What Is Truth?

It's been a while since I've had a chance to do any blogging. My son is playing football for the first time this year, my oldest daughter is cheering, and my middle daughter is taking dance. It seems like we are running all the time now.

I've been thinking lately about the modernism/postmodernism divide and how it impacts how we share the incredible, life-changing message of Jesus Christ, relate to people, and approach life as a whole. It seems to me that in the life of the church modernism has been concerned with the search for the right answers, whereas postmodernism is more concerned with the search for the right questions.

One of the things that I have been meditating on over the last several weeks is the idea that God is in the questions. The modernist approach to apologetics and the Christian life was to carefully formulate an answer to all the questions that skeptics and even believers ask. The postmodern approach and the approach of the emerging church is to live out the questions, to enter into the questions in conversation with other people.

To me, it boils down to the reality that God doesn't always want us to encounter Him in the answers to our questions, but in the questions themselves. Life isn’t simple. It’s complex and hard to figure out, and there aren’t always easy answers to the problems and struggles and stresses of life. Life doesn’t always work out the way you’d planned. Life leaves us with doubts and confusion and questions.

God is so infinite and so complex and so amazing that we will never have Him all figured out. And the questions point us to that reality. The aspects of life and theology and the Bible and faith that we cannot quite grasp illustrate the fact that we will never fully comprehend the wonder of all that God is.

Much of the discussion between modernism and postmodernism comes down to the question of truth. Modernism concerns itself with the search for absolute truth while postmodernism involves some questioning of the methods, goals, and presuppositions of modernism in that quest for truth. Both approaches to truth stem from a Western mindset and understanding of truth that goes all the way back to Aristotle.

Is there a way out of the struggle between these two different understandings about truth? I think it is found in a Hebrew understanding of truth rather than a Greek understanding. Check out John 18:37-38: “Jesus answered, ‘For this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.’ ‘What is truth?’ Pilate asked.”

Pilate represents the Greek way of thinking about truth. For the Greek, truth was a philosophical concept. It related to what could be known through reason and thinking. It related to facts, and it was static and unchanging. So, when Pilate asks, “What is truth?” He wants to know, “What can be known through reason and thinking? What are the facts? What is the answer?” As Westerners, we are the inheritors of Greek thought, and so, that is the same definition of truth that most of us operate according to. Even the postmodern questioning of truth stems from a Greek way of thinking.

But Jesus was not a Greek. He was a Hebrew, and Hebrews had a vastly different understanding of truth from the Greeks. For Hebrews, truth is not static. It’s not fixed in time. It’s not like what’s true now is always true. For the Hebrew, truth is developing, unfolding. Truth is something that grows and develops over the course of time and history. For the Hebrew, truth is not something you arrive at through thinking; it is something you learn through experience in life. Truth is something you come to know as you see it demonstrated in life. And so, for the Hebrew, truth is not something you know in your head. Truth is something you know in your gut, because you’ve seen the value of it as you have experienced the struggles and heartaches and pressures of life.

In the Old Testament, God is called the God of truth, and in that context, truth means reliability, dependableness, faithfulness, the ability to perform what is required. And so, God’s truth is demonstrated in the experiences of life. So, for the Hebrew, truth is found at the intersection of life’s experiences and the wisdom and character of God. Now, according to that definition of truth, truth does not exclude questions. No, questions, struggles, doubts are the essence of what it means to discover truth. The person who questions God is the person who stands at the intersection of life and God’s wisdom seeking to understand truth. Questions are an essential part of a growing faith.

So, may we all come to this understanding of truth. Rather than a modernist or postmodernist approach to truth, rather than a Western, Greek approach to truth, let us have a biblical approach to truth. Let us come to find truth at the intersection of the character of God as revealed in His Word and the experiences of our lives.