The Gospel Coalition

We live in a trustless culture. Very few people trust anyone these days, for good reason: Very few people these days are trustworthy. Lies, betrayal, hypocrisy — these things, to one degree or another, mark every institution and every relationship. Everyone seems to be a spin doctor. It’s really hard to know who’s being real and who’s not. We wonder, sometimes paralyzingly: Is she telling the truth? Is he trying to rip me off? Who might stab me in the back? Does he really love me? Is my wife cheating on me?

All of us, every day, face questions about who we can trust. We find ourselves becoming skeptical of just about everybody, from car salesmen to politicians, from our spouses to our colleagues. We don’t trust mechanics, preachers, or lawyers. We live life in a perpetual state of suspicion, wondering who we can really trust and rely on. Who will really tell us the truth? Who’ll be transparent? Who’ll be honest? Because we encounter people all the time who are none of these things.

The fact is, every healthy, functioning community is built on trust — whether in your home with your family, or in your neighborhood, or at work, or wherever you are. Cities, towns, villages, countries, cultures, you name it—all are dependent on trust to function properly. Take away trust and you take away community. Why? Because healthy community relies on people who invest in one another, serve one another, provide for one another, and defer to one another. Without this “one-anotherness” genuine community cannot exist. But here’s the problem: in a culture where people don’t trust each other, everyone looks out for themselves, not for others. People who don’t trust the people around them live a life of self-protection from others rather than self-sacrifice for others. And this posture ruins the possibility of real community.

So we need to somehow regain trust. But in order to regain trust, we must regain truth because trust is built on truth. It’s simple: You can’t have community without trust, and you can’t have trust without truth. You simply don’t trust people that you don’t believe. In order to trust someone you need to believe that they’re being honest with you, that they’re telling you the truth. But the reason it’s so hard in our culture to find people who are trustworthy and reliable is that we’ve departed from truth—truth in the 21st century, we are told, is unattainable and unnecessary. 

We now live in a world that, for the most part, has concluded universal truth doesn’t exist. Rather, each person creates “truth” for themselves. This is the view of the baseball umpire who, when asked about his philosophy of umpiring said, “Let’s be honest, there are balls and there are strikes, and they ain’t nothin till I call ‘em.” Truth, in other words, does not exist outside us. It is whatever we say it is, whatever we want it to be—“they ain’t nothing till I call ‘em.” 

The fallout from this conclusion that truth is purely subjective is that real trust disappears. If truth is whatever each individual wants it to be, then there’s no common ground on which trust can be established. So trust disappears. And where trust disappears, genuine, healthy community will disappear. This is why marriages fall apart, homes fall apart, neighborhoods fall apart, countries fall apart, and even churches fall apart—they become distanced from truth. Trust is required for true community, but trust must be built on truth. Trust, therefore, will disappear in a culture that does away with truth. Our contemporary culture’s unwavering commitment to the relativity of truth does not provide us with the foundation we need to enjoy true, life-giving community. 

This is where the church, the people of God, must demonstrate what community is intended to be. We are a community founded on and formed by truth. Therefore, we have everything we need from God to be honest, reliable, and dependable—people whose word can be counted on. Our belief in truth and love for truth will alone enable us to be the trustworthy people that God has called us to be and that the world needs us to be.

That’s what this community called the church is supposed to embody. That’s the kind of people God has remade us to be. When we’re anything less, the world views us just as suspiciously as it views everyone else wondering, What do they really want from me?

When the world concludes that we will say and do anything, whether it’s true or not, in order to gain cultural power, they tune us out—and rightfully so. For instance, some Christian writers who are keen to uncover the depths of America’s Christian roots in order to justify our “rightful claim” to this country, have embraced the Founding Fathers’ references to God without acknowledging that the god of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams is one most orthodox Christians of any tradition wouldn’t recognize. Preston Jones writes, “American Christians, who are concerned with truth, should want to avoid coming to wrong conclusions about history, even when that means giving up cherished ideas about the stuff of their nation’s past.” When Christians, in other words, spin history in a less than factual direction thinking that the end justifies the means, it shows that we’re no more trustworthy than anyone else. But when we’re trustworthy and factual and real, showing the world around us that we want to serve them, not sabotage them, the church becomes an incredible breath of fresh air—making a difference because we’re radically different.

Being trustworthy is what Paul is talking about when he says the church is to be a community that embodies truth. The church is to be the one community where what you see is genuinely what you get—no spin and no masks. We are to say what we mean and mean what we say—letting our “yes” be “yes” and our “no” be “no.” That’s not what people experience out in the world, where everyone is a spin doctor.

Truthfulness — that’s one fundamental way the church demonstrates before the world what God originally intended community to be.