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But much of the time is not all of the time. No doubt corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves. The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says to himself, "I think I shall lie to myself today."

The deception happens in such a tiny fraction of a second that the self-deceiver is not even aware that he has lied to himself. What lies does he tell himself? One of them is the lie that he is not really lying when he tells a lie. Another is the lie that the moral law does not apply to him, at least not in this case. In short, people tell bold-faced lies about very important things, and feel no guilt about their lying because they lie to themselves about what they are doing. Their problem is not with their heads, but with their hearts.

My second assumption was about God the Son. I did not assume that Jesus Christ brought us a new ethic to replace the old one. I assumed that he showed us two new ways of understanding the old one. The first has to do with what: showed us that if we have love, we will do more than just saying no to what the commandments forbid. The second with how: he showed us how to obey the moral law in a way that helps other people. Jesus' way of love, then, calls for doing more than saying no to bad things, and it is the way of doing good things in ways that are helpful to other people.

My third assumption was about God the Spirit. The Spirit of God is our eye-opener to the human situation that requires a decision from us. The moral law by itself is not enough to guide us. What we need is the ability to see what is really going on in the human circumstances to which we are trying to apply the moral law.

We must remember, however, that the Spirit is not like an eye surgeon; he does not remove our cataracts. Nor is the Spirit like an optometrist; he does not prescribe new lenses for our eyeglasses. The Spirit works on what lies behind our eyes. It is said that what we see lies eighty percent behind our eyes. It is that eighty percent that the Spirit works on.

Ordinarily, we see what we want to see. We do not see what we do not want to see. We do not want to see reality, because we are afraid of what it might tell us. The Spirit, however, gives us courage and honesty to want to see the truth no matter how much we fear it. This is how the Spirit opens our eyes to reality: he takes the blinders of fear away.

Seeing reality for what it is is what we call discernment. The work of discernment is very hard. Reality is always deucedly complicated; any human situation has far more to it than first meets anybody's eye. No one has twenty-twenty discernment. This is why we need other people to tell us what they see in the same chunk of reality that we are looking at. This is why people of the church need to share their visions of reality with each other before they shout their judgments at each other.

Teaching seminary students, I often used real-life situations about which someone had to make an important moral choice. Each student was given a written report of the situation. Invariably, some students protested: "Why do we need even to discuss it?" they said. "What is going on in this situation is perfectly obvious." But we did need to discuss it. Invariably, the students who thought that what was going on was as clear and as simple as the bark on a tree were shocked to learn that others, as smart and as spiritual as they were, were seeing things that they missed. It is always this way: discovering God's will for a human situation requires us to listen to what other people see in that situation.

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August (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47