One of my daughters was walking around the other day wearing a shirt declaring, “Truth is a person.” It is of course a riff on John 14:6, where Jesus declares, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except by me.” It’s also a profoundly important statement, especially to our scientistic, propositionalist culture.
And yes, I did mean scientistic, not “scientific”—that our culture is shaped by the belief, summarized well by the physicist Ian Hutchinson, that “science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge.” One problem with scientism as a philosophy (there are several) is that it produces a conflation of truth with fact. Not only does this lead people to assume that “truth” and “opinion” are opposed categories (when the actual divide is between fact and opinion), it also encourages the belief that “truth” is merely a matter of asserting correct propositions. As long as you have the right words in the right order, you’re speaking the truth.
This understanding of truth is inarguably correct in math and the hard sciences, in which a formula is equally correct regardless of who writes it, to whom, under what conditions, in what mood. The further you get from the purity of mathematics, however, the more tenuous that understanding becomes; in speaking of the realities of the human heart, it collapses entirely. Human truths are not just about getting the words right; whether our words are true is as much about the tone in which we say them and the relational context in which we deliver them as about the words themselves. As Frederick Buechner put it, speaking in character as the innkeeper from the traditional understanding of the Christmas story, “All that distinguishes a truth from a lie may finally be no more than just the flutter of an eyelid or the tone of a voice. If I were to say, ‘I BELIEVE!’ that would be a lie, but if I were to say, ‘I believe . . .’ that might be the truth.”
This is not to say that truth is relative. Truth is absolute, because Truth is a person: the Word by whom all things were made. We are relative: limited, contingent, timebound, localized, interdependent, imperfect. The idea of the autonomous, self-defined, self-created self is a postmodern fantasy. The point is, rather, that when we are considering human realities, truth is relational.
If I say to my wife, or one of my children, or another close friend, “That was wrong,” the necessary pieces are in place for that statement to be true. One, I have a relationship with them which gives me standing to speak into their lives. Two, I know them, so I have at least some chance of accurately seeing and understanding what they have done and why. Three, they know me, so they know my heart is toward them.
If, on the other hand, I turn to someone whom I do not know, who does not know me, and who has not invited me to speak to anything, and say, “That was wrong,” none of those three pieces are in place. My perceptions may be completely accurate, and I may be objectively correct in my conclusion, but what I say cannot be heard truly, apart from a miracle of the Holy Spirit. Truth is not communicated because the groundwork has not been laid. The Spirit of God can take my words and make them true by his work in the heart of the other person, but the Spirit is not my janitor; just because I’m careless doesn’t make him obliged to clean it up.
It’s not just the words we say that make our statements true or false, it’s how we say them, and in what spirit. (That’s why it’s possible for us to combine true statements in such a way that those who hear us will draw a false conclusion.) Truth without love decays. Without love, truth hardens, growing cold and brittle, like a coal removed from the fire; to say that God hates sin is to speak truth, but to say it without love is to give the very distinct impression that he hates sinners, too, which is most decidedly not true. Indeed, to grasp the truth that God hates sin without also understanding that he is love and that he loves all whom he has made is very likely to come to believe that God hates sinners.
At the same time, love without truth also decays, because true love seeks only what is best for the beloved. When truth is taken out, whether because the truth seems too hard, too painful, too inconvenient, too much work, too risky, too unpleasant, or what have you, the heart of love is gone, for it is seeking, in one way or another, its own perceived benefit. It may believe that it’s trying to spare the other person unnecessary pain, or something of that sort, but in reality it’s trying to spare itself; and that way leads the decline of love into the mere sentimentality which declares that love is blind. No, love has its eyes wide open, because love is founded on truth. It’s precisely the fact that Jesus knew exactly what he was doing and exactly whom he was doing it for, with no illusions as to our worthiness or anything else, that made his death on the cross an act of love. Had he been blind to all that, it would have been worthless.
God is truth, and God is love, and neither truth nor love has any meaning or reality apart from him; and thus to sever one from the other is to sever both from their source. What’s left is something very much akin to cut flowers: they may retain their beauty, and they can be kept alive for a little while, but they’re dying. To have either truth or love, we must have both.
Photo ©2018 Claudia Schmalz. Free for use.