Flannery O’Connor published her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952. She lived near Milledgeville, Georgia before disease took her life in 1964 (age 39). The abrasive characters she developed in southern gothic writing style gave voice to her commentary on the cultural flaws of her day.
She didn’t appreciate “expressive individualism,” the idea that your own truth forms your identity. In this novel, Hazel Motes is a disillusioned WWII veteran who invents his “Church Without Christ.” He identifies as a preacher and proclaims his truth. “There was no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.” He adds, “I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.” Enoch Emery pushes back. “You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else.”
If truth is up to each of us, there really is no truth because we will contradict each other. A few decades prior to O’Connor’s work, theologian Gresham Machen noted that if the only authority is your own experience, “truth can only be that which ‘helps’ the individual man. Once truth is regarded only as that which works at a particular time, it ceases to be truth… Dark and gloomy would be the world, if we were left to our own devices, and had no blessed Word of God.”
Darkness and gloom stalk the world where truth is based on the shadowy emotions of those who imagine themselves original thinkers, but who in fact repeat the feel-good bromides of a culture untethered from the wisdom of God. Exhibit A: pop singer Taylor Swift. “Religion’s in your lips. Even if it’s a false god we’d still worship,” she sings. “What if the way you hold me is actually what’s holy?”
The Word of God offers wisdom and truth to all who seek. To popular culture it says, “Do not be wise in your own eyes” (Prov. 3:7). It reveals the only source. “The Lord gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Prov. 2:6). God reveals truth to us through what He has made, and in Jesus Christ, “who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30).
About her novel O’Connor said, “That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for some readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.” It is of great consequence to search for wisdom in matters of life and death, meaning and morality, time and eternity. What you need is revealed in a Person: Jesus Christ.