Truth
Pilate asked, “What is truth?” (John 18:38)
The question Pilate asked Jesus is one many have asked: What is truth?
The dictionary provides only a little understanding; many of its definitions of “truth” are tautological (“the state of being true”), but it provides us with a good starting place: the property of being in accord with fact or reality. We often understand “truth” according to its antonym “falsehood”: truth represents reality and fact, while falsehood presents some level of fiction, often with the motive to deceive in order to gain an advantage over the deceived.
Definitions and comparisons give voice to what we intuitively understand about truth even if we may find it challenging to explain it as such. Yet definitions do not help us answer the question about what is truth: what is fact versus what is fiction? What is real versus what is imaginary? And how can we have any confidence in our apprehension of what we believe to be true?
In the Western world, we are children of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and positivist thinking. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Western people developed great confidence in our ability as humans to perceive that which is absolutely and objectively true and in our capacity to reason regarding what is true. Exaltation of knowledge and reason has led us very easily into the life of the mind and ideas, thinking about “truth” in terms of propositions which we formulate, analyze, dissect, dispute, and/or defend. Our ancestors maintained great confidence in not only the existence of absolute truth, that which is valid beyond any parameters or context, but also of our ability to come to a firm understanding of such truth or truths. Such exaltation of human reason, along with skepticism about any and all things metaphysical and supernatural, led many to believe certain absolute truth claims could be proven or verified: such is positivism. Even many who believed in God and affirmed the truth of God in Christ devoted themselves to such positivist rationalism and have made much of God as the Absolute Truth whose existence we can “prove” or “verify” based on the nature of the creation, and have made much of various propositions they affirm as “the truth.”
And then that world died in the cataclysms of the twentieth century. After the unimaginable horrors of two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation, it was hard to have a lot of confidence in human progress and reasoning. After millions of “civilized” people eagerly accepted demonic, inhuman propaganda and acted upon it, it was hard to have a lot of confidence in human ability to apprehend truth. When millions upon millions had died, and the prospect of nuclear winter seemed imminent, it was easy to fall into existentialist despair. Thus the Western world saw the rise of postmodernism and a return to Pilate’s question, bitter in despair: what is truth?
Pilate’s question to Jesus, of course, was less than sincere. Nothing in anything which has been preserved about Pontius Pilate would give us any reason to believe he was on a noble quest for what is true. Pilate was a man of the world, the dog-eat-dog rat race in which “truth” is only as good as it proves advantageous. Such is the world Machiavelli would well describe 1500 years later: it is better to be feared than loved. Ethics and morality are necessary for a society to function, but to obtain and maintain power one will have to breach them continually. Along the same line of thought, if you say something often enough, you can get people to believe it, and thus you can create and impose your own truth.
Our Enlightenment ancestors proved naïve and overly optimistic about human capacity for reason and ascertaining truth. We are finite, created beings: there is only so much we can perceive and understand. Our brain receives sense impressions from the world around us through our five senses; the abilities these senses provide are amazing and wonderful, but none of them are absolute. All of them involve active construction work by the brain. We cannot but miss seeing some things in our field of vision; some sounds our ears will sense but will be filtered out by the brain; we will not perceive some smells or tastes, and we cannot sense all things by touch. Furthermore, we can learn things about our environment, history, and the like, but we can never come to a full understanding of any of it. We will not have everything preserved; scientists continue to learn more about all kinds of things, even those things we think are basic to reality. Our memories are not static; according to the best evidence we presently have, in order to remember an event or experience our brains will recreate the event and have to re-archive it, and will almost invariably adapt and change that memory. We can never escape being “us”: pure objectivity is impossible. We have perceived or learned everything through the framework and prism of our own perspective, context, and background. We can never fully escape ourselves. And none of this even begins to speak of the corruption we have experienced on account of sin: our sense faculties and memory have been corrupted by sin and death, and we experience all kinds of motivated reasoning in how we perceive the world.
Thus many of the postmodern critiques of modernism remain quite valid. It was never a good idea for Christians to have been caught up so fully in the spell of Enlightenment rationalism and positivism. We have come to expect too much from humanity and have not been skeptical enough about our abilities. We did not take sophists and their sophistry seriously enough and naively maintained confidence that truth will prevail over error despite all the evidence throughout history to the contrary.
Yet is all lost? Is truth completely beyond us? What is truth?
What motivated Pilate’s question to Jesus?
Then Pilate said, “So you are a king!”
Jesus replied, “You say that I am a king. For this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world – to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37).
Jesus said He came to testify, or bear witness, to the truth, and those who belong to the truth listens to His voice. So what was this truth to which He bore witness? How can anyone belong to the truth?
Jesus replied, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
What is the truth? Jesus is the Truth. The Word of God is truth (John 17:17); Jesus is the Word of God which took on flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1, 14).
Then Jesus said to those Judeans who had believed him, “If you continue to follow my teaching, you are really my disciples and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32).
How could Israelites know “the truth” so that “the truth” would set them free? One can “know the truth” only like one can “belong to the truth”: one must believe in Jesus and come to know Jesus.
According to the Christian faith, therefore, Jesus is the Truth. Jesus came as God in the flesh, lived, suffered, died for our sins, and was raised on the third day in power by God, ascended, and now reigns as Lord. One day He will return to judge the living and the dead and all will be raised and transformed for eternal life or condemnation. We can communicate and speak of these truths as propositions, but their fact or reality is not in the proposition itself but in Jesus as ultimate Reality.
Jesus, therefore, is Truth. If the human category and conception of “absolute truth” has validity, “absolute truth” is God in Christ. God is our Creator, and He created us through His Word, and in His Word we have life, and that life is now manifest in Jesus (John 1:1-18. 1 John 1:1-4).
It has always been a fool’s errand for humans to imagine they could stake any substantive claim to capture the absolute, objective truth of anything. Our perception of reality is mediated by the senses and constructed by the brain; thus we can apprehend what is factual and real to some degree or another, but never fully absolutely. Even the most basic truth, like we exist, or Jesus is the Word of God made flesh and is the Truth, we can accept but never fully apprehend or understand. In our finite perspective there will be some things we will miss, however consciously or unconsciously; our perception and interpretation of reality do not absolutely, objectively reflect reality. If the standard to which we are held is full understanding, we will all fail miserably.
Thanks be to God, therefore, that the standard is not comprehension, but confidence. We are to maintain confidence in God in Christ through the Spirit and entrust ourselves to Him. As we seek to better understand the creation, we ought to do so not in order to manipulate and master but to better enjoy what God has made and glorify Him because of it. We can come to an understanding of what is true as we follow Jesus and become more like Him; the more we follow Him, the greater we are aware of the profound love of God displayed in Christ and how much greater God is than we are, and thus we learn greater humility and to hold our perceptions more lightly.
Jesus, therefore, is the Truth. We can come to a better understanding of all things when we understand them in and through Him. In Christ we are relieved of the burden of the expectation to come to full apprehension of truth as well beyond us and well entrusted in God our Creator. Let us therefore pursue Jesus the Truth and find eternal life in Him!
Ethan R. Longhenry
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