“What is Truth?”

We are born, we live, and we die. And somewhere in between we want to know and feel something real, something true. Whether or not we are able to come upon a grand theory of the universe, we want to experience something real. Pilate’s question, “what is truth” is our question, and it the question that has rung in our ears through the centuries.

Henry Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Walden). This is the visceral horror.

Part of the trouble is that we don’t know precisely what we are looking for, but we hope that when we come across it that it will be apparent: we will know that is it.  However, everywhere we look somebody has claimed truth, but when we look a little closer we think, “No, that’s not it.”

Naming shapes our perception of others, the world, and ourselves: take the word “immigrant” as an example. We name this and that; we label “those” people and ourselves, and in the process we poison the waters and pretend that we haven’t done so. Our troubled perception bespeaks our propensity and incapacity to name things. 

We are in the hunt for something real, but in the process our proclivity for misnaming things sends us south when we should probably go north. And so our troubled perception continues; we continue to shake our heads when we see people claiming to “possess” truth. We all seem to want it, but then maybe it’s not an it that we seek. Have we misnamed it as an object? However, objects are easier to handle, to possess, to manipulate and wield as weapons. We then prefer lies to the truth as long as the lies help us augment our own security. We long for truth. But we opt for cheap imitations, and we name those cheap imitations as “true.”   

We want to cut to “the truth,” and so we use words as swords when they could be used as plowshares. With guns and tanks it would seem easier to take captive truth than to do the precarious thing of letting truth captivate us. I would add, however, that usually we do not have much of a choice; it sneaks upon us without us knowing and so we take up arms fearing that our cheap imitations will be uncovered for what they are. 

For various reasons, Christians are often misled into thinking that Christians possess the truth, albeit “the truth” of which they speak frequently slips into generic affirmations that are safe and superfluous. I would suggest that Christians do not have possession of much at all, but they are to bear witness to truth. And it is with words that Christians bear witness to an incarnated truth they cannot control.

“What is truth?” This question may seem to be an easy question to ask if it is held at a distance as if it does not have dire implications for the one holding it at a distance. How truth is named is of special importance because what we perceive as “true” will be according to our naming of it. To our horror, we may awake to learn that not only have we not lived, but also we have intentionally misnamed life in order to name death as “life,” which is perhaps the life we would rather live as “good” and “true.”