually to the reality of what is. Our Lord is also the True One, in the sense that He is the One whose covenant loyalty can be trusted, and the entire weight of our existence staked on Him. Those who weaken their hold on truth, weaken their hold on God.
Secondly only a high view of truth reflects how we come to know and love God. Jesus is the only way to God, though there as many ways to Jesus as people who come to Him. But the record of the Scriptures and the experience of the centuries shows us that there are three main reasons why we believe (often overlapping): We come to faith in Christ because we are driven by our human needs. We come to faith in Him because He seeks for us and finds us. And we come to faith in Christ because we are convinced that the claims of Christ and the Gospel of Christ are true. It is because of truth that our faith in God is not irrational. It is not an emotional crutch. It is not a psychological projection, or a matter of wish-fulfillment. It is not the opiate of the masses. Our faith goes beyond reason because there is more to us as humans than our reason, but our faith is a warranted faith because we have come to the firm conviction that it is true. We are those who think in believing, and who believe in thinking.
Third, only a high view of truth empowers our best human enterprises. Skeptics and relativists who undermine the notion of truth are like the fool who cuts off the branch on which he is sitting.
* Without truth, the great enterprise of science and all human knowledge collapse into conjecture.
* Without truth, the vital profession of journalism and our ability to understand the events of the day and discern the signs of the times dissolve into rumor.
* Without truth, the worlds of politics and business melt down into rules and power games.
* Without truth, the precious gift of human freedom becomes license, and all human relations lose the bonding element of trust that is vital at their heart. We then as followers of Christ are unashamed to stand before the world as servants and guardians of a high view of truth, both for our Lord’s sake but also for the highest endeavors of humanity.
Fourth only a high view of truth can undergird our proclamation and defense of the faith. If our Lord is the God of truth, we gladly affirm that "All truth is God's truth." And we therefore welcome all ideas and arguments, and beliefs that pass the muster of God's standards of truth.
But we also know that all humans, including we ourselves, are not only truth-seekers but truth-twisters -- and that because unbelief as St. Paul says, "holds the truth in unrighteousness," we have the grounds as well as the duty to confront false ideas and false beliefs with the assurance that they are neither true in the end, nor are they in the best interests of those who believe them.
And we must never forget that our stand for truth today must start in the church itself. We must resist the powerful seductions of those who downplay truth for methodology, or truth in the name of activism, or truth for entertainment, or truth for seeker sensitivity, and above all those who put a modern and revisionist view of truth in the place of the biblical view.
Whatever the motive of these people, all such seductions lead to a weak and a compromised faith and they end only in sorrow and yet another betrayal of our Lord. To abandon truth is to abandon faithfulness, and to commit theological adultery and to end in spiritual suicide. Let the sorry fate of Protestant liberalism be a stern warning to us all.
Fifth, only a high view of truth is sufficient for combating evil and hypocrisy. Postmodern thinking makes us all aware of hypocrisy but gives us no standard of truth to expose and correct it. And now with the global expansion of markets through capitalism, the global expansion of freedom through travel and technology, and the global expansion of human dysfunctions through the breakdown of the family, we are facing the greatest human rights crisis of all time and "a perfect storm" of evil, including horrendous crimes such as human slavery and trafficking. Both hypocrisy and evil depend on lies - hypocrisy is a lie in deeds rather than words, and evil always using lies to cover its oppressions. Only with truth can we stand up to deception and manipulation. And all who hate hypocrisy, and care for justice and human dignity, and prepared to fight evil, truth is the absolute requirement.
Lastly, only a high view of truth will help our growth and our transformation in Christ. Just as Abraham was called to "walk before the Lord," so we are called to follow "the Way of Jesus." Not just to believe the truth, or to know and defend the truth, but to so live in truth that truth may be part of our innermost beings, that in some imperfect way we become people of truth.
So let there be no uncertainty from this Congress, as followers of Christ and as Evangelicals that if we do not stand for truth, this Congress might as well stop here.
Shame on those Western Christians who casually neglect or scornfully deny what our Lord declared, what the Scriptures defend, and what many brothers and sisters would rather die than deny - that Jesus is "the way, the truth, and the life."
Let us say with the great German reformer, as he said of truth in regard to the Evil One: "One little word will fell him."
Let us demonstrate with our brother, the great Russian novelist and dissident: "One word of truth outweighs the entire world."
If our faith is not true, it would be false even if the whole world believed it. If our faith is true, it would be true even if the whole world were against it.
So let the conviction ring out from this Congress: We worship and serve "the God of truth, and humbly and resolutely, we seek to live as people of truth. Here we still stand, so help us God -
As Evangelicals we are "people of the Good News." But may we also always be People of Truth, worthy of the God of Truth.
God is true. God can be trusted in all situations.
Have faith in God. Have no fear. Hold fast to truth. And may God be with us all.
Note: Os Guinness is the author of more than twenty books on religion, culture and political life, including The Case for Civility and Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Hype, Lies and Spin. He is the co-founder of the Trinity Forum in Washington, DC, and formerly a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies. Dr. Guinness was born and spent his early childhood in China, where he witnessed the climax of the Chinese revolution in 1949; he has since lived in Switzerland, England and the United States. He received his PhD in social sciences from Oriel College, Oxford, and is a frequent speaker to college students, business leaders and government officials around the world.
I have featured other talks of his on my blog before. More audio talks can be found here.