Haggard stepped down as president of the National Association of Evangelicals Thursday after radio and TV reports featuring a male escort saying that he had frequently paid him for sex and also bought meth from him. Haggard has denied the charges but today his church's senior pastor revealed that he had privately admitted to one or more of the charges. Later today Haggard admitted buying meth but claimed he had only paid for a massage from the accuser, not sex."I bought it for myself but never used it," he said, referring to the drug. "I was tempted, but I never used it."
The part of this that I find the most frustrating is that he bluntly lied about the charges before, essentially disclaiming all of them, and now he wants to say that he bought some meth but never used it and never sold it and he had a "massage" from a male escort but "not sex." It is probably fairly safe to assume that he did much more than just buy and not use the meth and that such a massage from a male escort may bend the definition of "sex" as much as Bill Clinton did. And here is my biggest problem, the constant lying. The fact that he flatly denied it at first and then the truth had to be dug out of him and even now the "truth" he is telling us seems more than a bit ridiculous. We've become so inured to people on TV denying allegations and then being proved wrong that it is old hat. We expect it now. In fact, we would be shocked if a politician were accused during a press conference of something and he responded, "Why yes, I did do that. How ever did you find out?" When a person like Ted Haggard is proved to be a complete liar what other part of the things he is saying can you also not believe? We need to be able to believe what other people are saying about themselves. In the book I am reading (Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present) Gerald Bray makes the point that our trust in the truth of the Bible is like our trust of the self-revelation in any personal relationship. The Bible is what God tells us about himself. In any relationship we have to trust what the other person tells us about themselves. If some of what they tell us is proved wrong, the relationship breaks down. This is why we have to believe that what the Bible tells us is true. If we believe that what God tells us about himself is wrong then our relationship with God will break down. But this makes what is happening in our society even more problematic. You see, when we assume that the first words out of anybody's mouth after an allegation will be a lying denial then we also assume that much of what any authority figure tells us about themselves is also wrong. (Why, after all, should they only lie about this allegation?) We then apply the assumption of lying to other self-revelatory acts and the greatest of these is God's own self-revelatory act, The Bible. So we might assume that everybody lies in their own self-interest, therefore the Bible is probably full of lies. And you can see this assumption at work if you talk to many people about God/Jesus/The Bible. There is an assumption that the Bible must be partially lies (since everybody else does it) and therefore you can pick the parts of it that you would like to be truth. The parts that are unpalatable? Well, that might be where God is lying. The parts that go down nice and easy and don't mean much in the way of a life change? Well, that is the God we would vote for! A nice politician God with lots of mistresses and problems in the closet but a good haircut and a smooth tongue. Such a concept is absolutely unacceptable to me. I want a God I can trust. I also want human authority figures I can trust, but 1 out of 2 isn't bad.
