Plautus: Pseudolus — When Rome’s Cleverest Liar Meets the Only Truth-Teller

In April of 191 BC, at the newly dedicated Temple of Magna Mater on the Palatine Hill, Roman audiences roared with laughter at a slave who bragged that he would out-scheme his own master. Plautus named his hero Pseudolus, “the Liar” or “Lie-man,” and the playwright built an entire comedy around the premise that deception, cunning, and fraud are not merely permissible but praiseworthy when performed with enough style. Calidorus needs twenty minae to buy his beloved Phoenicium from the pimp Ballio before a Macedonian officer claims her first. Pseudolus, the household slave, vows to supply both the money and the girl through pure trickery, and the play crowns him for succeeding. Scripture gives believers an entirely different vantage point from which to read this comedy. The God of Israel and the church is a God who “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2), and He calls His people to a life of truthful speech that mirrors His own character. Reading Pseudolus as a Christian, then, is not an exercise in nostalgia for a distant world of Roman festival theater. It is an opportunity to see, in sharp relief, exactly what the gospel rescues humanity from.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and Roman Connections

Pseudolus belongs to the fabula palliata, the distinctly Roman genre that adapted Greek New Comedy—chiefly the work of Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus—into Latin dress for Roman civic festivals. Plautus inherited the stock cast of Greek domestic comedy: the clever slave, the lovesick young man, the greedy pimp, the anxious father, the boastful soldier. Yet he Romanized these figures thoroughly, embedding them in Roman legal and social categories such as patria potestas, the stipulatio contract, and the institution of the leno. The play’s most striking literary achievement is its constant reach for epic grandeur. Pseudolus compares his scheme against Ballio to the Greek sack of Troy, casting himself as a new Ulysses storming the gates of an enemy city. He even describes himself, in his own Act One monologue, as a poet who takes up blank tablets and calls into being what did not exist before. Plautus is having his slave-hero claim the authority of Homer’s warrior-kings and the creative power of the poet himself, all in service of a scheme to steal a prostitute and swindle a pimp. The comedy works precisely because the gap between epic pretension and squalid content is so enormous.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis

Beneath the laughter lies a worldview worth examining soberly. Pseudolus does not present deceit as a regrettable necessity; it presents deceit as the highest form of human excellence. The slave’s lies are not merely tolerated by the plot, they are celebrated as artistry, and the play’s final act rewards Pseudolus with wealth, freedom of movement, and even authority over his own master. Human beings fare no better than the truth does. Phoenicium is a commodity throughout, purchased, deposited upon, and fought over by men who never once ask what she herself desires. The early church recognized this danger in Roman theater with remarkable clarity. Tertullian warned believers away from the spectacula precisely because such entertainments trained the soul to delight in what God condemns, and Augustine confessed in his own retrospective grief that as a young man he wept at fictional sorrows on the Carthaginian stage while remaining hard toward his own sins. Clement of Alexandria likewise cautioned that the theater shapes the imagination toward vice even when no literal crime is committed by the viewer. Christians reading Pseudolus today can appreciate its craftsmanship while refusing, with the fathers, to let its inverted values reorder the conscience.

Old Testament Analysis and Critique

The contrast between Pseudolus and the Old Testament could hardly be sharper. Israel’s covenant God is defined by אֱמֶת, emet, unshakable truthfulness, and Proverbs 12:22 states plainly that lying lips are a תּוֹעֵבָה, a to’evah, an abomination to the LORD, while those who deal in truth are His delight. Proverbs 12:17 sets the righteous witness who speaks truth directly against the false witness who speaks שֶׁקֶר, sheker, deceit, and the wisdom tradition treats truthful speech as the very foundation of a functioning community. Plautus builds his comedy on exactly the value Proverbs condemns. The Law is equally direct about the human trafficking that structures Ballio’s entire household. Exodus 21:16 prescribes death for anyone who kidnaps and sells a person, and Leviticus 25:39-43 forbids an Israelite master from ruling over a servant with be-pharech, harshness, because every Israelite ultimately belongs to the LORD who redeemed them from Egypt. Phoenicium’s fate as an object of sale and rental is precisely the abuse the Torah moved to restrain. Where Pseudolus rewards the schemer and commodifies the vulnerable, the Old Testament binds truthful speech and human dignity together as reflections of the character of God Himself.

Plato: Sophists — The Ghost Hunter and the Living Word: What Plato’s Sophist Reveals About Truth, Deception, and Jesus Christ

Few ancient texts invite the Christian reader into a more surprisingly fruitful conversation than Plato’s Sophist. Written in the fourth century BCE as a direct sequel to the Theaetetus, this late Platonic dialogue abandons the warm dramatic energy of Socrates and replaces him with a methodical “Eleatic Stranger,” a disciple of the philosopher Parmenides, who sets out to perform one seemingly simple task: define what a Sophist actually is. What unfolds is nothing less than a philosophical detective story, a high-stakes hunt through the nature of reality, language, truth, and deception. For the lay Christian reader, picking up this dialogue is not an exercise in wandering from the faith — it is an opportunity to watch the greatest mind of the ancient world press human reason to its absolute limit, and then to see, with fresh gratitude, exactly where it breaks and where the Gospel begins.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek Roots and the Hunt for Reality

The Sophist sits at the center of a tight literary trilogy alongside the Theaetetus and the Statesman, forming a deliberate philosophical arc in which Plato moves his readers from failed definitions of knowledge toward a sharp, technical classification of wisdom and its counterfeits. The dialogue’s primary literary engine is diaeresis — the method of division — which functions like a binary hunting net, repeatedly splitting a genus into two species to narrow the perimeter around its prey. The Stranger first demonstrates this tool on the humble figure of an angler before applying it to the far more elusive Sophist. Homer’s Odyssey shadows the opening pages, as Socrates playfully wonders whether the Stranger might be one of those Homeric gods who wander the earth in disguise to judge human folly — a layer of irony Plato plants deliberately, since the Sophist himself pretends to god-like omniscience while the truly wise Stranger arrives quietly, carrying only a net of logic. The dialogue also stages what it explicitly calls a philosophical “parricide”: the Stranger must dismantle his own intellectual father, Parmenides, who had decreed that “Not-Being” cannot exist, think, or be spoken. Because the Sophist hides in precisely that fog — arguing that since falsehood is merely “saying what is not,” and Not-Being cannot exist, he can never be caught in a lie — the Stranger must shatter the Parmenidean prohibition to make truth-telling philosophically defensible at all.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis: A Cosmos Seeking Its Anchor

The Sophist reaches its metaphysical climax in the “Communion of Kinds,” where Plato identifies five Great Kinds — Being, Motion, Rest, Sameness, and Otherness — and argues that some of these abstract forms can blend together while others cannot. By redefining “Not-Being” not as absolute nothingness but as Otherness (to say “an apple is not an orange” simply means it is other than an orange), Plato rescues language, saves the concept of falsehood, and traps the Sophist in his own illusions. This is a brilliant achievement of human reason. Yet from a Christian theological perspective, it exposes the deepest structural limitation of pagan philosophy: the universe Plato constructs is cold, impersonal, and self-sustaining. Being is defined as dynamis — the mere capacity to act or be acted upon — a definition that strips existence of any personal, sovereign foundation. Contrast this with Exodus 3:14, where God reveals Himself to Moses not as a passive metaphysical category but as ‘Ehyeh ‘ăšer ‘ehyeh — “I AM WHO I AM” — an active, first-person declaration that absolute Being is a living, self-existent, covenant-making Person. Plato’s abstract grid of logical forms desperately needs a personal architect; the Old Testament supplies One whose name is not a formula but a relationship.

Plato: Apology — The Philosopher on Trial and the One Who Judges All

Athens, 399 BC. Five hundred and one jurors file into the courtroom. The defendant is seventy years old, famously ugly, and utterly unafraid. He has spent his adult life wandering the agora, stopping generals and poets and craftsmen and asking them the one question they all prefer to avoid: do you actually know what you claim to know? Now the city has had enough. The charges read corruption of the youth and impiety toward the gods of the state. Socrates rises to speak, and what emerges is not a defense in any ordinary sense but a philosophical manifesto, a portrait of a soul so committed to truth that it will walk calmly into death rather than purchase its safety with silence. Plato's Apology invites you to sit in that courtroom and ask yourself a question far older than Athens: have you examined your own life, and if you have, what have you found?

The Gadfly and the God Who Sends Him

The architecture of Socrates' defense rests on a story from the Oracle at Delphi. His friend Chaerephon had asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, and the Oracle answered that no one was. Socrates, convinced he knew nothing worth knowing, set out to disprove the Oracle by finding someone demonstrably wiser than himself. He examined the politicians and found they knew nothing but believed they knew everything. He examined the poets and found they composed by inspiration rather than understanding. He examined the craftsmen and found that genuine skill in one domain bred an unwarranted confidence about all others. The conclusion was inescapable: the Oracle was right, not because Socrates possessed great wisdom, but because he alone recognized the poverty of his own. He compared himself to a gadfly attached to a large, noble, but sluggish horse — Athens herself — whose mission was to sting the city awake before it sank into the moral torpor of the unexamined life. The conviction that drove him was real, and the courage it produced was genuine. And yet a question presses in from the margins of the story: if the wisest human response to human ignorance is the humble admission of ignorance, who supplies the wisdom that humanity actually needs?

What the Oracle Could Not Give

The Old Testament had been asking that question for centuries before Socrates sat down in the agora. Proverbs declares that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and it means something far more precise than reverence for a vague divine principle. The Lord of Proverbs is the covenant God who has spoken, who has revealed his character in his law, and whose wisdom is not the prize at the end of a philosophical investigation but the gift given at its beginning. Ecclesiastes traces the same quest Socrates undertook — the examination of human achievement, pleasure, labor, and wisdom — and arrives at the same diagnosis of vanity, the same recognition that the searching mind cannot answer its own deepest questions. But Ecclesiastes does not end in the agora. It ends at the judgment seat of God, where every deed and every hidden thing will be weighed. Job pushes further still: the man who suffers demands an audience with the God who knows, and when God speaks from the whirlwind it is not with a philosophical argument but with a personal presence that silences every pretension and restores what no human wisdom could have recovered. Socrates' intellectual humility is the most admirable thing Greek philosophy produced. It is also the very thing that reveals the limit of what philosophy can do. Recognizing ignorance is not the same as receiving wisdom. Admitting you do not know is not the same as meeting the one who does.

The Cross-Examination That Never Ends

Socrates turned the trial into a Socratic dialogue by cross-examining his chief accuser, Meletus, with lethal precision. He exposed a flat contradiction at the heart of the charges: if Socrates introduced new spiritual beings, as the indictment claimed, then he believed in the divine, which demolished the charge of atheism. The jury was watching a man dismantle the prosecution's case with nothing but a series of careful questions, and the performance was dazzling. But there is a deeper cross-examination running beneath Plato's courtroom drama, one that the New Testament brings into the open. The apostle Paul, writing to the church at Corinth — a city drenched in the tradition of Greek philosophical sophistication — declared that the world did not know God through wisdom. God chose what the world called foolish to shame the wise. He chose what the world called weak to shame the strong. The cross of Christ is the instrument of that shaming, because it is the one event in history that no philosophical system predicted and no human wisdom would have designed. A messiah who dies, a God who becomes vulnerable, a resurrection that overturns every philosophical account of what death must mean — this is the wisdom of God that Paul sets against the wisdom of Greece, and it is not a refinement of Socratic inquiry but its radical replacement. The gadfly stings the city awake. The crucified Lord redeems it.

What Socrates Could Not Offer Meletus

When the jury convicted him, Socrates was invited to propose an alternative punishment. He suggested, with characteristic irony, that his true reward should be free meals for life in the Prytaneum — the honor reserved for Olympic champions. Only under pressure from his friends did he offer a modest fine. The jury, perceiving this as arrogance, voted for death. The scene is both philosophically magnificent and theologically revealing. Socrates could examine souls but he could not save them. He could identify the disease — the unexamined life, the pretension of knowledge, the substitution of reputation for virtue — but he possessed no remedy. He had no atonement to offer Meletus, no forgiveness to extend to his accusers, no power to transform the jury that condemned him. When Paul stood before King Agrippa in Acts 26 and delivered what became his greatest speech, he too was on trial for his beliefs, he too was defending a divine mission he would not abandon, and he too faced a powerful audience that had the authority to destroy him. But Paul's defense pointed not to his own philosophical integrity but to a risen Christ whom he had encountered on a road outside Damascus, a Christ who had blinded him and converted him and commissioned him not to examine souls but to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God. Socrates left the courtroom still searching. Paul left the courtroom still proclaiming.

The Question Death Could Not Answer

In his final remarks, Socrates exhibited a courage before death that has commanded admiration across twenty-four centuries. He proposed that death must be one of two things: either an absolute cessation of consciousness, like a dreamless sleep from which no one wakes, which would be a kind of perfect rest; or a migration of the soul to another place, where he could spend eternity questioning Homer and Hesiod and the great heroes of old, continuing his divine mission unhindered. Both possibilities struck him as desirable. The equanimity is breathtaking. But notice what is missing from both accounts. The dreamless sleep offers no resurrection. The heroic assembly in Hades offers no redemption. Neither account includes the possibility that death could be reversed, that the grave could be empty, that the God who created the soul could reclaim it by a sovereign act of life-giving power. Socrates was right that death holds less terror for the good man than the world supposes. He was wrong, not by philosophical error but by the poverty of the revelation available to him, about what lies on the other side. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the answer to both of Socrates' proposals, and it is an answer of a wholly different kind. It is not a philosopher's consolation. It is a historical event that broke the categories of Greek thought as decisively as the cross broke the categories of Greek wisdom.

Why You Need More Than Socrates

The Holy Spirit's great work in the human soul is, in one sense, exactly what Socrates attempted with his questions: the examination, the exposure of false certainty, the stripping away of the reputation that has been mistaken for virtue, the confrontation with what is actually there beneath the performance. Jesus himself was history's supreme practitioner of the penetrating question — what do you want? who do you say that I am? do you love me? — and every one of those questions did what Socrates' questions could not do, because they were asked by the one who already knew the answer and had the power to address it. If you have been living the unexamined life, you need more than a gadfly. You need a Savior who has already absorbed the judgment that your examination would produce, who rose from the dead to give you the Spirit who now asks the questions from within rather than from without, and who is building the kind of life that does not merely stand up under cross-examination but actually deserves the verdict: well done, good and faithful servant. Socrates died for the principle that the unexamined life is not worth living. Christ died so that the examined life might be fully and finally redeemed. That is the gospel, and it is addressed to you.

Demosthenes: Second Olynthiac — The Blossoming Flower and the Stone That Stands

When Philip of Macedon offered a city, he was buying time. When he swore an oath, he was making a tool. When he handed Potidaea to the Olynthians and smiled, both he and they knew that one day his patience would end and the smile would not return. Demosthenes knew it too. Standing before the Athenian assembly in 349 BC, as Philip’s siege lines closed around Olynthus to the north, this greatest of Greek orators did not argue from military statistics alone. He argued from the structure of reality. “It is impossible,” he declared in the Second Olynthiac, “to gain permanent power by injustice, perjury, and falsehood. Once in a way and for a brief season such things endure, and being furnished with hope they bloom brightly, but at the last they are detected and fall to pieces.” A house, a ship, any structure that must bear weight, Demosthenes insisted, requires truth and justice as its foundations or it will not stand. Twenty-three centuries later, that argument still arrests the reader, not because Demosthenes was right about politics, though he was, but because the foundations he describes point toward something far sturdier than any Athenian assembly could supply.

 

A Pagan Prophet and His Four-Hundred-Year Tradition

The Second Olynthiac belongs to the genre of deliberative oratory, the kind of speech designed to move a democratic assembly toward or away from a specific course of action. Demosthenes deploys the full arsenal of classical rhetoric: a carefully constructed exordium that thanks heaven for raising Olynthus as a providential check on Macedonian ambition; a central argument that dismantles Philip’s reputation for invincibility by cataloguing his betrayals of Athens, Olynthus, and Thessaly; and a peroration that calls Athens to act before Philip’s consolidation makes resistance impossible. The speech’s great literary achievement is its central metaphor, drawn from architecture and from nature simultaneously: Philip’s empire blooms like a flower and rests like a badly built house, and both images announce the same verdict. What blossoms without sound roots withers; what rises without true foundations falls. This was not merely Demosthenic invention. It drew on a tradition running through Herodotus’s meditation on the divine punishment of Persian hubris, through Thucydides’ analysis of the instability of alliances built on fear rather than justice, through the Greek poetic tradition in which temporary prosperity, olbos granted without virtue, invites the nemesis that undoes it. Demosthenes gathered and sharpened a centuries-old moral perception of the ancient world and aimed it at the most dangerous man of his century.

 

The Canon Speaks First

You may recognize that perception from somewhere closer to home. When Demosthenes declares that the foundations of lasting power must be truth and justice, the book of Proverbs has already said it more simply: “By justice a king gives stability to the land, but one who exacts gifts tears it down” (Proverbs 29:4). The Hebrew verb translated “gives stability” is a form of kun, the same word used of the Lord establishing the heavens and of the righteous whose steps he makes firm. Stability, in Proverbs, is not the result of skillful management but of alignment with the character of God who upholds it. Psalm 11 makes the political application sharper still, asking, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” — and answering not with a call to assembly or a military appropriation but with the declaration that “the Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven.” When the structural underpinnings of human civilization give way, the righteous are not, in the end, dependent on their quality. They are dependent on the enthroned God whose own rule rests on no borrowed foundation. Demosthenes diagnoses the same disease as these texts. He does not know the physician.

 

The Fragility of Empires and the Woe of the Prophet

The prophetic literature of Israel had been anatomizing exactly what Demosthenes describes for more than two centuries before he gave his speech. Habakkuk’s second chapter pronounces a woe against the empire that “builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity” (Habakkuk 2:12), and the structural irony is the same as the Second Olynthiac’s: the very reach of the unjust power is the measure of the wreckage of its fall. But where Demosthenes trusts that time and historical process will eventually expose the fraud, Habakkuk does not wait on processes. He announces that the collapse of unjust empire is divinely appointed, that it clears the ground for something no Greek orator imagined: “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). Daniel goes still further. Nebuchadnezzar, a king who built a civilization at least as impressive as Philip’s and with methods at least as ruthless, was not undone by the quality of historical inevitability or by the frank speech of a patriotic orator. He was driven from human society until he knew “that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will” (Daniel 4:32). When Nebuchadnezzar’s reason returned, so did his throne — and the doxology he then spoke is the theological destination that Demosthenes could not reach: “for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation.” Philip of Macedon and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon stand in the same dock, and the judge is not time or political mechanics but the living God whose purposes run through every empire and outlast every one.

 

The House on the Rock and the King Who Is the Foundation

When Jesus stood on the hillside and closed the Sermon on the Mount, he used Demosthenes’ own metaphor and transformed it from the inside. “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock,” he said, “and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock” (Matthew 7:24-25). The Greek aorist participles — rain fell, floods came, winds blew — carry perfective aspect in Constantine Campbell’s framework: decisive, completed impacts that test the building’s integrity without qualification or qualification. The house on rock does not bend; the house on sand falls, and “great was the fall of it” (v. 27). Demosthenes named truth and justice as the only foundations capable of bearing weight. Jesus names himself. Not an ethical program to be voted into law by an assembly, not a civic virtue to be cultivated by the educated, but the words of the Son of God, whose authority the storm he would still in the very next chapter demonstrated was not rhetorical. Paul’s architectural image in Ephesians 2:20 completes the picture: the church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,” the stone that determines the angle of every wall and the stability of the whole. Isaiah had announced this cornerstone six centuries before Jesus was born: “Behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation” (Isaiah 28:16). Philip’s empire was the blossoming flower. Christ is the stone.

 

What the Best of Athens Could Not See

Demosthenes was right that Philip’s power would not last, and history vindicated him. But the solution the orator offered Athens, and to which Athens gave a fatally delayed and insufficient response, was the solution of human resolve, democratic deliberation, civic courage, and military action. These are not worthless. You need not be a Christian to recognize that institutions built on systematic lying tend toward collapse, that leaders who betray their allies are sowing the conditions of their own undoing, that the quality of a civilization’s moral commitments has practical consequences. What Demosthenes could not see, because no natural perception and no Greek tradition equipped him to see it, is what John names in his Gospel when he calls the devil “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). The deception embedded in Philip’s empire was not a local Macedonian malfunction to be corrected by better Athenian policy. It was an expression of a falsehood-structure woven into every human political enterprise conducted apart from the truth of God, because the world has been organized around a primordial lie since Eden. Paul understood this when he wrote in 2 Corinthians 4:2 that he had “renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways” and refused “to tamper with God’s word,” but grounded his parrhesia not in civic virtue but in the apostolic call and the presence of the Holy Spirit, “who will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Demosthenes’ frank speech before the assembly was courageous. Paul’s frank speech before the world was something more: it was the voice of the risen Christ pressing through a clay jar, and it carried an authority that no Philip could buy or break.

 

The Courage to Build on What Will Last

Reading the Second Olynthiac is a gift to you if you are willing to receive it on its own terms and then ask what it cannot answer. Begin where Demosthenes begins, with the diagnostic: what am I building, and on what is it resting? The Athenian orator’s method, tracing the track record of specific promises against specific outcomes, applied to Philip and found him wanting, is available to you as you evaluate the political, institutional, and personal structures that claim your trust and your investment. Every leader who builds a following through flattery rather than truth is Philip. Every institution that papers its cracks with managed appearances rather than structural integrity is Philip’s empire. And every personal life constructed around the performance of a self that will not survive honest scrutiny is, in Demosthenes’ own phrase, a house whose substructure is not there. But do not stop with the diagnosis, because the orator’s diagnosis, however acute, was not enough to save Athens, and it will not be enough to save you. The Spirit of God, who was poured out on all flesh at Pentecost, is not sent to make you a better civic observer. He is sent to lead you to Jesus Christ, in whom “all the promises of God find their Yes” (2 Corinthians 1:20), and whose resurrection from the dead is the only event in human history that proves a foundation has been laid that neither storm nor sword nor death itself can move. Philip of Macedon’s power bloomed and fell. The kingdom of the crucified and risen Christ is filling the earth as the waters cover the sea. Build there, and build boldly, because the one who calls you to it has already borne the full weight himself.

 

 

 

 

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Demosthenes: On the Embassy — The Faithful Ambassador and the Comfortable Lie

When Demosthenes rose before fifteen hundred Athenian jurors in the summer of 343 BC, the city whose freedom he was trying to save was already busy choosing its own ruin. The speech he delivered that day — Peri tes Parapresbeias, “On the Misconduct of an Embassy” — accused his fellow ambassador Aeschines of betraying Athens to Philip II of Macedon during the negotiations that produced the Peace of Philocrates three years earlier. The charges were specific and devastating: Aeschines had given the assembly false reports of Philip’s intentions, had deliberately delayed the ratification of the treaty while Philip seized Athenian-controlled territories in Thrace, and had almost certainly done all of this because he had accepted Macedonian gold. The speech runs to nearly four hundred sections, and it crackles with what the Greeks called deinotes — the terrible, piercing force of a man who has seen the truth about a catastrophe his city prefers not to examine. Reading it today, you are not merely reading ancient forensic oratory. You are watching a civilization decide, in real time, whether it loves the truth enough to act on it. The answer, as Aeschines’ narrow acquittal confirms, was no.

The World the Speech Inhabits

Demosthenes composed On the Embassy at the intersection of several Greek literary traditions, and understanding those traditions changes how you hear the argument. As forensic oratory delivered before the Logistai — the board of auditors charged with examining ambassadors’ conduct — the speech follows the formal divisions of Attic rhetoric: proem, narration, proofs, refutation, and peroration. But Demosthenes pushes far beyond the courtroom. His narration of the embassy’s movements reads with the strategic urgency of Thucydides, building a case from sequence and timing rather than from direct evidence of payment. His character portraits of Aeschines are drawn in the register of Athenian comedy and invective, sharp-edged and memorable. His appeals to the jurors invoke the ancestral values of Homeric epic — the good man speaks plainly, places the city above himself, and does not enrich himself at public expense. The speech also draws heavily on historical exempla, the rhetorical practice of grounding present argument in past precedent, in the manner of Herodotus. Philip of Macedon is never quite a speaker in this drama, but he is its governing presence — the calculating power against which every character defines himself. Aeschines, in Demosthenes’ telling, has not merely failed a legal standard. He has violated the entire inherited moral vocabulary of Greek civilization.

The Anatomy of the Betrayal

The charges Demosthenes pressed were fourfold. Aeschines had reported to the assembly things Philip never promised. He had disobeyed his diplomatic instructions. He had introduced ruinous delays while Philip consolidated his advantage. And — the most inflammatory accusation, never supported by direct evidence — he had been paid to do it. Modern historians note that Demosthenes could not produce a witness who had seen money change hands. His strategy, instead, was to repeat the bribery accusation across the speech with such cumulative insistence — one scholar counts ninety repetitions — that suspicion would solidify into certainty before the jury’s eyes. What makes this more than a rhetorical trick is Demosthenes’ deeper and more accurate insight: a man whose judgment has been purchased does not suddenly become obviously incompetent. He becomes subtly, reliably wrong at the moments that matter most. He still speaks fluently. He still wears the face of a trusted official. He still sounds like a man serving the city’s interest. But his reports are shaped, grain by grain, by the interests of the man who has paid him. The corruption Demosthenes describes is not the gross, visible sort that destroys itself through excess. It is the quiet, professional sort that holds office for years while the damage accumulates below the surface of official language.

What the Old Testament Sees in This Man

You cannot spend time with Demosthenes’ portrait of Aeschines without beginning to hear another voice underneath it. When Jeremiah faced the prophet Hananiah in the temple courts around 594 BC, he confronted exactly the same structural problem Demosthenes faced in the Athenian courtroom. Hananiah spoke with all the forms of prophetic authority — the solemn declaration, the correct vocabulary, the bearing of an official spokesman — and he told the people precisely what they wanted to hear: the yoke of Babylon would be broken within two years, the exiles would return, and peace was coming (Jeremiah 28:2-4). He was not obviously a charlatan. He performed the right symbolic acts. He used the right divine formulas. He was wrong in the most catastrophic way imaginable, because the Babylonian army was already moving and Jerusalem had two decades of destruction ahead of it. The Bible’s diagnostic criterion is identical to Demosthenes’: measure the spokesman’s words against what actually happened. Did Philip do what Aeschines promised? Ezekiel sharpens the image further. The watchman who sees the sword approaching and does not blow the trumpet has the blood of the city on his hands, whether or not he was formally bribed (Ezekiel 33:6). Demosthenes is prosecuting that silence — the ambassador whose reports suppressed what was coming, who filled the space where urgent warning should have stood with comfortable reassurance, and who left Athens unprepared for the crisis it could have faced. The Old Testament does not merely parallel this concern. It grounds it in a covenant framework that gives the watchman a reason, beyond civic loyalty, to speak the truth even when the city does not want to hear it. He stands before a God who holds him accountable for the silence as surely as for the lie.

What the New Testament Completes

The New Testament is fully alert to the pattern both Demosthenes and the Hebrew prophets identified. Jesus warned that false prophets come in sheep’s clothing, recognizable not by their rhetoric but by their fruits — by what the city looks like after they have finished speaking (Matthew 7:15-16). Paul, writing to Timothy, described people who accumulate teachers to suit their own passions, turning from the truth to myths, because they cannot endure sound teaching (2 Timothy 4:3-4). The Athenian assembly as Demosthenes describes it is this community in miniature: a body that preferred Aeschines’ reassurances to Demosthenes’ warnings because Aeschines’ message asked nothing of them. But the New Testament also gives the problem a name that neither Demosthenes nor the Hebrew prophets could quite reach. The reason human beings are so reliably drawn to comfortable falsehood is not primarily a failure of intelligence or civic education. It is the corruption of the heart — the deep, structural preference for a version of reality that costs nothing, demands nothing, and confirms us in whatever we were already planning to do. Paul uses the language of ambassadorship deliberately when he writes that God makes his appeal through those who speak for Christ: we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us (2 Corinthians 5:20). The Greek verb Paul uses for this appeal, deomai, carries the sense of urgent, personal pleading — the kind of speech that requires the speaker to have the city’s actual condition clearly in view, not a comfortable misreading of it shaped by what the audience wants to hear. The faithful ambassador speaks the message he was sent to deliver, at whatever cost to himself, because he answers to a principal whose assessment of the situation he cannot revise.

The Deeper Failure Demosthenes Could Not Name

Athens acquitted Aeschines by a margin thin enough to demonstrate the jury’s ambivalence. Philip continued to expand. Chaeronea fell in 338 BC, and with it the independence of the Greek city-states that had defined classical civilization. Demosthenes’ warnings were vindicated in the worst possible way. But the deepest failure in this story is one that Demosthenes’ own framework could not illuminate. He appealed to civic loyalty, to the memory of Marathon and Salamis, to the heliastic oath, to ancestral virtue. These are not nothing. But they are insufficient answers to the question his own speech raises: Why should the watchman blow the trumpet when blowing it costs him his career, his reputation, and his political future? Why should anyone choose truth over comfort when the gods of the city are stories told by poets, when there is no ultimate witness who holds the record straight, when the verdict of history may simply be that the lying spokesman lived well and died comfortably while the honest one suffered? Demosthenes cannot answer this. His moral vocabulary is borrowed from a tradition that does not finally ground it. The Scripture does. The watchman serves because he stands before the God who sees in secret, whose knowledge of events is not subject to the manipulation of official reports, and whose justice is not acquittable by a jury that has been actively canvassed by the defendant’s supporters. It is this God who sent Jeremiah to speak when speaking was dangerous and who sent his Son as the faithful and true witness — the one who stood before Pilate and, to the question “What is truth?” did not offer an argument but offered himself, the Word through whom all true speech is possible (John 14:6; Revelation 3:14).

Living as Faithful Ambassadors

Reading On the Embassy is an education in what it costs a community to prefer smooth words to hard truth, and in what it looks like when someone refuses to make that substitution. Demosthenes shows you how to build a cumulative case from particular evidence rather than from emotional assertion, how to sustain urgent speech before an audience that is being actively lobbied to dismiss it, and how to name what is at stake in civic life with enough precision that the stakes become real rather than abstract. For Christians who read and teach Scripture, these are not peripheral skills. Preaching that merely states the truth without demonstrating it, without grounding it in the particular texture of real events and real consequences, has borrowed the watchman’s post without accepting the watchman’s discipline. Demosthenes also models the posture of the man who was right before the city caught up to him — who brought the same warnings before the same assembly for years while his countrymen chose otherwise, and who did not revise the message to suit the audience. There is something in that posture that every Christian communicator needs to recognize, not because Demosthenes was a prophet in any biblical sense, but because he inhabited, by natural conscience and civic courage, the shape of a calling that Scripture fills with incomparably richer content. The true and faithful witness is not, finally, the orator who speaks most powerfully in the courtroom. He is the one who carried the full weight of what his Father sent him to say all the way to the cross, whose testimony was not suppressed or adjusted or sold, and whose words — unlike the Peace of Philocrates, unlike every treaty hammered out between mortal ambition and mortal fear — will never pass away.

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Aristophanes: The Clouds and the Crisis of Truth

There is a moment that comes to every parent, every teacher, every pastor, and if you are honest, every person who has ever tried to pass something true and good on to someone they love. It is the moment when you realize that what you handed them has been turned against you. You gave them the tools of argument, and they argued themselves into positions that would have horrified you. You wanted them to be capable and confident, and they became capable and confident in directions you never imagined and cannot follow. Aristophanes staged this moment as a comedy in Athens in 423 BC. Strepsiades, a farmer buried in debt from his son’s extravagant lifestyle, enrolls his son Pheidippides in the Thinkery, a school run by Socrates where students learn the art of making the weaker argument appear the stronger. The son graduates. He comes home. He beats his father. He explains, calmly and logically, using everything the Thinkery taught him, why this is perfectly just. The education worked. That is not the punchline. That is the catastrophe. And if you feel something tighten in your chest reading that, it is because somewhere in your own life you have watched a version of this story begin to unfold. The question this ancient comedy places before you is not about Greek history. It is about what you are building your life on, what you are handing to the people you love, and whether the foundation beneath you will hold when the Worse Argument comes calling. It will come. It always does.

Literary Backgrounds: Old Enough to Be New Again

The reason The Clouds speaks to Christians today is not merely that it is old. It is that the problem it identifies is older than the play, and the resources that answer it are older still. Aristophanes was working within the tradition of Athenian Old Comedy, a theatrical form built for maximum cultural impact: a chorus that addressed the audience directly, savage caricature of living public figures, and humor deployed as a weapon of social diagnosis. He turned every convention of the form toward a single target, the sophistic movement and its replacement of genuine moral formation with the art of winning arguments regardless of their truth. The chorus of Clouds is the play’s most enduring invention. These shape-shifting goddesses become whatever the observer wishes to see in them, committed to nothing, reflecting everything, the perfect image for rhetoric severed from reality. Christians should note one important caution. The ancient evidence makes clear that Aristophanes blended Socrates, who actually opposed the sophists, with the broader intellectual trend he wanted to satirize. The temptation to caricature those with whom we disagree is not a Christian virtue. Accuracy in representing opposing ideas is a requirement of the God who commands us not to bear false witness. At the level of ancient cultural imagination, the image of divine beings commanding the clouds runs from the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, where the storm-god is called Rider of the Clouds, through Aristophanes’ comic inversion of cloud-goddesses as agents of rhetorical deception, and finally to Psalm 104:3, where Yahweh makes the clouds his chariot. Across three millennia of human expression, the intuition persists that the sky belongs to someone with ultimate authority over truth. Scripture alone names that someone and tells us what his authority means for the way we are called to think, speak, and live.

Theological and Ethical Analysis: The Road and Its Destination

Picture two roads. One leads to a life where words are tools for winning and the clever person always has the advantage over the honest one. It looks like freedom at the entrance. Follow it long enough and you arrive at a son beating his father and explaining, perfectly logically, why this is just. The other road begins with the fear of the Lord and leads somewhere the play cannot imagine: to wisdom that is pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits. The agon at the center of The Clouds, the formal debate between the personified Better Argument and Worse Argument, is the play’s theological heart. The Better Argument defends the old education: discipline, reverence for the gods, respect for elders, the formation of character through Homer and physical training. It is right about almost everything, and it loses. It loses not because the Worse Argument is more truthful but because tradition alone, without a foundation in transcendent and living truth, cannot withstand someone who has decided that winning is the only standard that matters. The Better Argument in your culture is also losing ground, and for exactly the same reason it lost in Athens: not because it is wrong, but because it is appealing to a tradition that has nothing beneath it deep enough to hold when someone sufficiently clever arrives to challenge it. The question is not whether you believe the right things. The question is whether what you believe is grounded in the God who is truth, or in the habit of having always believed it. One of those will hold. One will not.

Old Testament Analysis and Critique: The Ancient Answer

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7 is not religious advice. It is a diagnosis of what goes wrong in every Thinkery ever built, and a description of the only foundation on which genuine wisdom can stand. What Strepsiades and Pheidippides lacked was not intelligence. What they lacked was the one orientation that makes intelligence serve truth rather than self: reverent submission to the God who is the source and standard of all that is real. Proverbs 30:17 announces that the eye that mocks a father and scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by ravens. This is not cruelty. It is the announcement of a moral reality as fixed as the physical order: the structures God has placed in human life are not optional decorations, and when they are torn down by sophistic cleverness, the consequences are as real and as severe as the consequences of treating gravity as a social construction. The replacement of Zeus with Vortex in the Thinkery enacts in comic form the violation Exodus 20:3 forbids and the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4 addresses. When a culture replaces the living God with an impersonal force, whatever that force is called, it loses the only ground on which truth can stand, and once that ground is lost the Worse Argument is free to claim anything. Psalm 104:3 sets the clouds, Aristophanes’ symbols of shifting rhetoric, under the sovereign chariot of Yahweh. The Christian reading that image after reading the play does not merely feel the literary contrast. She feels the relief of standing on solid ground in a world where everything else is capable of shifting shape.

New Testament Analysis and Critique: The Better Argument Has Come

When Paul arrived in Athens as recorded in Acts 17, he walked into the city that had watched The Clouds four centuries earlier and had largely continued down the road the play warned against. He stood on the Areopagus and did something no sophist had done and that Aristophanes could not have imagined: he told the Athenians about the God who had made them, who was not far from any of them, and who was now commanding all people everywhere to repent because he had appointed a day of judgment and given assurance of it by raising his Son from the dead. That word repent carries the whole answer to The Clouds. Not burn down the Thinkery. Not simply choose the Better Argument. Turn from the road that leads to sons beating fathers, turn from the wisdom that serves the self into destruction, and turn toward the one in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden. The threat of sophistry was not only outside the church. At Corinth, Paul confronted believers who had imported the culture’s appetite for rhetorical brilliance directly into the congregation, forming factions around favorite teachers and measuring the gospel’s power by the impressiveness of its delivery, and Paul’s response was to declare that he had determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and him crucified, coming not with eloquence or human wisdom lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. The Thinkery had followed the church through its own front door, and Paul’s answer was not a better rhetoric but a deliberate renunciation of rhetoric as the ground of gospel authority. Colossians 2:8 warns believers to see to it that no one takes them captive through philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, a pastoral letter written as if for someone who had just watched the agon. First Corinthians 1:18 announces that the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing but the power of God to those being saved, and that God has made foolish the wisdom of the world. The Better Argument needed a foundation that tradition alone could not supply. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is that foundation, defeating not merely the Worse Argument but the death it leads to, and opening a way of living the Thinkery could never teach. If you have not yet received this, the invitation stands: the truth has a name, he rose from the dead, and he is calling you to himself.

Benefits of Reading and Patristic Wisdom: Companions on the Road

One of the most strengthening truths available to the Christian navigating a culture saturated with sophistic manipulation of language is this: you are not the first person to navigate it, and you are not navigating it alone. The Early Church Fathers walked into a Greco-Roman world shaped by exactly the intellectual culture Aristophanes had diagnosed, and they engaged it with discernment and confidence because they had something Aristophanes did not: the gospel of the risen Christ and the community of the Spirit-formed church. Irenaeus warned that false teachers adapt their language to the capacity of their hearers while leading them away from truth. Augustine, trained as a rhetorician who knew its power and emptiness from the inside, showed in On Christian Doctrine how persuasion is sanctified when it serves truth rather than self. Clement and Origen argued that intellectual culture could be brought under the Lordship of Christ and made to serve the gospel, disciplined rather than discarded. These voices give the Christian reader something more valuable than a critique of an ancient comedy. They give a model for faithful engagement in any intellectual climate: receive what is diagnostically true, reject what is foundationally false, and ground all judgment in the Scripture God has given as the final authority on what is real. You belong to a tradition of people who have done this across twenty centuries. That tradition is not a museum. It is a living community with resources the Thinkery never dreamed of.

Applying The Clouds to Christian Life Today: The Life That Is Available

Strepsiades burns the Thinkery, and the audience feels something like satisfaction. But it is the thin, hollow satisfaction of destruction without restoration, punishment without healing, a fire that clears the ground without planting anything in its place. The Christian knows that something better than fire is available, not as an abstract ideal but as the daily reality of a person whose mind is being renewed by the Spirit of the living God. Imagine speaking with integrity in a workplace where words are weapons. Imagine raising children who know not only how to construct a good argument but why truth is worth defending at personal cost, because they know and love the God who is truth. Imagine engaging the culture’s Worse Argument not with fire and not with despair but with the calm, settled confidence of someone who stands on a foundation that argument cannot reach. This is not a fantasy. It is the life the gospel makes possible, embodied by the saints across twenty centuries, and offered freely to everyone who turns from the road that ends in fire and receives the one who is the way, the truth, and the life. The Clouds held a mirror up to Athens, and Athens laughed and went home and continued down the same road. You do not have to. The ancient comedy has done its diagnostic work. Now let the ancient gospel do its transforming work. There is a wisdom that is pure, peaceable, and full of mercy, and it begins with the fear of the Lord, rests on the resurrection of his Son, and is yours for the asking.

Withholding Truth

Withholding Truth

Lying can be divided into two types: white lies and black lies. A black lie is a statement we make that we know is false. A white lie is a statement we make that is not in itself false but that leaves out a significant part of the truth. The fact that a lie is white does not in itself make it any less of a lie or any more excusable. White lies may be every bit as destructive as black ones. A government that withholds essential information from its people by censorship is no more democratic than one that speaks falsely. The patient who neglected to mention that she had overdrawn the family bank account was impeding her growth in therapy no less than if she had lied directly~ Indeed, because it may seem less reprehensible, the withholding of essential information is the most common form of lying, and because it may be the more difficult to detect and confront, it is often even more pernicious than black-lying.

White-lying is considered socially acceptable in many of our relationships because "we don't want to hurt peoples' feelings." Yet we may bemoan the fact that our social relationships are generally superficial. For parents to feed their children a pap of white lies is not only considered acceptable but is thought to be loving and beneficent. Even husbands and wives who have been brave enough to be open with each other find it difficult often to be open with their children.

They do not tell their children that they smoke marijuana, or that they fought with each other the night before concerning their relationship, or that they resent the grandparents for their manipulativeness, or that the doctor has told one or both that they have psychosomatic disorders, or that they are making a risky financial investment or even how much money they have in the bank. Usually such withholding and lack of openness is rationalized on the basis of a loving desire to protect and shield their children from unnecessary worries. Yet more often than not such "protection" is unsuccessful. The children know anyway that Mommy and Daddy smoke pot, that they had a fight the night before, that the grandparents are resented, that Mommy is nervous and that Daddy is losing money. The result, then, is not protection but deprivation. The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general. They are also deprived of the reassurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly. Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage. For some parents the desire to "protect" their children is motivated by genuine albeit misguided love. For others, however, the "loving" desire to protect their children serves more as a cover-up and rationalization of a desire to avoid being challenged by their children, and a desire to maintain their authority over them. Such parents are saying in effect, "Look, kids, you go on being children with childish concerns and leave the adult concerns up to us. See us as strong and loving caretakers. Such an image is good for both of us, so don't challenge it. It allows us to feel strong and you to feel safe, and it will be easier for all of us if we don't look into these things too deeply."

Nonetheless, a real conflict may arise when the desire for total honesty is opposed by the needs of some people for certain kinds of protection. For instance, even parents with excellent marriages may occasionally consider divorce as one of their possible options, but to inform their children of this at a time when they are not at all likely to opt for divorce is to place an unnecessary burden upon the children. The idea of divorce is extremely threatening to a child's sense of security -indeed, so threatening that children do not have the capacity to perceive it with much perspective. They are seriously threatened by the possibility of divorce even when it is remote. If their parents' marriage is definitely on the rocks, then children will be dealing with the threatening possibility of divorce whether or not their parents talk about it. But if the marriage is basically sound, parents woul.d indeed be doing their children a disservice if they said with complete openness, "Mommy and Daddy were talking last night about getting a divorce, but we're not at all serious about it at this time." As another instance, it is frequently necessary for psychotherapists to withhold their own thoughts, opinions and insights from patients in the earlier stages of psychotherapy because the patients are not yet ready to receive or deal with them. During my first year of psychiatric training a patient on his fourth visit to me recounted a dream that obviously expressed a concern with homosexuality. In my desire to appear t9 be a brilliant therapist and make rapid progress I told him, "Your dream indicates that you are concerned with worries that you might be homosexual." He grew visibly anxious, and he did not keep his next three appointments. Only with a good deal of work and an even greater amount of luck was I able to persuade him to return to therapy. We had another twenty sessions before he had to move from the area because of a business reassignment. These sessions were of considerable benefit to him despite the fact that we never again raised the issue of homosexuality. The fact that his unconscious was concerned with the issue did not mean that he was at all ready to deal with it on a conscious level, and by not withholding my insight from him I did him a grave disservice, almost losing him not only as my patient but as anyone's patient.

So the expression of opinions, feelings, ideas and even knowledge must be suppressed from time to time in these and many other circumstances in the course of human affairs. What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth? First, never speak falsehood. Second, bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required. Third, the decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one's map from challenge. Fourth, and conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld. Fifth, the assessment of another's needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other. Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another's needs is the assessment of that person's capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth. Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity.

All this might seem like an extraordinary task, impossible to ever perfectly complete, a chronic and never-ending burden, a real drag. And it is indeed a never-ending burden of self-discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. It is easier that way. Yet the rewards of the difficult life of honesty and dedication to the truth are more than commensurate with the demands. By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Through their openness they can establish and maintain intimate relationships far more effectively than more closed people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of illumination and clarification. Finally, they are totally free to be. They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguises. And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self~ discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness. The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again. By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.


Taken from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

The Color of Law

The Color of Law, Mark Gimenez’s first novel, follows in the style of John Grisham. Gimenez has the same grasp of the law and the moral dilemmas faced by lawyers. Gimenez is grittier than Grisham and tends to be a little preachy, yet he has a readable style that balances vivid detail with action and suspense.

Scott Fenny is a wealthy lawyer in the biggest law firm in Dallas. Scott has succeeded by being creative with the law, doing whatever he has to in order to win. He is living the perfect life, living in a $3 million mansion, drives a $200,000 Ferrari, wears thousand dollar suits, dines at the most exclusive dinner clubs, and is envied by many. But Scott is selfish, self-centered, arrogant, uncaring and shallow, just like all the other successful people around him, but he doesn’t know it.

Then into his perfect life falls a bomb. The federal judge appoints him as a public defender for a heroin-addicted prostitute charged in the murder of senator McCall’s son. Senator McCall is one of the most powerful men in Texas and is running for president, and he pressures Scott’s boss to keep his son’s wild and violent past out of the trial. Scott chafes at being told to lose the case and refuses to withhold the evidence.

Within days his perfect life has been completely unraveled. He loses his Ferrari, his mansion, his exclusive club memberships, and his wife, who walks out on him. Finally, he loses his main client and then his job. Completely devastated, Scott is forced to search his soul to find out what is most important. He chooses to defend the prostitute to the best of his ability; to discover the truth and not simply win. As a result, his life is completely changed and Scott becomes a caring, compassionate, man who thinks of other’s needs and not just his own.

Several quotes from the story are profound:

First, Scott’s boss tells him, “The color of the law is not black and white; it’s not about race. The color of law is green; money is what the law is all about. The law is for making and protecting rich men’s money.”

Second, Scott’s boss recounts what his first boss told him about success as a lawyer, in order to convince Scott to lose the case and move on. He said, “Early in your career you must decide whether you want to do ‘good’ or do ‘well.’ If you do ‘good’ you will never do ‘well’; you’ll never be successful. How does a lawyer become successful? By doing his job. Which is making rich people richer. And we get paid very well for doing our job. You have to ask yourself, ‘Do you want to make money or do you want to make the world a better place? Do you want to drive a Cadillac or a Chevrolet? Do you want to send your kids to private schools or public schools? Do you want to be a rich lawyer or a poor lawyer?’ If you want to do good, go work for the legal aid and help the little people battle their landlords, the utility companies and the police, and feel good about it. But don’t have regrets twenty years later when your classmates are driving new cars and taking vacations in Europe. And you will have to tell your kids that they can’t go to an Ivy League school because you did ‘good’.”


Gimenez is very cynical about lawyers and clearly shows the moral dilemma a lawyer must face. A lawyer, according to Gimenez, is merely someone who gets paid to lie. And the better you are at lying the more successful you will be as a lawyer. A lawyer will never be successful if he is concerned about truth and justice. While this may be hyperbole, anyone who desires to become a lawyer should wrestle with this dilemma before he even considers going to law school. For the rest of us, it is important to remember that a lawyer doesn’t have your best interest in mind; all he cares about is the bottom line.


Third, when Scott’s main client drops him, Scott asks him why he isn’t being loyal to him as a friend, since he took him on as a client eleven years ago when he was just a struggling land developer. The client retorts, “I am only loyal to my friends. All you wanted was my money, so that is all I ever gave you. You over billed me and took as much money from me as you could, and I didn’t complain; that was my payment to you in full. You are not my friend because you didn’t want to be my friend. And because you are not my friend, you don’t deserve my loyalty.”

Gimenez portrays the loneliness of a life lived only for success, money, status and all the things that go with it. There is no love, no intimacy, no transparency, no friendship between anyone, not even his wife. The only person Scott even gets close to is his nine-year old daughter. Everyone else is using him and being used by him, making love and true friendship impossible. Everyone needs to consider the cost of such a life and determine if it is truly “success.”

Thomas Merton on Peace

"Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience."

Thomas Merton

Lying with Statistics

We need to be careful when we use statistics to bolster our arguments. We also need to be more critical when others use statistics as well. Here is an excellent article that calls Christians to use statistics much more ethically. If we lie in order to make the truth more appealing or seem more urgent, we are doing God a disservice. While we might get short term results, we will end up hurting Christianity in the long run. Read this article and then evaluate how you use statistics, or how you have been misled by statistics, in the past.

Evangelicals Behaving Badly with Statistics
Mistakes were made.
by Christian Smith
Books & Culture, January/February, 2007.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/001/5.11.html