Truth against the world

Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, had a personal motto, "Truth against the world." The man was an incredible creative genius for certain but he was also an iconoclast and a man so consumed by his own genius that the motto essentially meant that he had transcended the world in most every way imaginable and had a bit of a messiah complex. In his field, Wright certainly pushed the envelope and taught the world a great deal about form, but his personal life was a disaster.

While his motto at first seems noble, worthy of Ayn Rand's attention and admiration, leading to the book, The Fountainhead, it is also defiant and egotistical in the extreme. It matters what principle we choose for living and Wright's perspective on life led him to stake out ground that set him above and apart from the world, alone with his truth. For Ayn Rand, it was an heroic choice, and based on the results of a survey by the Library of Congress in the 1990's which showed that Rand's Atlas Shrugged was second only behind the Bible when they asked which books most profoundly shaped their worldview, such a life is considered heroic by many in our culture.

The message of the Bible is, however, quite different from "Truth against the world." There is certainly that reality in the Gospel, that the way things are is not the way they should be, but the ultimate message is "Truth for the world." It wasn't and isn't a claim or play for power, God is pretty sure of His own sovereignty and doesn't need the acclaim of a small portion of His creation in order to establish His sense of identity. (Sarcasm intended) The basis of the claim of truth and the life that proclaimed it, is love, pure love, which gains nothing in the bargain.