Why We Hunger for the Truth

Well is a pleasure to be with you all again. Uh, as a Protestant and Presbyterian, I was kind of shocked to see myself on the advertisement for the Napa Institute just now, but also felt somewhat honored. It is always an honor and a pleasure to be here to speak to you all.

And something interesting always happens when I come to Napa, and this year it happened early. It happened yesterday. I’ve always regarded LAX as evil. Uh, I don’t think it would have existed before the Fall, that’s for sure. And they managed to conspire to make sure that my wife and I did not make our connection having flown in from DC to San Francisco and could not guarantee getting us here before late this afternoon.

So my wife noticed a Catholic priest in the problem line and asked if he was going to Napa, and he was. And so we rented a car and drove eight hours. And I thought that, yeah, there’s a—a Presbyterian minister, a Dominican friar, and the minister’s wife in a car driving through the heartland of California. It was quite an eight hours. So we talked about everything, I think, from Bruce Springsteen to rival models of Thomism in the late 20th century. So it was—it was fun for me and him. My wife slept in the back.

Why We Hunger for Truth

But I’ve been given the task of speaking on why we hunger for truth. Having listened to Monsignor Shea’s excellent talk just now, it seems to me that much of what I say will—will dovetail quite nicely with what he said. It’s always a little worrying when I see that I’m speaking after somebody so sharp and talented. I—I hope that what I say does not contradict what he says, because I would certainly be wrong. But I think the connections between what we say will hopefully reinforce the overall message.

Cultural Christianity

A question of truth, and the question of hunger for truth, seems to me is one that is becoming more pressing and in some ways more encouraging in recent days. In the last 12 to 18 months, a number of people that one would not associate with any sympathy with Christianity whatsoever have come out with statements of varying degrees of sympathy for Christianity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has declared herself a convert to Christianity. Those of you who know her history will know that she was closely associated with the so-called New Atheists, who were in their heyday maybe 14 or 15 years ago. Richard Dawkins, of all people, has recently declared himself to be a cultural Christian. I think he sees the way that some of the radical progressive ideologies of our day have simply torn away basic commonsensical truths. It’s left him thrashing around for some way to answer these ideologies.

And then this week, after I had actually already formulated this talk in my head, Elon Musk came out and declared himself to be a cultural Christian. And what I want to do is—is use that as my introduction and then reflect upon why this might be the case. Is it encouraging? And how we might respond?

And as a close friend of Fran Maier, I can—I can give you a—a heads-up on the second: is it encouraging? Say, no, not really. Uh, we’re generally fairly pessimistic guys. But I think there’s something here that we can capitalize on.

Created for Truth

So, first of all, a bit of background—and here I will touch on some of the things I think that Monsignor Shea just said. Uh, we are—I would state as a basic fact of anthropology—we are made to pursue truth. And that is grounded in the fact that we are created, as Monsignor pointed out. We are created in the image of God.

I would add to that that the image of God is—is not something that is added to us after creation. The image of God is intrinsic to who human beings were from the very beginning. It’s not as if we are like every other creature on the face of the planet and then God has given us this extra bonus, this image of God. No—we are created in the image of God.

The Rational, Relational, and Teleological Human Person

And theologians often talk about the image of God in a number of ways. They are not mutually exclusive, I don’t think. But some theologians might emphasize the rational dimension of being a human being—that we are the one creature on the planet that can freely think rationally about things.

Other animals may appear to behave acting rationally, but they behave instinctively. The rat knows that when you’ve set the trap for it not to go near it, not because he thinks logically about the trap, but simply because his instinct tells him it wasn’t there yesterday. It wasn’t there yesterday. Whereas we as creatures are rational.

Other theologians emphasize the relationality of the image. God is Trinitarian, and we are creatures made to be in free relation with other creatures. We take delight—again, as the Monsignor has already mentioned—we take delight in things like friendship. Our marriages are deep and mysterious. Even sexual attraction, properly ordered, is deep and mysterious in the sense that we don’t desire somebody else in general—we typically desire that particular person. We are a deeply relational creature.

And these things are true. But I want to add a third dimension—doesn’t contradict these, but it’s complementary to them. I want to say that we are also supernaturally teleological beings as well. We are created to move toward God.

The Chief End of Man

Now, as a Presbyterian, I hope you’ll indulge me here. I’m going to read from question one of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which is the standard document that Presbyterian parents will teach Presbyterian kids. But question one, I think, is a question and an answer that all Christians everywhere should be able to affirm. And the question is this: What is the chief end of man? What is the chief—the main, the primary—end of man?

And the answer is really quite beautiful. The answer is this: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

I read the Catholic theologian Doug Farrow a few years ago—one of his books—and he makes a beautiful point that man is a worshiping creature. Human beings are designed to worship. It’s really just another way of saying: designed to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Human beings have ends. And our end is truth. And truth, of course, has various dimensions, but it is incarnated in the Lord Jesus Christ. We are made in the image of God—but Christ is the perfect image of God.

What does that mean? That means that he reveals in his person true humanity. We are those who find our true humanity in that filial communion with God that the second person of the Trinity enjoys from all eternity.

Christ is both the manifestation of truth, the exemplar of truth, and also, in his act as Savior, he’s the means of us achieving that truth as well.

Truth is Propositional—and More

We might divide this truth that we are to pursue into a number of categories. It’s certainly propositional—that’s probably the way that most people think of the notion of truth. They think of what philosophers would call the correspondence theory of truth: when a statement is made that actually reflects a true state of affairs.

And certainly Christian theology always has propositional truth. John Henry Newman in his Apologia, right at the beginning when he’s talking about his Protestant phase—he’s talking about when he was converted to Protestantism as a 15-year-old—and he’s reflecting on what unites his early faith to his mature faith, and he makes the comment that he has always considered Christianity to be a dogmatic faith. It’s not some kind of liberal romantic feeling.

At the core of Christianity: propositional statements about who God is and how he relates to us.

And yet, that truth is not abstract in the way that 2 + 2 = 4 is an abstract truth. Christian truth is also deeply relational.

When Christ says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, he’s not simply saying I’m a set of propositions. He’s saying, “I manifest and embody in my incarnate person deep, eternal truths about God and truths about humanity.” Many things one could say there, but I would say this: one of the things that Christ brings out there, certainly in his incarnate life, is how dependent he is in his human nature upon his Father. He reveals that eternal relationship between Father and Son.

Theological Truth Draws Us Toward an End

Christian truth, I’ve said, is also theological. It draws us towards an end. Christian truth is not just about the things we believe; it’s about the direction, the destiny of our lives as well. So hold that in mind.

That’s then the reason why we hunger for truth. We might say we’re designed that way. Human beings are not designed to be independent and autonomous—which underlies so many of the modern religions and ideologies that make so much noise in our culture at the moment. Human beings, by virtue of being made in the image of God, are designed to be dependent and to be moving towards glorifying him and enjoying him forever.

And yet, I would say we need to add some qualification to this—qualification, of course, connected to the Fall. And I want to spend a few minutes reflecting here upon the significance of the Fall. The great narrative of the Fall, of course, is Genesis chapter 3. Eve takes the fruit, she eats of it, she gives it to Adam—she breaks the rules.

Detaching Beauty and Utility from Morality

There are a number of things one could say about the Fall, the narrative of the Fall. One of them would be this: Eve is not entirely wrong. Eve makes a couple of correct judgments before she eats the fruit. One correct judgment she makes is that the fruit is pleasing to the eye. The fruit is attractive. Nothing in the text would suggest that the fruit is not attractive. And indeed, if it was not attractive, it would be hard to understand how the serpent’s temptation had proved so successful. The whole tilt of the text, I would say, is that she’s correct—this is very attractive-looking fruit. This is a very shiny red apple, if it was an apple, if you like.

Secondly, she makes a correct utilitarian judgment—or judgment of utility. She sees that it would be good for food. And the fact that she and Adam don’t spit it out, the fact that she and Adam don’t die of food poisoning, that would seem to suggest that nutritionally the fruit that she’s looking at is, yes, good for food. If it wasn’t tasty and delicious, why would she have handed it to her husband?

So the narrative of the Fall points to two things that she gets right: she gets a judgment of beauty and a judgment of utility correct. Where she gets it wrong, of course—where she goes wrong—is she detaches this from any objective moral framework.

And you would say, “Well, why are you drawing that out?” Well, I would say, in some ways, that helps to explain a lot of the dynamic in the world we see today. The objective moral framework has been pretty much abolished. But human beings still crave the beautiful—or their own notion of the beautiful—and they still crave those things that are useful to them. They still crave, if you like, the things that bring them pleasure and the things, perhaps, that lessen pain.

Meaning Instead of the Truth

That craving for truth, though, has been altered because the objective moral framework has been sidelined. And that leads me—as I was thinking of preparing this talk, I was trying to think of how could I sort of get from “we have a hunger for truth” to “we have something like that today” but which has produced such terrible consequences.

I was reading a newly published collection of essays by the psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl. And Frankl has that great definition of human beings as creatures who crave meaning. Frankl is not a believer, but Frankl sees something in the human condition—that we crave meaning.

There are statements in that nature that make you sit back and think. One of my favorites is the one where he says, “It is not suffering that human beings find unbearable; it is meaningless suffering that human beings find unbearable.” And that’s his very dramatic way, I think, of getting at the point that I’m trying to make here.

Among fallen human beings, of which we are all examples, the hunger for truth has been sort of perverted into a hunger for meaning. And that’s both a good thing—in that, I think, as Christians, we can find points of contact to talk to non-Christians—but it’s also a bad thing because we tend to create our own meanings and do horrendous damage thereby.

False Meaning and the Allure of Sacrifice

The creation of our own meanings has today led to what? Mass mutilation and destruction of young bodies with the trans movement. Mary Hasson will be speaking on that later today. That’s truly horrific. But what is that an example of? Well, it’s kids and parents hungering for meaning—and coming up with the wrong one.

George Orwell has a fascinating review of Mein Kampf—I think he published it in 1940. It’s around about the height of the Battle of Britain, I think, when Hitler not well thought of in Britain at that point. And Orwell reviewed Mein Kampf, and he makes—I’m paraphrasing here—but he makes an interesting comment in that. He says: we make a mistake if we assume that the popularity of Hitler in Germany is rooted in the fact that he offers the German people peace and prosperity.

He said his appeal lies in the fact that he offers them a cause to suffer and die for. Very interesting. Very interesting.

We live in a world, of course, where consumerism has been the default for many generations. It really offers no meaning. We’re seeing lots and lots—particularly, I think, of young disaffected men—buying into all kinds of craziness because it provides them with some sort of meaning, however perverse or perverted that meaning might be.

Meaning Is Not Morally Neutral

We need to add a third aspect though—not just Eve and the quest for meaning. I think we also need to understand that this quest for meaning is not morally neutral. And here I—maybe I should—I was going to say, here I enter Calvinist mode—but I’ll say Augustinian mode. I think that’s probably more acceptable to the audience. Tempted to say, “When in Rome, do as the Romans.”

So it’s not a value-neutral quest. Paul in Romans 1 makes it very clear that the quest for meaning is now never a quest for the truth, but always a quest to avoid the truth.

Now the way Paul makes that statement in Romans 1 is perhaps at times a little arcane. The great thing about the Bible, of course, is what Paul presents in sort of a systematic way at points—we can actually find illustrated in some of the great narratives.

And I want to point you to 1 Kings chapter 19. You’ll know the story of Elijah. He’s just faced down the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Baal failed to show. Elijah’s God showed up and set fire to the sacrifice. And Elijah and his men—or rather, Baal’s team—are put to death. Team Baal—they’ve just been wiped off the face of the earth.

If ever there had been an obvious proof of the truth of the God of Israel and the falsity of Baal, that has to be it. And yet, listen to how Jezebel—the Sidonian princess who’s married to Ahab, king of Israel—reacts. And you know Ahab is a bit of an idiot. Jezebel is the brains of the outfit.

Listen to how she reacts. “Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword.” Now, you might anticipate here that Jezebel’s response would be, “My goodness, my god failed me. I need to switch my allegiance to the God of Israel at this point. Minimally, I need to do that.”

But listen to what is said: “Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, ‘So may the gods do to me and more also if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.’”

Notice Jezebel’s reaction. She’s had all the proof one could, humanly speaking, give her that her worship is false and wrong—that her own quest for meaning is terminated on a lie. And when that lie is exposed, not only does she double down, she recommits to the destruction of the Lord’s prophet at this point.

From a Hunger for the Truth to a Corrupted Quest for Meaning

Okay, so we hunger for truth. That has been perverted into a quest for meaning—but not a value-neutral quest for meaning. A quest for meaning that by and large allows us to avoid the truth.

What are the practical things we might draw from that? I’m a prison preacher, tend to focus in three points. You’ve had two of them. And end with practical application—here is the practical stuff, and here is the good news.

What does all this do? Well, the first thing it does for us is this: it should alert us to the fact that the battle for the truth today is a spiritual one.

Jezebel clearly demonstrates that—yes, it is important to be thoughtful. For those who can, it’s important to be learned. It’s important to combat false arguments with true arguments. But let us not forget, again as the monor [sic] mentioned, our struggle is against principalities and powers—and for the human heart.

I taught Early Church for many years at a seminary, and we used to read back to back The Life of St. Anthony and Augustine’s Confessions. And in some ways they capture the two sides: Anthony fighting all of the external spiritual enemies—the forces and powers of the air. Augustine struggling with his own heart. We need to realize that the battle is a spiritual one.

The bad news is, therefore, our powers are limited. Good examples and good arguments cannot in themselves win the day.

But—to return to where I started—Dawkins, Musk, and company. I’m inclined to see them as offering us an in in the armor. Yes, I don’t see Richard Dawkins at this point in time as bowing his knee to Christ as God and ordering his life appropriately. But the fact that he realizes there is a bankruptcy in the contemporary search for meaning is surely an opportunity for us.

Real Hope: Spiritual Weapons

And that then brings me to the point of real hope: the battle is spiritual, but of course the great thing about Christianity is this—it’s primarily armed with spiritual weapons. Word and Sacrament—or if you’re Catholic, perhaps Sacrament and Word. But there are promises attached.

God says when His Word is proclaimed, it will not return to Him empty. The power of the Word does not depend upon the power of the human or the preacher. The power of the Word of God depends upon the One who speaks the Word of God. And the One who speaks the Word of God ultimately is God Himself.

The sacraments—go back to what I was saying at the start about truth being more than propositions—the sacraments grab the whole person, don’t they? The Word does too.

When the Word sets forth promises—promises are not propositions. They’re things that grab us as individuals. They grip our imagination.

When a wife or a husband promises to be faithful in their wedding vows to the other, that seizes the imagination. It’s not just a proposition. Something is done powerfully at that point.

And these things also—to return again more or less to where I began—what do these things do? What do Word and Sacrament do? What does Church life do? What does life as the worshiping community—both in the gathered worship when we gather together as the people of God to worship, and our daily witness to the world around—what do these things do?

They show forth the satisfaction of man’s hunger for truth in a true way. They show human beings glorifying God and looking forward to enjoying Him forever.

Thank you very much for listening so patiently.