Well, now we've done it.

Last time, I asked whether a false belief can produce good fruit. Which complicated things nicely. Because if the answer is yes, and I think it pretty clearly is, then good fruit can't magically turn a false belief into a true one.

Fair enough.

But you probably knew where this was going… If a false belief can produce good fruit, we have to turn the question around. Can a true belief produce bad fruit?

And I have a feeling this one is going to make some of us considerably more uncomfortable.

Christians have spent an enormous amount of time trying to get our beliefs right. We've written creeds and confessions. Catechisms. Systematic theologies. Denominational statements. And more books than any reasonable person could read in a lifetime, all trying to get the answer right.

I'm not suggesting that was wasted effort. Truth matters.

But here's the thing I can't get away from:
Being right and doing right are not the same thing.

We've all known someone who was technically right and somehow managed to be completely wrong about it.

Maybe they corrected somebody publicly when there was absolutely no reason to. Maybe they won the argument and lost the relationship. Or maybe you could tell from the look on their face that being right wasn't nearly as important as making sure everybody knew the other person was wrong.

They were right. Congratulations, I guess.

But something still went wrong.

And I don't think that's just a problem with manners. I think it's a theological problem too. Christianity isn't simply a collection of propositions we're supposed to correctly identify as true. Those propositions become ways of understanding God, ourselves, our neighbors, and the world around us.

We've been circling around this idea for six articles now:
Theology doesn't stay put.

You can write it down in a book. Lock it inside a creed. Put it in a statement of faith and bury it three clicks deep on a church website. Eventually it gets out.

Theology gets lived.

And being correct doesn't exempt us from paying attention to what happens when it does.

One of the stranger things Christians sometimes do with truth is turn it into a weapon and then act surprised when somebody gets hurt. We tell ourselves the harm is unfortunate but necessary. 

We're defending truth.
We're standing firm.
We're refusing to compromise.

Maybe.

Sometimes truth really is difficult to hear.
Sometimes honesty hurts.
Sometimes confronting injustice creates conflict. 

If we're going to take harm seriously as evidence, we have to be careful not to define harm as "anything that makes somebody uncomfortable.” Being challenged can be uncomfortable. So can discovering we've been wrong. And, Lord knows, some of us can turn being mildly inconvenienced into a full-blown persecution narrative if given half a chance.

That's not necessarily harm.

Diminishing someone's humanity is something else entirely.

Jesus made people uncomfortable all the time. Particularly people with power. So I'm certainly not suggesting healthy theology should leave everyone feeling warm and fuzzy. But there is a difference between confronting someone's behavior and attacking their humanity. There's a difference between truth spoken in service of liberation and truth wielded in service of power.

We've blurred those lines more than I think we'd like to admit.

And then we've sometimes called the blur "faithfulness."

This is where the question gets harder.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a particular theological claim really is true. Not "I believe it's true.” Actually true.

Does that settle the matter? I don't think it does.

A true statement can still be given the wrong importance. It can be ripped out of context or applied somewhere it doesn't belong. It can be shouted while other equally important truths are barely whispered. Eventually, one truth becomes the lens through which everything else is interpreted until it has swallowed the whole of theology.

Christians are remarkably good at this. We find one thing we're convinced is true and build a house on it. Sometimes a mansion. Then somebody points out that there are other rooms we seem to have forgotten. And maybe a door.

Probably a window or two.

Think about something as basic as human mortality. You're going to die. True.

Yet, I don't recommend opening most pastoral conversations with it. Truth doesn't exist in isolation from context. When we say something matters. Why we say it matters. How we say it matters. And what we choose not to say alongside it may matter every bit as much.

Theology works the same way.

A church can emphasize human sinfulness so relentlessly that people leave believing there is something fundamentally disgusting about them. Maybe the church can defend every individual statement it makes about human fallibility. Maybe every sentence, taken by itself, passes whatever theological test they're using.

But if that church rarely speaks with equal force about human dignity, belovedness, grace, and the image of God, I'm not sure the problem is simply whether its statements are technically true.

The problem may be that its truth is out of proportion. And distorted truth can produce distorted lives.

That's worth sitting with.

I've spent enough time around Christianity to recognize some of the fruit. I've met people terrified that one wrong belief would send them to hell. People who spent years believing their bodies were shameful. Women who were taught that enduring abuse was somehow an expression of Christian faithfulness. LGBTQ people who learned to distrust some of the deepest parts of themselves.

And I've met plenty of adults who are still trying to earn the love of a God they were told loves them unconditionally.

Read that sentence again.

Trying to earn unconditional love.

Something has gone sideways.

Here's what makes this particularly difficult. The people teaching those things didn't necessarily wake up in the morning thinking, "How can I hurt somebody today?" Many believed they were telling the truth. Some probably believed withholding that truth would have been the unloving thing to do.

I think we have to take that seriously. Because it means good intentions aren't enough. 

And neither is being convinced we're right.

And here I go again.

Back to Jesus.

I keep doing that.

Jesus certainly cared about truth. But when I read the Gospels, Jesus doesn't seem especially interested in truth as something you possess, polish up, put on a shelf, and occasionally use to prove somebody else wrong.

Truth does something.

It sets people free. It exposes hypocrisy and challenges power. Sometimes it restores someone to community who had been pushed outside of it. Sometimes it makes comfortable people remarkably uncomfortable.

But it seems to be going somewhere.

Toward liberation.
Toward restoration.
Toward love of God and neighbor.

Which makes me wonder whether truth, at least in the way Jesus seems to embody it, has fruit of its own. We tend to ask whether a statement corresponds to what is true. That's an important question. Keep asking it.

But I think theology has to ask another question too. What does this truth do when we live it?

Because if what we call truth consistently produces fear, shame, domination, exclusion, or dehumanization, I don't think "But it's true" gets to end the conversation.

Honestly, I think that's when the conversation gets interesting.

Now, before somebody gets ahead of me, bad fruit doesn't automatically mean the belief itself is false.

We settled that in the last article. Or at least I thought we did.

If good fruit can't magically make a false statement true, bad fruit can't magically make a true statement false. We don't get to change the rules halfway through because we like where one version takes us better than the other.

Something else may be happening.

We may be interpreting the belief badly or applying it somewhere it doesn't belong. Maybe we've taken one truth and made it so important that everything else has to bend around it. Or perhaps the problem isn't what we're saying at all. It's everything we've conveniently left unsaid.

And, yes, there's another possibility. We might not be as right as we think we are.

I know.

There's that one again.

But we have to leave it on the table. Otherwise, the Fruit Test only gets a vote when it agrees with us.

That's not much of a test.

I think this may be one of the hardest things Christianity has to learn: Being right isn't enough.

Having the right Bible verse doesn't mean we can't use it badly. A doctrine can be true and still be given far more weight than it deserves. We can win the theological argument and leave wounded people scattered behind us.

I've watched Christians do this and then point to the correctness of the belief as though correctness cleans up the wreckage.

It doesn't.

At some point, the wreckage has to count. Not because truth doesn't matter. Because people do. And if our theology teaches us anything worth keeping, surely it teaches us that people matter enormously.

Whenever you encounter a theological claim, ask:

What kind of people does it produce?
What kind of communities does it create?
Who benefits?
Who is harmed?

Does it bear the fruit of love, justice, mercy, and human flourishing?

And now we need another question: Even if this is true, what happens when we live as though it's true?

Because being right and doing right are not the same thing.

Healthy theology should probably care about both.

Think about something you are absolutely convinced is true. Not something you're wrestling with. Something you're sure about.

Then, for a few minutes, stop asking whether you're right. Ask what that belief produces in you. Does it make you more compassionate? More humble? More curious? More generous? Does it help you love your neighbor?

Or does being right about it make you more suspicious, more judgmental, more fearful, or more certain that everyone else is the problem?

Don't change the belief.
Don't defend it either.

Just look at the fruit.

So now we've made things good and messy. A false belief can produce good fruit. A true belief can produce bad fruit. Which means the Fruit Test can't simply spit out TRUE or FALSE depending on what we feed into it.

That's not what fruit does. Fruit tells us what happened. And maybe that's the piece theology has been missing.

Not another test that promises to give us all the right answers.
A feedback loop.

We believe something.
We live it.
Something grows.

Then we have the courage to look at what grew and let that become part of the conversation too.

That's a little less tidy.

I'm beginning to think that's the point.