Truth and Speech

Truthfulness in scripture begins with God. He is God, who cannot lie (Titus 1:2), and it is impossible for God to lie (Hebrews 6:18). Jesus calls himself the way and the truth and the life (John 14:6), and he calls the devil a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). So when Christians speak truthfully, they are not merely following a useful rule for social life. They are reflecting the character of the God whose image they bear, and refusing the native language of the enemy. Proverbs says it bluntly: lying lips are detestable to the LORD, but those who deal faithfully are His delight (Proverbs 12:22).

The anchor verse gives a second reason, and it is a reason about the church. Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one another (Ephesians 4:25). A lie in the body of Christ is like a hand deceiving the eye. The body depends on its members telling each other what is real, and a church where people routinely shade the truth, flatter, exaggerate and conceal cannot function as a body at all. Notice also that therefore points back to the putting off of the old self and the putting on of the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness (4:24). Truthful speech is a mark of the new creation in a person.

The ninth commandment, You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor (Exodus 20:16), was first a law for the courtroom. In Israel a false witness could cost an innocent man his land, his freedom or his life, as Naboth's story shows (1 Kings 21). But scripture widens it. You must not lie or deceive one another (Leviticus 19:11). He who speaks the truth declares what is right (Proverbs 12:17). The story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 shows how seriously the early church took deception within its own life: their sin was not that they kept back part of their money, which Peter says was theirs to keep, but that they lied about it. You have not lied to men, but to God! (Acts 5:4).

Truthfulness is not the same as saying everything. Scripture praises the person who keeps a confidence: a gossip reveals a secret, but a trustworthy person keeps a confidence (Proverbs 11:13). It praises restraint: when words are many, sin is unavoidable, but he who restrains his lips is wise (10:19). And it praises the one who covers an offence for love's sake rather than spreading it (17:9). Thomas Aquinas, following Augustine, put the distinction memorably: it is a sin to say what is false, but it is lawful to hide the truth prudently. A Christian may be silent, may decline to answer, and may keep a confidence. The question that has divided Christians is whether he may ever go further.

The question is old, and every serious Christian ethics has to face it. Someone is hiding an innocent person. A man comes to the door intending to kill that person, and asks where he is. Silence will betray him. Is it right to say he is not here? The case is not academic. Christians hid Jews from the Nazis, Tutsi from the killers in Rwanda, and neighbours from militias in many conflicts, and they were asked exactly this question at the door. Two families of answer have been given, and both have been held by faithful and brave Christians.

The first answer is that it is never right to lie, even to save a life. Augustine of Hippo argued this in two works, On Lying (around 395) and Against Lying (around 420). He defined a lie as saying what one believes to be false with the intention of deceiving, and he argued that since God forbids lying and a lie is a sin against truth itself, which is God, no good end can make it right. We may not do evil that good may come. He did not say the hidden person should be betrayed. He told the story of Firmus, a bishop of Thagaste, who was asked by imperial officers where a man who had taken refuge with him was hidden. Firmus answered that he could neither lie nor betray a man, and endured torture rather than do either; Augustine reports that the emperor, moved by his courage, pardoned the fugitive. The faithful answer, on this view, is to refuse both the lie and the betrayal, and to suffer for it if necessary.

Augustine answered the midwives and Rahab directly. God rewarded the midwives, he argued, for their mercy and their fear of God, not for their words: what God rewarded was their kindness, and the deception was a weakness he forgave rather than an act he approved. Rahab was praised for her faith and her hospitality, not for her deception. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, question 110), followed Augustine: every lie is a sin, though a helpful lie told to save someone is a lesser sin than a malicious one. The same position was held by many Reformed writers, including John Murray in Principles of Conduct (1957), who argued that the texts commend the midwives' and Rahab's faith while saying nothing to approve their falsehood, and in our own time by Wayne Grudem in Christian Ethics (2018), who holds that affirming what one believes to be false is always wrong while allowing that a person may stay silent, decline to answer or act in ways that mislead an enemy, as in war.

This view has real strength. It takes seriously the plain prohibitions of scripture and the character of God, who cannot lie. It refuses to let the ends justify the means, a principle that, once loosened, has justified terrible things. It honours the martyrs, who could often have saved their lives by a false word and would not say it. And it reminds us that the choice is rarely only between lying and betraying: silence, refusal, delay, flight and courage are often possible, and the lie is sometimes simply the easiest way out. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, in a short essay of 1797, On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy, defended an even stricter version, but his reasons were philosophical rather than biblical, and Christian absolutists generally stand on Augustine's ground, not Kant's. Critics answer that the view can leave the innocent to die so that the speaker's words stay clean, that the choice between lying and betraying is sometimes painfully real, and that Firmus's story ended well only because an emperor showed mercy that the victims of Nazi or genocidal killers could not count on. Absolutists reply that God, not our words, is the protector of the innocent, and that a duty does not lapse because keeping it is costly.

The second answer is that deceiving the murderer is not the sin scripture forbids, or that if it is a wrong it is one a Christian must sometimes accept for love's sake. Its defenders also stand on scripture. The midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had instructed (Exodus 1:17); their answer to Pharaoh was part of that disobedience, and immediately afterwards the text says, So God was good to the midwives (1:20). Rahab's concealment of the spies was the very act by which she welcomed them, and Hebrews 11:31 and James 2:25 praise exactly that. They also point to God's own instruction to Samuel, who feared Saul would kill him, to take a heifer and say he had come to sacrifice (1 Samuel 16:2), and to Elisha telling the Aramean soldiers, This is not the way, and this is not the city (2 Kings 6:19). Absolutists reply that Samuel's words were true and only incomplete, and that the Elisha story is a miracle of blinding rather than a rule of speech. Their opponents answer that God gave Samuel those words precisely so that Saul would be misled, and that the line between a misleading truth and a lie is thinner than absolutists allow. The argument over these texts has gone back and forth for centuries.

Some defenders of this view, following the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in The Law of War and Peace (1625), argue that the ninth commandment forbids false witness against your neighbor, and that a lie in the full sense is a false statement that violates the right of the hearer to the truth. A murderer seeking his victim has forfeited that right, just as a soldier in war has no right to know where the other army is camped. To mislead him is not to wrong him. John Frame, in The Doctrine of the Christian Life (2008), argues along related lines that the biblical sin is deceiving a neighbour to his harm. Others, such as Norman Geisler in Christian Ethics (1989), take a different route: when two real duties conflict, such as protecting innocent life and telling the truth, a Christian must obey the higher one and is not guilty for failing the lower.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in a Nazi prison in 1943, gave this question its most searching modern treatment in an unfinished essay later published in his Ethics, What Is Meant by Telling the Truth? He argued that truthfulness is not the bare matching of words to facts, without regard to who is speaking, to whom, and why. A child's word to his parent, a husband's to his wife, a witness's to a court and a prisoner's to an interrogator each stand in a different relationship, and truthful speech honours what is real in that relationship. His famous example is a schoolboy asked by his teacher, in front of the whole class, whether it is true that his father often comes home drunk. The boy says no. Bonhoeffer argued that the teacher had no right to the question, that the boy was defending the order of his family against an intrusion, and that his answer, though formally untrue, contained more truth than a public exposure would have. He also warned against what he called the cynic, who tells everything to everyone and calls it honesty while destroying trust and love. Bonhoeffer had himself deceived his Nazi interrogators to protect others, and he knew what he was writing about.

This view, too, has real strength. It takes the stories of the midwives and Rahab at face value, where the deception is woven into the acts scripture praises. It understands the commandment in its own terms, as protection for the neighbour, rather than as a rule that the murderer can use against the innocent. It reflects the conviction of many Christians who hid the hunted, that it would have been monstrous to hand over a child to killers in order to keep one's own words clean. And it warns against a kind of moral self-protection that cares more about not having sinned than about the person at risk. Critics answer that it can make every lie look justified once a good enough reason is found, and that Bonhoeffer's own essay was unfinished and is hard to turn into a rule. Defenders reply that the line is not vague: it is drawn by the murderer's own intent to kill, and admitting the hard case does nothing to excuse the ordinary lie.

There is a third road some have tried, and the church has mostly closed it. Mental reservation was a teaching, developed by some late medieval and early modern Catholic moralists, that a speaker might say something misleading while silently adding a qualification in his own mind that made it true. Pope Innocent XI condemned the strict form of it in 1679, and Protestants generally regarded it as lying with extra steps. Both main views in this section agree that a mental trick does not make deception honest. This course leaves the main question where the church has left it, genuinely divided among those who hold scripture's authority. What both sides share matters more for most students: lying for convenience, for advantage, or to protect one's own reputation is sin, and no one in this debate defends it.

Few Christians will ever face a murderer at the door. Every Christian, every day, faces the smaller temptations of speech, and they do far more damage to churches than the hard cases do. The first is rumour. The words of a gossip are like choice morsels that go down into the inmost being (Proverbs 18:8). People enjoy hearing them, remember them, and pass them on. The law of Moses forbade it directly: You must not go about spreading slander among your people (Leviticus 19:16), and the next words in that verse are: You must not endanger the life of your neighbor. Scripture sees what a rumour can do. It can end a marriage, a ministry, or a life.

The phone has made the old sin faster. A message forwarded in a church group can reach thousands of people in an hour, and the person forwarding it rarely knows whether it is true. False health cures, false prophecies, false reports about a pastor, claims about another tribe or religion that stir fear, invented stories of miracles: all of these travel through Christian groups every day. In Rwanda in 1994 a radio station spread hatred and directed killers. In several countries since, false messages passed through phones have led to mobs attacking innocent people. The command You shall not spread a false report (Exodus 23:1) applies whether the report is spoken in a market or forwarded on a screen. Before passing anything on, a Christian should ask three questions. Do I know this is true? Is it mine to pass on? Will it build up or tear down, which is Paul's test in Ephesians 4:29?

The second temptation is flattery, which is a lie told to please. A man who flatters his neighbor spreads a net for his feet (Proverbs 29:5). In churches where leaders are honoured highly, flattery can become the air everyone breathes, so that no one tells the pastor the truth about his preaching, his temper or his money until it is too late. The opposite sin is harshness that calls itself honesty, the cynic Bonhoeffer warned against. Paul's phrase holds the two together: speaking the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15). Truth without love wounds; love without truth deceives.

Preachers face a particular temptation here. Exaggerated testimonies, numbers inflated in reports to supporters, stories told as personal that happened to someone else, and illustrations improved in the telling are all forms of lying, and they are common. A preacher who is willing to bend the truth to make a sermon work has taught his congregation that the truth is negotiable. The standard for the pulpit is not lower than the standard for the witness box.

A promise is truthfulness stretched into the future. When you promise, you make your word now a claim on what you will do later. Scripture treats this with great seriousness. If a man makes a vow to the LORD or swears an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word (Numbers 30:2). It is better not to vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it (Ecclesiastes 5:5). And Psalm 15 describes the one who may dwell with God as one who does not revise a costly oath (Psalm 15:4), that is, who keeps his word when keeping it hurts. Israel kept its oath to the Gibeonites even after discovering it had been tricked into making it (Joshua 9:19). For students in places where loans, land agreements, bride-price arrangements and business deals rest on a man's word, this is not a minor matter.

Jesus pressed further: I tell you not to swear at all (Matthew 5:34), and Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No.' (5:37). James repeats it (James 5:12). Christians have read these words in two ways, and both readings have been held by faithful churches. The Anabaptists and later the Quakers took them literally and refused all oaths, including in court, often at great cost, arguing that a Christian's word should be the same whether sworn or not, and that the oath implies ordinary speech may be false. Most churches, including the Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican, have held that Jesus forbade the careless and evasive oaths common in his day, the swearing by heaven or by Jerusalem that let people wriggle out of their word, not solemn oaths before lawful authority. They point out that Paul called God as his witness (Romans 1:9), that Hebrews says their oath serves as a confirmation to end all argument (Hebrews 6:16), and that God himself swore by himself (Hebrews 6:13). Both readings agree on the heart of Jesus' teaching: a Christian's ordinary word must be as reliable as an oath.

One kind of promise needs special care in ministry: the promise of confidentiality. A pastor must keep confidences, and a church where private confessions become public knowledge is not safe for anyone. But a pastor must never promise absolute secrecy before he knows what he will be told. If someone reveals that a child or a vulnerable adult is being harmed, keeping that secret would make the pastor part of the harm. The Pastoral Care track's lessons Keeping Confidences, and Their Limits and Protecting the Vulnerable explain why such things must be reported to the proper authorities. The truthful promise is: I will keep what you tell me private, unless someone is in danger.

Open your casebook to a fresh page and head it Truth and Speech. Write no names. Step one. Describe, in general terms, one situation from your own setting where truthfulness is genuinely hard. It might be a question from authorities or relatives that you fear answering, a promise you are tempted to break, a report passing through your church's phone groups, or a situation where people expect the pastor to tell them only good news.

Step two. Decide what kind of case it is. Is it a hard case of the murderer-at-the-door kind, where an innocent life or safety is genuinely at stake? Or is it an ordinary case, where the truth is costly but no one is in danger? Write which. Most cases, honestly examined, turn out to be the second kind. Step three. If it is a hard case, write how the Augustinian view and the view of Grotius and Bonhoeffer would each counsel you, and what options other than lying or betraying might exist: silence, refusal, delay, or getting the person away. If it is an ordinary case, write what speaking the truth in love would require, and what it would cost you.

Step four. Make one decision about speech for this week. You might decide not to forward any message unless you know it is true, or to go privately to one person you have spoken about behind their back, or to keep a promise you had been planning to quietly drop. Write the decision and, at the end of the week, write whether you kept it. Step five, for those who teach. Plan a lesson for your church on Proverbs 18:8 and Exodus 23:1 and what they mean for the phone groups your members belong to. Keep the page for the capstone.