The Pilate Philosophy

by Terry Wane Benton

Pilate washes his hands of killing Jesus Matthew 27:24

The Pilate Philosophy is to wash your hands of responsibility and to pretend there is no way to know the truth. “What is truth?” (John 18:38), he asked Jesus. There was also a “cancel-culture” mentality in his presence in the Jews wanting to get Jesus canceled by unjust elimination, crucifying Him to shut down the voice of truth. They could not handle the truth Jesus told. Pilate suddenly became complicit with the cancel-culture of his day by washing his hands when he knew Jesus had done nothing worthy of death. When Pilate asked, “What is truth?” he was complicit with a philosophy that can no longer administer justice because every man has his own “truth,” allowing the criminal to operate under his own “truth” and each man just has different truths. The mob mentality was sure to prevail when the arm of justice that Pilate represented could no longer distinguish truth from error, right from wrong, justice from injustice. When judges fail here due to the pressures of cancel-culture mobs, we see injustice prevail in the courts, and the system begins to crumble.

We see the cancel-culture in full operation today, but it seems mixed in with the same blindness to the truth, unable anymore to accept the truth that a baby is really a baby in the womb, and a man is a man, a woman is a woman. What is “truth?” our culture declares when it suits them. If a man wants to be a woman, what is true for him is true for him/her. And you must be canceled if you think there is absolute truth. Jesus declared that there is absolute truth (John 17:17). We must come away from the Pilate syndrome of believing that “truth” includes all kinds of lies that each person desires to tell themselves. When we become angry that truth is spoken in the pulpits and Bible classes, we have been conditioned into the Pilate philosophy and the cancel-culture of eliminating the voices of truth. When we don’t want people to hear the truth, we have made truth irrelevant, and we have adopted the Pilate philosophy that every person has their own truth if there is such a thing as truth. We have bought into the propaganda that conditions us to close our hearts and ears to the voice of truth, the word of God. Stand in the ways and see and ask for the old paths!

The Pilate Philosophy does not work. It is simply not true.