“In the biblical view, truth is that which is ultimately, finally, and absolutely real, or the ‘way it is,’ and therefore is utterly trustworthy and dependable, being grounded in God’s own reality and truthfulness. . . . Belief in something doesn’t make it true; only truth makes a belief true. But without truth, a belief may be only speculation plus sincerity.”

I was talking with a terrific Christian leader just the other day, and he asked me what I was reading lately. I replied, ‘Have you got an hour or so?!’ But I did mention that I was reading the first two of the quartet of books that Os Guinness just released to commemorate the 250th anniversary of America’s birth as a nation in 1776.

He confessed to having never read Guinness. My reply: ‘Just remember: God loves you and I’m working on it!’ He did get a bit better when he said he just read his very first Francis Schaeffer volume. Hey, he is moving in the right direction! So we briefly discussed his apologetic method.

Schaeffer spoke of removing the roof from the house that the non-Christian lives in. That is, we must expose the non-believer to the reality of his own worldview and show him he cannot consistently live in such a world. In his ministry to non-Christians, he routinely used this approach.

As but one example, someone steeped in eastern thought who denies good and evil, or insists that they are merely two sides of the same coin, cannot really live with those presuppositions. If he is standing on a train track and sees a train racing towards him, like all folks he will immediately jump off the tracks. His worldview may have sounded nice in theory, but in the real world, it comes crashing down.  

As a related example of this, Schaeffer was lecturing on the reality of objective right and wrong at his ministry chalet L’Abri in Switzerland. Another fellow who held to eastern religions was going on about yin and yang, and how evil and suffering are just maya, or illusion.

So to graphically illustrate the foolishness of such a position, Schaeffer grabbed a kettle of hot water (used for tea and coffee) and walked over to the seated student and held it menacingly over his head. With that, the young man got up and walked out of the room. He realised that he was caught out – big time – by reality.

Schaeffer’s apologetic was to expose people to the tensions between their non-Christian presuppositions and the real world. The further your worldview is from biblical truth, the further you will be from reality itself.   

Today we simply need to consider the trans insanity that is causing so much damage to so many, especially children and young people. Talk about a flight from reality. Pretending a male can somehow turn into a female is as nutso as it gets, but in an age where relativism reigns, and object truth is scoffed at, anything goes – even this utter craziness.

And of course this attempted attack on reality itself serves all tyrants and dictators so very well. That was a major premise of George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian novel, 1984. One classic line from the book put it this way: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

A larger quote is worth sharing here. In the book, the hero Winston Smith is being tortured in the ‘Ministry of Love’. His interrogator is trying to ‘cure’ him of his belief that reality is found in anything other than what the State says it is.

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