As you may know, we’re going to be spending the next several months reflecting on the concept of integrity in light of the Scriptures, and vice versa—a concept which eludes easy definition. We don’t want to abandon the effort, like Justice Potter Stewart, and say, “OK, I can’t completely define it, but I know it when I see it”; but moving from “I know it when I see it” to being able to articulate what exactly it is that we know is a challenge because integrity can’t be defined with a checklist. As Emily highlighted last week, it is an attribute of God, and like all such, it is too large a thing for us to pin down and dissect. We have to watch it fly, so to speak, to understand it.
Fortunately, for those of us who were here before the service last week for the Opening, Frank Benyousky gave us a little help when he started a parallel conversation about the nature of truth. Like integrity, truth is an attribute of God, and thus when we ask, “What is truth?” we are diving into a sea of which we will never see the bottom in this life; but for all that, I believe there is an answer that can guide us in that dive. It dates back over 2300 years to the Greek philosopher Aristotle: if I say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, I speak the truth. If I say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, I do not speak the truth.
It’s a simple enough definition, and can play out just that simply with regard to matters of scientific or historical fact; but of course, when you start dealing with the human heart, figuring out “what is” gets much, much harder. All the same, if we understand that each person is an objective reality—each of you exists, and each of you are who you are, whether I perceive and understand you accurately or not—and ultimately God are an objective reality who determine himselves who he are, not a concept we can define however it suits us, then I think there’s a principle here we can use. If we can say truth is alignment with what is real, I believe we can understand integrity in the same way.