What is truth?

"...For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world--to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth listens to my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" John 18:37,38 (ESV)

This exchange between Jesus and Pontius Pilate is evocative of the modern tortured soul searching for meaning and authenticity in a life awash in moral ambiguity and relativism. As I read this I am almost tempted to visualize Pilate as a beat poet, clothed in a black turtle-neck and beret, with a cigarette between his fingers as he wistfully asks his profound question, "what is truth, man?"

Perhaps the reason for my mental picture is the way Pilate's question seems so different in subject from Jesus' preceding statements that he had come to bear witness to the truth, and every one who was of the truth would listen to his voice--implying that truth was a qualifying characteristic of his message--whereas Pilate's question seems directed not at the nature of Jesus' message, but at the nature of the concept of truth itself.

This is why Pilate's question is so timely to our age; it goes to the very heart of a crucial dilema of Christianity and the Gospel message in the present. We are inheritors of a culture that has fragmented our concept of truth to, on one hand a solid compartment of "fact", in which we house science, and on the other hand an amorphous cloud, in which we relegate "values". Facts are reliable; they are Newtonian physics. Values are capricious matters of personal taste, arbitrary and changeable. In modern Western culture it has become bad manners to state one's morality with any degree of certainty.

Yet central to Christianity is a complete, undivided concept of truth. As Francis Schaeffer put it in his book The God Who is There:

Before a man is ready to become a Christian, he must have a proper understanding of truth, whether he has fully analyzed his concept of the truth or not... Some who consider themselves real Christians have been infiltrated by the twentieth-century thought-forms. In reference to conversion, in a Christian sense, truth must be first. The phrase 'accepting Christ as Saviour' can mean anything. We are not saying what we are trying to say, unless we make completely clear that we are talking about objective truth, when we say Christianity is true and therefore that 'accepting Christ as Saviour' is not just some form of 'upper-story leap'. (emphasis mine)


In other words, when we as Christians say God exists, we are not talking about god as an idea, but God as a person, for whom one can properly use the pronoun He. When we say Jesus died for our sins, we aren't talking about a myth that illustrates the comforting idea of forgiveness, redemption and second chances; we are declaring that the real and personal God who exists, took on the incarnate human form of a man, lived for 33 years, and was actually crucified in the real Roman province of Judea some 2,000 years ago; that His death was a substitute for our real moral guilt before God as a way to reconcile us back to a proper relationship with Him.

One of the most exceptional aspects of Christianity--by which I mean distinct from other religions--is how it is solidly rooted in space-time. The Gospels challenge every reader with references to real historical people, places and events in ways that can--and have--been examined and verified.

To Pilate's question Christianity says truth is: scientific fact, Newtonian physics and objective moral absolutes as defined by God's righteous nature, revealed to man through His word.