Day Three: What is Truth?

"People love truth when it shines warmly on them and hate it when it rebukes them." - Augustine

"I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us." - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Listen to "Freedom" by the Jason Lee McKinney Band to supplement today's reading.

Your worldview and sense of self provide much of the instruction manual for how you see truth. Someone who holds a material naturalist view of the world will see truth much more from an objective standpoint. Truth to the naturalist is that which is observable and can be measured. While someone with a relativist worldview will obviously view the truth as relative. Someone with a postmodern or existentialist worldview will be far more likely to view truth from a subjective standpoint. Someone with a religious worldview is far more likely to see truth as transcendent or divinely revealed.

All worldviews give priority and are biased to a certain view of truth. In this passage, Pilate is revealing how he viewed truth. He simultaneously reveals that he believed truth cannot be known and it wouldn't matter if it could be known. In other words, Pilate places little value on truth.

The philosophies of modernity (17th through early 20th centuries) reduced truth to only that which can be seen, observed, and measured. Post-modernity (second half of the 20th century) seeing the flaws in modernity reduced truth as purely subjective and only relative to the experience of the individual. In the postmodern reduction of truth, it always shined warmly on the individual because it was only subject to the individual. Both modernity and post-modernity over-emphasized one kind of truth and dismissed all others. Neither of these are a Christian view of truth. The trust is complex and robust. We do interact with an objective world, and we communicate about it analogously with each other in our intersubjectivity but never in a completely univocal way for two primary reasons:

1. The world/universe is inexhaustible. We will never fully understand nor be able to communicate the universe to one another. This does not mean there is no knowledge or that knowledge cannot be communicated at all.
2. We are contained by the nature of being a subjective self. Our experience of truth will never fully coincide with another subjective self's interaction with it. This does not mean there is not truth, only that we each interact with truth as ourselves and thus we can never communicate it wholly to one another.

We all see in part and know in part . . . all of us encounter objective truth but never objectively. We are trapped in our experience of objective reality. Christianity does not reduce truth to a singular kind of truth (relative or objective) but rather includes both, and it demands a response from humans to the whole truth. The whole truth rebukes us and reminds us of our limited knowledge and ability to truly understand truth. Yet there it is roaring at us, demanding we deal with and prioritize it. Truth is objective and subjective and intersubjective and relative and transcendent. So, what is truth? How can it be known? By the only one who can know objective reality and each individual's interaction with each other and the transcendent supernatural truth. In other words, God is truth. Friends, the whole truth unreduced can only be found in Jesus Christ. When Pilate asked "what is truth" he was asking the question to truth itself. He was asking the question to the "I am."

Father God, ultimate reality, the whole truth is only contained and can only be known by you. You are truth itself and its source. Help me to seek truth in you and you alone. Holy Spirit guide me in increasingly understanding truth and protect me from outright falsities. Protect me even from slight drifts from truth, from you. Keep me in a spirit of humility knowing I am one person experiencing the world and you Lord from my perspective when dealing with my brothers and sisters. Help me to learn from them so that I may know you better. Jesus, you are my example, my savior, and my king. May I never take my eyes off you . . . the truth. In Jesus' name. Amen.

This devotion is an excerpt from Dr. Jason Lee McKinney's devotional book, Devotions for Deconstructors, Disciples, and Doubters,and based on his book, Deconstructing a Disciple's Doubt.

The accompanying music comes from Jason Lee McKinney Band's album One Last Thing.