(12) Truth Is A Person

When asked to define "truth," a Christian turns sooner or later to John 14:6 and replies "Truth is Jesus Christ." What does not always come to light so quickly is the realization that this Biblical definition is radically antithetical to the whole concept of truth with which Western people have been raised and schooled. The result is that many Christians go through life in the spiritual or religious area of life, and another that operates in the other, more ordinary sides of life. For most of us most of the time, some intuitive, some emotional, etc., while at the same time, and with little or no sense of inner conflict, we assure ourselves that we believe Christ is the truth. This sort of dualistic thinking is fatal to the development of a Christian mind.
One indication that the Christian concept of truth is different from the one we have grown up with is that the Bible always speaks of the truth in the singular, never of "truths." There are not two kinds of truths – one composed of objective factual statements about ordinary things and events, and another spiritual kind of truth related to Christ. The Bible does not permit us to think of truths as discrete bits of information comparable to bolts stored in bins in a hardware store. There is only one truth because nothing in human experience makes sense all by itself. Everything in creation points ultimately to Jesus Christ as its meaning-giver, and thus all reality is integrated or tied together. He is the One who gives it all meaning. This revelation, which grows on one as one considers the problem, is of fundamental and far-reaching importance. The charge against Paul and his companions in Thesalonica that the "turned the world upside down," turns out to hold with equal force as the Gospel touches the area of human knowledge. Creation, although it is multiform with almost infinite variety, is still one in that it is expressive of the one Word of God. For modern Western man, having lost this understanding, it is not surprising that the "university" has now become aptly known as the "multiversity."
Another strand of evidence is the Biblical way of speaking of doctrine or teaching. With almost no exceptions, the words are used in the singular when speaking of the teaching that is in harmony with the Word of the Lord. The plural uses, as in the "doctrines of demons," etc., evidence the effects of sin. Sin divides what God has put together.
Truth then, does not consist of a rational grasp of objective sense phenomena. It is not equivalent to the meaning between autonomous human logic and empirical data, verified by a publicly repeatable experiment. The danger in this definition is that it makes man’s unaided reason the final arbiter of truth. It thus subjects truth to man. But He who is the Truth is the Maker, Sustainer, and Redeemer of man. He cannot be subject to man.
Truth, biblically defined, is a Person. That is to say, all that exists has an integrality or unity because it is held in being by the One Word of God, who is Jesus Christ. To say this is simply to take seriously the expression of Colossians 1:17 that "in him all things consist (margin hold together)." (cf. Romans 1:20; Palm 19 etc.)Created reality does not stand on its own; it is not independent or autonomous. It all points to Christ. He alone gives any of it ultimate significance or meaning. In an effort to emphasize this, some have even said that creation doesn’t "have" meaning it "is" meaning. If it "has" meaning, it has it for our rational understanding, which is thus placed in the position of an autonomous subject viewing of a static object. But if it "is" meaning, it speaks to us of the godhood of God, which is the point of Romans 1:20. It calls us at every waking instant of every day to a glad hearted submission to Him of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. (Romans 11:36).

(13) Facts Are Not Neutral

One of the principle foundations of the Enlightenment is the assumed neutrality of facts. Because all people are created by God to encounter His creation in ways which are outwardly very similar, when Enlightenment man declared his independence from God and his trust in autonomous human reason, it was easy to suppose that sense objects possessed an independent identity or neutrality which could become the key to a new understanding of reality. And from that assumption came a new way of looking at facts. Ellul put it this way:

"It is well known that in other civilizations men did not respect facts to the same extent, nor did they conceive facts in the same way. At the present time the fact, whatever it is, the established fact, is the final reason, the criterion of truth. All that is a fact is justified, because it is a fact. People think they have no right to judge a fact – all they have to do is accept it." (see footnote 1).

So facts have moved today from the position of servant to that of master. This is why developments like atomic fission and genetic engineering loom as portentous dangers. Pandora cannot resist the temptation to open the box of "facticity."
It must be remembered that facts are peculiarly human things. So far as we can tell, neither plants nor animals are able to conceptualize facts. And because humans are beings with hearts – hearts which are committed, below the level of rational inquiry, to some value-defining direction in life – there are always faith roots to their ways of looking at facts. Each of us has a conceptual framework. This is a way of looking at life and all its experiences. It is influenced, as a compass needle by the earth’s magnetic field, by a subconscious religious commitment to either the true God in Jesus Christ or to the absolutization of some element in the creation which thereby becomes the key to life’s meaning and so to facticity. Ancient peoples did this with physical elements in the creation – the sun, moon, stars, rocks, trees, etc. Modern people do it in a more sophisticated manner, They use economics as Marx does, early psychological experience, with Freud, reason with the Enlightenment, or wide variety of other aspects of human experience. Whatever "god" is selected, one’s view of fact is a corollary to the autonomy of human reason. Neither is a reliable concept from the Biblical standpoint.

(14) Truth Is Distinctive

That brings us to one of the fundamental elements in a Christian mind, i.e. the assertion that a Christian view of truth is distinctive. It is separated by an impassible gulf from all concepts of truth stemming from other than Biblical presuppositions. Christian thought and non-Christian thought are antithetical. It is impossible to homogenize them. There is no least common denominator in terms of which they may be united.
This is not to say that Christians and non-Christians cannot talk intelligibly with each other. Since they inhabit the same world and experience it in much the same way, there are almost endless ways in which they can communicate sensibly with each other. But in terms of ultimate meaning, there is no way to bridge between a Christian and a non-Christian perspective. There is no neutral ground upon which the two may agree in their effort to find a mutually acceptable intellectual position. Barrett puts it clearly when he says:

"But the issue here is no longer one of technical competence but of the basic premises of insight. And on this terrain men are likely to carry their own particular dispositions to see things as they do. One can scarcely have a clearer indication how all of us, mathematicians like the rest, can be chained to philosophical premises, and how potent these premises are even in grasping the most ‘objective’ matters. There is no such thing as a pure technique that isolates itself completely from the insight that decides what that technique is about and what is for. Technique has no meaning apart from informing vision." (see footnote 2)

The informing vision of a Christian mind is poles apart from that of a non-Christian one.
Isn’t this an arrogant position to take, to say that Christians understand the truth and no one else does? It would be if that were what is being said, but isn’t. No one who hears what the Bible is saying would presume to claim that Christians understand the whole of truth. "We see through a glass darkly," and "we know in part" (I Cor. 13:12 and 9) are only two indications among many that the Christian understanding of truth is fragmentary, incomplete, and very, very hazy. "Lo these are but the outskirts of His ways, but the thunder of His power who can understand." (Job 26:14) Christians do not claim to know everything, and they can and do learn much from non-Christian thinkers, but there is no way to synthesize a Christ with a non-Christian perspective on reality.
An analogy may help here. It is widely recognized that artistic knowing differs fundamentally from rational knowing. The artist arrives at his concept of truth intuitively, aesthetically, imaginatively. The scientist reaches his conclusions through the rigid application of laws of logic. The two are not mutually exclusive, for there is reason in art and there is imagination in science, but there is no way to find a third way of knowing which is more fundamental that either of these two and which combines them. The analogy – for that is all it is – is not perfect, but it may help to illustrate what is being said. In fact, witnessing is established on a sounder ground than before, but in the process it is altered. As long as we suppose that there is a neutral place where reasonable people, Christian or non-Christian, can get together in their pursuit of a valid understanding of experience, we are condemned to chasing the will-o-wisp. For the neutral ground must be something more than basic presuppositions of either party. From the Christian standpoint, at least, the suggestion of some starting place is more basic than the godhood of the living God is out of the question. When we agree that there is no third or neutral position big enough to combine both antithetical viewpoints, we are back to the recognition of the importance of one’s presuppositions. And that is the true genius of Christian witnessing. It is a matter of pushing people back to their own basic presuppositions. When the non-Christian is pushed lovingly, gently, but firmly back to the roots of his own thinking, he gets into real danger of being moved by the Holy Spirit to a different set of starting points. That is what happened to the Apostle Paul, St. Augustine, to C.S. Lewis, and to no end of other people. It is the sort of thing Lewis had in mind when he said that a young atheist can’t be too careful what he reads. Witnessing is, after all, only giving a clear statement of how things look to us and why they look that way – even when the "why" includes such illogical events as the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The business of changing people’s hearts does not belong to us; that is God’s handiwork.

(15) Truth Is To Be Done

One final subdivision of the topic of truth is that, in Christian perspective, truth is not something to be written, said or told; truth is something which must be done to be known. "If we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in the darkness, we lie, and do not the truth." (I John 1:6) The corollary is that a lie is also something that is done. Revelation 22:15, describing those excluded from the New Jerusalem, speaks of "the idolatries, and every one that loveth and maketh (margin, "doeth") a lie." The attempt to live independently of God is close to the essence of sin; when we do that, we live the lie of independence, for it is never possible to escape from being a creature, and a creature is always dependent upon God. (Acts 17:28) The concept that truth must be done is clearly expressed from an unexpected source in Jonathan Kozol’s The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home (a title which also had an element of surprise, being a quotation from the hymn, "Lead Kindly Light." ) Kozol, summing up the argument of his book, says:

"Truth, in my belief, is something which occurs when actions take place: not when phrases are contrived. Truth is not a word which represents correct response to an examination, nor a well-written piece of prose. Truth is not a "right word" which can be printed. It is (it only is) a "right deed" which can be done.

"In school, children learn that truth is something they must learn to say. What if, instead, we were to teach them it is something that cannot be said, can never be said, but only can be done or undertaken: "Oliver – are you telling me the truth?" What if, instead, we were to ask him if he dares to live it?" (see footnote 3)

The reason why Christian thinking insists that truth must be done to be known is implicit in the nature of truth. If truth is a Person, and if people are made in God’s image, then life is essentially a matter of responding to God in all circumstances, outer or inner. Then knowing the truth cannot be dissociated from offering– the active response of loving service to God in every area and aspect of life, i.e. of doing what we know. To the extent to which we as Christians profess to know, we shall doubtless be surprised and rewarded by finding that God has mysterious and powerful ways of making that confession effective in the coming of His kingdom.

Editor: Al Greene

Alta Vista College

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