The other day I asked a friend for feedback on an article. He asked a simple question. “Who are you writing for?”
All writers are supposed to have a target reader in mind. Well, at least if you aspire to be a “successful” writer anyway. And by successful we mean “published”: articles in a magazine, a book published by a “real” publisher, that sort of thing. And publishers (I should know, I used to work for one) want a unique point of view, a voice that stands apart. Most of all, publishers want writers with eyeballs on what they do—what people in the “industry” call a platform.
I get the question. I really do. But my answer was not terribly helpful and perhaps a bit contrarian (I have that problem from time to time). “Mostly I am writing for me.” That’s NOT the correct answer for these types of things. Especially if you are hoping to get enough people to read what you write so that perhaps you can earn a few bucks doing it, a feat increasingly difficult these days. We are well past the era of the newspaper essayist. Are there any papers beyond the New York times and the Wall Street Journal at this point? Is anyone even reading them? Add to that the fact that the few columnists left are immediately pigeon-holed, scaped-goated, ignored or sainted. No thanks.
The question of who I write for is inextricably linked to why I write in the first place. I write to figure out what I think about things. I write about the things that interest me, the things that niggle at the back of my mind, don’t quite sit right with me and make me ask “why.” Perhaps I am still acting out the era of my adolescence. I am most certainly a Gen X writer: 1 part “whatever”, 2 parts snark (it is my/our superpower), at least 3 parts “why be normal?” with a healthy dose of skepticism thrown in for good measure. But also write about the things that fill me with wonder and hope, the things that blow my mind and open up possibilities that I have never contemplated.
Who am I writing for? I am writing for me, there is no doubt, but the more I think about the question (and it is a good question, all snark aside), the more I realize that I am writing for more than just me.
The first decent paper I wrote in college was for an intro to philosophy class. An analysis on Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy—the cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) one. I am sure that it wasn’t great, but the prof stopped me outside of class and said, “good paper, you didn’t have to write a book!” He probably didn’t remember that, but I did. I ended up being his grad assistant a few years later. It was probably that class more than any other that set me on the path to exploring ideas and their implications. I wanted to know what was true. Really true. Not what I want to be true, not what I feel is true, but really, honest to God true. I looked around and saw people spending their time and energy, building their very lives on things that seemed to be just so much straw and sticks—one bad day and a big bad wolf away from the whole thing crashing down around their heads.
It was a few years until I really understood what was driving (chasing?) me. When words like “epistemology” (the study of how we know things), hermeneutics (how we read texts), theology and biblical studies took up residence in my head and the slow crawl of connections began. In the background, ever present: Truth. I wrote my master’s thesis on Generation X and truth. I looked at it not too long ago. I would write it differently today, but then, I am both the same, and a very different man than I was then. Life has happened. A lot of life. All of the things and people that have crossed my path over the years have contributed to who I am and what I am about. To why I write.
And for whom.
Beyond the surface and the cliches, beyond both the unwillingness to ask why and the creeping pretension that no one but me is willing to ask the hard questions, beyond asking questions just to ask questions or to be provocative, or whatever, through it all, I write because the truth matters.
Philosophers talk about truth as theory: correspondence theory—truth is what corresponds to reality; coherence theory—truth “hangs together”, it is coherent; pragmatism, a particularly American view of truth—truth is what works. There are other theories, but those are the big ones. The postmoderns notoriously played havoc with the truth: some rejecting it altogether, others questioning our ability to know it even if it did exist, some pointing out how “truth” is used to justify all sorts of oppression.
There are a lot of reasons behind the postmodern critiques, and I am more than certain that there are a fair few developments since I left grad school, but the older I get the less I am concerned about the theories and the latest philosophical stars. (Because academia requires publication for tenure and philosophers can be as cutthroat as cartels, they just like to play with words and convoluted sentences). And it struck me way back in the 90s that they were creating categories and divisions that were far less than necessary, carving up the truth like light and dark meat in a Thanksgiving turkey—good to eat, but less than the whole bird. If truth corresponds to reality, shouldn’t it “hang together? Shouldn’t it “work” on some level?
The philosophers are, no doubt, far smarter than I am. What I am, by nature, is an analyst and a synthesizer. I take things apart and examine them then I take what are, to many people, very different things and put them together. I may connections. And I reject the reduction of truth to a theory, even a good one. In the process of writing to analyze I come to see what I think about things, and hopefully somewhere along the way I catch a glimpse of the truth. That’s why I write.
And that’s who I write for.
I write for people who want the truth, and especially the Truth. The complicated messy truths of the lives we lead in this messed up, broken, marvelous, beautiful world. The Truth that is at once simple and terrifying, which can drive you to your knees or envelope you in embrace (and it can and does happen all at the same time). Because for all the things that I would change about my master’s thesis, that part I got right. Truth is far more than a theory. Far more than some dispassionate, disconnected, “objective” thing.
The philosophers, for all their brilliance, too often leave out the most important part. Truth is not simply a set of ideas or facts. Truth, the Scriptures tell us, is directly connected to God himself. God is a God of truth (Is. 65, Deut. 32). It is his possession and a constant and eternal attribute, in fact, the Hebrew word for truth is often translated a faithfulness. It is unchanging, a firm ground on which to stand. The Greek word, alethea, used in the New Testament, literally refers to nonconcealment. It is the state of things as they are, constancy, reliability. At the end of the day, truth is not arbitrary, it is a fundamental attribute of God. When the Scriptures say that God cannot lie (Num. 23:19, Titus 1:2, Heb. 6:18), it is not arbitrary or accidental. God is Truth.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. Indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness, for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him. (John 1:14, 16-18, CSB)
Jesus is the Truth.
In a world that is suspicious of claims to the truth to begin with, a world of deepfakes and AI generated everything, one where leaders once thought trustworthy are shown to be liars and liars are routinely rewarded with status and power, that short sentence is both jarring and hopeful. The search for truth is, at its heart, the search for God.
Anselm of Canterbury is credited with the phrase “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum), the idea that faith in Jesus prompts the search for deeper understanding. Augustine, some 650 or so years earlier said, “believe that you may understand” (crede ut intelligas), because faith and a desire to understand are not at odds as the caricature so often goes, rather, they are the truest of partners.
And so, I do write for myself, but I also write for all those who feel in their soul that the connection between faith and understand is a worthy pursuit. That if God is truth, then we should explore deeply the things that truly matter. We should ask the hard questions about what is and why we do the things that we do, about motivations and systems and deceptions. We should ask it not simply of the world “out there” or the church, but of ourselves as well. Because when I look at my own heart, I know that it is prone to wander, that it can lie to me as certainly as anyone can. And if I am not careful my question authority nature can turn to cynicism, my snark can become hatred and apathy can take over. But I also write because of the beauty and the hope I see in God and his wonderous is broken creation. Writing keeps my faith central and the worst of my tendencies at bay.
I am something of a restless soul. I have plenty of doubts, more than a few confounding questions, but at my core is a faith that seeks to understand. If you feel that, well, then the answer to my friend’s question is simple, I am writing for you.
Come tread the dawn with me. Let’s see what we can discover.
