truth

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

It looks like I'm gonna start with a long one. Try and stay with me.

One day last year, while I was still teaching, I had a really interesting lunch break conversation. On Mondays I would open up my classroom to the year 12's and 13's and we would talk about Christianity in relation to a whole bunch of topics. We would get students and opinions from all over the show which made for some great discussion as often simple faith would have to get a bit of a run around against some tough questions. On this particular day we had a teacher with us who was in her 40's (I think... I sure hope I didn't over-shoot that).

I decided that over lunch we were going to talk about different models of truth - how do we know if something is true? Is there ultimate truth? What does that even mean? Is all truth subjective or contextual? What are the core truths that we live by and why?

Now I knew that this is an incredibly huge philosophical debate that has been carried for the last 2400 years since the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, so I was not going to attempt to give any sort of good answer. But what I was interested in was seeing how the students themselves understood truth, and also how comfortable they were with jumping between different models of truth. So I presented a few:

Foundationalism








Most of us are pretty well versed in this modernist understanding of truth. It's probably easiest to describe this as a brick wall. In order for a wall to stand up nice and strong, you have to have built a firm foundation on which to build the rest of it. When talking about truth, you might start with a few foundational statements, maybe 'God exists' or 'Everything I interact with on a daily basis is real and not a dream'. Some people might put other things into their foundation like 'Jesus is the Son of God' and 'The Bible is true'. These statements or propositions form the basis on which to build other beliefs like 'God is good' and 'There is life after death'. Must of apologetics is based on this idea of truth as it engages with arguments.

There are a few things about this model that I struggle with. In church, people are often very quick to leave their foundational beliefs unchecked and not up for discussion. This can often mean thier ability to engage with others can only go so far as they 'know what they believe and that's that!' The more worrying side of it, however, is what happens when one of their foundational beliefs no longer works for them - the whole wall comes crashing down and they hit a faith crisis, unsure of anything.

Rob Bell says it like this in his book 'Velvet Elvis':

"Each of the core doctrines for him is like an individual brick that stacks on top of the others. If you pull one out, the whole wall starts to crumble. It appears quite strong and rigid, but if you begin to rethink or discuss even one brick, the whole thing is in danger... remove one and the whole wall wobbles."(p26)

This 'faith crisis' was something that I experienced as I had one of my foundational beliefs called into question. I was in a home group discussion night and was talking about the Bible, referring to it as 'the Word of God'. Another person immediately asked me 'Why do you call it that? What gives you any reason to think that God is behind that book?' I didn't have an answer. How could I trust a book when there's no way of really finding out who wrote it and what thier experiences were? That was a proposition that had gone unchecked. I didn't know how to answer those questions and my wall crashed over, leaving me with a nauseating feeling of floating in meaninglessness.

Luckily I found different ways to understand truth.

Narrative truth

I have been a bit of a fan of this model as it roots itself in the Bible to inform what it means by the words it uses. Essentially, truth is understood here as something revealed through a story. We understand the nature of God and this world through the unfolding drama of scripture. We know what God is like because of what he has said and done, and we understand our purpose by placing ourselves within that story. This one could be understood possibly like a fish pond, with propositions as the fish and the story as the water. If you take the fish out of the water they die. Similarly if you take a proposition out of the story, it loses its meaning.

For instance, you could say 'God is good' but that could mean whatever you want. If you place that statement within the story of the Bible, you could see that God is good because He rescues His people from slavery, makes a covenant with them, protects them and fights for them. He is good because He sends His Son to redeem the world. But if you take the statement out of the story of the Bible, God could be seen to be 'good' because you can buy that car that you wanted or because you finally found yourself in a romantic relationship. This model aims to ground our beliefs in understanding of what they really mean as revealed in scripture.

However, it can end up being a bit of a language game at times of needing to know exactly what you mean when you use a word...

Coherentism

...which leads us to this one. Coherentism rightly acknowledges that every statement we make is inevitably linked to other statements and words that we have a whole bunch of assumptions about. 'God is good' itself is a tricky one! What do you mean by 'God'? What about your idea of 'goodness'? It works like a network - each belief connected to others to understand its own meaning, making up a whole.

N T Wright has pointed out that even the statement 'Jesus Christ is Lord' is riddled with personal assumptions. Who do we think Jesus is? 'Christ' is a messianic term, deeply rooted in Jewish thinking - are we aware of this? And what do we mean by 'Lord'? Lord of our own lives, Lord of everything or just a term referring to God's power?

Stanley Grenz, in his book 'Renewing the Center' describes coherentism like this:

"Beliefs are interdependent, each belief being supported its connection to its neighbours and ultimately to the whole... Hence, knowledge is a 'web of belief'..." (p199)

Hopefully what has become clear is that when we talk about our own beliefs and assumptions, it really isn't as simple as just knowing the basics and moving on (although there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you're not a leader of some sort!). We all bring our own experience and opinions and ways of seeing the world to our own understandings of Christianity, so there's no way of extensively knowing 'pure Christianity'.

Back to the classroom - what I found was that basically all of the students were pretty comfortable with all 3 of these models of truth. They could engage and talk with the ideas easily, showing really flexible thinking. What was really interesting though, is that the teacher was the person who really struggled with understanding truth in any other way outside of foundationalism. She began asking 'But doesn't it have to be foundationalism? Don't we have to stand on a few basic truths to be able to understand anything?' She could clearly see that her wall was being threatened if she took one of those bricks out. What a generational contrast!

I replied to her that although in some ways she was correct, for Christians, truth is not a set of ideas on which we stand, but truth is a person. Christ is the rock, our solid foundation, not doctrines. What I was seeing before my eyes was a person brought up in modernity engaging with a bunch of people brought up in post-modernity who did not hold on to truth in the same manner.

So what do you reckon? How would you answer Pilate?

For a much more thorough, academic discussion on this, see this article by Rikk Watts: What if Truth was personal?