Honestly: Telling the Truth about the Bible and Ourselves

By Mark Wingfield

Author Mark Wingfield combines his theological training as a pastor and his skills as a journalist in this exploration of truth and faithful truth-telling. Truth is often elusive in our culture, but Wingfield maintains that the Bible has been misused by some to perpetuate certain kinds of lies and untruths. Exploration of key biblical texts is woven together with stories drawn from personal experience and news stories from both church and our present-day culture.

Wingfield points to a lack of real truthfulness that plagues America in both politics and religion today. We are shouting well-worn sound bites at each other from opposing platforms. Precious few of us are willing to step in the middle and facilitate dialogue, and those poor souls who do often get shot down from both sides. Rampant self-interest can lead to supporting lies and holding tight to particular stances that are not aligned with the Bible's ethics of justice and love.

The book begins with the important question, "What Is Truth?," and explores biblical truth on topics such as creation, race, climate change, evolution, Jesus and truth, liars in the Bible, and the truth-telling of the prophets. Final chapters look at the truth about who we are and what truth looks like in our current post-Trump era. A study guide is included to help facilitate group conversation about each chapter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781506485928

Book preview

Cover Page for Honestly

Praise for Honestly

Instead of using the Bible as a weapon to use to protect their ‘truth’ or as a fortune teller’s crystal ball, Mark Wingfield leads us to scripture as a mirror to see ourselves in the light of God’s truth.

—J Alfred Smith Sr., Pastor Emeritus, Allen Temple Baptist Church

Mark Wingfield draws from decades of experience in religious journalism to make the case for Christian truth-telling, even when it’s complicated and hard. Drawing from a rich mix of history, biblical material, and contemporary events, Wingfield creates a readable, useful book that every Christian should read in this post-Trump era of misinformation, falsehood, and lies.

—Susan M. Shaw, professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University

A unique, rich, pastoral, and bracing reflection on truth in an era where truthfulness is slipping away from us. Biblical and personal, timeless and timely, this brief book is well worth your attention.

—Rev. Dr. David P. Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics, Mercer University

"In true journalistic fashion, Mark Wingfield has crafted a most enjoyable, yet profound book about the power of seeking, recognizing, and courageously living out of truth. Weaving stories from the past and present, from scripture and secular wisdom, to speak into the age-old challenge of discerning truth, Honestly is both bold and hopeful. Few have shown the courage Wingfield does in these pages, naming the lies that are currently harming us as a society, and challenging us to undo those harms—by living the selfless lives that truth telling requires."

—Sally Gary, Executive Director, CenterPeace

Mark Wingfield has taken time, devoted the thought, and written with candor about truth and truth-telling. His book helps readers see how what we accept as true is affected by self-interest, our willingness or refusal to think beyond our particular situations, and our willingness or refusal to ‘un-learn’ beliefs that are based on myth, prejudice, and celebrity/authority-figure worship. This book offers the chance for us to become better thinkers, and therefore, better persons.

—Wendell Griffen, Pastor, New Millennium Church

Honestly

Honestly

Telling the Truth about the Bible and Ourselves

Mark Wingfield

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

HONESTLY

Telling the Truth about the Bible and Ourselves

Copyright © 2023 Mark Wingfield. Published by Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version.

Cover image: Apple is Shutterstock/MichaelJayBerlin. Illuminated H is Shutterstock/brem stocker

Cover design: Brad Norr

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8591-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8592-8

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

With gratitude to Discovery Class at Wilshire Baptist Church for two decades of discovering the Bible together and for shaping this book through your feedback during a time we could not meet in person

Contents

Introduction: Does Anyone Care about Truth Anymore?

1 What Is Truth?

2 The Truth about God’s Creation and Race

3 The Truth about the Bible and Climate Change

4 The Truth about the Bible and Evolution

5 The Truth about Liars in the Bible

6 Truth-Telling as a Prophetic Vocation

7 Did Jesus Tell the Truth?

8 The Truth about Where We’ve Come From

9 Telling the Truth about Who We Are

10 Truth in a Post-Trump Era

Epilogue: What Motivates Us to Lie to Ourselves and Others?

Discussion Questions

Introduction

Does Anyone Care about Truth Anymore?

Just because someone speaks with authority does not mean they are telling the truth. My earliest memory of understanding this came not that early. I was either a sophomore or junior in high school. My parents, who were lay leaders in our church, had invited a new, somewhat younger couple to our house for dinner. Being an only child, I always participated in whatever meal functions and after-dinner conversations were happening with the adults.

That night, we sat on the covered back porch of our house in Oklahoma, and the guest couple tried to sway me to their beliefs on some theological or political issue. I can’t remember what the issue was, and it doesn’t matter now. What does matter is that I was a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old—headstrong, yes—youth who suddenly found myself feeling like young Jesus left behind at the temple arguing with the religious leaders.

I knew what this couple was selling was a crock, but they remained insistent. They cajoled me, jokingly deriding my youth and perceived lack of spiritual knowledge. They were resolute. They were emphatic. They were rude. And they were wrong.

But they didn’t know they were wrong. They sincerely believed what they were telling me. They believed it so sincerely that they were willing to school me, the teenage son of their new church friends. And I remember vividly what that felt like, even though more than forty years have passed since it happened.

Here is the first problem when we take up the topic of truth: not all truth is true. Yes, there are some things that are so empirically true that there should be no argument—two plus two equals four, for example. And yet we now know all too clearly that there are people who intentionally lead us away from truth while pretending they’re telling us the truth. In psychological terms, this is called gaslighting. It is the manipulation of convincing people that the facts they clearly see with their own eyes are not facts at all. While the motives behind these two paths to untruth may differ, the end result is likely the same: people are led to believe and act upon information that is wrong.

Think of the US war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In mid-2021, the United States disastrously began the last steps of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan some twenty years after we first invaded there. Without turning this into an ill-formed lesson in military history, the salient points are as follows. The terrorist group al-Qaeda, based mainly in Afghanistan, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. The United States ultimately retaliated with an invasion of Afghanistan in an effort to root out the al-Qaeda leaders who had planned the attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House. Less than two years later, US president George W. Bush received intelligence that Saddam Hussein and Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Therefore, the United States diverted its attention from Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, and deposed Hussein. The resulting mess took twenty years to clean up, and the cleanup didn’t work. In fact, a case could be made that our cleanup only made things worse.

Truth plays a starring role in this story at several points. In the beginning, al-Qaeda leaders sold as truth to young terrorism recruits a story about the threat America posed to their way of life. Make no mistake: To these al-Qaeda leaders, the threat was real; it was truth. It was their version of truth. But we Americans don’t see it as truth. On both sides of the world, our truths are shaped by our cultures and experiences—as well as by our religious faiths. We responded with military force based on our understanding of truth.

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Then several other pivotal things happened that also—we can see now in hindsight—were predicated on truth that might not have been as truthful as we had hoped. US leadership prematurely called the war a mission accomplished when it was not, in fact, complete. The United States believed it could do something no other invading nation ever had been able to do in Afghanistan and establish a stable government there. That still has not happened. And then the United States distracted itself from its main mission by diverting troops and attention to Iraq based on what turned out to be bad information. Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.

Now, you may think all the steps the United States took in this matter were proper, and I’m not here to argue that point today. The reality is we have the benefit of hindsight that leaders did not have in 2001, 2002, and 2003. I raise all this military history to illustrate how difficult it can be to get a handle on the truth—and to illustrate the deadly danger of being misled about what’s true and what’s not.

There is no greater illustration of the deadly danger of being misled about truth than the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The further we get away from that fateful day, the more two things are apparent: (1) the reality was worse than we knew at the time, and (2) the political supporters of Donald Trump will go to tremendous lengths to deny this reality—even among the elected officials whose lives were saved by Capitol police that day.

A Lesson from Norman Rockwell

In the World War II and postwar era, Norman Rockwell captured America’s romantic imagination with his classic paintings for the cover of the most popular magazine of the day, the Saturday Evening Post. His cover art for the magazine portrays a vision of American life that we have come to believe is real—or at least believe should be real.

The problem is that Rockwell did not paint the reality of his own life. Married twice, not especially religious, and a workaholic, he was a deeply conflicted individual who was lonely and depressed. He moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1953 so his second wife could be treated at the well-known Austen Riggs psychiatric hospital. A New England newspaper a few years ago reported on Rockwell’s life, quoting one of his sons as saying his father painted his happiness but didn’t live it. That was his life, Jarvis Rockwell told the Berkshire Eagle. He worked everything out in his painting.¹

We applaud and revere the artist for his portrayal of life as we would like it to be, and yet another character who suffers the same disconnect from reality does not garner our sympathy. Consider Blanche DuBois in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche also lives a tragic life but wants to present reality as something other than it is. She says in the play, I don’t want realism. I want magic. I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth; I tell what ought to be truth.²

Blanche’s solution is to cover a bare lightbulb with a cheap pastel shade so that things look better than they are. In Blanche DuBois, we most often see a tragic and misguided figure. In Norman Rockwell, we most often see a heroic and patriotic figure. I puzzle over why this is so. Is it ingrained gender discrimination? Is it that one character brings us hope and the other shines the light a little too close to home?

True confession: I worry today about an American culture and, specifically, a Christian culture that papers over Rockwell’s departure from reality but demonizes Blanche’s similar flaw. Too often, we bind ourselves to an idealistic view of life that never really was and never actually could be. That’s largely what politicians sell us in their campaigns. And it’s the stock-in-trade of many an evangelical preacher.

I’m struck by that line from Rockwell’s son: he painted his happiness but didn’t live it. And lay that beside the words of Blanche DuBois: I don’t tell truth; I tell what ought to be truth.

Separating the Weapons of Truth from Truthiness

Let’s take a breather now with a lighter look at truth. From 2005 to 2014, Stephen Colbert played the part of an oddly conservative news anchor on his nightly TV show, The Colbert Report. He had a way of presenting the news of the day with both sarcasm and humor while still managing to get the point across. One of the maxims we learned from Colbert in those days is that there’s truth, and then there’s truthiness.

Truthiness is the kind of information that sounds like a rock-solid truth or is proclaimed as a rock-solid truth but in reality is not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We all perpetuate truthiness from time to time when we believe untruthful information because it sounds to us like it ought to be true.

A few years ago while traveling out