What Is Truth? (Part 1)

Reclaiming truth in a world of (Greek) abstractions

Photo credit: me

(A seven-minute read.)

I have a very simple question—which may or may not resonate with you.

It’s this: what is truth?

I’m not asking what is true—that is, what ideas correspond with reality and are therefore factually correct.

I’m asking about the nature of truth itself.

Again, this may not scratch where you’re itching. And it may slide into the academic too much.

But I think it’s a huge question that has huge implications for the way we pursue life and experience faith together.

So let me just cut to my punchline: I’ve had a growing conviction that many followers of Jesus have a very stunted and anemic understanding of “truth.”

It is, quite ironically (especially in relation to my faith community), a Platonic view of truth that is disembodied, abstract, and timeless. Truth equals correct facts and propositions that exist apart from context.

It’s therefore—by definition—universal, objective, and absolute, and engages only the intellect and reason.

An easy example, from my faith community, is the idea that Saturday is the Sabbath. We claim to know the “truth” about this and we want to convince others, using reason, of the correctness of this proposition. We thus line up our “proof texts” to rationally prove that Saturday’s the Sabbath.

But this approach is Plato—who insisted on the existence of “Forms” and ideas, which are detached from and superior to matter, and were timeless, universal, and unchanging. This is Descartes—who maintained that we are, at our core, merely “thinking things.”

But this isn’t, I don’t believe, biblical.

The biblical writers, I’d submit, had a much more robust, holistic, and embodied understanding of truth. Truth was about relational fidelity, not just accurate data.

To them, truth wasn’t abstract, disembodied, and timeless. It was relational, experiential, and lived.

It had a greater purpose and context.

Biblical truth

The Bible’s language for “truth” offers a clue. The original Hebrew word for “truth” is ‘emet (and its related words ‘emuna and ‘aman), and it actually carries more the sense of “reliable,” “faithful,” “steady,” “consistent,” or “stable.”

When something’s “true” in the biblical sense, it means one can rely and depend on it. It’s not just an abstract fact or proposition that’s correct.

Notice a couple examples from the Torah.

In Genesis, Abraham sends his chief servant to find a wife for Isaac from among his relatives, trusting God will guide the journey. When the servant arrives, he prays for a specific sign—and Rebekah appears, fulfilling it exactly and revealing herself to be from Abraham’s family.

Overwhelmed by God’s faithfulness, the servant shouts, “Blessed be the Lord God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken His mercy and His truth [‘emet] toward my master. As for me, being on the way, the Lord led me to the house of my master’s brethren” (Exodus 24:27).

Here, “truth” isn’t factually correct information. The servant isn’t saying God has given Abraham the right propositions. He’s saying God has been faithful, reliable, and dependable. He’s provided for Abraham.

Another example comes from Moses, when Israel battled the Amalekites. Whenever Moses held up his hands, Israel prevailed. When he let them down, they started losing. So Exodus explains this:

“But Moses’ hands became heavy; so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. And Aaron and Hur supported his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady [‘emuna] until the going down of the sun” (Exodus 17:12).

Again, Exodus isn’t saying that Moses’ hands were factually correct. It’s saying his hands were steady and reliable.

Other examples from Scripture could be multiplied.

Dru Johnson, who’s an evangelical Hebrew Bible scholar, has a whole bunch of good stuff on this. Notice these thoughts from his book Biblical Philosophy:

“Truth,” in the Bible, “is fidelity to a purpose or function.” It is a “function of reliability.” He also quotes Jewish scholar Yoram Hazony, who explains that “to be able to rely on something, to be able to count on it—this seems to be the heart of the truth of the Bible. . . . In the Hebrew Bible, that which is true is that which proves, in the face of time and circumstance, to be what it ought; whereas that which is false is that which fails . . . to be what it ought.”

Furthermore, Johnson offers an even more provocative thesis, challenging the idea that the biblical writers were concerned with the idea of absolute, binary truth. The Biblical writers, he explains, “work with a notion of truth not restricted to a true/false binary. Their sensibilities here do not preclude such a notion; it just does not appear as a concern when they depict matters of truth against falsity.”

Indeed, he further proposes, “the biblical authors cannot conceive of a simple notion of ‘absolute truth.’” This is an idea many find troubling, he acknowledges. When he shares it with students, some “immediately go into epistemic arrest,” because they’ve “been taught their whole lives that absolute truth—sometimes known as ‘capital-T Truth’—is the ideal and everything else is ‘small-t truth.’”

But it’s Greek-influenced conceptions of truth which propose that “true and false” are “opposite ends in a binary relationship, and are applied to an idea or state of affairs disembodied and independent of the knowing subject.” In this situation, “something must be either true or false and nothing in between.”

Further, in this understanding, influenced so much by Plato’s version of ideas and Forms, “truth-is-a-thing-in-and-of-itself,” detached from context, purpose, or embodiment.

This isn’t how the biblical authors related to truth, however. In their understanding, truth couldn’t be known in a “single instance” because it required ongoing experimentation which led to higher degrees of confidence in its dependability.

In this understanding of truth, “if something is what it ought to be over time and circumstances,” he writes, “then it is considered faithful (‘aman) and can, therefore, be trusted (‘emuna).” Truth can therefore “only be interpreted through a process of attending to someone or something’s veracity—it’s reliability.”

Johnson provides a relatable example. He says that if we have a water table map of a city, which shows where all the aquifers are, we wouldn’t consider that map “false” because it doesn’t guide people to local landmarks. That’s because “water table maps are not true to the aims of local tourism as tourist maps are not true to aquifer locations. Yet, that does not make those maps fundamentally true or false.”

This is because each map is “true” according to its purpose.

Similarly, I just went on a tour of Istanbul and was given a simple tourist map that had all the major landmarks (pictured above). You’d think I was crazy for calling the map “false” just because the Blue Mosque’s colors on the map weren’t the exact same colors as the Blue Mosque in real life, or if I insisted the map was wrong because the Grand Bazaar was shown a millimeter too far from the Hagia Sophia.

You’d understand that I missed the point of the map, and that my conception of what is “true” was too reliant on the precision of Enlightenment-thinking, framing things too much in absolute, binary “true/false” terms.

Johnson brings home the point: “The biblical sense of truth generally accounts for a thing doing what it ought to do per the context.”

Thus, if a map gets people to where they’re trying to go, then it’s “true.”

(This is perhaps a topic for another post, but Johnson would certainly acknowledge that maps could be updated for better accuracy, and that some maps are therefore more or less accurate than others. But he’d stop short of saying that any map could ever provide an “absolute truth” of a specific terrain. The best we can do is make maps—and claims—that are more and more accurate, while refusing to maintain that they’re true in some “absolute” or “objective” sense.)

I’ve dumped a lot on you—and if you’re like me, your head may be spinning as you’re trying to wrap your mind around this non-Platonic/non-Cartesian/non-Western way of relating to truth.

Here’s the bottom line: according to the biblical witness, truth isn’t correct information about abstract, timeless, disembodied facts. Truth is that which has proven—over time—to be reliable, dependable, and consistent.

Next week, I’ll try to unpack this a little more and tell you why I think this distinction is so important.

But here’s a sneak-peak, based on something Johnson explains: “Truth and justification entail personal agency and not brute appeals to logical necessity. Deductively logical arguments are secure on the basis of the persons involved, not merely the internal coherence of deductions.”

In other words, “truth” cannot really exist apart from the truth-teller.

But come back next week to learn more!

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Shawn is a pastor and church planter in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational and embodied expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.