A Few Thoughts on Truth [jenna]

Jesus answered, "...For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" - Jn 18:37, RSV

Pilate’s question of Jesus has fascinated me since childhood; the more so, because Jesus—on the record, at least—didn’t answer it, not to Pilate, anyway. The disciples got to hear Jesus say “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; but even with that statement, what we have in response to one of the most powerful questions asked in history is a strange and brilliant mystery.

The comments on my article “Spirituality and Certainty” last month have kept me thinking over the topic of truth and the different perspectives offered. Out of those thoughts have come several convictions. These ideas are not gospel, preached on a dusty Jerusalem street two thousand years ago. They are not necessarily exclusively correct or balanced. They are not even originally and directly mine alone. They have simply caught my attention as, if you will, truth about truth.

First: truth, however outwardly unappealing, leads to joy. The current cultural teaching—and often the immediate and natural reaction of our own hearts—says that truth, the word itself at least, mainly comes to us as a weapon in the hands of the controlling (extremists/arrogant/violent/naïve/insert your epithet here). Having grown up acquainted with the rigid and frequently reactionary sector of the homeschool movement, I can sympathize with the fear of repressive power. I cannot sympathize with the rejection of all rules except those that “protect” us from Judeo-Christianity.

Judeo-Christian “rules”, which seem to limit our freedom and joy, are actually their guarantee, and the freedom gained from rejecting those rules is illusory. Chesterton said in Orthodoxy that “The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.”

Second: truth is as likely to be complex and paradoxical as simple and straightforward. Whether we say “The only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth” or “Jesus saves; you just need to accept him”, we’ve stripped thought down to clichéd mantras and self-help. Forgive me the sarcasm, but since our hip and modern and enlightened culture prides itself on pandering to youth and ignorance (the former in matters of judgment and the latter in our systems of education), we have quite naturally lost the maturity-dependent ability to comprehend such things as paradox and mystery. Of course we run mad along pointlessly looping paths.

Of all candidates for authoritative truth, none could be more paradoxical than the Gospel. The ideology of grace, expressed by an itinerant Bethlehemite who claimed the titles of both “Son of man” and “Son of God”, perplexes theologians; allowing them to battle over things like extent, efficacy and application. But small children, just becoming conscious of the world around them, still entirely reliant on their parents’ faith, pray and take Communion and receive grace beyond their understanding.

The sheer mystery of truth should teach us that there are things too infinite for us to comprehend, too wild for us to dream, too powerful for us to challenge and too holy for us to touch. With that understanding should come all the humility necessary to keep us from arrogance. Even if we fail, though, our human weakness cannot nullify the glory of truth.

Third: truth is above, not opposite to, falsehood. Humanity is forever running to opposites. Women get treated as property in Africa, so they must receive every preference in America; the old style of worship seemed dry and stilted to the young, so nowadays the traditions of the elderly are blatantly disrespected in nearly every church. This might work if right and wrong were simply polar opposites, but they’re not. Wrong, in practically every instance, is a perversion of right. Likewise, lies generally distort truth, rather than contradicting it, and truth cannot be found by looking backwards from the viewpoint of the false.

Fourth: truth will command me, whether or not I recognize it. In C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, Jane Studdock has a garish vision that shatters her ideals of dignity and confronts her with an authority that promptly demands her submission. In discussing that vision with a Christian, she finds herself facing a dilemma that awaits us all. She can accept truth baptized or unbaptized, but it will have her one way or the other:

“…[S]he had been conceiving this world as “spiritual” in the negative sense—as some neutral, or democratic, vacuum where differences disappeared … The vision of the universe which she had begun to see in the last few minutes had a curiously stormy quality about it. It was bright, darting and overpowering … And mixed with this was the sense that she had been maneuvered into a false position. It ought to have been her who was saying these things to the Christians. Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their grey, formalised one; hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained glass attitudes. That was the antithesis she was used to. This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like.”

Finally: I need truth. I have tasted of Christ and now I must have Him. I would rather believe blindly, even foolishly—in the world’s eyes or my own—than surrender my faith to a perceived ‘intellectual honesty’. The need for His life is more concrete than my logic and more desperately hopeful than my imagination. For me, Christ has to be truly all, and in all.