Article September 18, 1989 Issue

Second Thought

Looking again at news and commentary

J. I. Packer—February 17, 1989

Christianity Today

"Justification [for stating untruths to promote a 'worthy' end] would be a way of saying that these statements fall in the category of what Plato called 'the useful lie' .... To see the end as justifying the means, or as old-time ... casuists put it, to treat a lawful intention as legitimizing whatever is done to fulfill it, is typically modern. But it is not right.

"Surely the means to any end has a moral quality of its own. Surely I am not respecting God's image in my neighbor if I conspire to bamboozle him. Surely advertising a product by making false statements to people who expect me to tell the truth would be a case, even if small-scale, of doing evil that good might come—a way of acting that God condemns. Surely the Devil is the father of white lies as well as of black ones. Surely the old dictum that those who tell white lies soon become colorblind is true.

"Said Samuel Johnson, that eighteenth-century man-mountain of Christian common sense: 'Accustom your children constantly to this: if a thing happened at one window and they say, when relating it, that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.' The contemporary willingness of Christians to trade in hype and untruths suggests that some of us were not brought up on this wise principle of meticulous respect for the facts....

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