No Lies For Good Causes (September 26, 2004)

Value the truth. Cling to it more dearly than life itself.

A friend sent me a quote from 19th century Scottish novelist George MacDonald which read, "I would not favor a fiction to keep a whole world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep a man out of is doubtless the very best place for him to go to. It is truth, yes, The Truth, that saves the world."

I researched that quote and found it came from a story where a minister meets a reclusive parishioner whose house is filled with books. The parishioner says that he has bound some of the books himself, and has done it so well that the minister would not be able to distinguish his bookbinding from that of a professional. He says, "I'll give you a guinea for the poor-box if you pick out three of my binding consecutively."

The minister goes to the shelves and actually does pick out three of the self-bound books. But when the bookworm, embarrassed, hands him the guinea, he refuses to take it on the grounds that his last selection was a random guess. Amazed and amused, the man rebukes his pastor: "Couldn't you swallow a small scruple like that for the sake
of the poor even?...You're not fit for your profession. You won't even tell a lie for God's sake...You won't even cheat a little for the sake of the poor!" That is when the minister responds by saying that he would not advocate a lie even to keep people out of hell.

Good for him. Once you compromise truth, you undermine all the good things (like helping poor people, or keeping sinners out of hell) that spring from truth. No good thing depends on a lie for its support, and no lie upholds some goodness that wouldn't be better off without it.

About the time I read that MacDonald quote, I came across a statement by Feodor Dostoevsky, author of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, that staked out an opposite claim. Philip Yancey writes that after 10 years in a Siberian gulag, Dostoevsky "emerged from prison with unshakable Christian convictions, as expressed in one famous passage, 'If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth...then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth.'"

Amazing - Dostoevsky would willingly build his faith on that which he knew to be a lie! I cannot agree with Yancey that this expresses "unshakable Christian conviction." All that it expresses is mind rot.

When you say that you would follow Christ even if he weren't true, you are saying that your faith is built on sand. Perhaps it is the sand of feeling, or expediency, or inner warmth, or social reform or who knows what else. Those things are all shifty, wind-blown mineral chaff. The only worthy anchor for conviction is truth. If you explicitly deny that your foundation needs to be true, then why should we believe anything you say?

A few years ago my niece went looking for a place to live and came across an older couple with an upstairs room to rent. While talking to them, she made a connection and realized that the man would know her grandfather (my father), who died in 1980. He said to her, "You're Lowell Lundquist's granddaughter?" He sat down in a chair and his eyes filled with tears. He said, "Lowell Lundquist was the most honest man I ever knew."

I cannot tell you how much it means to me, how privileged I feel, to have been raised by a man no less honest than the minister in George MacDonald's story. Be like that. For God's sake, never lie. Never cling to a known falsehood, no matter how much good you think might come from it.