I Am the Truth

Don: We usually think of the truth as being a principle, idea, set of beliefs, or dataset of empirical information—some thing that corresponds to some reality. We don’t think of it as being some body.

Jesus said that the Spirit of Truth is “He,” and that He will liberate you from something and sanctify you with His word, which is truth:

“… when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth;…” (John 16:13)

“…you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:32)

“Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.” (John 17:17)

Christians take Biblical scripture to be the word of God and therefore the truth. But in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus disputed that this is always the case, drawing a sharp contrast between the written word of scripture and his own teaching:

“You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court;…” (Matthew 5:21-22)

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:22-28)

“It was said, ‘Whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce’; but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 5:31-32)

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; [but] it is these that testify about Me;…” (John 5:39)

What are “these that testify about me”? They are:

“…the very works that I do….” (John 5:36)

Meanwhile, we continue to analyze the notion of truth. Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek outlined six principles concerning truth in their book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Crossway, 2004):

1. Truth is discovered, not invented. It exists independent of anyone’s knowledge of it. (Gravity existed prior to Newton.)

2. Truth is transcultural. If something is true, it is true fat all people, in all places, at all times (2×2=4 for everyone, everywhere, at every time).

3. Truth is unchanging even though our beliefs about truth change. (When we began to believe the earth was round instead
of flat, the truth about the earth didn’t change, only our belief about the earth changed.)

4. Beliefs cannot change a fact, no matter how sincerely they are held. (Someone can sincerely believe the world is flat, but that only makes that person sincerely mistaken.)

5. Truth is not affected by the attitude of the one professing it. (An arrogant person does not make the truth he professes false. A humble person does not make the error he professes true.)

6. All truths are absolute truths. Even truths that appear to be relative are really absolute. (For example, “I, Frank Turek, feel
warm on November 20, 2003” may appear to be a relative truth but it is actually absolutely true for everyone, everywhere
that Frank Turek had the sensation of warmth on that day.)

Truth is supposed to reflect reality. Most people of faith say they are seekers of truth but are usually already pretty sure that they have found it. People in one church seldom look longingly to another because the other church has the truth but their’s doesn’t. Truth is important to them because they think it is essential for salvation; a life and death issue.

At the trial of Jesus:

… Pilate said to Him, “So You are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?” (John 18:37-38)

Pilate didn’t wait for an answer. What is the answer? Truth so important to us that through the ages, including today, many have been and are willing to die—and to kill and maim—in its name. Truth is the cause of division, intolerance and unspeakable evil in society.

Jesus said he is the truth. Will it make a difference if we think of truth as a person rather than as a thing?

Jay: The definition of truth seems critical. That it is timeless and unbound by a specific age or society is reflected in Geisler and Turek’s six criteria. Perhaps another characteristic is that the understanding of truth can evolve just as our understanding of details about the truth of gravity has evolved. But I would caution that truth can only be discovered, not invented, because we do sometimes invent truths.

Kiran: The value of truth is given in the stories of the man who sold everything he owned in order to buy a pearl and the farm laborer who sold everything he had in order to buy the farm he had been tilling, because he had dug up some treasure there. They suggest that the possession of the truth—a real treasure—comes from giving up everything you own. Jesus is the ultimate example of this. He is, in fact, the ultimate truth, in everything he said and did. Discovering truth takes some kind of effort on our part, either by seeking it out from others or seeking it out on our own. By establishing a relationship with Jesus, we find the truth.

Alice: Finding the truth is as simple as having faith in Jesus.

Don: There is much personal investment in the search for truth. Is it then misguided? Is it even possible to approach truth?

Alice: As Jay suggested, the more we dig for truth, the further away we get from it. It is right in front of our noses.

Kiran: We seek certainty and stability. I searched and searched for answers that would give me them, but have found that it always comes back to my relationship with Jesus and my fellow human beings.

Charles: We tend to focus on truth from a philosophical standpoint, but scripture seems to say that it is first and foremost a matter of theology. At the highest level view of truth, God Is. That is our starting premise. The question then is: Is it true? We all come to the question from a different place. But if it is true, then the theological view of truth is that every aspect of our existence—both spiritual and physical—must be centered on him. It is a simple truth, but very hard to accept, even for people of faith.

Jay: Our search for the truth is selfish, either to prove that we are right or to put us in the right. It is much more productive to search for universal truth that applies to everyone, but as Chuck said, it is very difficult. To accept as the truth the existence of a God of Goodness and Love means to accept our responsibility for (a) submitting to his will and (b) accepting the eternity and universality of truth, and we tend to have a real problem with those. The real trap is that people seem to want to define truth as something that emerged only recently. To me, the notion of “new truth” seems oxymoronic.

Kiran: Because God told Moses to take off his shoes on holy ground, in India churchgoers take off their shoes in church. But when I first came to the US and found they don’t take off shoes, I became confused, wondering what was true. If universal truth were universally observed and applied, the world would be a much better place, it seems to me.

Charles: God exists and loves us. How much does he love us? As much as to sacrifice his only son for us, even though we are sinners. So how should we reconcile with God? Through his son, Jesus. Most of us are like Pilate: We ask the question “What is truth?” but we walk away when we suspect the answer will be theological. We turn instead to the physical world for answers to what is true. Is Jesus truth, and the only way back to God? If not, then our faith is irrational. If he is, then lack of faith is irrational. Humans are not just flesh and blood: They are flesh, blood, and spirit. The message of truth is that God exists eternally, but not physically. Jesus, however, existed physically and temporally, to provide a way back to God.

Don: Does religion have any role in establishing truth?

Chris: Doctrine is a slippery slope of supposed absolute truth. From the crusades to the Inquisition to Islamic State, religions and sects have established their own versions of the truth and then defend it to the death of themselves or others. Doctrine can have a positive influence only if it recognizes that it is not infallible.

Jay: Truth has a physical effect, connecting us physical beings to God through Jesus—the Way, the Truth and the Life. Truth changes the physical realm in order to provide opportunity.

Charles: If God exists and Jesus is the truth, his church—the church Jesus established—is true. Truth is passed on through that church. Originally, it was passed on by word of mouth. Writing came later. We are prone to misinterpret or even deliberately distort things we hear or read. I deduce therefore that religion contains the truth but may be prone to error and falsehoods. That does not change my belief that as part of God’s plan the church is the repository for the truth that is necessary for salvation.

Kiran: Philip Yancey said he left the church because he found so little grace in it, but he came back because he couldn’t find grace anywhere else. The church is not perfect, but it does have an important role to play for everyone at some stage in their journey through the stages of faith. It provides community and the opportunity to share God’s grace by helping others. This can be done outside the church but the church makes it easier—and we tend to want to take the easy way!

David: Daoism says we cannot know the capital Truth—an ultimate and eternal singularity not subject to physical law. We can only know lower-case truths that are impermanent. But there is value in those truths to the extent they meet the criteria established by Geisler and Turek. Without some truth then anything goes. Life would have no purpose. The Dao—the Way that is Truth—cannot be expressed in words. We cannot possibly understand Truth therefore we cannot possibly express it in words. However, the Dao does not preclude the notion that Truth can be expressed in the form of a person—which is precisely what Jesus said it is. So while I can accept that Jesus is the Truth, I cannot accept that any words purporting to represent Truth in fact do so.

Robin: Jesus said he spoke not of himself, but what he heard from the Father.

Chris: Maybe the challenge has to do with our intent behind the truth. Many times we use it to judge, to condemn others, to prove ourselves right. But it’s not our place to do so:

Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things. But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? (Romans 2:1-3)

Jay: Are we enjoined to refrain from judging because we do not and cannot know capital Truth?

David: I think so.

Charles: Truth is important because evil and hypocrisy depend on lies and falsehoods and misrepresentations of truth. We can only stand up to deception and manipulation if we know the truth. So getting truth right is critically important. The antidote to our vulnerability is faith in truth, which brings us back to the theological definition of truth as God exists and loves us.

David: I agree that the “I Am” is the capital Truth and that we can approach an understanding of it by means of a leap of faith—there is no other way. I am not sure that the antonym for truth is lie. History shows that we clearly have not arrived at universal acceptance of Capital Truth and probably never will. In the meantime, all we have to work on are small truths that may well not hold up for long but which are not necessarily lies. Our vulnerability stems from mistaking them as Capital Truth, but they are all we have to stand between us and nihilism and anarchy. The “truths” of the Inquisition were hurtful to say the least, but it could be argued they arose out of a fundamental human need for peace and order on society. We may develop better truths over the course of time, but we will never develop the perfect Truth.

Charles: Except by means of faith. If faith is true then it is true regardless of the world’s recognition of it. If it is false, it is still false even if the whole world believes in it. The issue of faith, Truth, and the existence of God is the existential question as defined spiritually.

David: Christians and Moslems can agree on the Capital Truth that there is one God, and both require an act of faith. But they can’t agree on, say, the small truth that women should wear a veil. At the end of the universal day, the small truths won’t matter, but here in the middle of the day, they do.

Don: They not only matter, but also they bring us into unspeakable conflict and distress, separatism, discrimination, and violence. Why does truth require such extreme responses? It seems we can’t present truth as “Take it or leave it — if it works for you, great; if not, no problem!” The possession of a supposed truth seems as a matter of course to make the possessor feel responsible for the defense of that truth even unto death.

Chris: If a truth is disputed, does that automatically invalidate it as Capital Truth?

Jay: Truths that are disputed because they are subjective, which are many, would seem to be not universal Capital Truth. What is extraordinary is that it is so very human to fall into the trap of small truths.

Charles: Yes, it is a function of our tendency to misinterpret our truths as God’s Truth. If God is Truth, we can and we should welcome all arguments and beliefs that pass God’s standard of truth. But we don’t get to define God’s standard of truth, and that’s the problem. At least in its totality, scripture does not seem to approve of the violence surrounding truth today and throughout history. We may often twist the truth, by mistake or even with benign intent, but whether it is God’s intent is another matter. Part of the reason God became flesh and dwelt among us was because it was the only way the Truth could be manifested, fully revealed, to us. We are the enemy; we are the anti-truth. We are vulnerable to mistakes that are then exploited by the forces of evil in the world.

Robin: The problem may be that when we come to faith in God the Father as Truth and Jesus sent to reveal and exemplify how to live in and by that Truth, then we think we own that truth. We should instead be humbled by it. Instead of being proud of our truth and deciding who is worthy of it, we should focus on loving our neighbor.

Don: We’ll continue to discuss the notion of “Truth as a person” and of our tendency to invent truth and the church’s willingness to help in that regard. We can’t seem to accept the simple, broad Truth. We want it broken down into myriad small truths, and if we don’t find them we make them up. We seems to have an insatiable desire to possess truth.

Charles: In the Garden, who defined Truth, God or Wo/Man? What happens when there is no standard of truth? The postmodernist humanist and atheist has no standard of truth beyond his or her own. The absence of a single standard of truth provides fertile ground for all sorts of rationalization. That’s why we seek truth, and why we need to reconcile with God to find it!

David: The standard of truth cannot be expressed in any words except “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” It is not otherwise defined except as in the person of God, and it can be manifested only through love. As the Daoist says, it cannot be expressed in words.

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