That Funny Little Thing Called "Truth" Gets People All Riled Up

"Modern culture has not really rendered creeds and confessions untrue; far less has it rendered them unbiblical. But it has rendered them implausible and distasteful. They are implausible because they are built on old-fashioned notions of truth and language. They make the claim that a linguistic formulation of a state of affairs can have a binding authority beyond the mere text on the page, that creeds actually refer to something, and that that something has a significance for all humanity. They thus demand that individuals submit, intellectually and morally, to something outside themselves, that they listen to the voices from the church from other times and places. They go directly against the grain of an antihistorical, antiauthoritarian age. Creeds strike hard at the cherished notion of human autonomy and the notion that I am exceptional, that the normal rules do not apply to me in the way they do to others. They are distasteful for the same reason: because they make old-fashioned truth claims; and to claim that one position is true is automatically to claim that its opposite is false. . . . Truth claims thus imply a hierarchy whereby one position is better than another and where some beliefs, and thus those who hold those beliefs, are excluded" (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 48).

Truth

Discussing the tenet "Christianity is true and anything opposing it is false," K. Scott Oliphint says, "God's revelation describes the way things really and truly are in the world. That is, we are saying that what God says about the world is the way the world really is" (Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith, 51).

Truth is Jesus Christ

"Jesus told those who believed in him: "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (John 8:31-32). He also said to them, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). Note that being formed as a disciple is prior to knowing the truth. As we submit to discipleship, we learn to be people who are truthful. Truth is not a set of propositions about the world; rather, truth is Jesus Christ. We know truth by coming to know this person and we know this person by learning to pray as he taught us" (William H. Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, Lord, Teach Us: The Lord's Prayer and the Christian Life, 16).