What is truth?

Pontius Pilate asked that question once. He even asked the right person. He just didn’t wait for an answer:

Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, “I find no guilt in him…” (John 18:37-38, ESV)

We spent the last part of this week’s How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth class dealing with issues of truth. It’s not directly addressed by the text we’re using for the class, but I wanted to open some discussion on this topic. Why? When you get right down to it, the Bible claims to be true. If truth is under attack, then the Bible is under attack, and we, as careful readers of the Bible, must be wise about the battle that is raging in both the visible and invisible realms…

Let’s continue this discussion by taking up that question: what is truth?

Aristotle put it something like this: if you say a thing is so, and it is, that’s true. If you say a thing is so, but it’s not, that’s false. Seems like common sense, really. Philosophers call this the Correspondence Theory of Truth: a thing is true if it corresponds to the way the world really is.

The challenge to this view comes from Immanuel Kant, who said we have no access to the world as it really is. On Kant’s view, since you can’t know the world as it really is, you can’t really decide if your ideas correspond to reality, can you? Therefore, Kant’s philosophy is hostile to our idea of truth. Kant thus planted the first seed of what grew into “postmodernism:” the idea that truth is unattainable.

The heirs of Kant’s philosophy go so far as to say that there is no truth. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to defeat this claim.)

What does this mean for the Bible?

For that, we are right in the middle of the main idea of this week’s class. Follow me on this:

1. If the Bible is of any value, the value comes from the claims it makes.

2. The claims of the Bible can be thought of in terms of “true” and “false.” Philosophers call these propositions.

For example: “Jesus rose from the dead.” This is either true or false. In fact, Paul gave this as the acid test for whether the Gospel is worth anything or not: “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” (1 Cor. 15:14)

3. The claims of the Bible can only be considered in terms of the intent of the authors who advanced those claims — and by extension, the Holy Spirit who inspired it all.

The postmodern attack on truth sets itself up against point 3 this way: it says that we are within our rights to read the Bible and take it to mean whatever we’d like it to mean — because even if there is any truth about the authors’ intent, we haven’t a chance of getting at it.

More important that this, however, is its attack against point 2: it says that the Gospel is neither true nor false — it’s just a story belonging to a world that has nothing to do with us.

In my next post, I’ll go deeper with the idea that this talk about “stories” is worth getting upset about.