Truth on trial

“Truth is stranger than fiction!” “The truth hurts!” These are clichés which people use in everyday speech. In today’s chaotic moral climate, it is not uncommon to also hear statements such as: “If you believe it, then it’s true for you”, “Truth is relative” or “What is true for you may not be true for me!” The message that pervades our culture is that there is no such thing as absolute truth. In his book The God Who is There (Hodder and Stoughton, 1968), philosopher Francis Schaeffer perceived the shift in the way our culture approaches the notion of truth – a shift which 30 years later has fully permeated our entertainment-saturated society.

Some time ago our family rented and watched the 1998 movie My Giant starring comedian Billy Crystal and NBA basketball player Gheorghe Muresan. The story is about a second-rate talent agent named Sammy (Crystal), who stumbles upon a giant named Max (Muresan) living in a Romanian monastery. Sammy promises Max that he can reunite him with his childhood sweetheart by taking him to America, where he will become a “star”. The plot is full of lies and half-truths. And it is with a final lie that the story ends. Sammy convinces his wife to pretend to be Max’s long-lost love because Max is now terminally ill and the real Lilliana has forgotten all about him. In the end, the audience is led to the conclusion that, in this case, it was best to tell a lie. This is just one example of the way our culture views truth as flexible.

Let us be clear: The Bible’s view of truth clashes with the 21st-century view of truth. The two views are antagonistically opposed, a fact we ignore at our own peril. Within the pages of Scripture and the annals of church history, truth is presented as absolute, knowable and normative.

Truth is absolute

Simply put, this means that there is a standard – a measuring stick – which determines the truth or falsehood of every statement or experience. Moreover, when something is true, its opposite is not true. Unfortunately, we live in a culture which no longer accepts or operates according to this understanding. For example, when a Christian declares that premarital sex or abortion is sin, that statement is immediately dismissed as meaningless. An evening spent sampling prime time television or listening to radio talk shows should convince us how thoroughly modern culture has rejected the truth claims of Christianity. And yet, as little as a generation ago, biblical, faith-based morality still informed society’s collective conscience.

But do people actually live the way they say they do? Do they really believe that truth is a private domain in which they decide for themselves what is and is not true? Consider driving down the wrong side of the road. If you truly believe that you are on the right side when you are not, it doesn’t matter how much you believe it, it is still not true! Only a few seconds of such folly will result in death and carnage. Clearly, this truth is not only a private opinion but is also valid in the public domain. Few people who adhere to relativism are prepared to live with their worldview when their own physical safety is at stake. Why, then, do they throw away logic and common sense when it comes to their method of arriving at truth? The simple answer is that they are confused by the bewildering array of options out there, disillusioned by a hypocritical or irrelevant church and thoroughly deceived by the god of this world.

Yet the relativism of our culture is clearly false. The statement: “There is no such thing as absolute truth,” is crushed under its own weight, for it comes in the guise of an absolute statement of truth!

Truth is knowable

This means that truth is not an obscure concept that can only be known by means of some mystical vision or esoteric experience. The Bible does not present or define truth in this manner. The revelation experience may have a mystical quality to it (e.g., Moses before the burning bush, Isaiah in the Temple, John on the Isle of Patmos), but the truth revealed in those situations was something concrete and real. To Moses God commanded, “Lead my people out of Egypt!” Of Isaiah He asked, “Whom shall I send?” And to John He revealed the spiritual state of the seven churches of Asia Minor and what was to come.

The Bible is a document of revealed truth. Within its pages, truth is not presented as a nebulous ideal, or as merely a series of propositions. Instead, truth is presented as something revealed and knowable in the nitty-gritty experiences of real life. God’s redemptive purposes were revealed to real people who sweat and bled like any of us. The Bible is the record of that revelation, and we declare it weekly from our pulpits and podiums as something people can know intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.

Truth is normative

Truth which is absolute and knowable also has universal application. It is not just applicable in my private domain. Truth is truth in Mongolia as well as Canada. It can be applied to a Japanese man as well as a Chilean woman. What the Bible reveals about God’s character and human responsibility is as true in 2003 as it was in 600 BC.

Application

Why is all this important to know? What difference does it make to me, an average churchgoer?

First, it is a healthy exercise for us to periodically review our faith and our own concept of truth to see how we measure up. It is necessary for us to consider how far our world has strayed from the biblical worldview. Perhaps the exercise will alert us to the fact that we, too, have crept into enemy territory. If so, then it is time to realign our thinking with God’s Word. Our thought processes, our method of determining what is truth, should not be dictated by worldly patterns. Instead, our minds are to be transformed by submitting them to the renewing influence of God’s Word and Spirit (Romans 12:2).

Second, this understanding should affect how we as Christians engage our culture, how we seek to evangelize our world. If we are to declare the gospel of Jesus Christ to this generation as the Great Commission commands, then we must begin by understanding that the people around us do not hold the same view of truth as we do. We begin at ground level, where people are now. Then we go on to build a presentation of God’s redemptive love revealed in Jesus. As Francis Schaeffer commented over 30 years ago, if we do not understand that a shift in the concept of truth has taken place, then we end up merely talking to ourselves – we become a quaint but irrelevant subculture that has nothing to contribute to the world at large. Unfortunately, that is how many outside the church see us. Our job is to convince them otherwise – to show them that they, too, can know the truth and the truth can set them free.

Dan Hiebert attends Northview Community Church in Abbotsford, B.C. and teaches part-time at Columbia Bible College.