What is Truth?

Truth is not something we can appropriate easily or quickly.  We certainly cannot sleep or dream ourselves into the truth.  No, we must be tried, do battle and suffer if we are to acquire truth for ourselves.  It is just an illusion to think that there is an abridgment, a short cut that dispenses with the necessity of struggling for it.  With respect to acquiring truth to live by, every generation and every person must essentially start from the beginning.

What is truth, and in what sense what Christ the truth?  The first question, as most recall, was asked by Pilate [John 18:38], and it is doubtful that he ever really cared to even have his question answered.  Pilate asked Christ, "What is truth?"  That it did not even occur to Pilate that Christ WAS the truth demonstrated precisely that he had no eye for truth at all.  Christ's life was the truth [John 14:6].  It was to this very end that Christ was born, and for this purpose did He come into the world, that He should bear witness to the truth.  What, then, is the fundamentally fallacy in Pilate's question?  It is primarily that it even occurred to him to question Christ in this way; for in questioning Christ he is actually damning himself as he reveals that Christ's life has not illuminated him.  How could Christ possibly enlighten Pilate with mere words when Pilate could not seen through Christ's own life what truth is!?

Pilate's question is extremely foolish.  Not that he asks, "What is truth?" but that he questions Christ, whose very life is the truth and who at every moment demonstrates more powerfully by His life what truth is than all the most profound lectures by the world's wisest thinkers.  Though it may make perfect sense to ask any other person, thinker, philosopher, teacher, pastor, whoever, "What is truth?" to ask this of Christ is the greatest possible faux pas.  Obviously, Pilate is of the opinion that Christ was just a man, like everyone else.  Poor Pilate!  His question is the most foolish and misguided ever asked by any man.  It is almost as if I were to ask someone standing right beside me, "Do you exist?"  How can one possibly reply to this?  So it is with Christ in relation to Pilate.  Christ is the truth.  "If my life," He might say, "cannot open your eyes to the truth, then what can I possibly say?  For I am the truth."

As with Pilate, in our day Christ as the truth has also been abolished:  we may accept Christ's teaching -- but abolish the very concept of Christ.  We want truth the easy way.  This is to abolish truth, for Christ the teacher is more important than His teaching.  Just as Christ's life, the very fact that He lived here on the earth, is vastly more important than all the results of His life, so also is Christ infinitely more important than His teaching.

Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only genuine explanation of it; the only bona fide way of acquiring it.  Truth is not the sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts, but, instead, a life.  Truth is not a way of thinking ... no truth is as Kierkegaard would say "a reduplication of truth within ourselves and within Him.  Your life, my life, His life expresses the truth in its striving."  Just as the truth was a life in Christ, so too, for us the truth must be lived.

Therefore, truth is not so much a matter of knowing this or that, but of being in the truth.  Despite our modern philosophy, there is an infinite difference here, as is best seen in Christ's response to Pilate.  Christ did not so much know the truth but was the truth.  Not that He did not know what the truth was, but when one is the truth and when the requirement is to be in the truth, to merely "know" the truth is insufficient -- it is even an untruth in comparison.  For knowing the truth is something that follows as a matter of course from being in the truth, not the other way around.  No one knows more of the truth than what he is of the truth.  To properly know the truth is to be the truth; it is to have the truth for one's life.  This always requires a struggle.  Any other kind of knowledge is a falsification.  In short, the truth, if it is really there, is a being, a life.  The Gospel says that this is eternal life, to know the only true God and the One whom He sent, the truth [John 17:3].  At the end of the day this means that we only know the truth when it becomes life in us.