WHAT
IS TRUTH?
A Sermon By
Dr. Walter A. Maier
Pilate
saith Unto Him, What is truth? — John 18, 38.
“WHAT is truth?” asks wavering Pilate
as he concludes his private cross-examination of our Lord. And as we
repeat this question, we often wonder what the motives may have been
which led that shrewd, worldly-wise politician to make this immortal
inquiry. Was he a seeker after truth or merely a deep-rooted skeptic,
an anxious inquirer or a disillusioned cynic? Knowing him as we do, it
seems quite remote that he entertained the hope, even for a fleeting
moment, that the silent, yet strangely majestic Galilean could end the
search for the truth that had eluded the soothsayers of Rome, the
philosophers of Greece, and the astrologers of ancient Babylon. To his
grasping heathen mentality, Jesus, of despised Nazareth, was but a
harmless, high-souled dreamer of dreams, a dealer in dim abstractions.
What danger could there be in a young idealist who, despising the
strength of Caesar’s legions, maintained that His kingdom was not of
this world? Why take this visionary seriously? Above all, why try to
kill Him when His purpose was not to clip the wings of the Roman eagle
by instigating a rebellion in Judea, but only to bear testimony to what
He called the truth? And so, with a half-flippant, half-sarcastic What
is truth?” yet without waiting for an answer, this administrator of
Roman justice, able to perceive the right, but unable to follow it,
fails in the greatest crisis of his life, and as the reins of justice
slip from his careless grasp, he delivers the very incarnate Truth into
the crushing power of His tormentors.
THE
ANSWER OF HUMAN REASON.
Today, when a
restless, disillusioned world echoes, “What is truth?” people often ask
the question with a calculated seriousness that is born of distrust and
suspicion. Experience has made men skeptical. They have gone through
the orgy of a war that was to make the world safe for democracy, but
that made graves for eight and a half million combatants, that made the
world comfortable for ammunition manufacturers and profiteers, and that
in many countries banished every vestige of democratic and
representative government. People have been led to believe that through
the introduction of political and economic measures a beneficent wave
of prosperity and material growth would cover the country; but today,
with more than five million wage-earners thrown into demoralizing
unemployment, with a riotous and conflicting combination of legislative
millstones about our national neck, they have found that the golden age
of economists and politicians is farther removed than ever.
All this has had
its reflex in things religious and in the questions of the soul, so
that, when people today ask, “What is truth?” more than ever before
they follow the example of Pilate by refusing to listen to the one
Source of supreme truth. Divine revelation has been rejected by our
modern, grasping, skeptical age, and human reason has been enthroned,
cold, calculating reason, which tells us that the only religious
verities are those which can be tested and proved by the results of
modern scientific investigation.
As we pause, then,
to ask whether this is the inevitable destiny of the Church of Jesus
Christ, that it must transfer its faith from God’s Word to man’s word;
whether it must turn away from the atonement of Christ to the
attainment of man; whether, finally, it must admit that human reason is
the foundation for truth and faith, I thank God that I have the
privilege of demonstrating that what men call scientific truth is often
so faulty, so self-contradictory, sometimes even so dishonest, and
always so incomplete that, if we build our hope for time and eternity
upon such shifting sands, we may just as well try to promote our
wellbeing by dieting on double-strength strychnine.
I want to remind
you, in the first place, that often these so-called scientific truths
hopelessly contradict one another. For instance, see what happens when
we consider the age of the world. According to Professor Chamberlain of
the University of Chicago, the age of the earth must be placed between
70,000,000 and 150,000,000 years. But Professor Duane of Harvard
declares that the earth’s age ranges between 8,000,000 and
1,700,000,000 years. Now, while you are thinking about this, let me
tell you that Professor Millikan of California claims to have proved
that the world may be as young as 1,518,000 years, while in England
Sir Oliver Lodge asserted that it must be at least 200,000,000,000,000
years old. So you have figures that differ to the extent of more than
199,000,000,000,000 years. Now, if science cannot definitely tell the
age of the rocks, but can offer only a hundred variant and
contradictory theories, you will realize that it certainly cannot give
the world the Rock of Ages for which the spiritual needs of all
humanity cry so incessantly; you will appreciate that we must hark back
to the warning of St. Paul concerning the “oppositions of science,
falsely so called.”
Again, the results
of scientific investigation often lack all stability, for they are
changed and modified in the most kaleidoscopic fashion. Thus the Bible
tells us in the very plainest language that God created this earth. But
many modern scientists have dethroned the Almighty and tell us that
myriads of millions of years ago there was a fiery mist, or nebula; and
from this, it is claimed, our world
emerged as a great ball of fire, which
gradually cooled and contracted into its present form. But another
scientist rises and tells you that this nebular hypothesis is
unscientific and out of date and that you must accept the planetesimal
hypothesis, which invoives a huge disruption instead of the shrinking
together demanded by the other theory. And while you are listening to
him, a third approaches with one of the still more modern hypotheses,
which is diametrically opposed to all the others. Now, which of these
conflicting claims will you accept as the truth? Can you accept any
when you know that the one you accept today may be rejected tomorrow?
Again, the history
of science (the science which modern theology wants to make the basis
of religious truth) reveals one error after the other and a long series
of misrepresentations. A hundred years ago, when the plans for the
construction of railroads were first made, the Academy of Paris, the
last word in things scientific in its day, branded railroads as
absurdities. That same scientific body denied the existence of meteors,
ridiculed the microscope, and became guilty of other unbelievable
errors. When Daguerre, the father of modern photography, spoke of
reproducing pictures, his scientific comrades thought him insane. When
Harvey suggested that the blood circulates through the body, as we now
know that it does, he was ridiculed by learned men in all professions.
And thus I could continue at great length and enumerate for you an
almost endless list of mistakes which have been committed in the name
of science. I could prove to you that some scientists have actually
stooped to dishonesty and fraudulent misrepresentation in the effort to
bolster up their failing causes.
My purpose, of
course, is not to cast aspersions upon the heroic accomplishments of
really scientific men, who, always conscious of their limitations, have
rendered inestimable service to mankind. No statement of gratitude can
adequately express our indebtedness to their labors and even to their
errors, which have often served to advance the truth of scientific
research. The point which I wish to make, however, is this: Can you
afford to trust your soul to a system that can make such mistakes?
Remember, for the eternal salvation of our souls we must have something
that cannot change, something that is surer than the foundations of
the earth, something that is as everlasting as eternity. But this is
not to be found in the delusions which are being taught our children in
many of the tax- supported high schools, where the minds of our girls
and boys are being perverted by anti-Biblical speculations which real
scientists rejected years ago. Neither can this faith and assured hope
be formulated in scientific laboratories and expressed in scientific
textbooks and preached in scientific lectures. Nor can it be found in
any human system of learning, because the human mind, darkened by sin,
is too feeble, frail, and fallible to give to the world the final and
absolute truth.
THE
ANSWER OF DIVINE REVELATION.
But, thank God,
tonight the answer to Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” comes to us
from a divine and infallible source, from the blessed lips of Him in
whom the very fullness of the Godhead dwells. None other than the Son
of the living God has told us that, if we continue in His Word, we
“sha1l know the truth.” Communing with His Father in prayer, He
declared, “Thy Word is truth.” Offering His divine guidance to a
perishing world, He pleaded, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
All these and other related passages unite in a convincing answer to
Pilate’s question and tell us that the Word of God, our Bible, the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, which claims to be, which we believe to be, and
which proves itself to be, the revelation of God to men, is in every
sense of the term the truth, the absolute, definite, positive truth.
Let me repeat: This divine Word not only contains the truth, not only
presents the truth, not only leads to the truth, but is the truth.
Consider its
unchangeableness, portraying to us, as it does, “Jesus Christ, the same
yesterday and today and forever.” Men have tried to change it, it is
true; they have tried to accommodate it to passing fancy and to the
absurdities of their own speculations. But while human theories change
with depressing haste, as one generation rushes on after another, we
have Heaven’s assurance that not one jot or tittle of this sacred truth
will pass away.
Remember the
imperishable power of this truth, which according to divine promise
will outlive heaven and earth. Men have risen up to blast this truth
off the face of the earth; a fanatical Roman emperor had this
inscription carved on a stone: “The name of Christ has been destroyed.”
It was the vain boast of Voltaire that, although twelve men were
required to write up Christianity, he himself would prove that one man
could write it down. But today this truth of God is annually
circulated in more hundreds of millions of copies than ever before —
the one, true, deathless volume.
Think of all the
unsparing and soul-searching penetration of this truth, which refuses
to sugar-coat the inborn perversities and iniquities of the human race,
but instead asserts with definite finality, “If we say we have no sin,
we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”
But behold
especially the unspeakable love of this truth, revealed to us in its
highest heights in the tragedies commemorated by this Lenten season, a
love so intense and overpowering that human comprehension cannot
understand even a fragment of it. I want you to see tonight in that
Man of Sorrows the truth of a love so profound that it could
uncomplainingly suffer the ruthless disregard every principle of truth
and justice. We hear of corruptions in our courts today; the annals of
criminal procedure repeatedly have recorded instances in which the
innocent have been pronounced guilty and even sentenced to death; we
have all read of men who for this reason or that have taken upon
themselves the punishment that should have been meted out to others.
Yet all this in its highest and noblest form, magnify it and intensify
it as we may, is so pale and insignificant when compared with the
mocking injustice to which that suffering Savior was subjected that it
completely fades into utter oblivion. For He upon whose naked back
those vindictive persecutors rained the lacerating lash, He upon whose
exalted brow blasphemous hands crushed a crown of cutting thorns, He is
loaded down, not with the punishment of His own sin, for He had none,
but with the punishment of the uncounted myriads of millions of
transgressions of which humanity in its entirety and throughout all
ages had stood condemned. No wonder that, with the sins of every man,
woman, and child that ever lived or that ever will live crushing down
upon His innocent soul as He wrestled in the agony of Gethsemane, He
cried out: “O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.”
No wonder that, when He hung suspended on the cross, with His arms
stretched wide, as though in this dying gesture to embrace all of
humanity for which He was now being slaughtered, He cried in piercing
despair from lips moistened with the vinegar of malice, purple in the
agony of death, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” We read of
the excruciating pain which characterizes the dying hours of some who
suffer from appalling diseases or agonizing accidents; we shudder when
we hear of the bloody persecutions to which followers of Christ have
been subjected by human malice and fiendishness at its worst; yet all
of the pain that murder, war, disease, accident, persecution,
oppression, in their totality have inflicted upon humanity, — all this
is but a temporary annoyance compared with the agony that all but broke
the Savior’s heart as He cried, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even
unto death.”
So tonight, as you
hear the overpowering immensity of His devotion to humanity rise up to
those sublime heights which made Him gasp, blinded in the darkness of
death, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”; as you
listen to His last cry as He bows His head apparently into defeat, in
reality into the world’s greatest triumph, “lt is finished”; as you
stand under the cross with the centurion, you must realize and believe
that above all the loneliness and the never-to-be-measured grief and
weakness that marked that black and bitter death you are face to face
with truth in the highest love of which even Heaven can tell.
Think of the
world-wide sweep of this truth, hurling down all the barriers by which
men have been separated into distinct and opposing groups and knocking
at every heart that hears these words tonight, with none too exalted
or too cultured, none too lowly or too illiterate, to understand and
believe its helpful message. Think of the conditionless offer for the
gift of this truth. Men may endow millions and devote decades in the
attempt to ascertain the truth of our physical life, but here, without
any prerequisites and without any price, is the free and unconditioned
gift of truth, “By grace are ye saved?” Think of the renewing and
regenerating influence and the demonstration of power by which ruined
lives have been recast, hopeless careers reborn with high expectations,
souls torn from the tyranny of sin by the faith to which the Savior
attached this promise, “The truth shall make you free.”
Ask yourself if you
have this freedom and remember that the most blessed verity in your
life, the positive, immovable, unalterable, imperishable truth, is
Christ incarnate, Christ crucified, Christ risen again, Christ
everlastingly victorious in your life here and hereafter. Amen.
[The Preceding Lutheran Hour sermon
first aired in October 1930.]