“We were making the future,” [Graham] said, “and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!”
—H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes
In chapter 3 of his book Twelve Ordinary Men: How the Master Shaped His Disciples for Greatness, and What He Wants to Do with You, John MacArthur describes the apostles James and John like this:
James and John were nicknamed [Boanerges] “Sons of Thunder” [by Jesus] because of their reckless tendencies.
Later, in chapter 5 on John – The Apostle of Love, he describes just how reckless and rough John could be:
The two men [brothers, James and John] had similar temperaments, … they were inseparable in the Gospel accounts. John was right there with James, eager to call down fire from heaven against the Samaritans.
But Jesus changes John and he becomes known as the apostle of love. In the same chapter MacArthur offers the following observation on love and truth:
Zeal for the truth must be balanced by love for people. Truth without love has no decency; it’s just brutality. On the other hand, love without truth has no character; it’s just hypocrisy.
Upon reading that observation, it became immediately clear to me how it applied to the current debate on Human Sexuality and Marriage in the Church. Although in its history the Church has brutally spoken truth without love, it does not excuse its current detractors of the hypocrisy of love without truth. There’s too much at stake to be that reckless.
In groups of people (committees) there tends to be an inclination, for the sake of consensus, to demand compromise from all the participants rather than evaluating (debating) whether certain points of view are wrong and should be changed and whether they are right and to remain unchanged. This is why Kierkegaard makes the claim “the crowd is untruth“; the introduction of a single untruth will corrupt the truth and, therefore, make the consensus untruth. Here’s Kierkegaard on the subject:
There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life; which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that ‘the crowd’ received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.
For ‘the crowd’ is untruth. Eternally, godly, christianly what Paul says is valid: “only one receives the prize,” [I Cor. 9:24]
— Søren Kierkegaard. The Crowd is Untruth
Here’s the whole scripture to which he referred:
24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.
— Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 9:24 (NIV1984)
