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A podcast focusing on issues related to nonviolence, and a member of the Kingdom Outpost.
Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. In our last episode, we explored the importance of immutable truth and discussed what many think is a crazy immoral assertion, that lying is always wrong. Always. Even if, as Kant said, there is a murderer at our door asking the whereabouts of our friend. While there are a number of reasons we could pull out of Kant's thesis in regard to respecting human dignity and autonomy, reason, notions like these, we highlighted 2 major arguments for truth, which are worth recapping here.
Derek Kreider:1st, Kant showed us that justifying a lie for any reason waxes the slippery slope that leads to social disharmony. If we don't uphold reason, if we can compromise on truth, then how can anyone ever trust that they're making rational decisions in any social context? There has to be some foundation of trust and assurance in any given social interaction. How could anyone have any faith whatsoever in the social contract if people can lie for any self justified reason, which we know they would readily do if we accepted lying as justifiable? Because everyone's definition of a justified lie will vary and often self servingly so.
Derek Kreider:To uphold the potential moral goodness of lies is to foster distrust, disunity, illogic, and moral relativism, not to mention its undermining of human autonomy and dignity. Yet Kant also recognized that there was great intuition about the goodness of telling a lie to the unjust murderer seeking to harm an innocent. We pointed out that Kant constantly caveated his thought experiment by recognizing that he was only offering up the truth to a murderer because he was assuming that a response had to be given, which is absolutely unrealistic. In the real world, silence is always an option. And there are also a couple other options, at least one other option besides silence, which, I'll talk about in a future episode.
Derek Kreider:But taking the hardest scenario possible, one in which either truth or lies were required, Kant argued that truth must be given no matter what. In this, Kant differentiated between the action of the murderer and the action of the truth teller. The truth is not in and of itself evil. It's just a fact of the universe. It's what one does with the truth that creates a problem.
Derek Kreider:For you to tell the truth is for you to live out and offer up the ideal world of unity and trust. For you to tell a lie, even to a murderer, is for you to chip away at a good world through the justification that the brick you're taking out of the wall is less structurally significant than the one that the murderer is taking out. But both are evils, and both contribute to the destruction of the world rather than to its edification. Now, Kant made his argument from a non Christian standpoint, which I think is fantastic, but it's also gonna be problematic, I think. In this episode, I'm going to build on Kant's case, and over the next few episodes, we'll be filling in some of the holes that I think exist for him as a secularist.
Derek Kreider:1st, for this episode, let's look at what I think is the backbone for Kant's case and the backbone for the case that I'm going to make against lying today and kind of build off of as we move forward. When we think of the act of lying, what appears to be the problem is not that lying itself is necessarily bad. I mean, why would a lie be inherently deplorable? If I say that the sky is red when it's in fact blue at this moment, the world doesn't stop spinning. I'm not struck dead.
Derek Kreider:Nobody's harmed. So making a false statement isn't in itself destructive. For Kant, lying was deplorable because of the tears that it made into the fabric of the universe, tears into the meaning, autonomy, and rationality that Kant thought were objective and immutable values. Little lies might seem small, but little lies are like little termites. They eat through wood.
Derek Kreider:Termites eat through physical wood, whereas lies eat through ideological and eschatological woods. The world would be a rational place if we didn't lie. The world would be a place where autonomy was valued if we didn't lie to each other. The world would fill in the gap. Lies, like termites, eat through wood.
Derek Kreider:They destroy the foundation and the underpinnings of all that's valuable. In a lie, then, the good one says that they seek to accomplish is betrayed by the compromise of the ultimate, the compromise of the world that would be if one didn't contribute to its destruction and the lie. Lying is like trying to repair or hold up the house by taking bites out of the foundation. It's counterproductive. It does the opposite of what one says that they seek to actually do.
Derek Kreider:Rather than uphold morality and value, lies both big and small end up destroying it, eating away at it. As just the tiniest of examples, let's discuss another common hypothetical that comes up in regard to lying. Much more common than the murderer at the door. Right? And something that people always bring up when you talk about lying.
Derek Kreider:It's the infamous wife's dress. Whenever the topic of lying comes up, people only half jokingly declare that lying can clearly be okay because if a man's wife asks if she looks fat in a particular dress when she indeed does appear fat, the husband is pragmatically, if not also morally bound to affirm her, his wife, with a compliment packaged in a lie. Wouldn't it be mean to tell her that she looked fat? Wouldn't it be unloving? Maybe.
Derek Kreider:But, yeah, the more I study lying, the less I'm convinced that those things would be mean or unloving. If the husband gives the truth, the wife might have hurt feelings, almost certainly so. I would be hurt if my wife told me that I looked fat, even even if I know that I do. Now maybe the wife would resent the husband, and she punishes him by giving him the silent treatment or withholding sex or whatever happens, yelling at him. There may certainly be consequences to the husband telling the truth.
Derek Kreider:But notice that these are all the wife's sins. These are all the wife's issues. Sure. The husband suffers for the truth, but it is the wife who is doing wrong relationally. The husband declared the truth, and the wife is choosing a course of wrongful action towards him.
Derek Kreider:Now this is doubly malicious on the wife's part because she asked a question. Desiring to be told a lie isn't any better than a lie itself. It's an echo chamber problem. It's what we've been talking about all season. It's what propaganda does.
Derek Kreider:It's what Facebook, social media, all that stuff does. It, creates an echo chamber and gives you only what you want to hear. Had the husband given in and told a lie, he would have been feeding into the false perception that his wife had, as opposed to telling the truth. Now I know. I know.
Derek Kreider:You think I'm crazy. But perhaps, if we look at the ideal that lying undermines in the situation, then you can see that a lie is going to carry far worse consequences. Consequences that the husband would actually become responsible for were he to lie. If the husband lies, maybe he buys himself some momentary comfort. But what if his wife gaining weight has been causing him to become sexually less attracted to her?
Derek Kreider:I've had conversations with a number of men throughout the years who have talked about, in private, their, waning attraction for their wife, but they can't tell her. They don't feel like they can tell her that she's gaining weight. In avoiding the truth, a husband here is going to avoid a conversation that probably needs to be had. Now he avoids facing the truth that his sexual attraction is waning, and he avoids working through that difficult truth. Working through that on his part and dealing with maybe faulty expectations of his wife or maybe problematic definitions of what we consider beauty or maybe legitimate health problems for his wife.
Derek Kreider:There and and probably all of the above. You know, he probably has faulty expectations, for, the way that his wife is supposed to look. Faulty expectations for beauty because of propaganda and media as just one thing. But then, also, there are probably health issues for his wife. It's probably all of these things wrapped up in it.
Derek Kreider:But that conversation needs to be had. Stuffing all that stuff is going to lead, at best, to diminish sexual intimacy and frequency, and at worst, to maybe the husband seeking sexual fulfillment elsewhere in the dissolution of a marriage. If the wife is gaining weight, the husband's lie may end up endangering her health. If a lack of affirmation might actually be what the wife needs in order to recognize that her metabolism and body are changing, and she needs to change her lifestyle, then a lie is going to avoid confronting the wife with information that she needs to hear, though maybe she doesn't want to. Information that might spur her on to living a more healthy lifestyle, which might end up prolonging her life and her relationship with her husband.
Derek Kreider:It might increase her comfort, might heighten her sex drive and their intimacy. Psychologically or sociologically, treating is treating one's wife as if she can't handle certain true information, that's paternalistic, isn't it? While eating disorders and the likes are always something that we need to consider and and we need to be gentle about, being told the truth in a loving relationship ought to be a positive relationship building event. To treat a woman as though she's too frail to handle true information should be something anyone who values the dignity and equality of women, that that should be a problem for those people who hold to that position. Women should be able to to handle the truth.
Derek Kreider:Right? Yet a lie does all of these things. It it patronizes them, and it fails to treat them as rational beings. Also, as Kant pointed out, to lie to one's wife about her appearance undermines her autonomy, and that she then doesn't have all of the information she needs to make the best rational choice. Choices as simple as what dress to wear tonight to much more weighty choices like how to handle her health or how to work through her marital relationship and sexual attraction.
Derek Kreider:If a wife doesn't know what her life partner thinks and she only has her self deception to work with, then Anana's second opinion on on her appearance may be what's needed to make the most rational choice on her part. So a lie in this seemingly simple, benign, comedic scenario, it might provide a husband and wife with temporary comfort. But there are a whole host of relational and physical, short term and long term, small and significant consequences which result from a lie. Now does that mean that the husband should have no tact if his wife asks him how she looks in a dress, or should he just go around telling his wife every time he thinks she looks fat? No.
Derek Kreider:Probably not. The truth is best told in the context of a strong and safe relationship and in ways which seek edification. It's not in the purview of this episode to get into all of that. I, as a married man, am still trying to figure out all of these things, relational things with, both my wife and my children. How do you deal with with, things and and sensitivities and emotions?
Derek Kreider:That's challenging. But please just know that it's a straw man if you're gonna act like I'm telling you that husbands should just call out their wives for being fat at every chance that they get or vice versa. So what is the point here? The point is that when we lie for some good we hold in our minds, in the case of the wife's dress, for example, the good of our wife's self image or the comfort and ease of our relationship, at least short term anyway, then when we do that, we actually end up only propping up fleeting and secondary things, momentary comfort and self perception, while simultaneously undermining deep meaningful relational structures like autonomy, physical well-being, relational intimacy, sexual intimacy, sexual fidelity, trust, and I'm sure a host of other things that I'm missing. A lie seems to work, which is why everyone always brings up the lying to a murderer at the door.
Derek Kreider:A Nazi looking for a Jew or a wife asking about her dress. Those are all situations where people are like, well, yeah. Of course, you lie. Lies might often be bad. We can admit to that, but there seems to be these clear cases where they just they work.
Derek Kreider:And they do work sometimes in the sense that they do obtain certain results, often results that feel good in the moment. They lies definitely obtain something, but that something that they may obtain is always eclipsed by the ideals and values they sacrifice as we just saw with the wife's dress. What Kant argued for, and what I'm going to continue arguing for in this episode, is that the truth is always better for obtaining the ultimate things, the ultimate values. My hope, though, is that I'll extend Kant's argument here, because I think Kant is missing at least one key aspect in his argument, and that is a grounding for his values. So I'll try to defend my accusation against Kant's lack of grounding over the next few episodes.
Derek Kreider:But in this episode, I wanna focus on the positive case for the grounding, of value in truth. In this episode, I wanna introduce a concept that I think is going to encapsulate in one word what I'm going to explain in the rest of this episode through many words. And this is a concept that I've actually been mulling over for a long time, but I didn't know that there was actually a term for it until just a few months ago when I was reading through doctor William Witt's work on the Atonement of All Things. In that work, Witt brought up a term, and I'm probably gonna say it wrong because I've only ever seen it written, and I haven't actually heard it other than, like, there are a million different, websites that try to pronounce things for you, but none of them could agree on it either. So, anyway, the the pronunciation I'm going with here is Eudaemonism.
Derek Kreider:Now there seem to be several variations of meaning for this word. Yeah. All the way back to, like, Greek thought and stuff. But the way that I'm gonna use it and the way that I think, you know, Witt presented it in the book, the gist of of the brand that I'm going with is essentially this. Three words.
Derek Kreider:Doing good works. Not not doing good works. Doing good works, like, functionally. It actually works to do good. And while I don't know how much of a foundation Kant would have had for thinking this way from a secular position, as a Christian, this type of thinking just makes perfect sense.
Derek Kreider:If I believe that a good God created a good world, I'd expect that doing good would produce harmony. Shalom. Right? He'd make his world to work in line with the good. Right?
Derek Kreider:You'd you're gonna get better results by doing good. You're gonna get functioning relationships, health, everything. Of course, Christians believe we now live in a fallen world, so telling the truth to a murderer at your door looking for your friend or to your wife who may soon become a murderer at your door looking for you if you tell the truth, It's the truth might not always work out well in this fallen world. But truth is not only an integral component of God's good world. It's gonna be a functional one too.
Derek Kreider:It produces better results. And before I move on, I have to caveat this brand of eudaemonism from 2 other ideas that you might conflate with it. Consequentialism and the Prosperity Gospel. Both of these eudaiministic counterfeits are anathemas, and I hate them. They produce nothing but rotten fruit, yet they'd be easy to confuse with eudaiminism.
Derek Kreider:First, the prosperity gospel is an idea that says if you follow God, then good blessings will come to you. If you send in $1,000 to the sleazy televangelist, God's gonna bless you with a 7 fold bounty. That's not eudaimonism. That's karma. That is guaranteeing that God is going to give you something in return for your actions.
Derek Kreider:Eudaimonism doesn't say that at all. Right? Because in the prosperity gospel, me sending in money has nothing to do with me getting money back. Like, there there's no coral causation, correlation, mechanism. Like, it just doesn't make sense.
Derek Kreider:So eudaimanism doesn't say that. By the way, eudaemonism says is that the world function in a particular way so that if you do something like say nice things to and love an enemy, that is going to foster better relationships and less violence than if you up the ante through harsh words and violent confrontation. Because of the way we emotional creatures, we humans were created to be, interacting with a human in a loving manner is going to tend to produce better results in God's good world than if you use violence and harsh words. There's there's correlation causation there that, like, they work together. It's not like the sending in $1,000 and miraculously getting 7,000 back.
Derek Kreider:Again, eudaemonism versus Karma there. Now the second notion that people conflate with eudaemonism is consequentialism. Consequentialism says that something is good because it produces good results. So if something ends up working, then it's christened as good. This is just the ends justifying the means, and that's not how eudaemonism works.
Derek Kreider:Eudaemonism would say that when something is good, it tends to work. On consequentialism, however, the outcome is objective, and what is good is subject to change. The results are determined before the good so that the good can then be determined. On eudaemonism, the good is always gonna be the objective. Now both of these bastardizations, consequentialism and the prosperity gospel pivot on the definition of the notion of what works.
Derek Kreider:Most of the time, people are going to define what works as either a will to power or a will to pleasure. And, honestly, these two things really go hand in hand and have all sorts of manifestations. Right? Political or social status can help one to grow rich, which in turn helps one to maximize pleasure and control. Likewise, becoming wealthy can help one to have more control over life and probably become more politically influential.
Derek Kreider:It goes both ways. Consequentialism then scoffs at the idea that something like never lying actually works because works is going to be defined as power or pleasure. It was in 2016 that I realized this is exactly the struggle I was having with my Christian community. My white evangelical community determined that good was that which could secure them political power, and what would not have been good a decade before, all of a sudden became labeled as good in the twinkling of an eye. And you know what?
Derek Kreider:It worked. The Republican candidate was elected. Evangelicals grasped power. Yet if you look at what's been happening to evangelicalism since then, the decline there went from a graded slope to a precipice. Scandal after scandal, deconstructionist after deconstructionist, and growing cultural animosity towards evangelicals.
Derek Kreider:Animosity, of course, labeled as undue persecution against innocent and righteous lands, it it hit a fevered pitch. So if 4 years of power is what defines works, then consequentialists can have their 4 years. But that's not what you demonists it's not what Kant. It's not what I'm talking about when I say when we say what works. We're not talking about momentary power or pleasure.
Derek Kreider:We're talking about universals, ideals, values, meaning. A will to meaning. I think the parable, parable of the prodigal son elucidates this idea well. So the prodigal son disrespected his family by asking for his father's inheritance early. He was essentially saying, hey, dad.
Derek Kreider:I really want your money now even though you're not dead. So could you keel over for me and, like, cough up your money? Because I basically wish you were dead. That's what the son was saying. I wish you were dead.
Derek Kreider:He left home with money in hand, and he lived it up in the city, surrounded by supposed friends. He had money, which gave him control, status, pleasure, social interaction with with people who pretended to be his friends. But when his money ran out, he ended up returning home, only to find that the father who had raised him, nurtured him, clothed him, and fed him was still there to do it all again at the lowest point in the son's life when he didn't deserve it. And no matter what the prodigal son did, he had a foundation of meaning. He had a family or at least his dad who would always love him and be there for him.
Derek Kreider:The son explored the will to power and the will to pleasure, and it worked for a time. Right? He found that his actions to obtain these things, they did work. They seemed to, but then he just as quickly found out that what seems to work to maximize power and pleasure is fleeting, and it's a will to meaning that is truly valuable. A will to meaning is the bedrock upon which true and lasting pleasure and control can be obtained.
Derek Kreider:Another great place you can go to get a glimpse of this concept of a will to meaning is in Viktor Frankl's book entitled Man's Search For Meaning. It's a really beautiful book that gets inside the heads of some Nazi concentration camp survivors. One of Frankel's thoughts from the book reminded me of a crossroads that the prodigal son came to. Frankel wrote about how prisoners would sometimes obtain cigarettes as part of their rations or for various work details that they had. Of course, cigarettes did one no good.
Derek Kreider:What the prisoners really needed was food because they were only given something like 10 ounces of bread a day and maybe some broth or something. Cigarettes then were for trading. You'd trade them to the guards or maybe to other inmates for, for food in order to survive. Frankl said that whenever they saw a man smoking a cigarette, they knew he had less than 48 hours to live. Why?
Derek Kreider:Because he'd given up hope just as the prodigal son had given up home. Right? He gave up his will to meaning and had embraced the fleeting will to pleasure. For the concentration camp prisoner, that change in wills was deadly. But things didn't turn out quite so bleakly for the prodigal son because he, at the crossroads, chose differently.
Derek Kreider:Luke says that the prodigal son was, quote, longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, end quote. Of course, that's disgusting to eat the remains of a cow that the pigs had eaten off of and that had been slopped in the mud. That's disgusting. But for a Jew, it would have been infinitely more disgusting considering that an unclean animal, a pig no less, had, come in contact with his food. Yet the prodigal son, in his longing to satiate his senses with the basest food that could be imagined, recognized that his life held more meaning than to stoop to satisfy his longing with what would have only been a temporary reprieve.
Derek Kreider:Instead of smoking the cigarette or eating the defiled cob, the son turned towards home and towards his good father. Now all of this is really just a long way of saying that, well, you might think Cont and I are crazy for the positions that we hold on lying. My bet is that if you do think that, you have a difference and what I'd call a skewed definition of the idea of what works. You might think that you define what works as a will to meaning, but in reality, I think you define it as some amalgamation of power and pleasure in the positive or in the negative sense, the avoidance of pain and discomfort for you or someone else. Telling the truth, doing what's good, it's not worth it because it's gonna lead to some, some pain.
Derek Kreider:And I'm sure you're chomping at the bit right now for me to try to make my case that Never Lying actually obtains greater meaning because you don't think that the case can be made, especially when it comes to murderers at your door. And we'll get there. Trust me. But before we do, I want to show you a parallel example that I think is going to help us when I try to show you how Never Lying obtains Meaning. I wanna look at the instance of martyrdom.
Derek Kreider:And what, if anything, does martyrdom obtain? It doesn't work. Right? It's pointless. It ends a life and prevents any more meaning from being created by the martyr.
Derek Kreider:Yet it was an early church father, Tertullian, who declared that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. It was Telemachus, a martyr who supposedly brought an end to much of the gladiatorial contest in Rome through his martyrdom in the arena. How is it that martyrs can obtain with their one life the lives and well-being of multitudes for generations to come? The martyr may embrace a refusal to dehumanize their enemies. Maybe they refuse to deny reality.
Derek Kreider:They might refuse to devalue their convictions. They display a bold confidence. There are any number of ways that a martyr with their spiritual capital redeems the lives of many. For while this world is being expunged for the martyr, another world is simultaneously being put on display by them for those looking on. And here, right here, is that foundation of would that we talked about at the beginning of the episode.
Derek Kreider:Martyrs display what would be if everyone lived as they did. What the martyr believes works. What is valuable and what is meaningful is made evident by their courage, their faithfulness, and integrity in facing even the most gruesome of ends. Their means of integrity displays their true and ultimate end embedded in their very own ending. They put on display ultimate, immutable, and pure ideals through their living out of a will to meaning.
Derek Kreider:How could someone with a will to pleasure or a will to power ever compete with eternal and incorruptible things like those put on display by a martyr? The aging and decrepit former philanderer and the weakened and impotent dictator may have had a few good decades, or so it seemed. But by the end of their lives, there's nothing left but rubble. They're pathetic. There's no eternal there.
Derek Kreider:Unlike the martyr, it's the persecutor who displays that their system doesn't work, because the persecutor displays insecurity, hate, violence, dehumanization, and an extreme sensitivity to opposition. Ironically, in trying to erase the meaning of another, the persecutor displays their own meaninglessness and allows the martyr to put their values and meaning on full display. So if we're gonna sit here and say that what works is defined as pleasure or power, we completely miss what actually plays out here in the vacuity and hopelessness of a persecutor's actions or in the deep meaning of the martyr's actions. Okay. Let's switch over to the concept of lying now, but keep that Martyrdom example, that parallel in the back of your head.
Derek Kreider:Let's now consider Kant's murderer at the door. What does lying entail? Lying may work, but it also might not, as Kant himself shows. You know, people often act as though lying is going to save your friend, while not lying won't. But that claim is just wholly unsubstantiated.
Derek Kreider:You know, the government says that that torture works and that and people say that lying works, but I think lying and torture really run-in the same vein. Everybody everybody thinks that they work when they really if if they're truthful, which I guess if you're a liar, you probably aren't. But if you're truthful about it, you're gonna say, yeah. It you know, maybe it's 5050, maybe. But lying just it doesn't it's not as effective as people think.
Derek Kreider:So maybe lying works. Let's just assume that maybe it does, but it might not. But we know that lying dehumanizes a person. We know that. It reduces autonomy.
Derek Kreider:We know that. It undermines the social contract. We know that. It embraces and displays a world that should not be. We definitely know that one.
Derek Kreider:It justifies the known means by the hypothetical and wildly optimistic ends. I mean, that's the story of of every election, at least in the United States. You know, every 4 years, all these promises of how this is the most important election ever. And that's exactly what it's doing. It's saying, you can compromise on all of these values that this party is going to, be against, you know, for these 1 or 2 really big things that are important.
Derek Kreider:Right? We need to do it. We're we're gonna do all these wonderful things. We're gonna get you this. And rarely, if ever, do they.
Derek Kreider:For a Christian, of course, there's even more reason not to lie. Lying contradicts the character of God himself, and the embracing of evil displays our lack of faith in God. It shows that we either believe that God is powerless to save us or that God isn't deserving of our faithfulness no matter what. How pathetic must we look to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who were facing a fiery furnace and, maintained integrity, and we, we we face the truth and resist it. It's just not the way that that the Bible portrays morality.
Derek Kreider:Right? As something that we compromise on. One of my, favorite stories that kind of displays this sort of thing is kind of an aside, and we might talk about it in future episodes too. But, Corrie ten Boom, she's, got a famous book called The Hiding Place, and I I actually she wrote another book. I forget what it's called at this point, but I'll try to put it in the show notes.
Derek Kreider:But I liked it way better than, than The Hiding Place. It was just fantastic. But, anyway, Corrie ten Boom was, with her family hiding some Jews, and some Nazis came in and were were asking about them. And her sister, she was against lying ever. And the sister I forget exactly what happened, but, I think one of the one of the sisters actually, like, told the truth.
Derek Kreider:Like, they're hiding under that table. And when she did, the, the other sister or she herself, I don't remember who, but just started cracking up laughing. You know, that's that's kind of how I react when my parents would get me in trouble. Even if I didn't do something, like, I'd just start I'd start laughing. And it wasn't because I was being disrespectful.
Derek Kreider:It's just there's something about, like, being caught. I don't know. It makes you kinda cackle. Or maybe I was meant to be an evil villain. I don't know.
Derek Kreider:But, anyway, the sister started cackling, and and the Nazis were like, you guys are just making fun of us. Right? They told the truth and then started laughing, and the Nazis were like, you you're just making fun of us. Yeah. Yeah.
Derek Kreider:You're gonna tell us that they're under the table. Okay. We're out of here. And, of course, the 10 booms got caught later, but they didn't get caught at that moment when they they told the truth. They, they were able to get out of that by the grace of God.
Derek Kreider:Now does that happen every time? Almost certainly not. Right? But our job is to maintain faithfulness and and not to compromise, and God can save us in situations like that if he so chooses. So as you can see from this story, refusing to lie doesn't always entail its opposite, revealing the full truth in in a serious fashion.
Derek Kreider:Right? You can also be comedic, and we'll also get into deception in future episodes too. Now something like silence can preserve, preserve the good while putting on display a fidelity to human life. So that's another option. The point for now is that refusing to lie works if, by works, we mean it creates and embraces a will to meaning.
Derek Kreider:Integrity, no matter what, works in a eudemonic fashion, in that it fosters a world that eschatologically will one day be by providing, through our integrity, a foretaste of what would be if only we'd all refuse the evil for the good. People recognize the importance of integrity and lone voices elsewhere. I've seen this, this meme come up quite a lot. Be the matchstick that steps out of the line, you know, and you you end the fire from spreading. Or be that German citizen who speaks up to the Nazis when all your neighbors are silent, right, when when evil prevails, when good men do nothing.
Derek Kreider:Be the one person with a camera and a voice when you're witnessing police brutality against someone else, even if it means harm for yourself or threats from the police. Those things might cost you, but if everyone just goes along and embraces evil, what would the world be? You be that one person who stands out and sets the example of what the world would be if everybody did what you did, if everybody had integrity. I mean, you don't get to pick and choose your morality, at least from a Christian standpoint, But that begs the question. If you should speak when your neighbor's autonomy is being violated by the gestapo, shouldn't you speak up when it's being violated by a lie?
Derek Kreider:Now whether we realize it or not, most Christians are consequentialists who typically have a will to power. I mean, just look at the run Christendom has had in the West. It doesn't take much digging through history or even modernity to see the death grip Christianity has had on the sword. But that will to power only lasts so long until a death grip turns into death throes. We'll have to see how things play out, but even as a Christian, I, like Kierkegaard, think the demise of Christendom is gonna be a good thing in the end.
Derek Kreider:Christendom's will to power is so antithetical to the message of Jesus. I don't know that the world can pick out Christ from much of Western Christianity that embraces Christendom. For the sake of analogy, let's switch over to art and imagine that Christians, because they ought to have the clearest picture of the world as God intended it to be, let's just say that Christians are the best painters for the sake of analogy. They're the best painters in the world. Imagine that these Christians, these painters, all of a sudden decided to quit painting.
Derek Kreider:They got this bright idea that because they loved art so much, they were actually going to spend their time and resources not painting, but taking over society. But don't worry. The paintings wouldn't stop. These Christian painters were taking over society so that they could force everyone else, all the non painters, to start painting. Painters love painting so much.
Derek Kreider:They're going to make everyone paint, Even if that meant that the natural born and professionally trained artists were no longer painting, but politicking. Even if they had to coerce and force painting on people. Even if the non painters didn't want it, or didn't have the skill set to do it. Even if they had to destroy priceless paintings so that there would be more incentive to produce new art, it would all be worth it so that everyone could paint. Can you imagine the resentfulness the world would have towards art and painting and painters?
Derek Kreider:Can you imagine the low quality of art that would be produced in such a society? Now I'm obviously not talking about Christians painting real paintings here. I'm speaking of Christians painting with the brush of morality and eschatology. We Christians say that we believe in a good God who created a good functioning world, so we should have the best vision of, of that world and the best vision by which to depict the ideal through the living out of our lives, through displaying that on the canvas of life. We shouldn't, as Christendom and the will to power have done, quit painting the ideal in an attempt to try to force everyone else to live out the ideal that we proclaim, even though we ourselves refuse to live it out because we're too busy politicking and having a will to power.
Derek Kreider:We don't live out the ideal that we proclaim because we don't really think it works. And the only reason it wouldn't work is either either because God doesn't exist as a creator. He doesn't exist as wise, or he doesn't exist as good. If a good, wise, and loving creator, God exists, then eudaemonism, a life always seeking the good, it works. Her job as Christians then is to faithfully represent the world that truly is.
Derek Kreider:The world that would be if everyone could see the painting. They could see reality clearly. I think this sort of sentiment is offered up in an early Christian document called the letter to, or the epistle to Diognetus. I wanna quote it at length here because I think it's a beautiful summation of what I'm trying to convey. The epistle says, quote, what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world.
Derek Kreider:The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body, and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible. The flesh hates the soul and wars against it, though itself suffering no injury, because it is prevented from enjoying pleasures. The world also hates the Christians, though in no wise injured, because they abjure pleasures.
Derek Kreider:The soul loves the flesh that hates it and loves also the members. Christians, likewise, love those that hate them. The soul is imprisoned in the body, yet keeps together that very body, and Christians are confined in the world as in a prison, and yet they keep together the world. The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle, and Christians dwell as sojourners in corruptible bodies, looking for an incorruptible dwelling in the heavens. The soul, when, but ill provided with food and drink, becomes better.
Derek Kreider:In like manner, the Christians, though subjected day by day to punishment, increased the more in number. God has assigned them this illustrious position, which it were unlawful for them to forsake. End quote. Woah. That last part.
Derek Kreider:God has assigned them this illustrious position, which it were unlawful for them to forsake. Doesn't that sum up what we've just been saying so well? Christians are the soul of the world or at least ought to be. We're the painters depicting reality. Contrary to what the will to power or the will to pleasure tells us, the true painters canvas is often the canvas of suffering, just as we saw with the martyr.
Derek Kreider:Suffering destroys all but the truest of the true that with ultimate meaning and value. There's a famous story of another artist, in this case, sculpting rather than painting, and that story is of Michelangelo working on the famous statue of David. According to some accounts, Michelangelo said something like, quote, in every block of marble, I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine sees it, end quote. Well, Michelangelo probably didn't say that.
Derek Kreider:There's a quote that's more probable which says something similar, though it wasn't specifically about the great statue of David, and it wasn't wasn't quite, you know, so so wonderful of a statement, but it's still really good. Quote. The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there. I just have to chisel away the super superfluous material, end quote.
Derek Kreider:Now whether Michelangelo said either of these statements or not, I think that we can recognize that great artists like Michelangelo have a knack for doing this very sort of thing. They see as existent reality what we, the unartistic, couldn't even imagine in our minds. For the artist that it already exists, and for us, we can't even picture it. Like, we can't see it until it it's actually there before us. Yet after the artist creation is completed, it looks so easy, and we can't imagine that it would have been any other way.
Derek Kreider:Artists give us a vision for what was there all along. We just couldn't see it. So it is with suffering and meaning. Suffering whittles and chips away at our hearts and lives of stone. It forces us to come face to face with the choice of whether we'll seek meaning or not, whether we'll eat the cob, the pig strip clean, and smoke the cigarette, or whether we'll return home to our good father.
Derek Kreider:We can choose to embrace and identify with the statue of David that the chisel of suffering is leaving behind and reveal a magnificent sculpture to the world. Or we can identify with the discarded rubble and dust destined for oblivion. Truthfulness, while seemingly inconsequential at times, is a part of the vision for the good, meaningful, valuable, ideal life. Seemingly trivial lies or lies that actually seem to obtain a greater good are easy to embrace if we fail to understand the foundation of a world that must be built to support the priceless, massive, heavy, yet fragile statue of meaning woven into the fabric of the universe. A statue that suffering and those made to suffer are able to reveal more and more into the world.
Derek Kreider:But such a work can only be created and put on display by those who harbor a foundation, a scaffold of wood. Jesus, on such a scaffold, once held on his back the world that he created with his hands. Christians are invited to erect the same wooden scaffolds in the same shape that of a cross. The servant is not greater than the master. On our scaffolds, in our suffering, through our unwillingness to compromise integrity or to deny meaning, the world will see one even greater than David put on display.
Derek Kreider:David's son, the Christ. The world will see that what would be, once was, and is, and is yet to come. That's all for now. So peace. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.
Derek Kreider:This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living.