Two Kinds of Truth
Photo by Gregoire Jeanneau on Unsplash
My favorite detective writer is Michael Connelly with his torrent of books concerning detective Harry Bosch and his half-brother, Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer. In his book of 2017, Two Kinds of Truth, Connelly has Bosch chasing down, at great risk to his life, a ruthless drug ring. Bosch is accused of planting evidence in order to convict an alleged killer. But his several colleagues and his several nemeses in law enforcement miscalculate about him. The narrator declares:
What Kennedy, Soto, and Tapscott could not know was what Bosch knew in the deepest, darkest part of his heart. That he had not planted evidence against Borders. That he had never planted evidence against any suspect or adversary in his life. And this knowledge gave Bosch as affirming jolt of adrenalin and purpose. He knew there were two kinds of truth in this world. The truth that was the unalterable bedrock of one’s life and mission. And the other, malleable truth of politicians, charlatans, corrupt lawyers, and their clients, bent and molded to serve whatever purpose was at hand (128).
The story that unfolds here is the truth of the incorruptible Bosch, and his cunning enemies in law enforcement.
Much later in the story Bosch’s daughter, Maddie, gently reprimands her father for taking what seem to be outrageous risks in his sense of duty. To his daughter, Bosch responds:
Look, I’m sorry. But I wanted to catch these guys. What that kid did, the son, it was noble. When all this comes out, people will probably say he was stupid and naive and didn’t know what he was doing. But they won’t know the truth. He was being noble. And there isn’t a lot of that out there in the world anymore. People lie, president lies, corporations lie and cheat…The world is ugly and not many people are willing to stand up to it anymore. I didn’t want what this kid did to go by without… I didn’t want them to get away with it, I guess. (289).
Bosch explains to his daughter that he acted in risky ways in order to settle scores on behalf of an innocent kid who was ruthlessly gunned down by the drug syndicate.
This reflective commentary by Bosch got me to thinking about “two kinds or truth,” the phrasing around which Connelly frames his thriller. There is the easy compromised truth of ruthless, powerful people who mostly can act with impunity, and there is the “unalterable bedrock” truth that Bosch in his practice fully embraces and embodies. It is such faithful practice that upholds justice, and beyond justice, assures human dignity and wellbeing. This framing by Connelly via Bosch got me to thinking about how “two kinds of truth” show up, recurringly, in the Bible.
At the very outset, we get these “two kinds of truth” in the Exodus narrative. The truth with which Pharaoh operates in his predatory impatience is: a) that he needs more bricks with which to store his surplus wealth, and b) that his Hebrew slaves are “lazy.” His truth deals in quantification, and has no interest in or capacity to notice the reality of human suffering, pain, or weariness evoked by his brick quotas. By contrast, the truth carried by the Hebrew slaves and thus by Moses is a truth closely embedded in their bodies. Thus they “groaned and cried out” (Exodus 2:23). They did not groan about the number of bricks. Nor did they cry out because of the regimen of work. Rather their “groan and cry out” was about the truth they knew best, that their bodies could not pay the cost of sustaining Pharaoh’s quantification. Eventually they had to run the risk of departure from Pharaoh in order to honor the unbearable truth of their bodies. It is recurringly the case that Pharaoh and his company— politicians, charlatans, corrupt lawyers—did not and could not know that the pain of slave bodies was a truth with which they had to reckon. The contest of “two kinds of truth,” moreover, is kicked upstairs, so that the Egyptian gods are patrons of quantity, whereas YHWH, the covenantal God summoned to the slave camp by bodily pain, is attentive to another truth: “God heard, God remembered, God looked, God took notice” (Exodus 2:24-25). This is the God who will not avert eyes away from bodily truth.
The same struggle between “two kinds of truth” is defining in the Elijah-Elisha narratives. The confrontation between “two truths” is dramatically joined in the contest at Mt. Carmel wherein Baal is a patron of the royal establishment of Omri, Ahab, and Jezebel (I Kings 18). YHWH, by contrast, is the advocate for the peasant Israelites who live a subsistence life. The dramatic either/or of Mt. Carmel is on full exhibit in the narrative of I Kings 21 concerning Naboth’s vineyard. In that narrative, King Ahab’s truth of possessiveness takes land as a fungible commodity. By contrast, Naboth, the subsistence peasant, knows land to be intimately linked to his family and to his identity in a relational way. In the short run, the commoditizing thought of Ahab prevails. In the long run, of course, that royal self-deceit cannot prevail against the insistent relationality of land and identity. (NB how immediately pertinent is this narration to the White-Europeans land-seizure of Native American land where the blood continues to cry out from the ground.)
In the stunning Elisha narratives the conflict between “two kinds of truth” is played out with specificity:
-In II Kings 5 Elisha adroitly heals the bodily disease of the Syrian general, while the Israelite king is helpless before such suffering (see II Kings 5:7).
-In II Kings 6:8-24 the intent of the Syrians king is foiled, as is the desire of the Israelite king to kill his enemies. In the face of these two failed kings, the truth of Elisha prevails that is his will for peace: And the Arameans no longer came raiding in the land of Israel (6:23).
-In the narrative concerning an acute famine, II Kings 6:24-7:20 we notice at the outset the king’s inability to respond usefully to the hungry woman:
No! Let the Lord help you. How can I help you? From the threshing floor or from the winepress? (v. 27)
By contrast to the king, Elisha promises food to the woman, food that is wondrously provided at the end of the narrative.
In each of these narratives we observe that royal truth cannot deliver anything useful, while the royal house continued to bask in its power and wealth. By contrast Elisha, who had neither wealth nor power, can and does deliver transformative aid in the interest of bodily wellbeing.
It is no surprise that the alternative truth carried by Moses, Elijah, and Elisha turns up decisively in the narratives of Jesus. Indeed Luke succinctly summarizes the dispute, tension, and contradiction between these two kinds of truth:
Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, scribes, and leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard (Luke 19:47-48).
On the one hand the urban power structure in Jerusalem—chief priests, scribes, leaders—specialized in official truth. They made the rules, kept the rules, and interpreted the rules. And they saw, repeatedly, that Jesus readily overstepped the rules in terms of generative, transformative power. They rightly reasoned that he had to be stopped, or the entire structure of control would be exposed and defeated. It was no wonder that they “kept looking for a way to execute him” as a violator of their truth. Everything in Luke’s summary turns on the adversative conjunction in verse 8, “but.” What follows that conjunction is a complete contrast to the foregoing. “The people,” the nameless throng without power, wealth, or resources, flocked to his exhibit of restorative transformative power. They found his teaching as compelling as his actions. They were “spellbound” by what he said to them. And what he said to them was a portrayal of an alternative social possibility that was not top-down. That prospect of alternative governance represents, recurringly, a profound threat to establishment power and its claim of truth. Thus “the people” had no doubt that Jesus, in his words and in his actions, evidenced a truth that was not accountable to the governing establishment and not answerable to its truth.
Thus everywhere in scripture the issue is joined between these two kinds of truth. One truth is top-down. It originates in and serves the aims of established power. It tends to be quantifiable, provides certitude and security, and grows always more abstract. The alternative truth embodied in and performed by Moses, Elijah, Elisha, and Jesus is bottom-up. It operates among and on behalf of ordinary people and concerns bodily possibility and bodily social transformation. The weight of scriptural testimony is to insist that top-down truth will never be effectively transformative and cannot be. Transformative power is released only from below. It may, to be sure, happily evoke top-down action of a salutary kind, but such top-down action remains transformative only as long as it is in significant contact with bottom-up bodily reality. When that contact with bodily reality is lost or disregarded, top-down authority floats toward abstraction.
In the modern world top down authority results from the Enlightenment reasoning of Descartes and Bacon, and yields a certain kind of certitude that is not impinged upon by the whims of human reality. This kind of reasoning is readily utilized by concentrations of great wealth and power:
-Thus nation states can together commit great violence, without blinking at the “Necessary” devastation. Thus witness Hiroshima or Dresden.
-Thus banks can readily mandate foreclosure on marginal housing for unpaid rent, without blinking at the desperation of resourceless people.
-Thus universities can easily admit legacy students or children of major donors, without blinking at the disregard of resourceless students who are well qualified but who do not “qualify.”
Such abstract reasoning is everywhere among us as it functions consistently as an ally of great wealth and power. While such “truth” is no respecter of persons, it is indeed often a respecter of wealth. It is not difficult to conclude that for the most part governments, banks, universities, and the media are allied in their great attentiveness to truth from above that tends to be abstract, quantifiable, drawn to a certain kind of rationality, and generated by and for the entitled.
We may take a deep breath to recognize that it is quotidian truth from below that is entrusted to the church. It is the peculiar mandate of the church to be in solidarity with those left behind and those left out. This is truth with a creaturely face that is marked by disjunction, disruption, and need, “without form or comeliness.” The church is an heir to the claims of Jesus. He was asked by John the Baptist if he was the Messiah. John, via the tradition, no doubt had in mind pedigree, ancient memory, and legitimate norms for any messianic claim. Jesus’ response to John’s query, however, is quite otherwise:
The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them (Luke 7:22).
That is all! This is an inventory of those who remain unqualified, without claim or resource:
Blind, lame, lepers, dead, poor!
They are the peculiar province of Jesus’ preoccupation. Consequently they are the peculiar charge to the church. To be sure, sometimes the church is seduced. We in the church, as much as anyone, like beauty, property, and grandeur. We stage impressive liturgical dramas. We build exotic edifices. All of that, however, is insistently assessed by the norm of real people in their bodily reality. When the church is seduced away from its proper truth, it is characteristically called back with a reminder that our leader “suffered under Pontus Pilate, died, and was buried.”
It is no wonder that the Roman governor expressed his confusion and bewilderment as Jesus stood before him:
Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” (John 188).
He saw before him Jesus in his acute vulnerability. And he had all around him the trappings of Roman imperial power. Present before him that day were indeed “two kinds of truth” that he could not compute or sort out. But he had an inkling. He knows that imperial power could not and did not impact Jesus. In the end he opted, as he inevitably would, for the power to which he was inured. He subsumed the truth of Jesus to the truth of the empire. He acquitted him:
Pilate then called together the chief priests, the leaders, and the people, and said to them, “You brought me this man as one who as perverting the people; and here I have examined him in your presence and have not found this man guilty of any of your charges against him. Neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us. Indeed, he has done nothing to deserve death. I will therefore have him flogged and release him (Luke 23:13-15).
But finally power from the people was too compelling, and Pilate gave in.
Israel was always standing before the either-or of Mt. Carmel:
How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him (I Kings 18:21).
And so the church is likewise always standing before the same either-or. We have no doubt where our true purpose and mandate rest. That is why we are privileged, regularly, to reembrace our commitment to truth from below, one neighbor at a time. Absent truth from below we can “love God” as a generic mandate. Truth from below, by contrast, knows that the only love of God that has any substance is the love of God enacted as love of neighbor. We know this through the prism of this counter-tradition of covenant that is always one neighbor at a time, every neighbor a carrier of that truth that no force from above can override or cancel out. We have many liturgical prompts through which we may keep our energy and attention focused on this truth entrusted to us.
