the truth about TRUTH

by Doyle Chauncey                                                                                   Vol. XX, No. 2, February 2007

    Executive Director, Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia

A special report in the September 5, 2005 issue of Newsweek entitled, "In Search of the Spiritual," began with these words, "Americans are looking for personal, ecstatic experiences of God, and they don't care what the neighbors are doing,." The passion for an immediate, transcendent experience of God is not new, but it is shocking that Americans have amazingly accepted diverse and unorthodox beliefs in an attempt to validate their experiences.

The website belief.net sends out more than 8 million daily emails of "spiritual wisdom" in various flavors to more than 5 million subscribers. Generic "inspiration" is most popular (2.4 million) followed by the Bible (1.6 million), but there are 460,000 subscribers to the Buddhist thought of the day, 313,000 Torah devotees, and 268,000 subscribers to Daily Muslim Wisdom. Pagans are divided Into groups, including Wicca, Druidism, Pantheism, Animism, Teutonic Paganism and, in case you can't find one to suit you on that list, Eclectic Paganism.

Whatever is going on here, it's not an explosion of people going to Bible-believing churches in search of objective biblical truth, but a growing number of "believers" who have decided to follow a version compiled by themselves from a smorgasbord of religious ideas. According to the Newsweek poll, eight in 10 Americans – including 68% of evangelicals – believe that more than one faith can be a I path to salvation, which is most likely not what they were taught in Sunday school. For them, truth is a matter of individual preference. And these are not just the neighbors across the street: they are in our own Baptist churches – in our own families.

To counter the faulty thinking about truth – that all moral and spiritual truth is subjective and equal – we must shift the emphasis. The truth about truth is that Truth is a Person – Jesus Christ. It resides in and springs from the Person who loves us wants a personal relationship with us. Jesus told Thomas, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). We must move beyond just "what to believe" to include "whom to believe."

[Reprinted from the Jan/Feb 2006 Proclaimer, the official news magazine of the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia.]