Telling the Truth

Author: Frederick Buechner

Overview

We listen to the truth from our emptiness, because we long for a truth to fill us and make us true.

The Gospel is not one particular truth among many; it is the whole truth, stretching from the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world to the age in which the lion and the lamb will lie down together.

The comedy of the Gospel is every point at which the preposterous is actually true: the King conquers death by dying and overcomes the world by meekness — a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. The foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong.

Fairy tales remind us of deep and abiding truths about life — truths so easily eclipsed, though never fully eliminated, by the clutter of life. They remind us that life is full of darkness, danger, and ambiguity, but it’s also a puzzle that is ultimately intelligible.

Life is a place where our choices really do matter; where everything is apt to be other than what it seems; where one can be doomed for merely enacting the forbidden; where the good might so easily not have happened; where everybody, in the end, is known by his true name.

“The Gospel met man’s mythological search for romance by being a story and his philosophical search for truth by being a true story.” G.K. Chesterton

Buechner’s Approach

The book is largely an open letter to preachers. Buechner writes with subtlety, wit, depth, and passion all in the hope of persuading those who attempt to tell the truth, to tell it all: to not omit the tragic, the terrible, the confusing, but to begin by acknowledging the very real “visible absence” of God.

As apologists instead of fabulists, preachers often try to pare the Gospel down to a size they think the world will swallow. The preacher, the steward of the wildest mystery of all, is often the one who hangs back, prudent, cautious, hopelessly mature and wise. But Paul tells him to be a fool for Christ’s sake, and Christ tells him to be a child for his own sake and for the sake of the kingdom.

“Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness. Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation. Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway.” — Melville

Memorable Concepts

A particular truth can be stated in words, but truth itself is another matter. Truth simply is, and is all that is. Jesus was silent before Pilate because truth is what words can’t tell but only tell about.

• To tell the truth in love means to tell it with concern not only for the truth being told but also for the people it is being told to.
• A man needs as much singleness of purpose to be unfaithful to his wife as he needs to be faithful to her.
• People go to church in the hope that somehow God will become real to them.
• A preacher is called to be human, and that is calling enough for any man.
• We are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.

​Buechner holds that Job’s words, and those of his friends, are said to be “words without knowledge” because they obscure the issue of God by trying to define Him as present in ways and places where He is not present. They try to define God as moral order, the best answer man himself can give to the problems of his life.