Do Christians have to tell the truth in all situations? What about situations where telling a lie may save someone’s life?
Joseph Fletcher had what is described as the “one norm ethic of love” in his controversial book “Situation Ethics: The New Morality.” He wrote that the situation trumps Scripture in determining ethics: “Situation ethics ... goes part of the way with Scriptural law by accepting revelation as the source of the norm while rejecting all ‘revealed’ norms or laws but the one command----to love God in the neighbor .... We are only ‘obliged to tell the truth, for example, if the situation calls for it; if a murderer asks us his victim’s whereabouts, our duty might be to lie.”[3]
This ethical question has been asked and answered all the way back to Augustine who said, “Love with care and then what you will do.” Yet, Augustine purported that it is always wrong to lie. Augustine wrote two books dedicated to the view that all lying is wrong: Against Lying and On Lying.[1]
Immanuel Kant also rejected lying for any reason: “Whoever then tells a lie, however good his intentions may be, must answer for the consequences of it.”[2]
Vern S. Poythress simply states “I think it is always wrong to lie.”[4] Poythress would disagree with Fletcher that the situation determines whether one should lie or not:
Those who permit lying describe situations in which a lie seems to lead to good results. Here we must be careful. The mere attraction of a possible good outcome is not sufficient to ground a moral argument. The ends do not justify the means. God does not permit us to “do evil that good may come” (Rom 3:8). The advocate of lying may say that the issue is precisely whether lying is evil in all cases. Yes. But an argument that depends wholly on looking at good results, if unsupported by other buttresses, is quite weak. It is weak also because, without exhaustive knowledge of a situation, knowledge that only God has, we cannot say for sure that there are no good alternatives to lying.[5]
But what about lying in wartime?
Bruce Waltke in his commentary on Joshua found in The New Bible Commentary states that “The deceptions by Joshua and Rahab [who were in a war situation] raise eyebrows ... we recognize that in such situations deception is legitimate, not wrong. So also the OT recognizes that in war intelligence, counter-intelligence and decoys are all part of ‘the game.”
The usual example given is the example of people hiding Jews from the Nazis and lying to do so. For example, Corrie ten Boom in her famous Hiding Place tells this story where she questioned the ethic of not lying to the Nazis. Two of Corrie’s nephews running from the Germans burst into Corrie’s house. The family hid the two nephews in the potato cellar under the kitchen table. The trapdoor was covered over with a rug with the kitchen table over the rug. Here is how Corrie told the story:
There was a crash in the hall as the front door burst open and a smaller crash close by as Cocky [Corrie ten Boom’s niece] dropped a teacup. Two uniformed German soldiers ran into the kitchen, rifles leveled.
“Stay where you are. Do not move.”
We heard boots storming up the stairs. The soldiers glanced around disgustedly at this room filled with women and one old man. If they had looked closer at Katrien she would surely have given herself away: her face was a mask of terror. But they had other things on their minds.
“Where are your men?” the shorter soldier asked Cocky in clumsy, thick-accented Dutch.
“These are my aunts,” she said, “and this is my grandfather. My father is at his school, and my mother is shopping, and— ”
“I didn’t ask about the whole tribe!” the man exploded in German. Then in Dutch: “Where are your brothers?”
Cocky stared at him a second, then dropped her eyes. My heart stood still. I knew how Nollie [Cocky’s mother] had trained her children— but surely, surely of all times, a lie was permissible!
“Do you have brothers?” the officer asked again.
“Yes,” Cocky said softly. “We have three.”
“How old are they?”
“Twenty-one, nineteen, and eighteen.”
Upstairs we heard the sounds of doors opening and shutting, and the scrape of furniture dragged from walls.
“Where are they now?” the soldier persisted.
Cocky leaned down and began gathering up the broken bits of the cup. The man jerked her upright. “Where are your brothers?”
“The oldest one is at the Theological College. He doesn’t get home most nights because— ”
“What about the other two?”
Cocky did not miss a breath.
“Why, they’re under the table.”
Motioning us all away from it with his gun, the soldier seized a corner of the cloth. At a nod from him, the taller man crouched with his rifle cocked. Then he flung back the cloth.
At last, the pent-up tension exploded: Cocky burst into spasms of high hysterical laughter. The soldiers whirled around. Was this girl laughing at them?
“Don’t take us for fools!” the short one snarled. Furiously he strode from the room and minutes later the entire squad trooped out— not, unfortunately, before the silent soldier had spied and pocketed our precious packet of tea.
It was a strange dinner party that evening, veering as it did from heartfelt thanksgiving to the nearest thing to a bitter argument our close-knit family had ever had. Nollie stuck by Cocky, insisting she would have answered the same way. “God honors truth-telling with perfect protection! ”
Peter and Bob [the nephews], from the viewpoint of the trapdoor, weren’t so sure. And neither was I. I had never had Nollie’s bravery— no nor her faith either.
But I could spot illogic. “And it isn’t logical to say the truth and do a lie! What about Annaliese’s false papers— and that maid’s uniform on Katrien?”[6]
Even the Corrie ten Boom family was divided over the ethical issue of whether to lie or tell the truth when lives were at stake. Rahab, unlike Cocky, chose to lie rather than tell the truth about the spies she was hiding in her house.
David M. Howard, Jr, discusses Rahab’s lie: “A troublesome aspect of the Rahab story for many people is that she apparently uttered a bald-faced lie by telling the king of Jericho’s messengers that the Israelite spies had fled when in fact they were hiding in her own house (josh 2:4), and she was never censured for it ... and the New Testament twice commends her in very glowing terms (Heb 11:31; Jas 2:25).”[7] Howard elaborates on the three positions of ethicists on Rahab’s lie.
The first position is called the “conflicting absolutes” or “lesser of two evils” view
The view contends that, to tell the truth, and save lives are two absolutes and in Rahab’s case; she had to choose the lesser of two evils: to lie or not save lives. Both are sins. If Rahab had told the truth and the spies would be captured and killed, Rahab would have sinned. In this case, the Christian has no choice but to sin and then ask God for forgiveness (1 John1:9). This would have been the position of Martin Luther: “If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true grace and not a fictitious grace .... Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world.”[8] To this view, Howard responded: “It is difficult to conceive of God’s holding people responsible for sinning when their only choice is to do just that.”[9]
The second position is called “hierarchicalism” or “graded absolutism” or “choosing the greater good.”
This is not a choice between two sins but between two absolutes one of which is more important than the other. Moral absolutes are on a graded scale and therefore some are more crucial than others. In Rahab’s case saving a life has priority over lying. Rahab, therefore, was exempt from the sin of lying because she choose the higher moral absolute. She did not need to confess sin for she had not sinned. In some ways, this view is similar to Fletcher’s Situation Ethic view which has a higher moral standard of love. In both, there is a hierarchy of values. Howard quotes R. A. G. du Preez: “In the choosing the greater good view “there is no real difference between an ‘intention"‘ [Geisler’s term] and an ‘end’ [Fletcher’s term].”[10]
Advocates of this view appeal to the Hebrew midwives who did not obey the Pharoah in killing the male babies in Exodus1:15-21. Just like Rahab, they are not censured in Scripture. This can be explained in two ways. First, narratives are mostly descriptive rather than prescriptive. Narratives are describing what happened not prescribing precepts or principles. Next, the narrative sometimes reveals whether an action is right or wrong by describing the consequences. Scripture does not condemn Abraham for having sex with Hagar. But the consequences of that action, the birth of Ishmael, were tragic long term.
The third position is called the “nonconflicting absolutes” position or choosing a third option
Instead of having to choose between two evils or decide which of the two moral absolutes is more important, there is a “third way.” This view would claim 1 Corinthians 10:13 as God’s promise in this situation: “God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so you can stand up under it.” This view agrees with Paul that the end (saving a life) does not justify the means (lying) in Romans 3:7-8.
There is another aspect beyond how our actions of lying or saving a life that needs to be considered. How do our actions affect or please God? Theologian John Murray wrote, “The necessity of truthfulness in us rests upon God’s truthfulness. As we are to be holy because God is holy, so we are to be truthful because God is truthful.”[11] Jesus declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). God cannot lie according to Titus 1:2.
To choose to lie so that in our thinking this will save a life is, according to Howard, “shows a lack of faith in God’s ability to protect or provide, even in desperate situations.”[12]
Cocky, Corrie ten Boom’s niece, choose the third option, to tell the truth, and trust God to accomplish his will.
How can Christians avoid telling lies?
Howard asks, “How could Rahab have avoided lying and still protected the spies? .... [Walter] Kaiser, for example, suggests that ‘Rahab should ... have volunteered, ‘Come in and have a look around,’ while simultaneously praying that God would have made the searchers especially obtuse.”[13]
Poythress provided another option. Start witnessing to the enemy: “Suppose one says to the Nazis, ‘Come on in. I want to talk to you. I know you may be just trying to do your duty. But I am a follower of Christ, and I believe that God’s standards judge every human government. What the government is doing to the Jews is wrong. But even more important than that is the good news that God sent, that Jesus Christ can deliver us from the wrongs we have done. If, however, we refuse his deliverance, we have to face his judgment. And that includes all the people who have a role in government. Do you believe in God? Do you know what his moral standards are?’”[14] Whichever option is chosen, we can still honor God “who can not lie” (Titus 1:2) and whose Word is truth (John 17:17).
[1] Augustine, On lying and To Consentius: Against Lying, in P. Schaff, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980 reprint)
[2] Immanuel Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives,” in The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas Kinsmill Abbot, 6th ed. London: Longmand Green, 1963, 363).
[3] Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1966), 26, 27.
[4] Vern S. Poythress, “Why Lying is always wrong: The uniqueness of verbal deceit,” in The Westminster Theological Journal, 75 (2013), 83.
[5] Ibid., 90.
[6] Corrie ten Boom with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, The Hiding Place (Carmel, N.Y: Guideposts,
1971), 87-88.
[7] David M. Howard, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1998), 106.
[8] Martin Luther, “letter to Philip Melanchthon, August 1, 1521,” in Luther’s Words, vol. 48 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963, 281-282, quoted in David M. Howard, The New American Commentary, 107.
[9] David M. Howard, The New American Commentary, 108.
[10] R. A. G. du Preez, “A Crritical Study of Norman Geisler’s Ethical Hierarchicalism” (Th. D. diss., University of South Africa, 1997) quoted in David M. Howard, 109.
[11] John Murray, Principles of Conduct (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 127.
[12] David M. Howard, The New American Commentary, 109.
[13] Walter Kaiser, Hard Sayings of the Old Testament (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1988), 97
[14] Vern S. Poythress, “Why Lying is always wrong: The uniqueness of verbal deceit,” 93.