Living Truthfully: Addressing the Violence within

- address given by Winifred Wing Han Lamb
on 7 August 2003 at St.Mark's Theological Centre, Canberra

It is good to see you all here tonight to present a Christian witness to our intention for peace. It has already been noted that this event is not an academic seminar, rather it is an occasion for us to hear and to reflect so that we can orientate our hearts to peace. So tonight, I'm not going to talk about violence on the grand scale of war and human history, but I'd like to approach the subject of violence from a subjective angle. I'd like to talk about living truthfully as a way of overcoming the violence within ourselves. I will approach the subject from the Christian point of view because I believe that in this day and age - whatever clash or conflict of civilisation or religion there may actually be, we need to be clear about our responsibility for world peace. So I invite you to reflect with me on the question of Christians and violence, i.e. the violence to which we, as Christians are particularly prone, and to consider the resources which we have to address the violence within.

In a recent interview on the ABC Religion Report, James Haire talked about the war-mongering governments around the world which took us to war on Iraq. He pointed out that with all the spindoctoring, or 'sexing up' of propaganda leading to war, that in the face of such blatant deception on the part of governments, the church should 'declare truth'. If truth is the casualty of such war-mongering propaganda, then exposing lies and declaring truth are vital weapons against violence. However, tonight, I want to say that the declaration of truth is only part of the work of peace, simply because sometimes the truth is not enough. Truth itself can be used as the ally and instrument of violence. Indeed, the most violent people are zealous about their version of truth. Even people of good will and ideals can grow bitter if no one will listen to them.

With our contemporary consciousness, we have become instinctively sceptical of people who claim to know the truth. We wonder if anyone can be trusted with that word. We are suspicious of fundamentalists who claim that they are on the side of the definitive truth. We are equally suspicious of the media which tries to convince us of their version of truth even if they use statistics and seemingly objective TV images to show what really happened and what the facts really are.

As Christians, we are concerned to seek the truth in all places and we seek to found our lives on the truth which we believe is revealed in Jesus Christ. But tonight I want to ask the further question. This is not a question about objective truth - important as that is - but it is the question of what is our relationship to truth? Tonight, I want to explore with you how our relationship to truth is important for the overcoming of violence. (This is not a sermon, but it does have 3 parts!) To do this, I will start with the poet and philosopher Coleridge who gives us a theological insight into the meaning of truthfulness and its dynamic relationship to self and society. Then, with help from Coleridge, I will argue that truthfulness requires openness, including openness to those who are different from us and even hostile to us. To model this openness, I will turn to two philosophers who present hostile critiques of Christians. David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche both believed that Christian faith and practice are forms of veiled violence and their critiques of Christian practice offer valuable insight into the psychology of violence. In the final part of my talk, I will then consider how we can respond to Hume and Nietzsche and the resources we have in our faith to live truthfully in the light of their critiques.

1. What can Coleridge tell us about truthfulness and its relationship to self and other? 
Perhaps the best way to introduce the uneasy relationship between truth and violence is to begin with Coleridge's famous aphorism:
He who begins by loving Christianity, better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
According to Coleridge,1 it is not enough for Christians to claim to put truth at the centre of their lives, but truth itself must, as it were, be constantly nurtured by the love of truth. For Coleridge, the love of truth must be theologically grounded to save it from deteriorating into parochial loyalty. He believed that when human reason and will are properly exercised in the love of truth, they actually correspond to the divine reason and are trinitarian in form. To love something less than truth is to fail to participate in the Trinity and to undercut the proper use of will and reason. It is to engage in an idolatrous form of knowing which is the very opposite of learning and growth towards truth. To call something less 'the truth' and to love that like truth is to enter a downward spiral which ends in self-love and which produces atrophy and closure within the individual.

All this is very profound, and whatever we think of Coleridge's theology, it seems to me that he presents us with a choice: our relationship to truth could either be a process of learning and development, or it could be a process which leads to insularity and stagnation. If we choose learning, we have to work on ourselves especially to resist the tendency to self-enclosure. As Coleridge saw it, the love of truth is not the exclusive concern of the intellectually gifted but it is part of personal and spiritual growth in a broad sense.

In this light, our relationship to truth is both a spiritual and moral matter in which we have to 'take heed' that we do not atrophy. If we are to nurture our relationship to truth, we need courage and inward transformation. While our faith requires our faithfulness, Coleridge encourages us to think of faithfulness in a broad and dynamic sense, not as loyalty to a comfortable, partisan position, but as faithfulness to truth itself which is grounded in the triune God. As Coleridge saw it, the greater God is, the more we will be stretched beyond ourselves in our faithfulness to truth.

2. Truthfulness therefore requires openness and openness enjoins us to listen to what people say about us.
But who will tell us what we are really like? Our friends and our fellow believers will not always tell us what we need to know. They may not discern our collective faults. They may not see past our shared comfort zones. We therefore need to hear from people who are outside our communities of faith. So Merold Westphal writes, 'When our holiness has halitosis we need someone to let us know, and on such occasions, those who wish us no good can be helpful.'2 Westphal argues that without openness and courage, our own lives and the life of our communities will not only atrophy, as Coleridge warns, but they will themselves be characterised by arrogance and by the exercise of coercive authority.
 
Much of contemporary postmodern thinking reminds us that violence goes together with neglect of the other and it is therefore a form of self-enclosure. This is why cruel deeds are done when empathy is absent. People are marginalised when they are invisible. This is why people turn to crime in big cities where they are anonymous. Is this why it is particularly easy to be cruel when we are convinced we are on the side of truth? Is this why we are afraid of fundamentalism?

But to be truthful is to be vulnerable about where we stand. It is to allow ourselves to be challenged.  I wonder what the public thinks when they read reports of how the church responds to challenge, especially to the explosion of sexual abuse charges? What do people think when stories are presented of ruined lives and the victim is more than often met with the hard shell of self protection rather than acknowledgement and openness. In the light of the Christian message of the Incarnation, shouldn't vulnerability be at the heart of things?

Tonight, we have come with vastly different experiences of life.  Some of us see ourselves as victims, while others of us are fortunate enough to have escaped serious violence But beneath our differences we have to address our hearts.

For insight into our hearts, I have chosen two philosophers who believed that beneath the piety of Christians lies a dormant and underhand violence. I begin with the atheist philosopher David Hume who is well-known for his philosophical arguments against Christian beliefs. However, Hume had other less esoteric objections to Christians. For example, he wondered whether Christian faith is nothing more than an insurance policy against the contingencies of life and the fears we hold in the face of its uncertainties. He had a certain admiration for the lofty and noble ideals of religion, but he advances his atheism with this challenging question: how could so much violence be done in its name?3 Centuries later that question is echoed in the postmodern protest that the big stories of faith have given us as much terror as we can take.4

Hume's answer to his own question is illuminating and challenging. He said that many religious people are able to live with such a fundamental contradiction because they have domesticated their religion into cosy ideas and 'comfortable views' which have lost all their challenge and edge. As he sees it, believers are so cocooned in their web of beliefs that they will use it to justify whatever they want. These people are in control of a religion that they use to advance their self interest. God has become an idol in their hands, a lap dog for their cosy comfort. Faith is nothing more than an instrument of self interest.

With this in mind, Hume asks another question: how does this kind of domesticated religion fit in with Christian 'worship'? Doesn't worship of God require a letting go of self interest. Isn't true worship a self-forgetful, non calculating act. For this reason, Hume concludes that it Christians don't worship. They're simply psychologically incapable of it. What they call adoration and worship is nothing more than placation and flattery. An insurance policy against things going wrong.

Now Hume is a good preparation for the next philosopher, Nietzsche who was even more critical! In fact, Nietzsche was so disgusted with Christians that after meeting one, he said that he felt like washing his hands! So he spent a lot of time trying to discredit Christians and their lives. He was confident that he could mount an intellectual argument against Christianity to make it look utterly ridiculous. But he said that he had a better argument. All he had to do was to expose the psychological reasons for why people adopt the Christian faith and then he will show that their psychological disease matches the warped nature of their faith.

However, in his searing criticisms of Christians, though not only of Christians (he despised a lot of people), Nietzsche himself relied on a very cynical view of human nature. He believed, in fact, that we are driven by the will to power. The will to power is the primary and overriding instinct, no matter what we believe. Nietzsche explained that this works differently for different people - depending on whether they are powerful or powerless. Some of us can enjoy the will to power because of our privileged positions but some are born into a low status. So while the strong can openly celebrate their power, the losers have to live with their unnatural humiliation. And so the story of Christianity begins.

According to Nietzsche, Christian psychology is rooted in the resentment that is produced by unnatural humiliation. But since Christians are power-hungry like everyone else, they turn their weakness inwards, and make a virtue out of their weakness. They take their revenge by abstracting from the anger and humiliation which they naturally feel by turning their weakness into a virtue. This inverted reactive approach to life is what Nietzsche calls slave morality. So when Christians talk about 'loving their enemies', it sounds good, but it's nothing but the 'cunning of impotence'5 as Nietzsche says.

According to Nietzsche, the 'cunning of impotence' is particularly obvious in Christian pastoral care. How is that the case? Well, argues Nietzsche, in pastoral care, the carer enjoys the feeling of power and superiority, of being indispensable. In caring for another, he also finds a cover for his low self-esteem. The carer then draws attention to himself in his moral elevation. Pastoral care is a 'Look at me!' exercise. [it's funny that since Kath & Kim, we can't say that without a certain Aussie inflection!]

In contrast, however, the one who is cared for experiences humiliation. He becomes an object of care and furthermore, has to carry the burden of gratitude and obligation. As Nietzsche says, 'Pity is often obtrusive, and offends the sense of shame, hurting another's pride.'6 He therefore counsels that it is sometimes better not to help at all, especially if it means that we carry out the kind of compulsive and aggressive caring in which which the person needing help becomes secondary while the carer gets all the kudos.

In his anatomy of Christian compassion, Nietzsche tries to argue that Christian love is really nothing but a form of judgementalism. By their acts of goodness, says Nietzsche Christians 'walk among us as embodied reproaches'7, making the rest of us feel bad. In characterising the will to power under the cloak of piety, Nietzsche adopted a term from the New Testament (rather uncritically) because he uses the term 'Pharisaism' to describe Christians and all who live the life of slave morality.

Nietzsche represents the lives of Christians as lives ruled by underhand vengefulness. Christians aren't very nice nor are they very interesting people. Because they can't be honest and open, they've lost touch with themselves because they have turned self-deception into an art-form. And yet they look visibly restless and exhausted by all the effort they put into projecting an image. Nietzsche says that this all springs from self-hate. Then he introduces some wise counsel - what people like this need is a healthy dose of self-love then they wouldn't wish that they were someone else and get all exhausted trying to pretend to be what they are not!

However, Nietzsche doesn't think that Christians can change. They are 'imprisoned' 'in their good conscience' and too scared to leave the comfort zones of their preconceived patterns of slavish thinking. They can't change because they are locked in and are not free to understand new ideas.

3. Response - acknowledgement and confession
Why must we listen to Nietzsche?
I have drawn on their hostile portrayals (actually I have left out a lot of the violent language that we find in Nietzsche) not only because they are insightful, not only because they are good 'secular theologians of sin'8, but also because they reflect the kind of cynicism against Christians that we find in contemporary consciousness today.

Furthermore, I believe that the speak like prophets. Where they are right, they speak to us about the idolatrous mindsets which insulate us from truth - the 'No-Gods' which trade the voice of truth for tame and domesticated versions of it. Karl Barth therefore argued that prophetic voices outside our comfortable spaces can be the most effective in revealing our idolatry because 'the cry of revolt against such a god is nearer the truth than is the sophistry with which people attempt to justify him.'9

So what do we recognize in Hume and Nietzsche's critiques of ourselves? Do they reveal to us the violence in our hearts? 

To Nietzsche in particular, my own response is mixed. I find what he says very confronting because he is insightful about what goes on in my heart. He speaks as if he has an insider view of the church. (And yet, as I will elaborate later, not quite insider enough). But of course, I don't fundamentally share his view of human nature. We are driven by the will to power, but as human beings and as Christians we will not ultimately be satisfied by this. We long for much more.

Yet Nietzsche is right about many things. I recognise the masking in myself, the inauthenticity which may sometimes be encouraged by Church culture. I recognise what both Hume and Nietzsche say about comfortable views that lock me and my fellow believers into idolatry. I recognise the sometimes aggressive way in which I take an interest in the plight of others - the extent to which the interest in them is curiosity rather than genuine and self-effacing concern. I recognise the 'Look at me!' syndrome, not only in myself, but in others.

And I sense the burden of unreality. The life exhausted by masking and manipulation. I identify with the Pharisees and the slaves who divide the world into 'sinners' and 'righteous' - 'them' and 'us' and I sense that I often derive my comfort from such a fixed worldview. I see this spiritual apartheid in the church and I see it in the current rhetoric about groups of people who might threaten our comfortable Australian identity.

But I long for the life of authenticity and for non-calculation. I long for the freedom to worship with self-forgetfulness. I suspect that you too have these longings tonight.

So as Christians we must wherever appropriate, acknowledge and confess the machinations of our own hearts. Are we self-deceived, inauthentic, unreal, manipulative and burdened? Do we live untruthfully? And do we, striken by the burden of this self, long for freedom?

I believe that if we listen honestly to people like Hume and Nietzsche, we become sharper in our spiritual focus. Hume and Nietzsche can sharpen our understanding, not only of ourselves, but of the Christian Gospel. If they convict us, they also remind us that there is good news. They can drive us into the arms of grace. Hear these liberating thoughts:

* Christ calls us beyond Pharisaism
* God's love takes us beyond Pharisaism and introduces us to the radically different logic of grace
* Grace affirms our worth without condition. While instrumentalism - the demand to be productive, to be better than someone else, to look good, to be a success - infects the human condition, grace affirms 'the demonstrative value of [our] being'10 and frees us from the instrumentalism which is the warp and woof of human society and culture.

* As St Paul declares, it is 'For freedom, Christ has set us free...'11
So in response to Nietzsche, we turn to grace because it is the source of a healthy self-love. This will free us not only from violence to others but also from violence to ourselves. As Nietzsche has insightfully shown, a healthy self-acceptance enables us to be truthful. If we accept ourselves we do not need to practice deceit. As Karl Rahner argues,
... [t]he need no longer remains to hide behind devices of deceit and manipulation. There is no need for interior deceitfulness with one's self, dishonesty, "putting up a façade" ... affectation and other forms in which a man tries to avoid facing up to his own nature.12
* So grace frees us from violence to ourselves. But it also frees us to practice genuine care. Pastoral care does not have to be self-featuring. We can love like God, to set the other free. So too must we in the way we care. We may not always get it right because as Kierkegaard notes, only the omnipotent God can love to est free, but still, we must practice what Kierkegaard calls 'the art of power' which consists in the capacity to set free.13
* We are thus enjoined to the ongoing practice of truthfulness. We will discover that it is not the life of slavishness as Nietzsche maintained. For the practice of Christian weakness requires courage and a robust character. If God desires 'truth in the inward part'14 we will discover more about ourselves and the fragility of truthfulness not only in ourselves, but also in others. But God's love covers a multitude of sin.

That God knows our hearts and is not scandalized by what is there is partly what we mean by grace. This gives us courage to accept ourselves as we are in the ongoing life of truthfulness. Perhaps it is fitting to end with this meditation and prayer of Michael Leunig:

In order to be truthful
We must do more than speak the truth
We must also hear truth
We must also act upon truth
We must also search for truth
The difficult truth
Within us and around us
We must devote ourselves to truth
Otherwise we are dishonest
And our lives are mistaken
God grant us the strength and the courage
To be truthful. Amen.

Footnotes
 
1 I have based this discussion of Coleridge's position on Dan Hardy's essay. His theological interpretation of Coleridge's idea of the love of truth effectively illuminates the notion of 'interpretative arrogance' in communities of faith. See Hardy, 'Created and Redeemed Sociality,' C.E. Gunton & Daniel W. Hardy eds., Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989).
2 Westphal, Merold, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), p.284.
3 Hume, David, The Natural History of Religion, H.E. Root, ed., (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1956).
4 Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr., Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p. 81.
5 On the Genealogy  of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale  and Ecce Homo, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 40.
6 Zarathustra, tr. Thomas Common, with an introduction by Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche (New York: Macmillan, 1905), Fourth Part, LXVII, pp. 265-7.
7 On the Genealogy  of Morals, p. 123.
8 This is Westphal's phrase.
9 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, tr. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 37-52. I am indebted to Westphal for his discussion on Barth, in Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, pp. 4-6.
10 A phrase from F.J.J. Buytendijk and quoted in Moltmann, Theology and Joy, (London: SCM Press, 1971), p. 42.
11 Galatians 5:1.
12 Karl Rahner, 'On Truthfulness,' in Theological Investigations, vol. 7 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971), p. 239.
13 The Papers of SØren Kierkegaard, quoted in Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 146.
14 Ps. 51. 6