People > Prophecy

Why I'm done prioritizing truth over God's children

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

(A seven-minute read.)

“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” -1 Corinthians 13:2

I have a very simple thought: I’m done prioritizing truth over people. I’m finished defending ideas instead of God’s children. I’m done allowing prophetic interpretations to lead to humanitarian paralysis.

I know, I know. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. And I totally agree.

But I’ve just been noticing lately that it seems like many religious people, especially the Christian circles in which I travel, seem to exert more energy defending ideas than defending people.

We feel that truth needs to be guarded and protected even at the expense of God’s children.

Don’t get me wrong. I think truth is good and important and awesome. I appreciate theology. I value orthodoxy.

But I love people.

It feels like, so often, we do the opposite though. We appreciate people but we love truth. We’ll speak up on behalf of God’s children—to a certain extent—but we’ll fight tooth and nail to defend doctrines.

We often do this because we have a “trickle-down theology.” We think if we defend truth then it will trickle down into people’s lived experience, protecting them against deception and eternal ruin—which is a loving thing to do for others.

So loving, protecting, and defending truth is a round-about way of loving, protecting, and defending people.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this on a theoretical level. As I said, I value truth. I’m a big fan of good theology.

But it seems that, at the very least, there’s a lot of collateral damage when we prioritize defending truth over defending people.

Let me give you an example. It will be a controversial one.

I believe in the givenness of gender—that there’s something worth saving about male and female.

In other words, though I have significant disagreements with many “traditional” views of gender, I’m still, at the end of the day, firmly committed to the historical gender binary of male and female—believing, with only rare exceptions, that one’s gender is determined by biological sex.

But transgender people are more important to me than the “truth about gender.”

So I have little interest in defending “gender” if it comes at the expense of transgender people.

What does this even mean?

It means I try to actively seek to invite transgender people to my table—where they are, to use a phrase from a reading we do with our church, not just welcome, but desperately and fiercely wanted.

It means I seek to learn their story and help them know they are valued, loved, and heard.

It means I refuse to turn them into an “ism” (ie., transgenderism), and try to call out people who vilify and demonize them.

It means I seek to not simply be “not transphobic,” but actually “anti-transphobic.”

Again, none of this requires me to change what I believe the truth is about gender—or at least I don’t think it does. Nor does it require me to never say anything about those beliefs.

It just means I always seek to remember that people are more important than “truth”; that I won’t prioritize and defend abstract ideas at the expense of embodied people.

(I realize that many people will think my stance is the frightening start of the dreaded “slippery slope,” while others will think it’s not good or far enough—and that’s OK.)

I could multiply the examples—but, suffice it to say, many of us religious people will go to great lengths, spending lots of money and spilling lots of ink, to defend abstract ideas.

We thus defend marriage. We defend the Sabbath. We defend creationism. We defend the Bible.

We act as though all these things have thoughts, feelings, and personhood—that they’re more important than the embodied people who really do have thoughts, feelings, and personhood.

And we sometimes—perhaps often—vilify those people who disagree with us about these matters.

It reminds me of a story John tells (or at least our version of John’s Gospel tells it). The religious leaders bring a woman to Jesus, throw her at his feet, and say she’s been found in the very act of adultery.

“Moses, in the law, commanded us to stone such a woman,” they say to Jesus. “What do you say?”

Jesus stoops down and begins writing in the sand, and then looks up at them and says, “The one who is without sin, let him throw the first stone.” They quickly scatter.

He asks the woman where everyone went, and then amazingly announces that he doesn’t condemn her.

But what about defending marriage?

What about defending the law—which, according to Christian teaching, Jesus himself had given to Moses?

What about defending the authority of Scripture?

Don’t miss the point: the religious leaders wanted Jesus to defend these lifeless, abstract ideas. Jesus instead defended the frightened woman trembling at his feet.

To be clear, Jesus fully affirmed the authority of Scripture; he believed in the sanctity of marriage; he believed in the law of Moses. He thought they were all worth defending and sometimes spoke about them.

It’s just that he thought defending a defenseless woman was more important in that moment than defending a lifeless, static, abstract law—that her thoughts, feelings, and emotional well-being were of greater value than “defending marriage.”

Of course, it should be noted that the religious leaders themselves weren’t really concerned about marriage or the law of Moses anyway.

After all, where was the man?

But that’s part of the point: our defense of abstract ideas and “truth” is often just a cover for control and conformity. We don’t really care about truth; we don’t really care about the rules.

We just use them as a way to try to get others in line.

What good is truth?

Let me end with a quote. It’s probably the most explosive quote I’ve ever come across by one of my favorite authors, Ellen White.

“The greatest deception of the human mind in Christ’s day was that a mere assent to the truth constitutes righteousness,” she writes. “A jealous regard for what is termed theological truth often accompanies a hatred of genuine truth as made manifest in life.”

She then notes how “the darkest chapters of history are burdened with the record of crimes committed by bigoted religionists,” and how the religious leaders in Christ’s day “thought themselves the greatest religionists of the world, but their so-called orthodoxy led them to crucify the Lord of glory.”

And then she drops this bombshell:

The same danger still exists. Many take it for granted that they are Christians, simply because they subscribe to certain theological tenets. But they have not brought the truth into practical life. . . . Men may profess faith in the truth; but if it does not make them sincere, kind, patient, forbearing, heavenly-minded, it is a curse to its possessors, and through their influence it is a curse to the world.

I could spend a whole post analyzing this quote, but I’ll let it stand as-is.

Suffice it to say, she points out how “many” prioritize “truth” over people; they defend abstract ideas over God’s children.

And thus truth—when it doesn’t make us kind, loving, patient and sincere—becomes a curse to the world.

In other words, it’s better to not share “truth” with the world at all than to share it through a repulsive, impatient, and unkind life.

I don’t want to give up on truth or prophecy or abstract ideas altogether; I just want to remember that these things are for the purpose of ultimately helping me to prioritize and love people.

Thus, if I’m going to err, I’d rather err on the side of prioritizing and defending people over prioritizing and defending truth.

Imagine how different the world would be if us religious people spent as much time defending people as we did defending ideas.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.