It may not be popular today, but reality still exists!
I was talking with a terrific Christian leader just the other day, and he asked me what I was reading lately. I replied, ‘Have you got an hour or so?!’ But I did mention that I was reading the first two of the quartet of books that Os Guinness just released to commemorate the 250th anniversary of America’s birth as a nation in 1776.
He confessed to having never read Guinness. My reply: ‘Just remember: God loves you and I’m working on it!’ He did get a bit better when he said he just read his very first Francis Schaeffer volume. Hey, he is moving in the right direction! So we briefly discussed his apologetic method.
Schaeffer spoke of removing the roof from the house that the non-Christian lives in. That is, we must expose the non-believer to the reality of his own worldview and show him he cannot consistently live in such a world. In his ministry to non-Christians, he routinely used this approach.
As but one example, someone steeped in eastern thought who denies good and evil, or insists that they are merely two sides of the same coin, cannot really live with those presuppositions. If he is standing on a train track and sees a train racing towards him, like all folks he will immediately jump off the tracks. His worldview may have sounded nice in theory, but in the real world, it comes crashing down.
As a related example of this, Schaeffer was lecturing on the reality of objective right and wrong at his ministry chalet L’Abri in Switzerland. Another fellow who held to eastern religions was going on about yin and yang, and how evil and suffering are just maya, or illusion.
So to graphically illustrate the foolishness of such a position, Schaeffer grabbed a kettle of hot water (used for tea and coffee) and walked over to the seated student and held it menacingly over his head. With that, the young man got up and walked out of the room. He realised that he was caught out – big time – by reality.
Schaeffer’s apologetic was to expose people to the tensions between their non-Christian presuppositions and the real world. The further your worldview is from biblical truth, the further you will be from reality itself.
Today we simply need to consider the trans insanity that is causing so much damage to so many, especially children and young people. Talk about a flight from reality. Pretending a male can somehow turn into a female is as nutso as it gets, but in an age where relativism reigns, and object truth is scoffed at, anything goes – even this utter craziness.
And of course this attempted attack on reality itself serves all tyrants and dictators so very well. That was a major premise of George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian novel, 1984. One classic line from the book put it this way: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
A larger quote is worth sharing here. In the book, the hero Winston Smith is being tortured in the ‘Ministry of Love’. His interrogator is trying to ‘cure’ him of his belief that reality is found in anything other than what the State says it is. As he informs Smith:
“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.”
Since I already mentioned Guinness and Schaeffer, some quotes from each are worth running with here. First, a few from Schaeffer:
“Christianity is not just a series of truths but Truth – Truth about all of reality.” A Christian Manifesto
“Christianity is not a series of truths in the plural but, rather, truth spelled with a capital ‘T.’ Truth about total reality, not just about religious things. Christianity, biblical Christianity, is Truth concerning total reality – and the intellectual holding of that total Truth and then living in the light of that Truth.” A speech given at the University of Notre Dame in 1981
Time For Truthby Os Guinness (Author)
And two quotes from Guinness, both from Time for Truth:
“In the biblical view, truth is that which is ultimately, finally, and absolutely real, or the ‘way it is,’ and therefore is utterly trustworthy and dependable, being grounded in God’s own reality and truthfulness. . . . Belief in something doesn’t make it true; only truth makes a belief true. But without truth, a belief may be only speculation plus sincerity.”
“Postmodern forms of relativism, skepticism, cynicism, and the like may appear to shatter traditional convictions to smithereens. But fears that such views are beyond argument are groundless. For no human being lives outside the reality common to us all. Whatever people may say the world is or who they are, it is what it is and they are who they are. Again, no argument is unarguable, but there are thoughts that can be thought but not lived. When all is said and done, reality always has the last word. The truth will always out. Standing up to falsehood, lies, and crazy ideas is never an easy task, but … it is far easier than the hardest task of all, becoming people of truth ourselves.”
Since I am also a great fan of G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, I will not go astray in sharing a brief quote from each one as well. Chesterton said this: “Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.” And Lewis wrote: “Truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is.”
The inability to live in the real world, or the insistence of holding to that which is patently unreal and untrue has long been an indication of a social pathology, if not a mental illness. Not all that long ago when someone claimed to be Jesus Christ, or said he could walk on water, we locked them up in institutions for their own safety – and the safety of others.
We certainly did not humour them or recklessly say that they were somehow entitled to their OWN truth. There is only THE truth, not our own truth. There is only reality, not our little make-believe worlds. You can push the nonsense that everything is just a social construct, but the next time you leap from a tall building, you will know what utter rot that was – the law of gravity wins every time.
As the Objectivist Ayn Rand said: “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” Or as the Canadian essayist David Solway put it in a piece titled, “The War against Reality”:
Reality is a formidable opponent. It never loses. Sometimes the victory is immediate; in the political, cultural, and economic domains, it may take a while longer. In any human confrontation with the intractable facts of life, physical or historical, the outcome is never in doubt. Ignorance is a serious liability in any transaction with the real world. Denial is ultimately lethal. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/04/the_war_against_reality.html
The war of worldviews that Schaeffer and others championed is still a worthwhile way in which we can engage with others. But of course that task has gotten more difficult than it was back in Schaeffer’s day. Back then most westerners still believed that there were such things as objective reality and universal truth. And they also believed that reason and logical thought mattered.
Today there are far fewer folks who do – especially in the “enlightened” West, and in its universities. Someone like Charlie Kirk – who was much more than a conservative spokesperson, but an evangelist and an apologist – certainly encountered this big time in his campus work.
So our task might be more difficult nowadays, but we are still commanded to share truth and point folks to ultimate reality, of which Christ and Scripture are the paramount expressions.
