What is Truth?

The Pursuit of a Person, Not an Ideology to Argue

The truth matters. Every Christian I know would agree with that simple statement. We profess the Christian faith because we believe the story that articulates our faith, the good news of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God, is true. But we also live in an age where the notion of truth is questioned.

Ours is a post-truth age in which “truth has been eclipsed—that it is irrelevant.”¹ Today, people speak of living “your truth” or “my truth” as though the truth is defined by the self. Even the notion of facts has undergone a redefining, with the inclusion of “alternative facts” introduced to our lexicon.² It seems we are in an age where we can spin anything as truth, creating a reality where everything is relative, and the use of an adjective, such as your or my, to go along with the noun truth symbolizes this problem.

Christians are rightfully concerned about this truth problem, but it belongs to Christians as much as it does to the rest of society. Even before there was your truth and my truth, I can remember Christians affixing adjectives to the word truth. As an undergraduate student, I was assigned to read a book that introduced to me the difference between objective truth and subjective truth.³ Truth is a philosophical concept, and the question of objective and subjective truth in philosophy is a matter rooted in the Enlightenment that gave us modernism and now postmodernism. Or we speak of truth as absolute truth, which seems like another philosophical way of defining our understanding of truth and making our understanding a totalizing claim beyond question (or so we think).

The problem with truth, in part, is that we keep affixing adjectives to the word truth and therefore define what truth is. Whether our definition is personalized in the form of your truth and my truth or given a definition borrowed from philosophy, such as objective and subjective, we are committing ourselves to a particular ideological concept that we must defend rather than the pursuit of truth. That’s how arguments work. We commit ourselves to a particular claim and defend our claim as though our claim about truth were infallible.⁴ But maybe we should rethink our usage of the adjectives when it comes to truth and this entire game of trying to define truth and subsequently defend our definition of truth.

Let’s consider the Gospel of John because I’m a minister of the gospel who happens to believe we should let scripture speak. As we do so, note that the concept of truth is very important to the Gospel of John. In fact, the noun alētheia, which means “truth,” is used twenty-five times in the Gospel of John. But not once is there ever an adjective affixed to the noun truth in order to qualify the meaning of truth.⁵ That means our understanding of what truth means in the Gospel of John must be derived (pursued) from the story itself.

The story that John is telling in this Gospel is, of course, about Jesus Christ, the very Incarnate Word of God. Therefore, Jesus Christ is both the one who reveals the truth and is the truth himself. But what really should grab our attention is the exchange between Jesus and Pilate over the notion of truth in John 18:36-38:

Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

These are the last three times the noun truth is used in the Gospel of John. First, Jesus claims to testify to the truth and said that those who desire truth will listen to him. But Pilate, attempting to dismiss Jesus, raises the question that captivates much attention by asking, “What is truth?”

So what is the answer to Pilate’s question? The answer is exactly what Jesus said when he claimed to be the way, truth, and life back in John 14:6. Jesus doesn’t engage Pilate in a philosophical debate about the meaning of truth, whether truth is objective or subjective, and so forth. Instead, Jesus gives up his life in crucifixion so that he can take it up again in the resurrection. It is there in the passion of Jesus that we find the true way of life, revealed in the crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah.

The truth is what Jesus reveals in his very own life. The truth is a person, not a concept, and not something that we can or get to define ourselves by affixing our own preferred choice adjectives to the noun. The truth is Jesus, whom we must pursue before we can ever proclaim but… Can we really pursue Jesus as the truth if we set ourselves on assigning our own meaning to the word truth and defend that meaning as if we are in a philosophical game that we must win?

Jesus showed us the truth by revealing to us the way of life, which comes through the crucifixion and resurrection. In an age of skepticism, where the notion of truth seems irrelevant, the way forward for Christians is following Jesus. Living as followers of Jesus has always been our way as Christians, and that doesn’t change just because some new philosophical notions emerge. So I might be totally off base, but it seems Christianity in America would be wise to stop arguing about the meaning of truth and instead live what we believe is true, just as Jesus Christ did—trusting God with the results.

1. Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018, 5.

2. Aaron Blake, “Kellyanne Conway says Donald Trump’s team has ‘alternative facts’ which pretty much says it all,” The Washington Post, January 22, 2017, available at: https://washingtonpost.com/news’the-fix/wp/2017/01/22/kellyanne-conway-says-donald-trumps-team-has-alternative-facts-which-pretty-much-says-it-all/.

3. Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air, Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998, 27.

4. McIntyre, Post-Truth, 53, makes this point with the notion of truth and political beliefs, but the same logic applies to religious/theological claims.

5. The occurrences of alētheia in the Gospel of John are 1:14, 17; 3:21; 4:23-24; 5:33; 8:32 (2x), 40, 44 (2x), 45-46; 14:6, 17; 15:26; 16-7, 13 (2x); 17:17 (2x), 19; 18:37 (2x)-38. The adjective alēthēs is used 14 times, see 3:33; 4:18; 5:31-32; 6:55 (2x); 7:18; 8:13-14, 17, 26; 10:41; 19:35; 21:24.