Posted on 08/19/2023 5:40:04 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
In a world where the truth is often tainted and an occasional white lie may seem more ethical than telling a brutally honest truth, many believers may wonder if exceptions exist to the Ten Commandments' prohibition on lying — or bearings a false witness.
Throughout Scripture, many biblical figures have found themselves neck-deep in lies. Some were apparent lies, while others were more subtly withholding the truth. Adam and Eve sinned and tried to hide from God by temporarily withholding the truth. The couple did not immediately admit their faults before God — which occurs in Genesis 3.
In 1 Samuel, David lied out of fear as he was running for his life from King Saul. And in the New Testament Book of Acts, Ananias and Sapphira infamously lied about how much of their wealth they had given to the Church.
In the modern-day, many believers face conundrums surrounding the ethics of lying, especially in scenarios where dishonesty, deception or withholding the truth seem to be the better moral option from a human perspective.
For example, would it have been OK for those who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust to withhold the truth or lie if Nazi police knocked on their door? Would telling the truth have pleased God in that situation?
Are there times when it's OK to lie or withhold the truth if it protects that person or someone else from emotional, physical, psychological or financial hardships or suffering?
The Christian Post interviewed pastors and religious scholars from different denominational backgrounds (Baptist, Episcopal, nondenominational and Catholic) about their thoughts on lying and if there are ever scenarios where doing so is acceptable.
Some interviewees said lying is never OK in any scenario. But others believe that a gray area exists in which the liar's motives should be taken into account.
'Some things are best we don't know'
The Rev. Steven McKeown of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Steubenville, Ohio, said he believes God takes into account the complexities surrounding the ethics and morality of lying or withholding information.
"There are some things that are best we don't know and don't share. Sometimes the complete facts of certain situations can be very painful. And it could be something someone's family is involved in or something of that nature," said McKeown, who is in his late 70s and has served as the head pastor of his Episcopalian church for the past 17 years.
McKeown believes that the morality of lying, withholding the truth and white lies should be determined on a case-by-case basis if it means protecting someone else's feelings, saving lives or keeping minors from being exposed to information too early to handle emotionally, mentally, physically or psychologically.
"In a situation where a person is an adopted child, is it good for them to know who their father was or who their mother was? And that's where this can get very awkward, especially if there was a negative or painful background with that. And sometimes, it's best not to be the person that will reveal that," McKeown said.
McKeown said some women face tough decisions if they decide to raise their baby conceived as a result of rape or incest. Should they tell their child they were conceived by rape or incest at an early age or keep that from them until they are mature enough to know the truth?
"It's not mandatory to tell the truth in this scenario because the mother might not want to put that category or label on their child for the rest of that child's life," McKeown rationalized.
McKeown believes God looks at the heart of every person.
"I think He knows us all. We believe in the principle that He created us all. So, therefore, He knows us back and front," McKeown said.
"At the end of the day, from a Christian faith, He wants us to know Jesus, who took on the form of a human being. And from that, He thought we could relate better and that we could better understand God through His Son Jesus. So, I think there's nothing done in secret as far as God is concerned."
'Not all lies are created equal'
John Grabowski, a Roman Catholic theologian and a professor of moral theology and ethics at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., firmly believes Christians should obey the Ten Commandments and refrain from lying whenever possible.
"I think honesty is a biblical mandate. That's what we should strive for, to be honest all the time. Obviously, we all know from experience that we're not. And then, there are different reasons in different circumstances why we're not," said the professor, who has been on the teaching staff at Catholic University for the past three decades.
"But given that this is a biblical mandate, and we're called to speak the truth to one another and to others, I think honesty is a responsibility of Christians and something we ought to strive to live for as best we can."
Grabowski said his approach to honesty was inspired by the viewpoints of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic theologian and philosopher. There are three main distinctions of the types of lies that people typically commit, according to Aquinas' perspective: jocose lies, officious lies and malicious lies.
According to Grabowski, jocose lies are when someone bends the truth, usually for the sake of satire or comedy, as in a joke, or in telling exaggerated stories.
Officious lies are when a person tells a lie to spare someone else's feelings or avoid saying a truth that could potentially be hurtful to someone else.
Malicious lies are when someone lies to do damage to another person by distorting and withholding the truth from them.
In Aquinas' perspective, Grabowski said, the first two kinds of lies — jocose and officious — are wrong, but not gravely wrong.
"Jocose lies or humorous lies and officious lies are what people tend to refer to as white lies, which are lies where you're not intending to harm someone else but you're intending the opposite. You're trying to help someone else in some way," Grabowski said.
"Whereas with malicious lies, you're actually seeking to do damage to another person. ... Those are seriously wrong. That's more seriously sinful. So while all of those are wrong, not all lies are of equal gravity or equal malice. I agree with Aquinas because I think all lying is wrong, but not all lies are created equal. Not all lies do the same kind of harm."
If he were faced with such a situation, the professor said he would lie to Nazi police if he were hiding Jews.
"That's an officious lie. A person who is lying in that scenario is lying in order to try to protect the life of an innocent person from incarceration and death," Grabowski said. "So in and of itself, that's the wrong thing to do. But, their motivation is trying to save another person's life and putting their own life in danger by doing so. Their motivation shows that they have very little moral culpability for what they're doing there. They're really trying to help another person. That's their aim in withholding the truth."
"The person who's hiding his Jewish neighbors from certain death is, in a sense, willing to lay down his or her own life in order to protect them. So the motivation is an act of love, even though they're technically doing something that's wrong if they say no to the officer," Grabowski added, citing John 15:13.
The verse says: "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends."
However, Grabowski doesn't believe it's ever OK for a parent to lie to their child who was conceived by rape about who the child's father is, categorizing that as a malicious lie.
"I think when a child is young and not in a position to process that information, I think parents probably should withhold the information from a child who's not in a position to understand and process that because they're too young," Grabowski said.
"But I think if the child is older, a young adult perhaps, and is asking questions about who their father is, I think that child does have a right to the truth."
Parents of young children may be tempted to lie to their kids for various reasons, telling simple lies to make their job easier. Grabowski does not think a parent should ever lie to their children to make their own parental role less difficult.
"For example, if a child wants to go to the toy store and a parent lies to them and tells them the toy store is closed, but the store is not actually closed, that is not OK. That's a parent just not wanting to be a parent in that moment," Grabowski noted.
"The parent just thinks it would be easier to tell a lie in order to silence the kid. I don't think that's a good approach for a Christian parent to get in the habit of lying to their child to try to make parenting easier."
Unacceptable under any circumstance
Brandt Waggoner, the pastor of Fairview Church in Lebanon, Tennessee, a Southern Baptist congregation, said that lying, white lies, deception and withholding the truth are all unacceptable in all cases under any context.
"Honesty is a biblical mandate. All through the scriptures, we see God calling His people to be people of truth, not being deceitful, not speaking lies. … You have this consistent theme of the people of God being people of truth and people who are honest," said Waggoner, who has been the lead pastor of his church location for over five years.
Referring to Ephesians 4:25, Waggoner mentioned how Paul states in the verses: "'put away falsehood. Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor. For we are members of one another.'"
"I think at the highest level, you have Scripture that says that: 'God is not a person, so He doesn't lie.' And so, at the highest level, when we're talking about God, Scripture confirms that He doesn't lie. But there is this acknowledgment, that for normal people, obviously, there is a reality of lying that we experience," Waggoner said, saying humans still fall short of the glory of God and lie occasionally.
"Jesus is an example of not lying because He was without sin. But clearly, for the average person, lying is something that everyone does at some level."
In Waggoner's perspective, white lies are considered just as "harmful" as any other lie.
When asked what he would do if he was married and his spouse asked him if he ever lusted over anyone else while married to her, Waggoner said that the "truth will set you free from lust."
Waggoner said, "just because someone is telling the truth doesn't mean they are required to give all the details behind the truth."
The truth, he said, does not have to reveal every possible detail because someone can be "simple and truthful and yet not intentionally deceiving their spouse in that instance."
"In Colossians 3:9, Paul says, 'Do not lie to one another. Since you have taken off your old self with its practices.' And so, I think that ties into how we operate naturally, typically to say whatever feels right at the moment. But that should be replaced with answering the call from Scripture to speak truthfully," Waggoner explained.
"I think there are ways to speak the truth with tact. I think there are ways to do that with compassion. Clearly, you can speak the truth in a way that is hurtful, and that is rude. And I think that's clearly problematic. But the call of Scripture most consistently would be, to tell the truth."
Waggoner admits in his pastoral ministry, he occasionally struggles with telling the full truth to congregants because of the pressure that he said exists to please others and to avoid hurting other people's feelings.
"I'm not proud of this. When I do lie, it is usually in an area where I'm not trusting God completely," he said. "Pleasing others can be the most consistent reason for not being completely truthful. It has to do with me having a concern for pleasing people that is greater than a concern for pleasing God."
Waggoner encourages believers to question themselves when they lie: "Why was I not completely truthful?"
"I think it's a very helpful question to consider if I was driven by a desire to please, or was I driven by comfort? I think that has also been another reason why I have resorted to lying. Sometimes, it's just more comfortable to lie than to deal with the difficulties that can come along with just being completely truthful," Waggoner said.
"Jesus says, 'To live in the kingdom of God is to not worry or be anxious about anything.' And He says: 'Because your Father takes care of the flowers and the beauty that they're clothed with.' And He takes care of the birds," Waggoner said, reciting the scriptures that have helped him to be more honest in his pastoral vocation.
"And so there's this view of the kingdom that Jesus gives us, of no reason to worry about anything or to have anxiety about anything. And to me, that's tied to the idea of if I trust God completely as Father, that I don't have to worry about these things, and therefore, I often don't have to lie. I'm able to express my trust in God by telling the truth and ultimately trusting Him to handle the outcomes."
'There's no distinguishing point'
Taylor Drenzyk, a pastor at Edge City Church in Mineola, New York, said he believes honesty is a biblical mandate at all times, regardless of the circumstances.
He said telling white lies and holding back the truth is unacceptable for Christians because "half-truths are no truths at all."
"One way that the devil works is by taking a truth and twisting it or by giving you part of it and then leaving out the rest for you to fill in the blanks. When something is half true, it's not enough. God is holy. There's no imperfection in Him or around Him," Drenzyk explained.
"And therefore, when we talk about the idea of the Truth, like a capital 'T,' absolute; things that are in fact true, they're without any fault or failure. So half-truth is no truth at all. So when we leave things out, that's a half-truth. And it's not complete."
Drenzyk said if faced with Nazi police at his door, he would find another way to protect the people he was sheltering without having to lie.
"If it came down to it, in all honesty, if there were some sort of Nazis knocking at my door, right now in New York, and saying to me, 'hey, you're harboring whomever we want; Jewish people, gypsies, Polish folk,' I would either find a way to have them take me away and kill me or I would buy time so that the Jewish people could escape, without lying," Drenzyk reasoned.
"There's no such thing as a righteous lie. And therefore, all lying is absolute. If the wages of sin is death, and we know lying is a sin, and there's no distinguishing point, then therefore, all lying is sinful."
'Humans are fallen creatures'
But Drenzyk understands that it's impossible for Christians to be honest all the time.
"Humans are fallen creatures ever since Adam and Eve's sin in the garden," he said.
Pointing to Genesis 3, Drenzyk said that one of the very first actions Adam and Eve do is lie by omission, and then the duo passes the blame around about whose fault it was that they bit the fruit.
Drenzyk said that he believes Adam and Eve are examples of the first humans who ever endured consequences for the act of lying. And because of their "grave sin," Drenzyk said, all of their progeny, which makes up humanity, have since struggled with lying for thousands of years.
"I don't think it's possible to be 100% honest, 100% of the time, because we are in fact, 100% fallen creatures. And even though we've been redeemed, and we have the Spirit of God guiding us, there's still a connection to sin. And from time to time, we may find ourselves lying, whether we realize it or not," Drenzyk said.
"We can be lying to ourselves. We could be telling a lie of omission. We can be telling a lie to cover something up. We could be unintentionally lying about something and then realizing later that we lied. There's just so much of a wide berth of what is a lie that I don't think it's possible to be 100% honest 100% of the time. Though, I do think that's what we should be aiming for and that should be our intention. That's how we need to be."
Drenzyk said it's extremely important to him in his ministry work to understand that telling the truth to others is just as important as the way in which truthfulness is expressed.
In the first few years of his ministry work, he said he struggled because of the way in which he shared the truth.
"In those cases, early on in my ministry, I had no problem telling it how it is and putting it out there. And sometimes, my bluntness or my ability to speak the truth and be strong about it was important and it was needed. But there were other times where I felt like maybe I could have been more gentle or maybe I could have had a bit more relationship equity with a person or picked a better environment in order to convey the truth in love," Drenzyk admitted.
Lying can lead to other sins, Drenzyk warned, which can potentially be even more detrimental to a Christian because it can lead to them eventually not being furthered in their sanctification and discipleship, as well as them being distanced from God.
Drenzyk said when he provides direction to someone who confesses a lie to him, he always tries to remind them of God's grace and forgiveness. But, he said, he tries not to "sugarcoat the truth" that lying can lead to unavoidable consequences and sometimes even more sins.
"All sins are forgiven by God. If you believe in Jesus, our sins are 'cast as far as the east is from the west.' And 'there's no condemnation' for us because we're in Christ Jesus; Romans 8:1. But at the same time, there's consequences. So I can come to God and ask for forgiveness if I lie. But sometimes, God's going to allow for a person to sit in the consequence. … We aren't given forgiveness so that sin will abound," Drenzyk noted.
"God did cover Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 with the skins. … And this man from the dirt, who God said 'would surely die,' in that moment, didn't die. God was merciful. And they lived another day and another day. And Adam and Eve lived to be, give or take, 900 years old. And so God, in a sense, forgave them. But the consequences literally damned humanity."
Interesting the article’s author didn’t know the bible well enough to even quote the only biblical example that DOES shed light on the question....
When the wife asks, “Does this dress make me look fat”?
RE: Interesting the article’s author didn’t know the bible well enough to even quote the only biblical example that DOES shed light on the question....
Can you share with us the specific book and verse? Thanks.
I have found many times people have lied in the Bible. David when he was running from Saul several times, Faked sickness, madness, promises broken in the various wars between David and Saul, David’s promise to Shimei son of Gera, broken by Solomon, and many others.
God is the creator of all reality. To deliberately misrepresent that which we know to be true or factual, is an affront to the Creator.
“Does this dress make me look fat?”
The answer is a matter of survival.
Of course. What a silly question.
The terrorists break into the house. The children are hiding in the closet. The terrorists ask me if anyone else is in the house. I'm going to say, "Yes, the children are hiding in the closet." Of course I'm going to say, "No."
However, any time you must lie, say to yourself, "That's a lie." That's very important. NEVER lie to yourself.
What part of thou shalt not bear false witness don’t these pastors, priests and theologians understand?!
Jacob tricks Isaac into getting a blessing meant for Esau.
Blind father; animal skin on the arm story.
And Jacob is considered a partriarch, and Esau not.
I like this debate. Nazi’s at the door asking for Jews is a classic scenario. The question from the Nazi’s is immoral and for an immoral purpose. What would Reverend Waggoner say during a home invasion if he knew his children were hiding in the Attic and the invaders asked if anyone else was in the house? What would he say if his 4 year old daughter asked him if he liked her painting?
Interesting dabate
“Doctor, the last thing I recall before waking up in this hospital bed, was telling my wife, “No honey, it is not the dress that makes you look fat.””
I believe the safe answer to such a question would be, “Aw honey, how could you even ask?”
That answer is bound to get you some lovin’ that night. (Unless you have been critical in the past, in which case, an ice pack on your soon to be black eye would be recommended.)
a little more happened after Jacob tricked Isaac and before Jacob was blessed by God and considered a patriarch, it’s in the Book.
The wife who asks that is acting in bad faith and deserves to be called out for it. A husband who is truly the spiritual leader of his family will do so.
-PJ
I dunno. When I ask did I do something stupid or what, the wife never ever says I am wrong.
I lie constantly when all these idiot companies insist on me giving them my personal information.
When Rahab hid the Israelite spies and told the king of Jericho they had left.
Conversely, this seems trivial compared to Bonhoeffer, I believe many speakers in the pulpit exaggerate in their storytelling to make a point. Hard to prove, but sometimes I think, "never happened."
“No honey, that particular dress doesn’t make you look fat BECAUSE, ahem, everything you wear makes you look fat. I mean when I see you in a black dress, I think of outer space.” All the flesh eating bacteria on her died from exhaustion.
Before anyone uses these lines make sure your will is completed and notarized, and a peaceful life is no longer your desire.
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