If you talk hard about this world’s need for truth telling―or better yet, if you do some telling of hard truths in the specific―it will likely not be long at all until some diligent churcher shows up to make the show-stopping observation that the scripture says, speaking the truth “in love“.
He may want to suggest, or at least insinuate, that whatever truth-telling you have been doing may well be disqualified―and ungodly, even―on account of its not being accompanied with enough love (the properly qualifying amount of love being determined by him, of course).
He is almost certainly either gaslighting you, or mimicking behaviors learned from the observation of gaslighters. But however that particularly conversation should happen to play out on its merits, do be sure to ask him separately while you’ve got him whether there is also some passage that suggests that not speaking the truth is also a thing that may be done in love.
(I’m going to pause right here to let you read that last sentence again.)
Ask him what becomes of all those occasions on which he and his churchmates hold their tongues, and let the truth of a matter go unspoken, claiming that the lack of love present in the moment had made the speaking of the truth actually improper at that time.
Ask him why it so often seems (to them) that the better solution is to let the truth go unspoken than to let the one in need of the truth go unloved. And ask him how that’s working out.
Ask him whether the aid the Good Samaritan gave to the injured man would have been in vain and godless had it not been accompanied by love. And when he (likely) tells you, “Yes!”, ask him whether the aid the Good Samaritan gave the injured man was love. That is, whether the act itself was a loving thing to do. If he says it was, then you both need to go back and start the conversation over again. And if he says it wasn’t, ask him how it is that giving the man love―however that is defined―would have been better than giving him aid. And let him venture to explain in his own words how that aid would have been worthless without the love he claims was missing.
Does not James speak to this when he says:
14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
James 2:14-17. NIV.
But let’s flip this around. Suppose the person meets the physical needs, but doesn’t say “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed”. Why didn’t James write about that scenario? Perhaps it’s because it wouldn’t have been considered a problem!
So, back to our discussion of the Good Samaritan scenario:
If the injured man needed aid and love―(and I’m working on the assumption that the two things, aid and love, were considered by Jesus to be separate things)―would it not have been a double sin to withhold the both on account of not having the one present?
Ask your friend, then, how it would not be a double sin to withhold both the truth and the love, when the truth-telling is shut down on account of there being a supposed lack of love present.
The gaslighter (as opposed to the mere gaslighter mimic) will jump all over someone’s supposed lack of love, but he is not sincerely concerned about whatever he thinks “love” is; he’s concerned about getting you to shut up about whatever you think the truth is. (And the gaslighter mimic isn’t really thinking any of this through; he’s just saying stuff he thinks he’s supposed to say.) And you’ll often find both in the same company.
So many churchers today have been conditioned to think that the “love” in the verse, “speaking the truth in love” is some sort of esoteric, emotional thing, rather than a commitment to do what is best for the other person all the time, no matter what. And more than that, they seem to think that not only it is an emotional thing, but that it must be by nature a “positive” emotional thing that feels good to all parties involved. And this way, if someone is trouble by words intended to help, he can claim (by way of a faulty definition), that the words were not spoken “in love”.
This is just all kinds of ignorant, yet it is quite popularly understood this way. But Jesus gave many life-saving rebukes that stung people. Even Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 cut them to the heart, it says. And that was Day One of “The Church” as so many see it.
If those people had been gaslighters, instead of sincere and faithful people, they would surely have pushed back against Peter in the same way that is so common today. They’d have attacked him for his tone, looking for some way out of it. But they would not have had the aid of the one verse from Paul that we’ve been talking about, for that verse had not been written yet.
When Paul writes “speaking the truth in love”, he’s not differentiating it from speaking the truth without love; he’s reminding them that speaking the truth is love. It’s what loving people do. It’s what you do when you want to help the audience turn itself around. That somebody else might use the truth from time to time to do harm, has nothing to do with what Paul was talking about. But the gaslighter is heavily invested in the supposition that it does. He needs this verse to be Paul telling themselves to shut up whenever they find themselves telling someone the truth, and yet not being overwhelmed with warm-and-fuzzy feelings in the moment. And he needs to import that idea that if the hearer himself is not overwhelmed with warm-and-fuzzy feelings at hearing it, that it clearly was not spoken “in love”.
And he will tell you such things as often as possible, psychologically conditioning you―training you like a Manchurian Candidate―to pull the trigger against truth-telling whenever he doesn’t like it. And if he succeeds, you’ll curb the truth-telling regularly, and tell yourself that what you’re doing is indeed the “loving” thing to do. And that will put you squarely against the example of the real Jesus and the real apostles, but in a gaslighting fellowship (made up mostly of gaslighting leaders and their mimicking followers), who’s going to notice the difference?
