The Denial of Truth

William Stringfellow is visiting with me this morning though his little book, An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land.  He was a creative and talented writer and a radical social maverick within the Christian community back in the 60’s and 70’s.  I heard him speak several times and was held captive by his stirring oratory, and at the same time, deeply discomfited by his disturbing convictions.  I am still held captive and still discomfited by his words as we connect this morning.

Are there demonic powers at work in our world?  Stringfellow answers with a resounding YES!  “If the powers and principalities (institutions, ideologies, images, causes, corporations, bureaucracies, traditions, idols) be legion, so are the means by which they assault, captivate, enslave, and dominate human beings.”  He goes on to write about the “Stratagems of the Demonic Powers.”  “Typically, each and every stratagem and resort of the principalities seeks the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension which specially distinguish human beings from all other creatures…demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience” (that is, “the dehumanization of human life”).

He describes one of these stratagems as the denial of truth.  “A rudimentary claim with which the principalities confront and subvert persons is that truth in the sense of eventual and factual matter does not exist.  In the place of truth and appropriating the name of truth are data engineered and manufactured, programmed and propagated by the principality.  The truth is usurped and displaced by a self-serving version of events or facts, with whatever selectivity, distortion, falsehood, manipulation, exaggeration, evasion, concoction necessary to maintain the image or enhance the survival or multiply the coercive capacities of the principality.”

Okay, Bill Stringfellow, it is time for our visit to end.  You are still a hammer hitting the contemporary nail on the head!  You were a prophet in 1973 when you wrote this stuff, and your words ring more true today than they did then.  Enough!  Let’s meet again some other day.