One of the posts yesterday on justice generated a really fruitful discussion, and here is a follow up to some of those issues.
When Peter and Susan go to the old professor about Lucy’s weird behavior, he gives them a basic lesson. Edmund was saying sane things, but his character was problematic. Lucy was saying crazy things, but she was a sane and honest person. The professor said, simply, that they should accept what she was saying, and mind their own business. What she is saying can only have three possible causes — she is telling the truth, she is nuts, or she is deliberately lying. Peter and Susan testify that she is not a liar. It is plain as day that she is not nuts. Therefore, she must be telling the truth. Bless me, what do they teach them in these schools?
This same trilemma comes out again in Mere Christianity, when Lewis is dealing with the patronizing nonsense that wants to have Christ as a great moral figure in history, an ethical exemplar, but not the Son of God. The problem was that He claimed certain “over the top” things concerning Himself. He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man comes to the Father except through Him. He and the Father are one. Before Abraham was, Jesus said, I am. If false, this means that he believes it himself and was on the same level as a man who claims he is a poached egg, or he does not believe it himself and is a monstrous charlatan. He is either the eternal Logos, or one of the worst specimens of a pretty bad humanity. But anyone can tell that the liar or lunatic options are not genuine options. He doesn’t teach like a demagogue or like a basket of fruit. His moral character is compelling. He is Truth incarnate.
To say that Truth is personal is the opposite of relativism. The Christian claim is that God was enfleshed and dwelt among us. We can certainly write true propositions about this on the classroom blackboard, but the propositions depend on the Person and not the other way around. In the most ultimate sense possible, Christians know that character matters.
Now one of the places where character matters is in the judges who have to sift through issues like this, and weigh all the evidence. What are we to do with Bulverism, for example, another observation from Lewis? If you advance an argument, Bulverism undertakes to explain how you got so silly, instead of answering the argument. How does Lewis’ correct rejection of Bulverism comport with his admirable support of Lucy’s story about the wardrobe?
Godly men, who know what justice is, what it smells like, how it operates, have to accept the word of some witnesses and reject the word of others. One of the tasks confronting judges is to oversee a process in which false witnesses are impeached and true witnesses are confirmed.
So let us take the motivation of envy, which Scripture teaches us was the driving force in more than one trial. The Jews delivered Jesus up because of envy, as even Pilate saw (Matt. 27:18). And St. Paul was on the receiving end of this treatment more than once (Acts 13:45; 17:5). Now why do the scriptural writers bring up envy? Isn’t this Bulverism? No, because it is the true explanation of what is happening. But there are other instances where it is not relevant in the same way.
Suppose there are two scientists competing to unlock the secret of whatever it is. One of them is consumed with envy of the other one, and mutters to himself every day as he goes to work. His envy makes him go to his lab earlier, and stay later. He works harder, driven by bitterness, resentment and raw envy. As it turns out, this “pays off,” and he makes the discovery first, and publishes his results first. And as far as the science goes, everything was fair and square. God will deal with his envy (because it is always relevant at some level), but those who read his journal article and reproduce his experiments (getting the same results) have confirmed his work, and have shown than the envy is extraneous to the process — it can in principle be detached from the science. If hate-filled secularists affirm that the sun rises in the east, I don’t have to deny it just to keep my soul pure.
But suppose the envious scientist has one of his grad students change universties to go study under the rival. And suppose that, three months later, she charges the rival with sexual harassment, put up to it by the envious one. Now, is the issue of envy relevant to the charges? Absolutely — not only is it relevant, it is necessary for the judges to consider it if they want to understand what has happened.
Now, bring it on home. In our little Moscow potpourri bowl of charges, one of them has been the charge that New St. Andrews college was out of compliance with Moscow zoning laws. Certain “ojectivists” wanted to pretend that this was only about “the code,” and we should only evaluate the code. That way, we are being “objective.” No, we are actually being clueless. By an insistence that we limit the discussion to this, they were in effect insisting that they were refusing to understand the situation. The complaint was filed by three individuals, each one of whom had “a history” with our church and/or the college. One of them was the same person who filed the complaint that led to the Attorney-General’s investigation of moi. Limiting the discussion to the black letters of the code was a determination to not understand the story at all.
Persons bring charges. Persons have motivations. Those motivations need to be evaluated, just like the charges do. No one is suggesting that we look at motivation only, and ignore the objective evidence. It is simply that persons cannot be extricated from charges; the whole thing cannot be turned into a math problem. Attempts to turn it into a math problem constitute a flight away from the basic Christian story. Christ stood before Pilate, who famously said, “What is truth?” When he asked this, Truth was standing right in front of him. Various robed falsehoods had arraigned Him, consumed with their envy. Pilate even saw the personal nature of the lies, but faltered when it came to understanding the personal nature of the Truth. Truth has ten toes. Truth was unjustly flogged by the provincial governor. Ultimate Truth had a crown of thorns jammed on His head. And Truth, when it appeared among us, caused various incarnate and envious lies to cook up some charges. For personal reasons.