Saving Truth in a post-truth world, by Abdu Murray
This was a book I bought by impulse, when it was even in pre-order, after reading its first chapter for free. It is a very interesting book and it got 5 stars from me in Goodreads. First, the author is Abdu Murray, who is one of the leaders in RZIM, the apologetics ministry from Ravi Zacharias. Their ministry is probably the best one in the area of cultural apologetics, as I call, which means defending the faith from the cultural changes of our times, and this book is an excellent example of that.
The author starts the book talking about the confusion in truth and meaning from a general perspective, and later in the book he will focus on specific subjects and explain how we need to save the truth in each of them. My review will probably focus more on the general parts, to avoid being too long.
“According to Oxford Dictionaries, post-truth means ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’”
This is actually some movement that started after the so-called post-modernism and I also confused both before reading. In postmodernism, there is the concept of relative truth: some fact is true considering that it is analyzed by a person’s background. In other words, something can be true for me but not true for other person. In the post-truth definition, people may even consider truth to be absolute, i.e. true for all or false for all, however they “don’t care about the truth if it gets in the way of [their] personal preferences.” Given that people in our current times are more and more adopting this type of mentality, the author warns us with a quote from C.S. Lewis: “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end. But if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth — only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”
The problem with seeking comfort, specially in our times of social media which leads us to a comfortable bubble, is that we are not seeking for truth anymore and we usually get on the defensive whenever someone challenges our beliefs. It is a war of “us” versus “them”. The author even say that facts start to become something we try to “get around” instead of something we use to build our beliefs. The next problem with this in our culture is that it enters our churches in ways we don’t even notice:
“Let’s address the first post-truth seduction: making the gospel pill easier to swallow to avoid uncomfortable discussions with non-Christians and difficult Bible passages that challenge our behavioral preferences. […] The second seduction — that of using the truths of Scripture to bludgeon outsiders — brings a pendular swing of overcorrecting our desire to be liked. Too often, Christians conveniently forget the fact that like everyone else, they need a Savior. When Christians forget that, they create an “us versus them” paradigm leading to Christians hungrily gobbling up and passing along iffy articles about how awful “they” are without a moment’s pause. Worse yet, Christians may make churches so unwelcoming that they repel the very people who could benefit from what Jesus has to offer.”
The first problem is maybe the problem of pluralism, that you don’t really need to follow the gospel, you just need to believe in “God”. This makes the gospel too weak, a gospel that can not save. On the other side, taking the perspective of “us versus them”, people may also others too bad to be saved by Jesus. Again, a gospel too weak, a gospel that can not save. In order to avoid this spirit of anger towards others (that I’m seeing in a huge number of Christians in Brazil, because of the upcoming elections), the author reminds us all people are made in the image of God: “Accordingly, all people must be treated with dignity and respect even (especially) when their ideas or behaviors challenge us or must be challenged by us.”
Confusing autonomy for freedom
In a post-truth culture, where preferences and opinions are elevated over facts and truth, anything that challenges our preferences, even if a challenge is laced with facts, is deemed offensive and oppressive. How dare someone disagree with my preferences or opinions? Isn’t freedom found in being able to fully express one’s preferences and opinions without challenge? Western freedom is all about the ability to do, feel, and say whatever we want so long as we don’t hurt someone else, isn’t it? Even if we do hurt someone else, it’s only because that someone else isn’t affirming our preferences. And that person is an oppressor anyway. If oppressors get hurt in the process, well, they had it coming. Freedom must have no bounds. Not even reality will be our boundary. But what I’ve just described isn’t freedom — it’s autonomy.
The author describes the origin of autonomy from the Greek words “autos” and “nomos”, which basically means someone is autonomous if this person is “a law unto himself”. For autonomy, nothing can be in the middle of myself and what I do, however for freedom, we need to put truth in the middle of that. Abdu is brilliant in this book to argue that several things will collapse if we start to put truth aside when it hurts our feelings. And the first example is our ability to reason. The author exemplifies this with the fact the many try to disqualify violent extremists as not true Muslims (despite their self-identification as so), but fight to affirm others self-identification in aspects of gender, race, or ethnicity. The point here is not to dismiss people’s self-identification, but to analyze if this is an inconsistent framework of reasoning.
Besides, the autonomy over freedom cause problems in our moral accountability. If I should do anything based on my feelings and not based on truth, our final state is “in a world where practically anything is permissible except the idea that some things shouldn’t be.” When human autonomies collide, though, and we have no moral accountability anymore, entire societies may be eliminated in the process: “The paradox is that in striving to go from bearing the Imago Dei (with accountability to God) to Deus Homo (with accountability to no one), we have lost what it means to be human and to value other human beings.” Finally, in this chaotic quest for autonomy, Abdu Murray says that we lose even our freedom in the end.
“Autonomy is so distortive that self-evident truths are ignored to win an argument or to keep ourselves comfortable. We need to know the truth that our quest for autonomy is what enslaves us. We are in chains that we cannot feel and in prisons we cannot see. And they are both of our own making.”
Clarity among the chaos
Abdu then starts the part of the book where he tackles some of the clarity problems in our current society. The first one (Clarity about Freedom) I found to repeat some of the stuff he had already said, but the main point in it is that our true identity must come from a source outside ourselves and that is the only way we can actually be free. Of course, this outside source is Jesus. The next topic is about human dignity, which can also be confusing in a world where preferences are above truth: “How can human dignity and meaning be objectively true irrespective of human preference if we create and develop them? […] To vaunt human autonomy, we have to say humans have inherent dignity. But for humans to have objective dignity, we can’t be the autonomous definers of dignity.”
Humans have intrinsic value but we are also intrinsic bad, corrupted by our sins: “Yet while everyone seems to agree with Jesus that humanity has a heart problem, everyone seems to resist the necessary truth that we need redemption from a source outside ourselves.” Again, the author presents Jesus as the outside source that can redeem humans and give their dignity back.
The next clarity that we need is probably the most controversial one, but I hope the readers follow the author’s line of thought, since I think he is one of the most important apologists from our times to talk about these issues: sexuality, gender, and identity. All of them affect not only “our physical pleasure” but also “our emotional well-being”. After recognizing that people with same-sex attraction, for example, are still mistreated and sometimes victims of violence, the author notes:
“But the heroism ascribed to being gay or sexually confused makes these identities morally attractive. Instead of being just expressions of one’s sexuality, they are seen as expressions of one’s virtue. The same tends to be true about gender identity. People who deal with gender dysphoria, the pervasive feeling that one’s gender doesn’t match their biological sex, are engaged in a genuine, often painful, struggle. Those who eventually choose to identify with a gender different from their anatomy are lauded as headline-making heroes.”
According to Murray, this emphasis to promote people’s autonomy sometimes can be a burden to the ones actually struggling with gender dysphoria. I have not much reading on this topic, so I’ll allow myself to just point the idea presented in this chapter. That said, the author has one of the most compassionate Christian voices on this topic and acknowledges: “Those who experience sexual and gender uncertainty still look for ultimate answers […] We owe them more than just making them media darlings and faddish heroes. We owe them compassion and truth.” As a central point in his argument, though, is the fact that human sacredness imply that sex (the process to create this sacred being) is also sacred, and that the Bible says what it says to protect this sacred institution of God. Finally, recognizing the struggle and hurtfulness of people with dysphoria, he adds:
“The church needs to open its doors and Christians need to open their hearts so that those struggling to find resolution to their dysphoria — and those who are struggling to find clarity amidst other confusions — can find community and, ultimately, their true identity in Christ. In Christ, they can be understood.”
In order to find clarity about science and faith, it is necessary to understand that “science is only a method of observing, measuring, and making predictions about the physical world.” And also, “science doesn’t say anything. Scientists say things based on the conclusions they reach, sometimes through a scientific method. And yes, like the rest of us, scientists have their own biases to deal with.” That said, religion is also trying to make sense of the world. More broadly, it tries to make sense of the physical and non-physical world, through the use of science for the former, and philosophy and theology for the latter.
It is also important, as the book shows, to avoid the trap of scientism, which is the theory of knowledge where all the knowledge is only acquired through science. The problem is that this is self-refuting: is the knowledge that scientism is true acquired through science? Bringing clarity to this possible conflict, he says:
“Science alone cannot tell us why we’re here. Science alone — with the philosophical assumption of naturalistic atheism — leads someone like Lawrence Krauss to call us “cosmic pollution” that is “completely irrelevant.” But when coupled with a larger worldview that allows for nature’s design to speak to us about ultimate purpose, science can lead us to see that we are significant and relevant not only to each other but also to the One who created it all. Science confirms the truths in Scripture. Scripture unveils the poetry of science. The confusing fog of the false dichotomy between science and faith fades.”
The final topic to bring clarity is religious pluralism. As the RZIM director says, pluralism was initially used to welcome all the religious or nonreligious views and bring them to the center of the debate, i.e. every worldview can have their arguments in favor and against. In a post-truth world this concept is now confused by the shield of tolerance, where certain views can not be scrutinized, or that we should accept everyone as they please with the mantra: “All roads lead to God.”
As I also noted in the beginning of my previous post where prof. N. T. Wright talked about the differences between religions, even among the ones that believed in eternal life, not only the roads lead us to different destinations, they don’t even claim to lead to the same place: “Homogenization of religious beliefs doesn’t lead to tolerance, it leads to confusion and ignorance.” Even some views that claim to be inclusive, usually consider the exclusivists as wrong. Again, as it is argued throughout the whole book, Jesus is the one that can bring clarity to this topic:
“God grants us the dignity of embracing or rejecting Christ as our Savior. But lest we be confused and think that gospel is an exclusive club, the most famous passage of the Bible gives us clarity. In John 3:16 we read, “For God so loved the world” — that’s everyone — “that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him” — that’s anyone — “should not perish but have eternal life” (NIV). The Christian message is that there is an exclusive way to get to God. And that one way cost God more than it will ever cost us. But the invitation to accept it includes us all.”
Conclusion
As I noted in the end of previous section, the author emphasizes that Jesus is the answer for all this confusion, the one who brings clarity and meaning in a post-truth world. He also brings hope to our lives. We can trust that, in the same way he has done in the past, he will do in the future. Even “the atheist philosopher and former Italian senator Marcello Pera agrees”:
“If we live as Christians, we will be wiser and more aware of the dangers we face. We will not separate morality from truth. We will not confuse moral autonomy with any free choice. We will not treat individuals, whether the unborn or the dying, as things. We will not allow all desires to be transformed into rights. We will not confine reason within the boundaries of science. Nor will we feel alone in a society of strangers or oppressed by the state that appropriates us because we no longer know how to guide ourselves.”
As a final assurance that Jesus is the one in whom we should trust, Abdu ends the book in a magnific way:
“What is truth? we may ask in a world that elevates personal preference over truth. The answer is Jesus — the truth who is personal. He is the Saving Truth.”
I am almost finished with my backlog of books to write reviews for. I hope you have enjoyed this one and, please, clap if you liked and leave a comment or a question below. Give some tips on how to improve or ask for a book to be reviewed. The next book will probably be a very different review, since I’ll write about 1984, by George Orwell. 1984 was the first fiction book I read since my high school years, I would say! You can follow me on Twitter too: @heltonduarte.
