Truth does not have to be denied. It only needs to be redefined.
In 1917, a man bought a urinal, signed a false name to it, and called it Fountain. The shape of the porcelain never changed. Only the declaration did—and it was enough. The French artist, Marcel Duchamp, had not created the object. He had selected it, renamed it, and presented it as something it was never understood to be. The controversy was not really about the item. It was about authority. Who gets to say what a thing is?
As it turns out, nearly anyone.
Forty-four years later, the same question had reached language. Philip Gove and the editors of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary rejected the historic expectation that a dictionary should stipulate the proper use of words. Instead, it would follow the fashions of the day by recording what people had made them mean. Critics saw this as a surrender of authority. They were not entirely wrong to worry.
A word, like a urinal, put up no resistance.
By 1985, the question had reached the self. In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues described a nurse named Sheila who had assembled a private religion from her own convictions. She called it “Sheilaism.” Her faith did not have to answer to a creed or a tradition outside herself. It was hers because she had made it hers.
A faith could be declared into being as easily as a fountain—except that a faith was meant to answer to something outside itself.
Inevitably, the Almighty was recast into the role of a cosmic utility provider.
In their study of American teenagers, Christian Smith and his colleagues identified a de facto faith they called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. God existed, and He wanted people to be happy and nice. Beyond that, He was expected to stay out of the way, intervening only when called upon to help.
The examples are not historically identical, nor do they prove a single line of causation. They do, however, trace the same move, each time to something larger. An object can be designated. A word can be redefined. A religion can be constructed around the self. Even God can be reduced to something convenient.
Once that threshold has been crossed, it does not take long to ask: Who gets to say what I am?
Christianity’s answer begins with a fact that autonomy cannot absorb: I did not author myself.
After a series of terrible losses, Job demands that God explain Himself in terms he can accept. God does not negotiate. Instead, He confronts him with a reality that existed before Job and will endure long after him.
Who is this that obscures divine plans with ignorance?” “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? (Job 38:1, 4)
The questions continue: Who determined its measurements? Who established its order? Who commands the morning? Who gives the wild animals their food? Rather than argue His case, God describes a world whose existence and order do not depend upon Job’s judgment of it.
Job has no answer left but this:
I have declared that which I do not understand.
Therefore, I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes (Job 42:3, 6).
That is the discovery of solid ground. A person can judge the world, interpret it, resist it, and even change small parts of it. He is still not its source.
The possibility of being wrong is part of what makes knowing possible. The mind can be corrected because the world does not rely on what we think about it. Not everyone accepts this. Some stop discovering reality and start inventing it instead.
Fulton Sheen’s description of pride gets closer to this than the stereotypical picture of the arrogant man who thinks himself better than everyone else. Pride, he says, “erects the human soul into a center of origin apart from God.” That phrase puts a finger on something more pernicious than vanity. The proud person has begun to occupy a place that does not belong to him. He is no longer merely judging the world. He means to remake it.
It is little wonder that pride, at first, feels like freedom. Soviet history shows what that particular brand of freedom costs in practice. Under Stalin, Trofim Lysenko’s theories of heredity received political protection because they fit the regime’s determination that nature itself, like society, could be remade according to ideology.
The long-accepted standard of Mendelian genetics was condemned as bourgeois and then suppressed. Scientists who rejected Lysenko’s notions lost their positions, their freedom, or their lives. The botanist Nikolai Vavilov, one of the world’s leading geneticists, was arrested, sentenced to death on fabricated charges, and died in a concentration camp of starvation. With devastating consequences, Lysenko’s ideas were imposed on Soviet agriculture despite their inability to withstand scientific scrutiny. The wheat did not care what the regime believed about heredity.
Reality was no longer being treated as something that could correct the ideology. The ideology had now claimed the right to revise reality.
Once the self becomes the arbiter of reason, disagreement can only look like an attack. A person who can never be wrong has stopped seeking truth. He has sealed himself off from what might teach him otherwise, demanding submission from the world rather than learning from it.
Sooner or later, even the Creator comes under review. God is not denied. He is edited.
Few people have taken this idea as literally as Thomas Jefferson. He did not dismiss Christianity wholesale. He physically took a razor to the Gospels. In 1804, and again later in an expanded form, he assembled his own version of the life and teaching of Jesus, cutting passages from the Gospel accounts and arranging what remained according to his own judgment. The miracles were gone. So was the Resurrection. What remained was the Jesus that Jefferson could recognize as reasonable and logical: a teacher of moral wisdom whose lessons could be separated from the supernatural claims of Christianity.
We began by asking who gets to say what a thing is. Jefferson carried that authority into revelation itself. The creature now tells the Creator what He is permitted to say.
Revelation, by its nature, depends upon a source beyond the person who receives it. Its whole power rests on the possibility that it may confront us with something we would never have discovered or chosen for ourselves—which is precisely what Jefferson’s project could not permit.
Discard whatever contradicts our own judgment, and what remains has lost its essential character and purpose. We are no longer receiving something from beyond ourselves. We determine, in advance, what may count as revelation in the first place. The arrogance needed to rework the Gospels requires a sleight of mind that can just as easily adjust a man’s own history.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and Minister of Armaments, became widely known as the “good Nazi,” the cultured intellectual who freely admitted the criminality of the regime and accepted responsibility for his part in it. At Nuremberg, Speer distanced himself from the other defendants by accepting what he called a collective responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi government. He condemned it and expressed remorse, all the while maintaining that he had not known the full extent of the extermination of the Jews.
Speer could acknowledge that the regime was evil without having to imagine himself as the kind of man who had knowingly participated in its obscenities. His language shifted the ground from guilt to circumstance, from a conscious moral choice to routine bureaucratic function. He painted a picture of being little more than a technocrat caught inside a monstrous system.
Later evidence made that account difficult to sustain. Documents showed that Speer had been much closer to the machinery of the Holocaust than his carefully constructed facade allowed. But even then, the plain language of moral judgment was replaced with the euphemisms of psychology: a blind spot, a psychological block, an inability to comprehend what actually stood before him.
What Speer did was more sophisticated than simply denying everything. He preserved his preferred identity by changing the vocabulary under which his actions could be judged. The facts could remain while their moral meaning was altered.
The deed does not need to be erased. It only needs a new name to live under.
True repentance refuses this false trade. It means being able to say, “I was wrong.” But those words require a standard beyond the self. Without one, the person who judges his own conduct also controls its meaning. Repentance needs a floor to hit. But the floor has been removed.
Through the sacraments, the Catholic receives mercy without needing to revise the past in order to have a future. Prayer asks the same thing from a different direction: someone real, capable of answering, and asking something of the self it would rather not give.
A God revised until He never disagrees has nothing left to do but confirm what is already believed. What remains is no longer prayer. It is a more formal way of talking to oneself.
On Calvary, this inversion of prayer is put into practice. The thief on the left looks at Jesus and tells Him how His power should be used. If He is the Christ, then He should immediately save them from the horror of their crosses. The demand seems reasonable enough: they are in agony, facing certain death, and Christ can remedy the situation. The thief is not really asking for mercy. He is issuing an instruction, dressed as a request.
The other thief, known as St. Dismas, sees things as they are. Nothing left to possess. Nothing left to demand. He acknowledges his guilt and accepts the justice of his punishment. He does not ask Christ to explain the circumstances, revise his sentence, or make the suffering conform to his wishes. He turns toward Jesus and asks for what he cannot give himself: to be remembered when Christ comes into His kingdom. And he receives it.
One demands mercy on his own terms. The other submits to the One who can grant it. The contrast between these two prayers is more than a matter of defiance versus submission. It shows the fundamental tension between authorship and reception. And that distinction becomes deeply personal when what is most desired must be given by another person. To love strips us of the power to dictate, leaving only the capacity to receive. Love always comes from somewhere else.
Follow any of these ideas far enough, and they converge on the same truth. You are not your own author. You do not need to be.
The autonomous self keeps producing such small answers—a fountain, a word, a private religion, a manageable God—to a question larger than they are capable of resolving. Each strains to say, “This is what I am.” But a self answerable to no one still ends up smaller than what it was trying to become.
What autonomy desperately tries to establish, Christianity reveals as something that can only be received: an identity that can never be taken away.
The Logos shows this in the most complete way. He is Son, eternally begotten of the Father, and in no way diminished because of it. It is the very relation by which He is Son. And then this same Son enters our humanity—born to a mother, entirely dependent on others, as each one of us begins.
The person who spends his life trying to invent himself discovers, in Christ, that the deepest identity is not something he constructs against every claim upon him. It is what he receives from another and returns in love. You were not asked to endure the fact that you are not your own.
You were invited into the relationship the Son always had. And in Him, you discover that the answer to the question “Who am I?” was never yours to write. You are His child. And you are loved.
