What is Truth?

 John 18:37 Pilate asked [Jesus], “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” 38 Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” 

“What is Truth?”  Pilate’s question.  Our’s today.  The question, in the text, is rhetorical.  Pilate is either being evasive or dismissive.  It is the end of the conversation for Pilate.  The reader and the church know otherwise, or at least we should.  The truth is standing right in front of him.  In the 4th Gospel — as the church has held ever since — truth is a person, the Word made flesh. In fact, Jesus does not claim here to be truth itself, but rather, Jesus is the one who makes God known. The words of the gospel point to the Word, the Word makes God known in order that we may “belong to the truth.”   

Using a bit of modern Evangelical language, the goal of the biblical testimony is that we may have a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.  Truth, then, cannot be reduced to objective “facts,” but is known and made known in our relationship with God and one another.  This is an abstract idea, but attested repeatedly in Scripture. The evidence and measure of our relationship with God in Christ is how we treat one another.  This is why — I suspect — in Matthew 25 for example, Jesus suggests that we meet him in the face of poor we feed, or deny him by ignoring the needs of the rejected and outcast.  This is why — as I illustrated in my last post — hundreds of verses in the biblical text address how we treat one another, especially the least.  

The beauty of this simple, ironic scene from John, is its unveiling of our most fundamental confusion about the Bible. Truth is not about certain knowledge; truth is the One to whom we belong. For Christians -- I would argue -- the Bible is the word of God only in a derivative sense, only in the sense that it brings us into relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Truth, then, cannot be reduced to “facts,” no more than a relationship can be reduced to sentences.  In my previous post, I listed the seven passages that are argued to condemn same sex acts as antithetical to the Christian lifestyle.  In these “facts” we claim to possess the truth.   Friends, we do not possess the truth, we belong to it.  The truth possess us.

​This misunderstanding exists among modern liberals and conservatives, alike.  Modern Liberals have attempted to burrow beneath the testimony and discover truth by the measure of our scientific, analytic reason.  The question for liberals is “Did it happen? What did the original author really think and say?”  Modern conservatives, in a parallel quest for objective certainty, freeze the text as if each verse were a “fact” given to us by God.  Both ways of reading are dead ends.  We do not possess the truth, we belong to God, and that belonging is evidenced in how we treat one another.  Until we recognize that mistake, I fear we will never move forward as a church.  I pray that as our General Conference ponders: “What is Truth?” that we observe Jesus standing before us, always standing before us guiding our way.

-- Rev. Mark F. Sturgess

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