To some, this may not appear to be so great a threat. What is the problem with having information—knowledge—as the goal towards which we strive? Surely, the details of life are worth studying, even from an empirical perspective: more data certainly can and often does lead to greater knowledge, and, as long as we’re being optimistic, to wisdom. Knowledge in itself is clearly useful. So what is the problem?

The greatest threat to the Gospel in our age is not unbelief. It is not relativism or open hostility to the “narrow” Christian tradition. It is not even the hypocrisy of the church, which holds up the white banner of faith for all to see and then spatters it with the mud of pretense. As inimical to the Christian faith as these may be, there is something far more destructive to the Gospel, something we rarely consider, because it is too close for us to notice. The greatest threat to the Gospel is treating it as mere information.

If contemporary culture were a royal ball, information would be the ageless and debonair host, striking every lord and lady with his pristine smile, all the while masquerading as truth. His tangible personality would blind the guests to the fact that his clothes were too big—they belong to someone six inches taller, with broader shoulders and a fuller chest. Distantly, all of his guests would know that truth is what called them together and demanded something of them. But they don’t see truth so easily. They see information, because he makes constant rounds with a silver platter of Hors d’oeuvres. The real host of the ball requires seeking out.

Information is not truth; it describes truth, complements it even, but it is not itself truth. Truth is the underlying foundation for the way things really are; it is “nothing less than the self-disclosure of God in his Son, who is the truth (John 14:6).”[1] Information is data, figures, descriptors, sound bites, and visual clips—all of which we may choose to act on, or to store in a retrieval system (and we’re better at storing than retrieving). Yet, we confuse the two, and while this may seem trivial, it is tantamount to confusing Jesus Christ for someone or something else. This confusion, more than anything else, may be the cause behind the decline of orthodox Christianity in the west. Before I get to why, it’s important to know how this threat crept out from the shadows of human history.

What happened that confused people of the difference between truth and information? Francis Schaeffer had an unparalleled sense of cultural trends, and his thoughts on this issue are illuminating. In The God Who Is There, Schaeffer discusses what he calls the “line of despair.” By this he refers to a trend in thinking (beginning roughly in the 19th century) that rejected absolutes and antithesis—a clear division between truth and falsehood.^[2] Instead of debating the truth or falsehood of a claim, the philosophers, musicians, artists, and even theologians of the day began to favor dialectics and existentialism. In other words, people began leaving behind absolutes in favor of “pragmatic relativism.”^[3] And who needs truth when information—undemanding dialogue and descriptions—will carry the day’s burdens? In part, this is what blurred the line between truth and information. If we leave behind ultimate truth—antithesis and absolutes—then something must replace it, and that “something” was information. Information could answer the how question that would come to replace the ultimatewhy that had been addressed, up to that time, by theology and philosophy.

And once information was confused with truth, the floodgates of noetic deception burst. Our world, in one sense, is a bottomless reservoir of information; there is always more to know—experiments to conduct, hypotheses to test, logistics to work out, mechanics to fine tune, ideas to develop and apply. The attainment and understanding of truth had been the litmus test of human development, but information has replaced it. Increased knowledge (i.e., awareness and retention of information) has become the new standard of value. Specialists have become the respected figures of society: the doctor has replaced the minister; the psychologist the sage; the scientist the theologian.

To some, this may not appear to be so great a threat. What is the problem with having information—knowledge—as the goal towards which we strive? Surely, the details of life are worth studying, even from an empirical perspective: more data certainly can and often does lead to greater knowledge, and, as long as we’re being optimistic, to wisdom. Knowledge in itself is clearly useful. So what is the problem?

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