REGLAMENTO DE LA REAL Y MILITAR ORDEN DE SAN FERNANDO TITULO I

(Deuteronomy 5:20)

Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour.

(Deuteronomy 5:20)

Joseph Bryant Rotherham’s translation brings out the meaning of this commandment very plainly: “Neither shalt thou testify against thy neighbour with a witness of falsehood.” Robert Young also uses the word “testimony” in his Literal Translation. Primarily, the refer-ence is very clearly to a court of law. Secondarily, all falsehood in normal circumstances of life is forbidden. This law does not forbid espionage and like covert action, nor does it obligate us to tell the truth to men who want to use it to do evil. We have in our time peo-ple who believe that we should, rather than keep silence or lie, reveal to evil men, to the Nazis in World War II, or to the K.G. B. in the Soviet Union, things which can be used to kill innocent men. This is not biblical, and it is a sordid justification for cowardice.

The purpose of this commandment is to protect the integrity of courts of law and the normal routines of life. We live in an evil and dishonest society, and we must protect the freedom of normal com-munication. In tyrant states, as under Marxism, people are afraid to talk freely one to another, or to their children. One who visited the Soviet Union in the Stalinist era told me that there were no conver-sations between people in the streets. At the same time, the squeak of badly made shoes was everywhere. He was, in fact, conspicuous because his shoes did not squeak. Because the Soviet socialist state held that it had a right to all men’s secrets, truth-telling between per-sons was limited and dangerous. To hear another man’s confidences and opinions on subjects not approved by the state placed both speaker and hearer at risk. Silence was therefore advisable. More-over, since one had no way of knowing what dangerous opinions someone else had in secret, it was wisest not to get too close to oth-ers. This limited liability.

What tyrant states have created are societies that are closed to God but open to the state. The church is persecuted, and God’s law is de-spised. The strength of a society is to have people who are open in two fundamental ways: first, they must be open to God in prayer.

This helps arm them against the tyrant state because their appeal in

prayer is beyond man and the state to the sovereign and triune God.

This freedom of access to the throne of all creation arms a man against the powers of the state. Second, men must be open to God by believing and obeying His law. They then know that God’s justice governs men and nations, and that the wages of sin are finally and always death (Rom. 6:23). They are then able to stand against the small, closed world of the state.

To keep this commandment, we must recognize that the world was created by God the Son, who is truth incarnate (John 14:6). The enemy of the triune God is Satan, who is the father of lies (John 8:44). We have on the one hand the realm of Christ, of truth, and of life, and, on the other, the realm of fallen men, of lies, and of death.

In protecting the realm of truth by this law, God summons us to fur-ther His kingdom, not the kingdom of Man.

We are not to testify against others with a witness of falsehood.

The purpose of this law is to strengthen and further community. In the kingdom of Man, truth-telling is used to further evil. We are summoned to betray our neighbor’s godliness. Is he secretly holding church services on his premises? The Kingdom of Man wants to use the truth to destroy men, and this is not God’s ordained purpose for the truth. Hence, God blessed the Egyptian midwives for not betray-ing the mothers and their newly born babies (Ex. 1:16-22), and He blessed Rahab for saving the lives of the Hebrew spies (Josh. 2:1-24;

Heb. 11:31). Truth cannot be divorced from God; it cannot be put to satanic purposes.

For the Greek philosophers, truth, along with goodness and beau-ty, was an abstract universal which existed apart from God, who to them was simply the first cause. Truth, for the philosophers, was an abstraction, not the Godhead. Plato wrote:

Just in the same way understand the condition of the soul to be as follows. Whenever it has fastened upon an object, over which truth and real existence are shining, it seizes that object by an act of reason, and knows it, and thus proves itself to be pos-sessed of reason: but whenever it has fixed upon objects that are blent with darkness, — the world of birth and death, — then it rests in opinion, and its sight grows dim, as its opinions shift backwards and forwards, and it has the appearance of being des-titute of reason.

Now, this power, which supplies the objects of real knowledge with the truth that is in them, and which renders to him who

Truth and Community (Deuteronomy 5:20) 105 knows them the faculty of knowing them, you must consider to be the essential Form of Good, and you must regard it as the or-igin of science, and of truth, so far as the latter comes within the range of knowledge: and though knowledge and truth are both very beautiful things, you will be right in looking upon good as something distinct from them, and even more beautiful.¹ Truth is thus an abstract concept; it is the accurate scientific percep-tion of things. It is therefore limited to philosopher-kings and scien-tists. The major part of humanity can only have opinions; it cannot know the truth. This view of truth logically limited knowledge and power to an elite group of philosopher-kings, and it placed most men under their control.

In one form or another, this same concept of truth governs intel-lectuals, scientists, and politicians in our day. Most people are held to be incapable of knowing truth in this scientific sense, and truth is therefore beyond their knowledge. As a result, the carefully crafted political lie is basic to our society. We are not told the facts of our federal deficit, or anything else, so that all may understand. Truth is then the domain of a small elite. As against this, the biblical mandate is for truth to all men under most circumstances. Only when men seek to do evil, as Pharaoh with his order to kill all male children born to Hebrew women, are we exempt from telling them the truth and thereby aiding and abetting crime.

For Aristotle, the world had to be reduced in order to be compre-hensible to man. He wrote:

Again, if the kinds of causes were infinite in number it would still be impossible to acquire knowledge; for it is only when we have become acquainted with the causes that we assume that we know a thing; and we cannot, in a finite time, go completely through what is additively infinite.²

In other words, truth for Aristotle must be comprehensible to the philosopher. For the Christian, truth, Jesus Christ, whose revelation is His enscriptured word, is open to all men; for Aristotle, truth is a domain for philosophers and scientists.

1. Plato, The Republic, trans. J. L. Davies and D. J. Vaughan (London, England:

Macmillan, [1852] 1935), [508] 230.

2. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books 1-9, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London, England:

William Heinemann, [1933] 1956), 2.2.13, 93-94

For Aristotle, the good is that at which all men aim.³ But, as Chris-tians, we know that fallen man aims at evil, not at truth. As a result, the non-Christian doctrine of truth, in all its forms, is a lie.

Thus, there are very basic issues in this law. It is a question which Pilate treated skeptically, saying, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).

The purpose of this commandment is to guard the truth, and the community of the Kingdom of God, by insisting that truth-telling means no false witness in courts of law, nor between ourselves and our neighbors. The purpose of truth is to enhance and develop jus-tice and community in society. It means that this commandment, where obeyed, furthers peace and harmony in a society. If we do not testify against our neighbor with a witness of falsehood, it means positively that we live with him under the mandate of our King, Jesus Christ.

It is very important to recognize that, in this century, confession, full disclosure to God, has declined among Catholics and Protestants alike. At the same time, the federal government, and, for a time, cor-porations, were demanding full disclosure. The state was claiming the prerogatives of God while denying them to God. The Fifth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was at the same time being breached: the right to be free of a forced confession, the immunity against self-incrimination, was denied on various federal levels, be-ginning with Congress. It is not surprising that servile churchmen, to whom openness to God is alien, should insist on a full disclosure to statist agencies.

3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England: Pen-guin Books, [1953] 1958), bk. 1, chap. 1: 25-26.

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Chapter Twenty-Two