We are moving into a post - post-modern world But what does that look like and mean for truth - and us as pastors - as we attempt to communicate with our churches?
Our church members have unconsciously adopted some of the presuppositions of our society in the way we process texts and information.
We are living in a fake news world on social media with a parallel loss of confidence in institutions and authorities. Prince Harry says, ‘Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past.
Former US President Barack Obama says “Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up. They just make stuff up. … we see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more. Politicians have always lied, but it used to be if you caught them lying, they’d be like, “Oh, man”. Now they just keep on lying."
Moore Theological College Lecturer Lionel Windsor joins Dominic Steele to explore what it means to believe the truth, turn to the truth, and adopt habits of truth and faithfulness in a post truth world.
Purchase Lionel Windsor’s Truth be Told https://bit.ly/3VVD34N
--
Become a regular financial supporter of The Pastor's Heart via Patreon.
We are moving into a post - post-modern world But what does that look like and mean for truth - and us as pastors - as we attempt to communicate with our churches?
Our church members have unconsciously adopted some of the presuppositions of our society in the way we process texts and information.
We are living in a fake news world on social media with a parallel loss of confidence in institutions and authorities. Prince Harry says, ‘Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past.
Former US President Barack Obama says “Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up. They just make stuff up. … we see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more. Politicians have always lied, but it used to be if you caught them lying, they’d be like, “Oh, man”. Now they just keep on lying."
Moore Theological College Lecturer Lionel Windsor joins Dominic Steele to explore what it means to believe the truth, turn to the truth, and adopt habits of truth and faithfulness in a post truth world.
Purchase Lionel Windsor’s Truth be Told https://bit.ly/3VVD34N
--
Become a regular financial supporter of The Pastor's Heart via Patreon.
It is the pastor's heart and Dominic Steele and truth is in trouble. We have a problem with truth. Lionel Windsor is our guest. It was about 15 years ago and I was speaking on a church weekend away as a guest speaker at a large church conference here in Sydney and we came to Question Time after my presentation and I lost control of Question Time.
Speaker 1:I've been teaching on the first part of Ephesians 4 and arguing in the presentation that we should all aim to reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and that by truthing in love, speaking the truth in love, we would all collectively grow up into unity and understanding and maturity in the faith. And that's what we should pray for, long for and expect. And then somebody said well, what about when we disagree on gender roles? Or what about when we disagree on sexuality? And then somebody else piled in and what about when we disagree on denominations and baptism and all sorts of things? And there was a pile on then of people disagreeing with me and I have reflected back over that question time while washing the dishes. You know you do this. What could I have said? What should I have said? And I still think I was theologically correct in what I said on Ephesians 4, but I'm absolutely clear that I did not persuade. And as I've thought about that exchange, I think now that I didn't think hard enough about the world that I was speaking to and the presuppositions that we collectively had brought and unconsciously taken on.
Speaker 1:Anyway, lionel Windsor is a lecturer at Moore Theological College. He has this new book out, truth Be Told, and I've had that moment of question time in my mind the whole time as I was reading your book. Lionel, tell me, have you crashed and burned in questions?
Speaker 2:Oh yes, I've crashed and burned in various places, various pastoral situations in lots of ways, but including in trying to argue for truth and including, indeed, as people have read my book and responded to it, a few people, as I've heard some responses Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. So I mean, it is an issue for us in our pastor's hearts to try to persuade people of the truth. But before we get to some of the solutions and some of the scriptures, let's just get you to define a little on what's going on in the cultural milieu, because wherever it was 15 years ago, for me it's much more complex now.
Speaker 2:In one sense it's more complex. In another sense, maybe, there's a glimmer of hope that it's becoming a little better in some ways. Now, where are we in the cultural moment We've lived through postmodernism? Postmodernism is a reaction to modernism. Modernism is in the Enlightenment, a time when people were very confident that we as human beings could all come to a knowledge of what is true, what is objectively true.
Speaker 2:Postmodernism is a movement, a philosophical movement, a cultural movement that says no, we can't, and so is greatly, has very little or no confidence in actually coming to a sense of truth. Now, as Christians, we have lived in and we are growing. We've grown up in that kind of cultural moment. So I guess what you were dealing with, as I've dealt with and as we are dealing with, is this sense. It's not simply that I disagree with you. In the Enlightenment times and in the modern times, people would disagree with each other, but they would have a sense that, even though we're disagreeing with each other, there is an objective truth to be found. And as long as we keep disagreeing with each other, well, we'll be able to find it. The postmodern idea is no, you can't.
Speaker 1:But you say we've lived through it, indeed In a sense of past tense. Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I found as I was writing this book was people. And when I say people, I'm not talking so much about Christians. I'm talking about presidents, former presidents. I'm talking about a friend of mine who has been quite high up in the government broadcaster here, the ABC in Canberra, who's not a Christian. As far as I know, various people who have been saying, this whole idea that there's no such thing as objective truth is disastrous.
Speaker 1:Well, let's just watch a quote that you drew to my attention from former President Barack Obama, and he's speaking a couple of years after he finished in the presidency in 2016. So we're perhaps 2018. So Donald Trump is in power. We'll just watch that clip now.
Speaker 3:Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up. They just make stuff up. They just make stuff up. We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders, where they're caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more. It used to Look, let me say, say politicians have always lied. But it used to be.
Speaker 1:If you caught them lying they'd be like oh man, now they just keep on lying now barack obama there is speaking in a world where we've got some uh donald trump using lines like um, that's fake news, um, and 30 000 or something, mistruths or misrepresentations of the fact. According to I think it was the Washington Post.
Speaker 2:That was the Washington Post which has it in for him. But yes, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you were saying five presidents.
Speaker 2:Indeed. So in preparation for this book I mean, the centre of the book is the Bible, but the first part of it is looking at various parts of our culture and so in preparation, I did a. I mean, the centre of the book is the Bible, but the first part of it is looking at various parts of our culture and so in preparation, I did a lot of reading. One of the books I read was a book by, I think, his name's Nick Bryant. He's a BBC journalist.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he was looking at five presidencies before Trump and was looking at precedents for Donald Trump, looking at Reagan's use of the media and use of TV and the emoting of the nation and looking at and moving from, if you like, the facts of the written word in the newspaper to the emotional.
Speaker 1:You know the emotional exactly.
Speaker 2:You know Bill Clinton, you know the famous, you know issues to do with his infidelity.
Speaker 1:So I did not have sexual relations with that woman, with that woman, and he had to.
Speaker 2:Then, when he was challenged on that, and it was obvious that he did, he said well, you didn't understand what the word is. There is no relationship, he said.
Speaker 1:You didn't understand what the word is meant in that sentence. And I did not have sexual. She had sexual relationships with me.
Speaker 2:Exactly so, various precedents. So what I think what I sensed in Obama almost and I'm not only paraphrasing him at this point, but giving a sense of the moment is we have grown. The second half of the 20th century is postmodern the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth. And the idea of postmodernism was that if we could just get rid of the idea of objective truth, we could just get rid of the idea of this ultimate authority, then things would be fantastic because we'd be able to just live together, and it would be just wonderful because there'd be no authority, there'd be no terrible authority over us. And the sense is that that seems to be what Donald Trump has taken seriously, and he's just running with it, and Barack Obama is saying no.
Speaker 2:When we said there's no such thing as objective truth, we didn't mean that, you know, we didn't mean what has actually happened, and that is relationships are disastrous when there's no sense of objective truth standing over the top of us. It's just whoever is the most powerful wins. So postmoderns would say well, really, truth is just power, you know, it's just about the will to power, and so that means that powerful people come along and whoever can spin the best narrative, whoever can tell the biggest victim story, whoever is able to persuade people powerfully is the one who wins Now.
Speaker 1:I mean, let me just give you the quote that jumped out at me from Prince Harry, as you quoted it in your book. Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory. It does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit. And there's just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause and effect are often just fables. We tell ourselves about the past.
Speaker 2:Yes, and that's stark, and yet it's precisely what people have been taught over the last 50 years, 60 years.
Speaker 1:And so that's the presupposition that the person in question time has. Yes, how do I communicate it? I mean, that's the big question how do I communicate as a Bible teacher? Yes, that's right.
Speaker 2:And I can go there if you like.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, I just want to set up a problem because I mean, there's a that's the problem we've got with um, the media, with politics, with fake news, but there's a problem of loss of confidence in institutions. Yes, um, and we probably even I mean we put universities, science and even theological colleges in those institutions that we've lost confidence in, and churches, but then also there's actually a problem in our hearts.
Speaker 2:So let's do institutions in our hearts OK, yes, so one of the points I was making is that, to function well, an institution is just a set up with agreed rules in society that enable us to live together well and to get things done together. That includes things like education, the things that you listed. To work well, institutions need authority. Now, authority is actually a good thing, but the general postmodern idea is that actually, authority is inherently a negative thing. We must constantly pull down authority. That's one thing. Secondly, what's actually happened with many institutions in our society is that people have breached trust, and so to make authority work, you need trust, and to make trust work, you need truthfulness and you need faithfulness. You need to be able to trust that the words that are said by the institutions actually are followed through, and in so many ways that trust has been breached, and so we've lost authority.
Speaker 1:And I mean, as I was reading that chapter, I was reflecting on the season we had during COVID and it felt like we had a little season where our politicians were saying we've got to trust the science, you know, and which was kind of completely out of step with the mood we'd been going in for 20 years. But we've got to trust the science, We've got to trust the science and I think, OK, we've got to trust the science. But then actually the science didn't quite tell us the truth.
Speaker 2:Not only did it. Part of the issue with the science is you say you've got to trust the science. But then there's the question of yes, but science is only ever there to tell you what the consequences might be. It doesn't actually tell you what to do. And so there's all those questions as well. So the politicians were also implicitly saying you've got to trust us, and, in a sense, there was no other choice. We needed to to start with and, in a sense, there was no other choice we needed to to start with. And so we've actually seen a further loss and erosion of trust because of the fact that, well, no one's perfect and indeed politicians are not perfect and the science is never 100% perfect, and so we've lost faith in that as well.
Speaker 1:So what do you want to say from the heart? Because there's actually at root, it's a problem with me.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's right, that's where I want to bring it. So in the book I started with politics, because politics is out there.
Speaker 1:I'm totally fine criticizing them Exactly because they're politicians.
Speaker 2:Of course we criticize politicians, and then what I try to do is move it. I talk about technology, social media, institutions, then I talk about the sort of postmodern philosophy, I talk about culture, you know, with Prince Harry and others, but what I'm trying to do is narrow it down or not narrow it down, I'm trying to bring it home, because actually the issue is I mean, even when it comes to politics, people have this phrase speak the truth to power, and the assumption there is that I'm truthful and they're powerful and so I'm on the side of truth and they're on the side of evil. But actually the problem is us, the problem is in us. Now, that is clearly a scene well, hopefully clearly seen when it comes to things like abuse, where truthfulness clearly seen, when it comes to things like abuse, where truthfulness, the lack of truthfulness and the lack of holding on to truth and faithfulness, keeping your word, is actually inherent in the dynamics of abuse. But the thing is, it's not just those deep and awful issues of abuse, it's actually in each one of us.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, I want to ask, and it's a question with the obvious answer Are you always truthful? You know, I ask myself that, am I always truthful? And there's only one answer. Well, there are two answers.
Speaker 2:If the answer is yes, then that proves I'm a liar, I've just lied, that is we are constantly.
Speaker 1:All of us want to make ourselves look better than I. Want you to see the best version of me, and so I just kind of gild the lily, exactly.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's why this is the most. I say it in the book. It's the hardest book I've ever written, not because it's got the most difficult concepts that I've ever grappled with, but because I've had to face up to my own lack of truthfulness in my life and in past instances. And I'm not talking about huge, huge things, but I'm talking about things that actually really really do matter.
Speaker 1:And if you're going to put yourself out on a platform writing about truth, exactly yeah.
Speaker 2:But the great thing is I mean can I get to Jesus now?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, one of the things in that is and the wonderful thing is that actually being a Christian is fundamentally about admitting that we're wrong and that we're not truthful. That's what it is and that is something that we have as Christians, that our world doesn't have, that we have as Christians that our world doesn't have. That is, our world doesn't have the security in Jesus Christ to admit they're wrong. And so what we get is these polarized debates where everybody's got to be right and everybody's got to be constantly. You know, can't be proved wrong, because the alternative is, if you prove wrong, then you've got nowhere to go. But we do have somewhere to go. We have Jesus. And so in 1 John whoever you know, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, and that's because of Jesus' death on the cross for us. So it all's got to come back to Jesus in that fundamental way. And so there is so much that we have. We have Jesus in this world.
Speaker 2:The modernism or the Enlightenment will say there is objective truth, but it's impersonal. Objective truth is this abstract idea Place out there. It's out there. That's right. Postmodernism says there is no truth, or if there is, there's no objective truth, it's in me, subjective truth, your truth, my truth. And then all we've got is a whole lot of different people who've got their own truths, and everyone's just trying to win power by being the biggest victim. What the Bible says is that truth is personal, and when I say it's personal, I don't mean that it's just subjective, but it operates at a personal level. It's about our personal relationships and even more than that, it's about a person. It's about Jesus Christ. It's about God, the Father of Jesus Christ, who is truthful, who is faithful, who is committed to us, who keeps his word and who speaks the truth about the world. And it's about Jesus who, in John's gospel, so often talks about truth. He says I am the way and the truth and the life when he confronts Pilate, the post-truth politician.
Speaker 1:And he says what is truth.
Speaker 2:Pilate says what is truth. What he means by that is yeah, I don't care.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what is truth, John? I don't know what, since you're here.
Speaker 2:The answer is Jesus. I mean, jesus has told himself I am the way, the truth and the life. But, yeah, break, I can't let you get away with that, that's right. Yeah, just bringing that back to Jesus In so many ways. It's the gospel of the Lord, jesus Christ in all of its wonderful glory. That is in Ephesians. We come back to Ephesians.
Speaker 2:What Paul says is that when you heard what does he say? Right at the beginning, chapter 1, verse 13, when you heard the word of truth and he defines that as the gospel of your salvation you heard, you believed and you were sealed with the Holy Spirit. His point is that the gospel is the word of truth. Now, what that means is that it's the gospel that speaks about God as our creator. It speaks about the fact that we ourselves are sinners and we need to come to the Lord Jesus. It tells us the truth about ourselves and it also tells us the truth about our world that it's a world that, yes, is God's world, and yet it is under sin. And yet Jesus himself is the one who redeems the world and indeed is where the world is heading, as Ephesians says.
Speaker 2:Also, as you get into Ephesians, chapter 4, paul says the truth is in Jesus, in Ephesians, chapter 4. What does he mean by that? He's talking in terms of, at that point, learning and teaching. He's talking about living in Christian communities. He's talking about what does it actually mean for us to be holding onto this truth? And he says the truth is in Jesus. He's actually talking about the words of Jesus and what we know about Jesus, and so I think there he's actually referring to the traditions about Jesus which we have in the gospels Jesus' words, jesus' actions, what we know about Jesus. That's where the truth is Okay.
Speaker 1:You've just done a little riff from Ephesians. I was teaching on Ephesians when I crashed and burned. I'm going to put on the hat of the members of the congregation and push you into my corner. Yes, okay. And play devil's advocate with you. So, lionel, how can this be possibly true when we have churches claiming to be evangelical who have radically different view on gender roles? Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, so if you've got the assumption or Baptists and Presbyterians, or Baptists and Presbyterians, or what do you know? Let's not debate church government, let's say Protestants and Catholics, okay. Or people who believe in the second blessing of the spirit and people who think there's one blessing of the spirit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, yeah I mean the protestant catholic. This is not. This is not a modern debate. That is that's gone back to the reformation yeah, yeah, yeah. But how can it be the case, you know so if you assume, as as so many of us do, and we without even realizing it the air that we breathe tells us that the truth is located just in ourselves. The air that we breathe tells us that we just assume that really there's no objective truth out there.
Speaker 1:Which is really Prince Harry's position. It's Prince Harry's position exactly.
Speaker 2:Now we assume that without even realizing it.
Speaker 1:And in the church we probably imbibe that as well.
Speaker 2:You're a great devil's advocate. Thank you, I'd like to have you, sorry, no, I don't.
Speaker 2:Thanks for that Now, the fact that we have imbibed it, and so what we're doing is we're so what's behind that question? What's behind that question is if we disagree, then how are we going to ever know the truth? And the assumption is that there is no truth out there that stands above us. There's just us. There's just what you think and what you think and what you think. And if there's, you know, three of us who think something different on these questions, then the assumption is there's no objective truth that stands outside of us.
Speaker 2:But if Jesus is the objective truth that stands outside of us, what we can do is come humbly to him, come to his word and seek to say I might be wrong, god's word is true, jesus is true. What does Jesus have to say about this, which is not going to necessarily be easy. It's not as if there's going to be. Oh yeah, we'll come straight to God's word and then, five seconds later, we're all going to know exactly what the truth is.
Speaker 2:Paul talks about it in Ephesians, chapter four, in terms of learning and teaching educational language he uses there when he says the truth is in Jesus. What he's saying is Jesus is almost the curriculum. This is what we're actually seeking to learn together, speaking the truth in love, growing together. So if we have a shared commitment to knowing that, to the fact that there is truth in Jesus and that it stands outside of ourselves and that we may be wrong and so we need to submit ourselves to God's word, rather than just dig in and belligerently hold on to our own views, as we're trained constantly to do by social media, then we can keep seeking after the truth. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that in every aspect we might agree, but that was the criticism that the Catholics leveled against the Protestants in the Reformation. They said well, you know, if truth is just about God's word and people will just interpret God's word in different ways, then that ends in chaos. What you need is and what they said is not Jesus but us.
Speaker 1:Exactly, you need us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that actually doesn't work either. You know, and even at the time of the Reformation you had the Catholic Church, but you also had the Eastern Orthodox churches and others.
Speaker 1:It can't possibly work at the moment with Pope Francis flip-flopping.
Speaker 2:Oh, exactly that's right. Yeah, yeah, he's just trying to include everybody In, perhaps a more spectacular way than previous popes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's a whole other thing. My friend, mark Gilbert, says that Pope Francis is very Catholic in the sense that he's just trying to include everybody, so he's not as interested in the dogma, he's much more interested in just inclusion, which is, in our world, a powerful thing. Let's just hug everybody.
Speaker 1:Back to unity. Sorry, it was me who took us off on that side. You got to 2 Corinthians and you described 2 Corinthians as a worked example of speaking the truth in love. That here was a moment where we were in disagreement and take me through that. How does that work?
Speaker 2:Yes, 2 Corinthians is a snapshot of a very, very fraught relationship that Paul has with the church in Corinth. In Ephesians, he's speaking generally about how things work. In 2 Corinthians we see an example of where things really are not working. What I've actually done in 2 Corinthians is identified. The various issues that we have in our world, like misinformation, power plays, issues of just mistrust, then spiritual abuse, various things that are going on in our world. You can see them all there in 2 Corinthians. Now, that's what I've tried to do in the book. The book's mainly for your average Christian to read, but I've also, at the end of each part two and part three, sought to talk about things that are particularly relevant for pastors, and so 2 Corinthians is one of them.
Speaker 2:Here's Paul. He's dealing with a very complex situation. He's had people saying things about him. He's had to change his plans, but people have imputed false motives to him. Or did he change his plans? Well, it's hard to know, but people are saying that he did and he's saying you know, I didn't change my plans because I was being fickle. I did it for you out of love and questions about his motives.
Speaker 1:It's all the normal problems.
Speaker 2:And then I mean, he's even facing this issue of he's being gentle with them. And so he's got these powerful. He calls them super apostles, who come along and say, oh, he's being gentle with you. Oh well, that's just a trick, you know, that's just. Yeah, he's too weak, you know you need to follow us. And so, no matter what he does, he's facing both the super apostles and the Corinthians themselves in this deep and difficult and complex situation. And so what I do there is I explore what does he actually do in that situation? Because the letter is him telling the Corinthians what he does and him actually doing it at the very same time, and there's various things that he does.
Speaker 1:So a worked example of we're pursuing unity in the faith.
Speaker 1:We're pursuing unity and understanding Jesus and living for him and living for him, in agreement about that, and we're working through the messiness of our life, yes, to achieve that. Yeah, yeah, I said to you before that, um, as I was reading your chapter, I remember watching from a distance, from sydney to seattle, watching mars hill implode all those years ago, back in 2014, and writing to Driscoll, yes, and I don't know if he ever got my email, but writing to him suggesting I reckon it would be maybe possible to pull this back together. If you taught through two Corinthians humbly, you know, because they were in a mess, you know, yeah, yes, they were in a mess, you know, yeah, and I just thought I wonder whether or not you could have humbly, because I said, well, I got this wrong and I got that wrong and we've got it together to work to unity in the faith, and it just could have been the master class of understanding what Paul was trying to do.
Speaker 2:It may well have been. I mean, history obviously didn't play out that way and again, I don't know all the details of the situation, but I actually had in the back of my mind. There was a podcast about Mars Hill and you know whether that was fully accurate or not. One of the key chapters in 2 Corinthians 2 Corinthians 7, paul talks about repentance, and so I've got a chapter on repentance and what repentance actually is. Repentance in our world, often repentance is saying I'm sorry and then just keeping on doing exactly the same thing, or that kind of politician's apology I'm sorry that you took me the wrong way, or I'm sorry that you've done the wrong, you've misunderstood me, and that kind of regret. That's not actually repentance.
Speaker 1:Now, what do we do as pastors today in this world, because my suspicion is some of my peers are well, we're not running towards this as an issue, do you know? Yeah, and I feel like your book is a call for us to run towards trying to change the hearts of our people on this issue.
Speaker 2:I think that's what your your thesis is that's, that's a, that's a large part of it. That's right and that is what it is. I want to see and have seen, in fact, but even more so communities transformed by this truth and this confidence in the truth of the gospel of the Lord Jesus and living it out. The subtitle of the book is deliberate it's living truthfully in a post-truth world. As pastors and as Christians, we are very conservative. What I mean by that is we're often about 15 to 20 years behind the Zeitgeist. So in some ways, we're kind of still in and I lumped myself in there before reading these books.
Speaker 2:We're still in that time of, oh well, people don't really believe in truth. You know, people don't think there's such a thing as truth. Now, that is certainly the case in our world, but there is a growing movement in our world to say this is terrible, this whole idea that there's no such thing as truth. So Barack Obama is just the example of that. But, my friend in the ABC, you know there's no such thing as truth, you know. So barack obama's just the example of that. But, my friend in the abc, you know there's a whole lot of people who are saying if the swing back is happening or not.
Speaker 1:Well, there's not necessarily the swing back, but the swing off. Post-modernity, yeah, to where?
Speaker 2:to nowhere. And so we have it. We have the truth we have. When I say we have the truth, I don't mean we've got the absolute truth that we can wield as a weapon against everybody. What we've got is the Lord, jesus Christ, and we have that ability. We have the ability to say we're wrong. We have the ability to repent, not because we're great, but because we have Jesus. We have that security in him and we have the spirit at work in our lives to transform us, to be more like him, to live truthfully, and that is a that's a powerful thing.
Speaker 2:I think we can often say, oh well, we're in a world that doesn't really believe in objective truth and so we need to sort of downplay that a little bit and instead play up more sort of relational kind of things, and that's that's right. We do need to be talking about relationships, but relationships work when there is truth. And if we just abandon truth without relationships, then we get well love, but it's an insipid love that's just fuzzy and doesn't follow through. Or we get the idea of loyalty without truth, which ends up being tyranny and fosters abuse. You've got to just be loyal. We all just have to be committed to one another.
Speaker 2:Well, if you just say we have to be committed to one another without truth, without that Jesus standing above us and giving us that sense that we need to keep coming back to him in repentance and faith, then we end up in the same kind of tyrannies that the world is starting to realize is a real problem. So we have this wonderful thing, and so to live in communities of truth, which is my final chapter, to foster communities of truth where we are both speaking the truth in love, we're doing both of those things we are loving and truthful, because that's what God is. God is the one who is abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Those two words chesed emet truth and love. So that's what I want to call people to.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming in. Thanks, Dominic. My guest on the Pastor's Heart, Lionel Windsor. He is the author of Truth Be Told, Living Truthfully in a Post-Truth World, out now from Matthias Media. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart. We'll look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.