What is Truth?

We are again at that time of year when the Gospel lessons remind us of Pilate's famous question, "What is truth?"  It came up last week in our youth meeting at Nick's Pizza, and I've been thinking about how to explain it to the young people of our parish in a less confusing manner.  I thought it might be helpful to share some of my as yet unorganized thoughts here as we all prepare to engage a culture where everyone seems to believe that one truth is just as good as another.

I begin by positing that "truth is a reflection of the Character of God."

• Sometimes this comes through the book of creation, which we often call "nature," or "science."
• Sometimes it comes through direct revelation in the person of Jesus, or in the Bible, which is the record of his person and work which the Holy Spirit inspired and verified through the canonization process of the Jews and the Christians.

Truth is different from "opinion."

• Truth is factual, like math or physics, or the law of gravity or of thermodynamics.
• Opinion may be possible, and on rare occasions may even be probable, but because it is based on our personal experience, perspective, and feelings (there is that awful word again!), it is unlikely to be demonstrably factual.
• Truth is the same yesterday, today, and forever- and it is binding on all men in all places.
• Opinions change with our situations and vary from culture to culture.
• The form of truth tends to follow function and actuality, while opinion tends to be of a more ideological or theoretical nature.

A few observations.

• Some day, given my family history and lifestyle, I will probably face some sort of heart surgery or angioplasty.  When I do, I want the best doctors with the best available science.  I do not intend to tell the doctor what I feel might be helpful based on my layman's understanding or based on what I think might be fair or what might make me feel the most comfortable.
• Many years ago, when my beloved in-laws used to occasionally disagree with my wife-to-be about her choice of clothes, her mother would say, "Rebecca, if everyone else were lined up waiting to jump off of Mount Pleasant, would you get in line too?"  The statement was based on the shared community experience (sometimes called scientific method) that everyone who had ever jumped or fallen off of Mount Pleasant had messed themselves up pretty badly.  Truth is often in a very real sense rather "self-evident" to steal a phrase from Thomas Jefferson.
• If I am so sure about what constitutes predictable and logical outcomes in terms of medical or other scientific truth, then why am I willing to completely change my way of understanding what constitutes truth when I consider metaphysics or religion?  Either the creeds are true and Jesus is the resurrected Son of God or he is not.  If they are, and if he is, then I ought to accept his teachings and their logical implications and act accordingly.  (If they are true, then having premarital sex or aborting a baby because it has Downs Syndrome or stealing from my employer or underpaying my employee is something akin to jumping off of Mount Pleasant!)  If they are not, then I really should just chuck this entire thing we call religion and traditional morality as a charade designed by old white men to enslave people around the world and throughout history.  By staying in the Church when I consciously reject the verity her basic teaching, I am living a lie and allowing the detractors of the Church to have a real reason to say she is filled with hypocrites.
• A word about feelings: While they are very real, and impact us in ways that are most serious, they often seem to be the personification of illogic.  What seems "fair" or "right" to me, when it grows out of my own feelings, experiences, or relationships, has in my experience led to increasingly difficult complications and eventually to bad decisions which seek to re-define the clear expectations of God revealed in Nature and Scripture, and ultimately elevate my own ego and understanding to the place of God.  In the end it becomes the idolatry of self-worship.  I can easily imagine that my friend or relative who engages in theft, murder, sexual immorality, or gluttony is different than all of those others, because his or her education or experience is tragic and relieves him or her of personal responsibility.  But such rationalization does nothing but enable more tragedy and more brokenness within our family circle.  To ignore God's revelation in science or in Christ Jesus, whether it involves jumping off Mount Pleasant or receiving sexual partners to obtain drugs, is always destructive of who and what our loving heavenly Father made us to be.

I'm out of time, and must go, but I hope this little rant helps you to frame your Holy Week considerations as it has helped me.

Mount Pleasant from the fourth turn of the Fairfield County Ohio Fairgrounds
To jump or not to jump? The choice is ours! The consequences are eternal.